Issue #1: The Accessibility of Wine, pt. 1

Big Drinks is a bi-weekly newsletter about the beverages we drink, where they come from, and how we enjoy them. Each issue hopes to approach a topic and explore it from a new angle with help from experts. Subscribe to get each new issue directly to your inbox.

Part I:

A bottle of wine is a commitment.

A bag of coffee retains quality for weeks, tea can be enjoyed for months after it’s packaged, spirits last almost indefinitely (which maybe should give us pause for putting something that antiseptic into our system) and beer is usually packaged for individual servings.

A bottle of wine, however, represents a distinctive timeline: while many wine styles can be aged in the bottle, the moment you open one you’ve got a ticking clock. Exposure to oxygen can help open up aromatics in a wine, but as the bottle continues its exposure, you start to see a degradation in quality.

Knowing you’re going to open a bottle of wine is a tacit agreement with yourself (and whoever you may be with) that the experience will peak likely within a few hours, and no matter how vacuum tight your re-corking system is, the next day will bring changes to the flavor profile, and those continual changes will likely develop some sort of off-flavors by the third day.

While there are a variety of levels of quality and price points out there, it’s hard to ignore the rise of natural wine — maybe even capitalized as Natural Wine to discuss it as a concept — amongst a broader group of wine drinkers. Simply put, natural wine is wine made with the fewest amount of additives: that includes, generally, allowing natural yeasts in the environment to do the fermentation work as well. The concept can be much more complex to define at times, and there’s no certification for natural wine leaving it open to interpretation sometimes, but that hasn’t stopped it from becoming a buzz-worthy phrase. Much like Craft Beer before it, Natural Wine is turning into a category that insinuates quality amongst certain groups of people.

I reached out to Ann Marie Meiers, a wine professional in Chicago, to get a better perspective on this:

“I think one of our most important jobs as professionals in the natural wine community is to keep a conversation alive that characterizes this really special craft beyond it's marketability (or something) and emphasizes the things that excite us about it; namely the people we love who make it and the unique places it comes from, and how those elements continue to evolve independent of the buzzwords and what's fashionable to drink or buy or act like you enjoy or whatever.”

As a phrase, craft beer referred generally to a new movement of young, upstart breweries challenging the notion that beer had to be dominated by a limited selection of styles and produced in mass quantity. The Brewer’s Association has some specific designations it uses to denote what craft beer might mean:

Now, that’s a pretty simple definition, but what really tickles my fancy are the footnotes:

It’s a whole lot of sound and fury, signifying nothing. Much like pornography to Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart, craft beer, even to the Brewer’s Association, is very much “I know it when I see it.”

Part of this somewhat troublesome attempt at a definition comes from the Brewer’s Association constantly fighting against the corporate beer world. As major breweries like Anheuser-Busch continue to snatch up formerly small, independent breweries, the Brewer’s Association has continuously tried to paint major breweries as bad for beer. The idea here is that the small, independent breweries that the Brewer’s Association represents view themselves as a collective competition against corporate breweries like Miller-Coors or Anheuser-Busch.

Walt Dickinson of Wicked Weed, a formerly independent brewery bought out by Anheuser-Busch, had this to say, however:

Whether or not natural wine is having an impact on craft beer sales is hard to gauge, but but there’s definitely more to explore in how natural wine contends with the conventional wine industry.

Thanks for reading part one! Check back tomorrow for the thrilling conclusion!

If you liked this issue, please share it with a friend!

Thanks to Ann Marie Meiers, whose answers were the backbone of this issue of Big Drinks. Ann Marie has worked with mostly natural wine, mostly in Chicago, for a pretty long time. She likes most people and everybody's pets but is extremely discerning regarding cheesburgers. Additional information and help for this issue of Big Drinks comes from DJ Piazza.

Artwork by Ashley Elander Strandquist. You can view her illustration work here and check out her printing business here.