When did taking pleasure in fine wine become an ideological transgression?
Its time seems to have come in an America where earth-huggers now seek to de-legitimize all kinds of previously unchallenged everyday activities, like driving an automobile, eating meat and using lightbulbs that actually cast light.
A few weeks ago, I grumped about restaurant wine lists I found “100% inscrutable” — especially all-Greek ones and the eco-friendly lineup at new Reynard in Williamsburg’s Wythe Hotel. My rant had no underlying political agenda. I wanted only to point out how dumb it is to make wine choosing an ordeal.
There was a little outrage over my Greek gripe. But ticking off eco-wine maniacs was another story.
I wrote that Reynard’s all-French list — 100% comprised of offbeat bottles by small producers, many of them so-called ”natural” wines — were unknown to 100% of customers. Did a list lacking even a few familiar reference points make sense at a casual Brooklyn eatery with an all-American menu?
That gentle insight set off a coast-to-coast hissy fit that hasn’t let up. The Times’ Eric Asimov accurately wrote that my rant “landed like a fat bug in a glass of fine Irouleguy blanc.”
But the uproar wasn’t really over whether wine lists can be too esoteric for the average customer — which can also be a nuisance at lots of restaurants that have no natural vintages. It was that I’d inadvertently aroused the slumbering dragon of politically tainted, anti-mainstream wine wonkery.
As Wall Street Journal columnist Lettie Teague has written, to a growing number of zealots, “natural wine is not just what you drink with dinner, it’s a crusade . . . against ‘industrial wine,’ a reclamation of the honest and handmade.”
Among other departures, “natural” wines are typically made “without intervention” and unfiltered. The strategy is supposed to preserve hitherto overlooked qualities that natural proponents claim have been lost through modern methods.
The “natural” crowd also promotes the baloney that sulfites — a naturally occurring substance normally added to wine to stabilize and preserve it — are toxic, a claim befitting the hucksters behind “purified” tap water being peddled for $2.50 a pop at a shop downtown.
Making wine the “natural” way usually yields a clunky product — at their worst, as rough-edged as the eerie, grape-based beverage my paternal grandfather and uncles once made in their Brooklyn back yards and cellars.
Often they’re inherently unstable. As Reynard sommelier Lee Campbell gleefully told an interviewer, they can change character not only from year to year, but day to day — “that yeast is really showing its ass today,” she laughed. At prices up to $100, some of us prefer an orderly and predictable ass.
At Reynard, I liked a selection from the Rhone’s Saint-Joseph region, La Ferme des Sept Lunes 2009 — a plausible, pleasant syrah we’d enjoy more at less than its $72 cost. But we also had banal pinot noir, disconcertingly cloudy sauvignon blanc and a sip (all we could stomach) of a mysterious red evocative of descending into a mildew-caked farmhouse cellar.
I’ve tasted funky stuff at other New York places, even Bar Boulud. But Reynard is one of the few places where the obscure repertory is the only one available.
Reynard is a good restaurant that I believe most people would enjoy more if there were alternatives to its current wine choices.
My reward for standing up for the imbibing millions?
To San Francisco Chronicle wine editor Jon Bonne, I was “sounding a bit like the old guy shouting at kids to get off his lawn.” I’m a “lunatic” to something called Digest NY and “stultified” to online Palate Press.
The blog Dr. Vino launched a thread that continues to draw comments two weeks on. Insights included, “Yes, Steve, we must explore nearly extinct varietals from Savoie . . . If you would like to eat and drink only what you know, there are countless Applebees and Olive Gardens.”
Campbell herself weighed in the other day that I was like the “old curmudgeon who doesn’t get where progress is going.”
Finally, lending something like gravitas to the babble, the Times’ Asimov made my column the subject of his own column on Wednesday. He made it sound as if I endorsed selling only “mainstream” wines and disdained the “adventurous.” Which of course I don’t — I merely object to restaurants forcing customers to struggle to make sense of an unfathomable list.
A former restaurant critic himself, Asimov surely knows how hard it can be to choose even a wine one knows well in a dark, cramped and raucous dining rooms like Reynard’s. Yet he wrote 1,111 words without once mentioning what exactly is “unfamiliar” about Reynard’s list — namely, that much of it is tailored to Campbell’s and owner Andrew Tarlow’s notion of “natural.”
Asimov asked whether restaurants didn’t “have the right to stay uncompromisingly true to a vision that may strike some as arcane.”
A restaurant has the “right” to sell whatever it wants. But Reynard’s list isn’t just “unconventional.” It is in service of a very particular philosophy of winemaking, the fruit of which tastes even worse than it sounds.
The Times’ headline asked, “Should a wine list educate or merely flatter you?” The right answer is neither — it should merely taste good. But don’t let that get in the way of loftier ideals of “progress.”