Note: This piece was originally published in a slightly different form in Fall 2022, in Disgorgeous Zine Volume 4: RBRT PRKR. Find stockists and support the zine here.
When do ideas die?
Not just because they’re bad, unfortunately. Just look out the window—that much is clear.
Bad ideas, like ethnic nation-states or the Marvel Cinematic Universe, show us they’re alive and kicking precisely by how much they demand consideration. They forest themselves in discourse. They cover themselves in a dense overstory of argument and elaboration. The environment is rich; it supports not just hummingbirds and spider monkeys but species whose entire ecological niche is arguing that the rainforest is problematic, actually.
No, an idea (the humoral theory of medicine, free jazz, the British monarchy) hasn’t really died until it’s become so irrelevant that there’s nobody left fighting against it.
It wasn’t so long ago that our little corner of the world of fermentation was consumed by the concept of alcohol percentage. The fact that there were two sides arrayed against each other, in classic Hegelian dialectic, just confirms how deeply the idea was entrenched. When I got my first restaurant job, the battle lines had been drawn for years.
On one side, a particular group of California pinot noir and chardonnay producers had created an organization, ‘In Pursuit of Balance.’ The manifesto talked about a “European sense of proportion.” Founder Raj Parr had his rule at RN-74—no pinot noir or chardonnay above 14% alcohol. The wine director at the place I was a busboy in 2011 was excitedly telling the staff about the 11.5% abv côt from the Loire we were pouring by the glass. Bartenders at Terroir East Village would serve you something and whisper ‘10.4%’ as a selling point. A younger Alice Feiring was writing sentences like, “I believe that grapes lose their individuality and ability to transmit terroir when they reach very high sugar content. … Nature just doesn’t want to make wine when the grapes are so ripe.”
There was a sense, a decade ago, that high-octane alcohol had been winning for years, that low-abv was an underdog movement for the geeks and the real heads.
On the other side of the battlefield: glycerol, hedonism, faces like red thumbs, boomers and their cabernet, You Know Who.
The question of alcohol ripeness was existential. It was a defacement of what made wine real. It was a choice that producers were making, to pander. It was monster wine hauled in at 33 brix.
The critic known as Robert Parker was by this point playing a caricature of himself on Twitter: “The jihadist movements of green, underripe wines, low alcohol, insipid stuff promoted by the anti-pleasure police & neo-anti-alcohol proponents,” he wrote, in 2010, “has run its course as another extreme and useless movement few care about.”
He was wrong, of course, in the sense that he was basically being a piece of shit on the Internet. But it occurs to me, these days, that he was also right.
Clinging to low- to moderate-alcohol—as a singular guarantor of balance, authenticity, terroir—was soon going to be completely beside the point. The movement was about to run its course.
2016, the year that In Pursuit of Balance packed it in and the year Trump became president, is as good a moment to call it as any.
What Parker couldn’t have perceived or acknowledged was that everything he was yelling about—power, oil, consumer advocacy in the form of numerical scores, the idea of ‘greatness’—was going to shake out as extreme and useless, too.
He must have hoped, once, for a Tom Sawyer-at-the-funeral moment. There he is, fake-dead, looking down at baby sommeliers tearfully swirling prestige cuvée Châteauneuf-du-Pape. One by one, they step up to the mic to admit that Daddy Parker was right about the good wine.
What he’s going to see instead is a generation of wine folks pulling their masks down to drink no-spray PiWis and foraged guava co-fermented with wild vines off the side of the freeway. They’re in Oakland talking about labor equity and indigenous food forests in the Pacific Northwest. They’re in Florida comparing 15.5% alcohol Beaujolais to Pokémon cards. They’re in Itata farming 300 year-old pais that they age in local tropical hardwood while their neighbors sell their land to eucalyptus plantations that will go up like candles in the next wildfire. They’re in Poligny field-planting hybrids as an act of defiance against the phytochemical industry.
Looking back, not only did Parker have nothing to tell us about wine’s most urgent issues, wine’s most urgent issues seem never to have occurred to him. It was always about treating wine like Consumer Reports treats laundry machines. It’s a very particular form of consumer protection, the retail side of the coin that Danny Meyer minted: the guest is always right.
