Jane Anson
Afew years ago a friend of mine introduced me to the artist Jake Berthot. He was an American painter who started off in the mid-1960s working in a minimalist style, but in his later career switched to landscapes and the natural world. He specifically liked the idea of Slow Art – works that took him a long time to complete, and so ought to take viewers a long time to see all their facets, if ever. He hated, so he liked to say, fast paintings.
Not too hard to make the jump from here to fast and slow wines. This year everything has slowed down – there’s less travel, less commuting, less socialising, less driving children to school, less of pretty much all the things that make our lives so frenetic in a ‘normal’ year. We are all going to have to decide what bits of ‘before’ we want to keep, and which parts we need to rethink. Not just for work and travel, but choices over what we put on our tables every day.
Fast food and fast wine have their place, no question, and sometimes there is nothing better. But fast wines are inevitably ones that are made at scale, that prioritise the cheapest sourcing, the widest routes to market, the business model where the brand owner, distributor or retailer invariably makes more than the people who produce the grapes. And all of a sudden the human cost of that model looks more uncomfortable than ever.
Covid-19 has put the brakes on business the world over, and the headlines for wine regions make painful reading. Champagne this week announced that more than 100 million bottles are likely to go unsold, with sales figures that are worse than the Great Depression. The South African wine industry is facing crisis as both domestic and export sales have been severely restricted or (depending on the week) banned outright, compounding issues from a deep recession that was impacting wineries even before Covid hit. And now the beautiful wines of the Bekaa Valley in Lebanon are dealing with the quadruple hit of an economy in meltdown; hyperinflation in an industry that imports all barrels, vats, bottles and corks; an increasingly severe Covid situation; and the catastrophic explosion in the port of Beirut.
It made my tasting of the most recent releases from the dynamic and relatively new Ixsir winery this week a bittersweet pleasure. This is one of the highest estates in the country at 1,800m in the mountains around Batroun, and is one of the highlights of new and developing viticultural areas beyond the Bekaa Valley. Founder Etienne Debbane recently told an industry paper that: ‘Lebanon has been in on-and-off war for 40 years, but I think this is the toughest crisis we have ever been exposed to.’ They have had to find ingenious ways to get this year’s newly bottled wines out of the country to export markets; in my case, making its way to Bordeaux via consultant Hubert de Boüard. Each bottle – from the richly textured El Ixsir, SyrahCabernet Sauvignon-Merlot to the indigenous white grape of Obeideh with Muscat and Viognier in the Altitudes cuvée – is a reminder that we as consumers have the ability to help.
It’s not easy to find bright spots in the news right now, but supporting carefully created, slow wines – ones that inch forward Berthot-style, one step at a time, whether in the bottle with ageing or in the glass once opened, revealing new facets and complexities over time – is something we can all do.
Slow wine is not synonymous with fine wine – money is not their yardstick, but authenticity and heart. These are wines that support their local areas, shed a light on culture and history and that support the families who make them. They’re able not only to provide moments of pleasure in a difficult year, but to help us understand that our own consumer choices give us a way to resist the stresses of 2020.