What even is 'wine' anymore?

Descripción

It's 2019, and the boundaries are blurring. I go into wine shops and have to squint to tell the difference between bottles of sparkling wine and bottles of cider on the shelves. At my local beer bar, at least a quarter of the draft pours have peaches or boysenberry or wine grapes in them.

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Ficha

Fuente: SFChronicle.com
Fecha: 2019-05-09
Clasificación: 2.1. Sidra
Tipo documento: Prensa
Fondo: Sagardoetxea fondoa

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Código: NA-008552

Texto completo

It’s 2019, and the boundaries are blurring. I go into wine shops and have to squint to
tell the difffference between bottles of sparkling wine and bottles of cider on the
shelves. At my local beer bar, at least a quarter of the draft pours have peaches or
boysenberry or wine grapes in them. Things I was always trained to dislike in wine —
like high concentrations of brettanomyces — I’m reconsidering as positive attributes if
present in beer or cider.
People enjoy wines at a natural wine tasting in the Starline Social Club in Oakland, Calif. on March th, .
As a reporter, I’m fascinated. The tides of drinking fashion are rolling! Even more
exciting, the energy behind this embrace of funk has a pseudo-political edge to it. (A
reporter’s dream.) “Anarchic” is how Bon Appetit’s Alex Delany puts it in a recent
story. Funky, boundary-blurring beverages provoke our notions of what wine, beer or
cider even is. And when these drinks ferment spontaneously, rather than being
inoculated with lab yeast, Delany writes, they challenge our assumptions of control.
“A co-ferment of beer and blueberry juice that tastes like a savory Lambrusco? That’s
what gets me out of bed in the morning,” he announces.
On an episode of his podcast “The Grape Nation” last October, Sam Benrubi asked
Isabelle Legeron, who runs the natural-wine event Raw Wine Fair, what the next big
thing in the natural-wine world was — the next orange wine, the next pet-nat. Legeron
didn’t hesitate: co-fermentations of grapes with other fruits, like apple or quince. The
rise of these co-fermentations, Legeron went on, “is really exciting because, in a way,
it harks back to — you have a farm, you have a few apple trees, you have a few grapes,
it’s what nature gives you. Even throwing in some honey from your hive.”
Yep, fascinating stuffff. As a critic, though, I have some bones to pick. We’re conflflating a
lot of disparate things here: Natural or spontaneously fermented beverages don’t have
to taste funky. Hybrids of beer/wine/cider don’t have to be spontaneously fermented.
This is correlation, not causation. We need to be more careful about helping
consumers tell the difffference between what’s philosophically appealing (see:
“anarchic”; “what nature gives you”) and what’s physically appealing (does it taste
good?).
I’m learning too. I don’t know how to evaluate a beer that’s also a cider and tastes like a
wine. It defifies everything I know about beer and cider and wine. I’m open to engaging
in a new set of standards for how we decide what to drink — in fact, I’m exhilarated by
it. Like Delany, I usually request “Give me something fun to drink” when I’m out at a
restaurant or bar run by someone with interesting taste. That’s the ideal setting to
discover something unusual: with a trustworthy guide.
My hope is just that as we rewrite some of our expectations of what fermented
beverages should be, we do it in a thoughtful way that doesn’t dispense with standards
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If you read any story by me this week, it’s statistically likely to be about “Wine
Country,” the gal-pal flflick directed by Amy Poehler which begins streaming on Netflflix
on Friday. (Seriously, I wrote three separate stories about it.) I shared a glass of wine in
Napa recently with two of the fifilm’s stars, Rachel Dratch and Liz Cackowski (who also
co-wrote the screenplay), who told me about their real-life Wine Country trip that
inspired the fifilm. I was impressed with their swirling techniques and with their use of
wine descriptors like “jammy.” (Later, Cackowski told me, “We like to say things like
‘jammy,’ but we don’t really know.”)
Cackowski also mentioned she’s a wine club member at several California wineries,
including Robert Sinskey in Napa, plus Tablas Creek and Linne Calodo in Paso Robles.
“It’s always the third winery that you visit where you end up joining the wine club,”
she said. “You think that one is the winner, but it doesn’t matter — you’re