But the wine folk that lined up against him, imagining themselves Davids against a Goliath, seem equally quaint. Their balance-and-moderation discourse was almost entirely rehashed Neoclassical aesthetics:
Wasn’t all of this ripeness a bit rococo, for instance? A bit gaudy? Weren’t these wines a modernist imposition on the sober-minded civitas of our fathers? Wasn’t new oak like women’s makeup? (And wasn’t makeup just a trick women played on you?)
Aesthetic theory, unhitched from any other consideration, is the last thing we need if we’re going to understand wine—if wine is going to survive.
Or, put another way: who the fuck cares about moderation right now? And where, one might wonder, has civility gotten us?
The world is on fire. Inclusion and equity are as urgent as they ever were. Farming, and the people doing that farming, matter.
The allowable spectrum of what wine can be, who can make it and out of what and from where, has never been vaster. And this Technicolor breadth has, ironically, happened in the midst of an extinction-level crisis for late capitalism of which wine is just a synecdoche.
I’m not saying that you can’t enjoy 13.5% alcohol Beaujolais. But the people who held it up as a paragon of Real Wine remind me of the people who think that ancient Greek temples were all temperate white marble columns instead of being painted purple and green and gilded in gold.
Wine’s gaudy, excessive, immoderate spectrum is so much wider and wilder than Robert Parker’s version of pleasure, or the anti-Parker crowd’s vision of balance.
It can include garnacha from the Sierra de Gredos that tops 16%. It can encompass slightly fizzy piquette in cans that barely scratches six. And while Beaujolais can have a home there, be prepared to see after an audit that your bottle of 2021 Villages that reads 13.5% on the label is actually 15.4%, because Parkerization is not the reason Beaujolais is picking at the potential alcohol it’s getting picked at today.
This essay began, twenty drafts and on-time ago, as a tongue-in-cheek defense of high-ABV wines—as though Parker had taken me aside and convinced me.
But the truth is deeper. Who cares, anymore? I don’t care about the brix you pick at. I care about how you got there. There are bullshit high-ABV wines that come about because they’re juiced by irrigation and Mega Purple. They don’t deserve half a column inch; they’ll die when the aquifer empties.
We are going to be living through a climate crisis that will alter wine, but not in the way wine professionals were talking about it a decade ago, like ‘thank god Loire reds taste good’ or, ‘can’t wait for British Champagne.’
Are you posting on a message board that was at its most active twenty years ago about how this vintage in the Loire-et-Cher isn’t “classic” enough for you? You need to grow the fuck up.
The growers you valorize, if you’re the sort of person who purports to care about human-sized wine, are choking on smoke, facing early flowering and devastating frost, drought and flash floods. They can’t afford the price hikes on the glass they bottle in.
The vines they grow are dying of diseases caused by the grafting that became common practice post-phylloxera. The varieties they’re planting are impoverished monoculture. They may not even be right for the region, anymore.
The issues facing wine today are existential. They encompass the migrant labor working those vines, the interns being assaulted by cult winemakers with magazine profiles, the depleted aquifers, the Gulf Stream.
Parker has nothing left worth fighting against. It’s for that reason that he can still, in this moment, have some things to teach. We can strip the corpse and loot the body of a few souvenirs to carry with us.
For instance: sometimes, an opulent, glycerol-laden glass of wine, incense and intensity, might be exactly what you need.
It’s ok. He can’t hurt us. The only people who remember him well enough to be scared are on their way out, themselves.
HIGH ALCOHOL WINES I HAVE KNOWN AND LOVED
Béla Fekete juhfark from Somló, the extinct volcano in the heart of western Hungary; Nicholas Joly’s chenin from the Coulée de Serrant; romorantin in the Loire-et-Cher from Villemade or Tessier; manseng in Jurançon and Irouleguy, in particular Camin Larredya or Arrotxea; garnacha from Sierra de Gredos, the mule paths and mountain streams in the granite hills west of Madrid, in particular Ruben Díaz, 4 Monos, or Comando G; sumoll from Els Jelipins, in Catalunya; kitchen-sink Alsatian whites from, e.g. Christian Binner, or Pierre Frick; certain Piedmontese freisas or barberas (for example, the 2013 from Cappellano); primitivo from Fatalone, in Puglia; babic from the Dalmatian Coast, in particular Vinas Mora; assyrtiko from Hatzidakis, in Santorini; 2018 savagnin from Tissot in Arbois and chardonnay from Pattes Loup, in Chablis….
Children's Atlas of Wine 