Should we expect wine to taste good? I think so, once allowance is made for preferences as separate from judgments of quality, once balance and complexity take recognizable forms within us. But natural wine, the trendiest and most contentious corner of the wine world, questions this picture of taste in wine. As philosophers Douglas Burnham and Ole Martin Skilleas remark in their 2014 article, ‘Natural Wine and Aesthetics,’ the natural wine movement is so very interested in how a wine is made and so little interested in how it tastes that it’s no longer part of wine’s aesthetic community. In June, Jancis Robinson wrote of her shock that the New York bistro, Frenchette, whose wine list only offers natural wines, refused to allow novelist and winewriter Jay McInerney to open and drink two non-natural wines, a 1982 Chateau Haut-Brion and La Mission Haut-Brion, even for a high corkage fee. These classic, surely delicious bottles were declared unwelcome, a threat to the experience of the restaurant because of how they were made. This is a symptom of a general, regrettable divisiveness, Robinson notes, that’s even affecting the wine world. Frenchette’s sommelier, Jorge Riera, can be heard online praising natural wines as “easy drinking,” as “like fruit juice,” and “nutritious,” wines that are therefore aesthetically foreign to the Haut-Brions. In valuing the unimpeded expression of nature in wine (as they see it) over its aesthetics, the natural wine movement is, according to Burnham and Skilleas, subject to a lingering Romanticism; but it’s perhaps more accurate to say that natural wine is under the sway of a powerful anti-aesthetic impulse in today’s culture.
We see signs of this anti-aesthetic when natural wine—wine made with minimal intervention, naturally-occurring yeasts, and often without added sulfur—makes a point of embracing the faults that winemakers have fought to eradicate since time immemorial. As the prominent natural wine advocate, Isabelle Legeron MW, advises, “The best test to decide if the wine is faulty is to decide if you like drinking it.” This is a version of the obviously false reassurance to novice wine drinkers that “Good wine is whatever you like.” While a hint of Brettanomyces (barnyard, band-aid) or volatile acidity (vinegar, nail polish remover) can add interest, to name just two common faults, it’s also the case that above certain concentrations they dominate unpleasantly. Lacking understanding of fermentation or spoilage well into the nineteenth century, winemakers were forced by faulty wines into desperate and elaborate measures, adding poisons such as lead or perfumes like lavender, and blending the wines with a wild assortment of other substances, liquors and liquids to regain a measure of palatability. By all accounts, the failure rate in their creative but unscientific quest for good wine was high. Now that science and technology have made so much good, fault-free wine available, can we, should we, as Legeron suggests, for natural wine’s sake, learn to love faults that mask anything we might call local or individual taste?
According to the UK natural wine importer, Doug Wregg, our palates should indeed change. Eager to contribute whenever there’s call for commentary on natural wine, Wregg’s education is in English literature, and his learning seems to have influenced his view of taste, one that values sublimity over beauty, excess over comprehension. While sublimity, the experience of the vast and the wild, is emblematic of the mind’s freedom from constraint in Enlightenment thought, in the anti-aesthetic vein of contemporary thought (on which more below), there’s a new take that places the disturbing effects of sublimity at the centre of our experience, and that rejects, in the words of French thinker Jean-Francois Lyotard (1924-1998), “the consolations of correct forms, [and] refuses the consensus of taste….” As Wregg explained to wine blogger Jamie Goode a few years ago, tasting is about being swept up in an experience while being silenced by its force. And as Wregg explained to Stephen Buranyi in the latter’s piece on natural wine in the Guardian in 2018, if you abandon your preconceptions, if you “liberate” your palate, you find that “Instead of looking for faults, you take what the wine gives you.” Ostensibly, this passivity, not just by the taster of natural wine, but also by the natural winemaker during vinification, allows nature to shine through. By allowing set ideas of quality to slip away—letting go of Lyotard’s “consolations of correct forms,” one supposes—then, Wregg says, “Everything is valid, everything is as good as everything else.” Wregg’s belief in the cultural malleability of the palate, imagined as apparently without biological limits and norms, is extreme, because the palate’s capacities and limits exist to alert us to the qualities and even toxicity of what we consume. But such talk puts Wregg firmly within the anti-aesthetic.
More signs of this anti-aesthetic come from the late natural winemaker, Stefano Bellotti. His wines are on Frenchette’s list, and many speak highly and fondly of him, Jonathan Nossiter naming him a “poet of the earth” in his recent book, Cultural Insurrection: A Manifesto for the Arts, Agriculture, and Natural Wine (2019). Nossiter argues—I’m unconvinced—that natural wine is a solution to our cultural malaise, a healer of the gap between rural and urban worlds, between agriculture and culture. But in an interview elsewhere, Bellotti defends the existence of this gap and implies the superiority of the rural in maintaining that neither the “region,” the “variety,” nor the “nose” is important; if you speak of these aesthetic aspects, he declares, earthily but unpoetically, “you are intellectualizing wine, and wine doesn’t give a shit about being intellectual.” Commenting on the loss of his friend, his American importer, Jules Dressner, says that the great lesson he learned from Bellotti was to be more concerned with how wine estates worked the land “than in the wines themselves.”
