In Division

“I lay in a bed of resistance, chained to either side. I really wish I could reset, rewind.”

Not to make this dramatic, but this opening lyric from a less-popular Underoath album has been particularly stuck in my head over the last few months. Of course, in the last few months, I’ve been questioning what my relationship to natural wine is and what it needs to be. In that time as well, I’ve wondered if I’m past it. There is a disconnect between my goals and the reality of selling wine in 2024 and I struggle with seeing where I fit into that. None of this is to say that I’m willing to step aside from it all, I just figured that I should be open about what is driving this conversation.

I’ve never been someone to struggle to connect with people, especially over the medium of wine, but there seems to be a disconnect between the practice and perception of natural wine that I am laboring to bridge in conversation. I’ve built a career trying to make wine accessible and enjoyable to a wider swath of people encouraging them to drink things that make them happy. At the same time, as we’ve moved further into the natural wine universe, I’ve begun to stop recognizing the wines that people expect to fall under that umbrella, or at least the redeemable qualities in them that attract so many. On one hand, I’ve thought that this could be my “if it’s too loud, you’re too old” moment and have worked on the acceptance portion of that grief. But too often I see phrasing like “Forget about flavors, is the wine alive?” or “I’d rather drink a wine full of flaws with nothing added than have anything in my wine.” which makes me realize that we are not working within the same value system. There is space for everyone to enjoy whatever it is that they like, there is no debate about that but I feel like a portion of the natural wine world is opposed to wine on a very basic level.

To then couple this with all of the fanfare around the remarks of Sylvie Augereau at the beginning of this year’s La Dive Bouteille, the schism between the idealogue and the layperson has widened. In my position, I have to bring those two sides together but the desire for those two sides to unite or at least understand one another has to be there and I deeply feel that this desire is missing. For what it’s worth, I don’t think you can build a following on a product that you cannot rely on. Not to say that I don’t enjoy wines that challenge convention, but I do believe that a product has to be good first. Am I the arbiter of what is good? Only for myself really. But we do have some pretty well-done guidelines to help us figure that out.

But we do have to remember the important part of natural wine is that it is still wine and is never going to become a separate beverage.