“Nothing added and nothing removed” is the mantra: no industrial yeasts, no additives, no synthetic processes. In natural wine, the resulting imperfections are not really imperfections; they are the goal.
Master sommelier Pascaline Lepeltier was walking through Central Park when she recognized a scent: manure, which rhymes with flâneur when she says it. “It’s funny because some guys love this smell — that kind of dirty, sweaty smell,” Lepeltier says. “That’s what they want in natural wine. Horse shit.”
Even the city’s most upscale restaurants are getting into weird wine: Last year, Eleven Madison Park shocked traditionalists by pairing a smoky sweet-potato dish with a biodynamic orange wine from Austrian winemaker Christian Tschida. I contacted Bonné after a natural-wine booster cautioned: “Jon Bonné doesn’t really have a true understanding of natural wines. Plus, his wife works for a traditional import company.” Bonné believes natural-wine merchants who are ignorant — or taking advantage of ignorance — sell overpriced wine under the guise of iconoclasm. “They’re being curated for the correct virtue points; they’re not being curated for quality.
If you haven’t noticed, Bonné is fairly unapologetic in his elitism. He thinks the second purpose of natural wine is to “willfully kind of piss on a thousand years of history,” as though “a millennium of cultural work is somehow irrelevant because it’s uncool.” But enough shit-talking. Let’s talk manure. That horse-shit scent, politely called “barnyard,” is the product of Brettanomyces, a bacterium present in many wines. Lepeltier, a partner at downtown bistro Racines NY, explained: “It triggers some sexual stuff. And I’m sure about that.” Lepeltier has a degree in philosophy and total certainty in her opinions and taste. Like a musky perfume, barnyard wines appeal to “something very, very primitive in us. So that’s one reason [people like it].
Though a natural wine could, in theory, conform to any aesthetic, the wines currently marketed as such tend to fit a sort of dressed-down, casual-chic vision of abundance. As a recent feature in Fortune explained, “The French, perfecters of both making and consuming natural wine, have an onomatopoeic term for this, glou glou, the sound these easy-drinking reds and whites make hurtling down your throat on a warm June day.” This is wine designed to be gulped, not sipped.
Natural wines are expensive but not garishly so. That’s part of why Frenchette’s wine list impressed Asimov — and another reason natural wine seems so drinkable. As a restaurant, Frenchette appeals to a “heat-seeking customer pool of food lovers, fashion followers and Wall Street whales,” Asimov writes, in the Times:
Amanda Smeltz joined the staff of Roberta’s in 2012. Four years after Carlo Mirarchi turned the Bushwick pizza parlor into the gourmet juggernaut, he launched Blanca, an ambitious tasting-menu restaurant in a converted garage behind Roberta’s. Artisanal pizza is inherently glou glou. A Michelin-starred tasting-menu restaurant in an artisanal pizza parlor’s backyard? Glou glou squared.
The second time, she was working as a sommelier at the Breslin. The year was 2009. The wine was Hervé Souhaut’s La Souteronne, and she was drinking with two other somms. “We opened it up and put it in the glass, and it was just like, Ho-ho-ho-oly shit!” The sound effect here is foulmouthed Santa Claus, as played by Foghorn Leghorn. “Like, all three of us just started laughing.”
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