Accidental Manifesto

On why it's time to bring old people's wines into trendy natural wine bars

“God, I’d kill for a Barolo”, - my sister Alex and I are scanning the shelves of a charming wine shop just one canal across from Haarlem’s city centre. 

A small room in a residential neighborhood full of fairytale looking houses, Wildewijn is actually a shop only three hours a week - from 2 to 5pm every Saturday. There are quirky posters, fun bottle labels, soulful vinyl playing in the background, and all other attributes of a natural wine space created with love. 

Wildewijn has been the flag bearer of the natural wine scene in the Netherlands since 2013, and is one of the key forces shaping the lists of some of the trendiest wine bars in Amsterdam. Which explains the presence of quite a few headliners on their shelves - from Domaine Petit Gimios, Olivier Horiot and Julien Guillot to Domaine de l’Ecu, Lulu Vigneron, and to my great surprise - even a few bottles of New Zealand’s Kindeli by Alex Craighead.

We count the days till my departure and leave with an incomplete case containing a Pet-Nat and a Saint Laurent and Zweigelt blend the brilliant husband and wife Maria & Alex Koppitsch duo in Austria’s Burgenland, Zsolt Sütö’s signature orange “Porta #8” from Slovakia, Sebastien David Coëf’s Cabernet Frank from Loire and a mandatory “Růž” rose by Milan Nestac (which at this point can be proclaimed “the official fridge door wine of summer 2024” in our household).

“Even a Langhe would do,” - I catch myself thinking on the drive back. The idea of me suddenly lusting after a glass of Nebbiolo on a summery Saturday afternoon is so amusing, I can’t help but chuckle. In a few moments it dawns on me that in my three weeks in Europe, I’ve been drinking almost exclusively at either Karakterre or the best natural wine purveyors in Austria and the Netherlands.

The privilege of drinking only natural wines has not been an option for me ever since I’ve stepped into running fine dining beverage programs 2,5 years ago. Not many people realise this, but unless a somm owns a restaurant or a bar outright, their wine list is as much a reflection of their point of view, as it is a testament to their negotiation skills. Just like in a fine political thriller, decoding wine list placements even at the most recognised venues is often about “following the money”, as in - investors, some of the wealthiest guests and the omnipresent mafia that most of the companies distributing world’s biggest wine brands insist on being.

So despite the fact that both of my lists - for Embla and Cristal Room have been nominated the Best Sustainable Wine Lists in Asia by the Star Wine List Awards in their respective years, the reality of writing those was a bit like speed walking through a minefield hoping you’d make it to the other side before someone’s patience explodes. In other words, at high stake venues new age natural wine is something you sneak onto your list, not something you serve or drink exclusively for weeks on end.

Needless to say, once my plane touched down in Vienna I consciously and willingly threw myself into the natural wine scene that I so desperately miss in Hong Kong. And I loved it, too! Hand to heart, I’ve tasted some of the most exciting and paradigm shifting wines in a long time during this trip. It just turns out that drinking exclusively what a trendy natural wine bar considers cool at the moment can leave you a little jaded after a while. 

So what was amiss, you ask? Well, nothing major. Just like half of the wine map of Europe. 

Barolo, Rioja, Bordeaux, Northern Rhone, Tuscany - and it’s not like these places are devoid of soulful artisanal winemaking in line with the natural wine ideas. Yet most of the lists I’ve flipped through would have Frank Cornelissen listed, but not Bartolo Mascarello (or ok, allocations be damned, Giulia Negri, Elena Brovia, or any number of naturally minded producers in Piedmont), Gut Oggau, but not FX Pichler, Julien Guillot, but not Bachelet Monnot and so on. Grower Champagne seemed to be the only genre of classical wine that was prominently featured everywhere, which is kind of funny considering it’s one of the most technological wines of the bunch. 

Trust me, I get it. Obscene prices on some of already well known producers and long standing distributor relationships or hard to get allocations are part of it, so is the desire to push against the overall representation disbalance that has plagued the wine lists for so long. It’s true that the wine industry as a money making project spurred by industrialisation and globalisation is the first to blame for the trend of glaring omissions. “A bizarre case of mass amnesia” - I scribbled in my notebook while studying some of the wine lists from the famous fine dining places around the world late last year. 

But it seems like the idea that there are wines not touched by the evils of capitalism and industrialisation in Piedmont is about to become as revolutionary in natural wine circles, as the idea that wine existed before the monks have planted Burgundy (and well before there were Christian monks or France at all) needs to become among fine dining somms. 

What bothers me I suppose is that the demarcation line drawn between the traditional and natural wine venues seems to be less and less about viticulture, winemaking and ethics, and more about the style. There’s glu glu and there’s red wine that has tannins. There’s experimental wine a 24 year old in his second vintage is putting out and there are wines with books written about them. There’s young people’s wine and there’s old people’s wine. 

To understand this dichotomy, my wine theory of pants may come in handy. It stipulates that every decade or so there’s a magical force (rumored to emanate from the gravitational field of the Earth itself) that makes pants skinny, only to make them as ridiculously wide as possible in 10 years time. Lighter and structured wines seem to be under the same spell. 

Natural wine bars are in the “textured whites, glu glu reds” phase at the moment, which I would have enjoyed and filed under “oh fashion”, if they were called “young people’s wine bars”, and didn’t imply that they represent the whole of an ethically colored spectrum of the wine world that I would like to succeed long term. Because I see a lot of people and regions excluded from this phase due to style differences, and I think that creating stylistic silos and narrowing down what a wine could be is exactly what the natural wine movement has been trying to escape. In the process of this frantic escape it has somehow established a case of reverse amnesia, which is just as equally dangerous for the shared and culturally significant 9,000+ year old project of wine.

More practically, I think excluding classic wine producing regions from service is not reflective of how people drink.  I don’t drink stylistically homogeneous wines. I’m almost certain the somms that run these natural wine programs don’t drink like that, and I’d bet money that even (and hopefully) the winemakers most prominently featured on those lists don’t drink like that. Yet, a casual millenial that frequents only natural wine spots would seemingly never discover the wines that shaped the last century. And in many cases we can’t discount it on being simply priced out - J.B. Becker, Lopez de Heredia or Domaine Huet cost as much as Milan Nestarec, whose wines I also love dearly.

Also! It’s like you can love mom and dad, both. We are complex creatures trying to make sense of an infinite universe of flavour and plants and people that create it. I’m all for asking the difficult questions and holding people accountable, but no Barolo is not a “bougie white girl’s wine”, as one natural wine bar owner puts it. It’s just wine.

I think there’s a lot of work to be done in bridging the classic and new age wines that share the same core values and weaving examples from each camp into a well rounded story about how wine came about, where it’s at and how we can head into an ethically sound future. The kind of future where there are just sommeliers and bars, without the stylistic qualifiers and where I can follow a glass of delightful glu glu with a glass of an elegantly structured red and not feel like total a creep.

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