New York festival celebrates recent trend of ‘living’ wines
IT MAY seem shocking, precious or counterintuitive to think of wine as alive. But RAW Wine billed its recent trade and consumer fair as a celebration of “wines with emotion. Wines that have a humanlike, or living, presence”.
“Humanlike” and “emotion” may overstate the case. Yet few qualities are more desirable in a wine than a sense of it as a living, evolving, energetic thing.
RAW was a perfect opportunity to test out the proposition, as roughly 125 producers poured tastes of their wares in a cavernous, barely finished event space in Brooklyn. The fair drew almost 2,300 visits during its twoday run in early November, the event organisers said.
While RAW did not say so explicitly, the event was a celebration of natural wine, that contentious category that has polarised the wine industry during the last decade.
Opponents have excoriated natural wines just as the establishment lampooned hippies in the 1960s, citing bad hygiene in production, stinky bottles and, most of all, the lack of a rigorous definition of what makes a wine “natural”. They take issue with the implied criticism in the term: If your wine is natural, what does that make mine?
I have always considered the lack of a definition of natural wine to be a great strength. Despite the mainstream wine industry’s defensiveness, natural wine has never been an organised movement. It’s an ideal, rather than a set of rules: to make wine with an absolute minimum of intervention and manipulation in the vineyard or in the cellar.
Practically speaking, that means farming organically, biodynamically or by using some variant of the two. In the cellar, no overt manipulations or additives are allowed beyond a minimal amount of sulfur dioxide, which has long been used as a stabiliser and preservative, and all processes should be communicated transparently. Yet, even within the natural-wine world, the meaning of the ideal is debated fiercely. “The word ‘natural’ might go away, which wouldn’t be a bad thing,” said Alice Feiring, an author and natural-wine advocate who, along with sommelier Pascaline Lepeltier, spoke on how soils impart their personalities onto wines. “More and more, we’re just talking about good wine.”
Which brings me back to the question of what it means to call a wine alive. I asked Isabelle Legeron, an educator and author who organised RAW, what the term “living wine” meant to her.
“They have rather strong personalities, they are fully self-expressive,” Legeron said. “I think the issue nowadays is that we taste with our heads, we don’t really taste with our mouths. Let your instinct take over, then you really connect to this living element of the wine. There’s a communication with them, because they are so full of life.”
With a nod to a growing contingent of American natural winemakers, around 25 were represented at the fair, including old favourites of mine like Dirty & Rowdy, which poured a wonderful, mineral-suffused mourvèdre from the Chalone region of California; Donkey & Goat; AmByth Estate (see if you can find its savoury 2013 Paso Robles syrah); and Eyrie, now making a trousseau from the Dundee Hills of Oregon.
Newer names for me include Day Wines, making pure Willamette Valley pinot noirs, and Vinca Minor, which makes primarily cabernet sauvignon and carignan wines from old-vine vineyards in California.
“It was powerful, and we feel lucky to have been a part of it,” Jason Charles, Vinca Minor’s owner, said of the fair. “Isabelle is a force, and the community that she has built with RAW is remarkable.”
Perhaps no wines at RAW embodied Legeron’s definition of living better than those from Gut Oggau, a small producer from the Burgenland in eastern Austria. The wines seem so alive to the proprietors, Eduard Tscheppe and Stephanie Tscheppe-Eselboeck, that each of their cuvées is named after a family member, complete with an intricate line drawing of the relative’s face on the label.
In the glass, they are energetic, exuberant and pure. They are not only a pleasure to drink, they also make you feel healthy and good. I particularly loved the gorgeously floral rosé, called Winifred, made of blaufraenkisch and zweigelt.
Tscheppe-Eselboeck, who has been to RAW events in Europe, said she was thrilled to be at the New York fair.
“At the end of the day, we are just producing wine, creating and sustaining a culture,” she said. “Why not get a wider awareness of healthy soil and sustainable production?”