Are you acquainted with the phenomenon of déjà vin? It is the profound and inexplicable certainty that you keep seeing the very same bottles of white wine all over you go, in every little Instagrammy bar and bistro in America.Didn’t we consume this bottle at The Glou Factory, no wait, was it Glou Glou, or Glou Bar, or Natural Dispositions, or I think with your friends at Stuck Like Glou (from individuals behind Huffing Glou), which is next to Maisøn de Tinned Fish– I get them all confused. Was it the shimmering piquette or the sparkling pét-nat or the one with the cartoon animal on the label– a bear, I believe, or some other big hulking monster, no doubt? It featured pastel pinks and smokey oranges, to match the absolutely natural wine within, made from a grape you’ve never ever heard of, in a bar with throbbing music on vintage speakers and a great deal of Tossing Fits-looking guys standing around, holding their stemware from the base and examining their phones.Is it starting to seem like the same discussion is being had about wine right now, over and over once again? Natural red wine culture in America is ascendent, remaking the method a generation beverages and sells wine in a meaningful way. However … have not I scrolled past this meme before? One can not duck into an old preferred bar in Los Angeles these days, the sort of pubby-clubby location where one might buy a beer and a shot, without being faced by a brand-new menu sub-section designated in bold font, with additional exclamation points: NATURAL WHITE WINE!!! You might ask the bartender to tell you more, as I did– when did these white wines join the menu? Existed one to recommend?
“Natural wines are like, better for the environment,” they say, glancing up from their iPhone, below the clanging din of the bluetooth stereo. “It indicates the white wine benefits you,” they include, prior to advising an orange red wine from Meinklang.Is that actually
why these white wines are on the menu? For my health?
“Well– natural white wine is really popular right now, you know. I guess we felt like we had to.”
It’s dèjá vin all over again. Invite to the memeification of natural wine.Wine is an industry in flux. The stats tell a contrasting story: Millennials are spending less on white wine, and if the industry fails to bring in more youthful drinkers, sales might drop by 20% in the next years. And yet, market sales are up by nearly 17% in the in 2015, and income from “great red wine” sales have actually grown by as much as 40%. This whiplash speaks volumes about the inadequacy of reporting on the red wine service as a monolith: sales of Two Dollar Chuck indicate absolutely nothing to the roaring vintage wine auction industry, which is presently setting all-time highs.These sales patterns imply less than zero to the world of natural wine– an amorphous, rather deliberately undefinable category that has actually been woefully underserved by business reporting and sales patterns, in spite of its growing cultural primacy. Natural white wine’s roots remain in the work of doggedly independent, little production winemakers working largely without the addition of additives; commercialization and financial dividend have typically hardly went into the photo. Even a few short years ago, natural red wine was something like a specific niche beverage subculture, and a signifier of quirk and trick for the facilities that dealt with it.
Source: https://www.bonappetit.com/story/natural-wine-list-meinklang-cool