Another popular way of talking of the land as more significant than taste today, even in the wider wine world, is to refer to “context.” In one 2018 column, wine writer Jon Bonné laments the absence of “real cultural context” in wine writing, and in another, hopes for the 2019 decline of the tasting note, because then we’ll all take context seriously and “not just sit around criticizing bottles.” Carlo Petrini, founder of Slow Food, writes in a 2015 essay that the lesson he takes from the tragic 1986 Italian methanol-in-wine scandal that fatally poisoned 23 and disabled many others, is that the wine tasting he and friends had valued so much, the “splitting hairs over an aroma or a scent or a color in the glass” was nonsense, really “a function of brainlessness,” amounting to a willful disregard of “context.” And at Margins Wines, natural winemaker Megan Bell explains that where the grapes come from matter more than taste or making “what winemakers would traditionally call ‘the best wine possible….'” Made “out of just grapes and nothing else,” as she puts it, their context matters since often the grapes come from “outcast” vineyards: “Much like people living on the margins, vineyards can be outcasts too.” When the land is emphasized like this, the actual taste of wine is effectively marginalized.
Just where, then, does this anti-aesthetic come from? It partly originates in the art world, and has spread to the humanities and the social sciences, as we see in an influential figure like Doug Wregg. The often unspoken assumption, when the matter of taste comes up in these fields, is that the tradition of aesthetics is simply passé. Defined by art historian Eve Meltzer as “the idea that meaning [in art] is contextual to an extreme,” the anti-aesthetic also entails, she adds, “resistance to particular humanist ideals….” One of these ideals displaced by the anti-aesthetic is the focus on human being and perception, leading to the call by another art historian for a “de-centering [of] the importance of human perception in conceiving of the world.” Thus, in the anti-aesthetic, meaning in art flows from its social and political contexts, it flows from the “agency” of inanimate objects and of the natural world; the anti-aesthetic downplays and even ignores the sensory qualities of the artwork that inevitably anchor aesthetic experience in consciousness. As philosopher Carolyn Korsmeyer remarks in ‘Taste and Other Senses: Reconsidering the Foundations of Aesthetics’ (2017), we experience and evaluate a work of art, or a wine, say, in all its sensuous particularity through direct knowledge or contact with it. Denying or resisting this, as the anti-aesthetic attitude does, Korsmeyer concludes, leaves both gustatory and aesthetic taste—the taste for food and drink as well as for art—strangely unmoored.
In choosing an anti-aesthetic attitude, the natural wine movement risks the phenomenological richness that makes wine the world’s most compelling drink. Natural wine is unreasonable to consider human intervention such as the addition of sulfur a failure, nor should it consider tasting like fruit juice a genuine achievement. We already have a perfectly good, aesthetically-grounded way of guaranteeing wine’s beauty and authenticity, well described in Jamie Goode and Sam Harrop’s Authentic Wine: toward natural and sustainable winemaking (2011). They list the requirements for authentic wine as fault-free taste qua the expression of place, founded on and supported by environmental sensitivity from “grape to shelf.” For their part, philosophers Burnham and Skilleas note the incoherence of natural wine permitting pruning and other interventions in the vineyard while prohibiting even the basic intervention of sulfur in the winery. On natural wine’s practice of avoiding cultured yeasts, they observe, citing Goode and Harrop, that science confirms that the indigenous yeasts which ultimately ferment the wine don’t come from the vineyard on the grapes, from the land and nature, as has been assumed, but rather, inhabit the winery buildings and the winemaking tools, having been brought there on visitors’ vehicles and shoes. The question arises, in other words, in what sense natural wine’s rules really make wine less of a human product, in their terms, more natural and authentic. After all, as Burnham and Skilleas incisively say, in the small-scale wineries hewing to tradition that minimize and carefully select the technology they do use, the concept of terroir already functions as an effective conduit for nature, that is, for “the expression of site specific conditions in sensory form.” So, when proponents of natural wine either defend the presence of faults in natural wines or extol their simple flavours, as Wregg, Legeron, Riera and others do, they’re justifying the masking of terroir, they’re needlessly abandoning the aesthetic possibilities inherent in the sensory characteristics of fault-free, delicious wines from particular places.
A Most Particular Taste 