DROPLETS: The Week in Natural Wine

DROPLETS is an irregular round-up of quick takes, clapbacks, shout-outs, and other miscellany related to natural wine, wine-at-large, and the restaurant scene in Paris and beyond. It’s a smorgasbord of natural wine counter-propaganda to the Anglophone and French wine media. The first three topics in a given week are free, with access to the full deluge of ten topics limited to paid subscribers.

Abruzzo winemaking scion Chiara Pepe sent wine nerds’ heads spinning recently with the announcement in Wine Spectator that she is the new head of viticulture and winemaking at northern Rhône brand Domaine de la Chapelle, part of the Paul Jaboulet Ainé estate, owned since 2006 by the Frey family (whose vast portfolio also includes Bordeaux estate Château La Lagune, Burgundy estate Château Corton C., and part of Champagne Billecart-Salmon).

As Domenico Fontana might have said upon discovering Pompeii, there’s a lot to unpack here.

Among renowned Italian wine producers, the Pepe family were quick to recognize the recalibration of fine wine markets in the 2010s instigated by the rise of natural wine in France and beyond. They rightly saw parallels with their own winemaking, which has always eschewed exogenous yeasts and filtration and which has always involved sulfite doses far lower than prevailing norms. Yet there has long been a tension between the Emidio Pepe estate’s laudably natural family winemaking and its manifest aim to be perceived, on export markets with substantial buying power, as a producer of premium, ultra high-end wine. (Cf. the family’s longtime practice of releasing its less expensive young-vine montepulciano and cerasuolo exclusively within Italy.)

The tendency to dissemble or obscure one’s desire for wealth and business success is a trait encountered more often among French natural winemakers than their Italian counterparts. (A legacy, one might suppose, of the French Revolution.) But most natural vignerons throughout Europe still recognize the value system that unites natural winemaking with the ideal of the proprétaire-exploitant, or owner-operator.

Natural winemaking requires the freedom to take risk. (It is a risk to plow less, to spray less. It is a risk to sulfite less, or not at all. It is a risk to age wine for many years. Etc.) Ownership of the land one farms helps permit this freedom. Similarly, one is arguably less inclined to practice destructive farming in pursuit of insane yields, if one owns the land and lives on it full-time, amid any potential environmental harm.

Conversely, large-scale landownership and the top-down administration of wine estates in diverse regions at the hands of distant owners often results in terrible, risk-averse winemaking, and various forms of agricultural abuse, even within organics and biodynamics. (Talk to Cyril Fhal about Chapoutier’s investments in the Roussillon, for example.)

This is why it is hard to fathom Chiara Pepe’s embrace of the “flying winemaker” role, which is predicated upon a division between ownership and operation of an estate1. On some level, it represents siding with an international ownership class whose interests are in many ways opposed to those of one’s fellow owner-operator vignerons, few of whom wish to see the land in their region snapped up by distant owners - no matter who they eventually hire.

It’s possible that the Pepe family’s well-cultivated relationships in the international fine wine market are enough to justify Chiara Pepe’s salary at Domaine de la Chapelle, which has until now been basically an upmarket supermarket brand. It also seems possible the arrangement could comprise a prelude or test-run, on the part of the Frey family, for a certain investment in Abruzzo. For her part, Pepe professes, in Wine Spectator, a “lifelong obsession with syrah.”

In her defense, the culturally hegemonic position of French wine has long represented a chip on the shoulder of basically every ambitious Italian winemaker. So one can still applaud the symbolism of a dynamic young Italian woman being placed at the head of a prominent northern Rhône estate. Here’s hoping Pepe has the wisdom to bring some of her grandfather’s inspired approach to montepulciano to Domaine de la Chapelle’s balance-sheet syrah, rather than vice versa2.

Change is also afoot further south, where Czech-born Ardèche vigneron Andrea Calek and his American-French collaborator / ex-companion Stephana Nicolescou have put their renowned, 6.5ha Alba-la-Romaine estate up for sale. Interested parties can take a look at the details here.

“Each one of us wants to move on, and create our own, smaller estates,” explains Nicolescou, who has copiloted the estate since 2016. “He’s almost retirement age, and I’ve always wanted to do my own thing.”

Andrea Calek founded his estate in 2007 with the aid of Gérald and Jocelyne Oustric of Le Mazel. Famously residing in a caravan for his first few vintages, Calek, for many in the wine media, seemed to incarnate the air of mystery and anarchism surrounding early encounters with natural wine. Yet he would prove arguably the most classicist truly natural winemaker among what would soon become a profusion of newly-installed natural vignerons in Ardèche. I rarely leave a visit to the estate nowadays without some new demonstration of the astonishing age-worthiness of his wines.

Prospective buyers need not fear any obligation to live in a caravan. For several years now the estate has comprised a handsome, bioclimatic two-bedroom house with an open kitchen and a bath, as well as a 250m2 harvest house up the hill, replete with a shower.

To onlookers possessed of a certain sensitivity regarding agricultural issues, witnessing the knock-on effects Donald Trump’s reckless, inhumane, self-defeating war on Iran is proving a strangely ambiguous experience.

If world leaders of all political and moral persuasions are unanimously calling for continued peace to permit the resumption of traffic through the Strait of Hormuz, it is partly because the latter permits shipment of fully a third of the world’s nitrogen fertilizers, which are essential for Big Agriculture to continue overproducing terrible food of declining nutritional value at great environmental cost throughout the world.

“If we’re not able to sustain our land with the nutrients that’s needed to grow crop, then our yields are going to go down, [which is] eventually going to drive up the price of corn, which is what we use to feed chickens, pigs, cattle, amongst other things, and eventually that is going to go back to the consumer at the grocery store,” says Lance Lillibridge, former president of the Iowa Corngrowers’ Association, in a recent video report in the New York Times. The same report notes that the price of two widely-used nitrogen fertilizers rose by 20% and 50%, respectively, in the opening weeks of Trump’s war on Iran.

As someone occupationally engaged in the activity of persuading people it is worthwhile to spend a greater share of their income on responsibly-farmed organic food and wine produced without the use of nitrogen fertilizers, it would be nice to imagine that me and my ideological cohort are insulated, in some way, from the extended closure of the Strait of Hormuz. After all, we already spend much more than the average person on far superior groceries!

But we would be kidding ourselves. There is not a government on earth that would (will?) withstand the fallout from the mass realization that the low food prices - and freedom from participation in food production - that the overwhelming majority of us have enjoyed throughout the last century-plus have been predicated on a devil’s bargain with noxious environmentally-destructive nitrogen fertilizers. It could almost be said that preventing this realization (via agricultural subsidies and other maneuvers) is among the primary roles of government today.

Here, as with other government functions, the characteristic disregard of the US president is something to behold.

Subscribers can scroll down for 7 more quick takes, on topics including: Simon Woolf on orange wine nomenclature; Eric Asimov on the effects of AI on sommeliers; Rene Redzepi and AMEX; Felicity Carter on declining alcohol sales; Karakterre Germany erratum; and more.