Through the Grapevine #29

Wine news and just a smidge of commentary for Aug. 14, 2024

The News

• The alcohol policy wars continue, and everyone has an agenda. The quote I most related to was from Karen MacNeil, who isn’t without an agenda of her own as a wine professional and founder of Come Over October, a counter-movement to Sober October. “What’s hard about the medical discussion is that it’s very elliptical…One set of doctors says X, another says Y, and pretty soon consumers are just like, ‘what?’” Doctors and scientists are as likely as anyone else to be ideologues, and research is often funded by someone who stands to make a profit from its results. Everything feels like fake news. Personally I’m going to keep enjoying my wine, and if it shaves a month or two off my lifespan, I won’t know the difference anyway.

• If you do want to cut down, de-alcoholized wine continues to get better. I didn’t love the Giesen 0% wines I tried a year or two ago, but they’ve become very popular, and the company is doing great work in innovating within the category and upping their sustainability practices. I thought Leitz nonalcoholic wines were better at my last sampling, but it’s been a while, and many of these companies are continually improving.

• Is wine a good value? In an individual sense, it really depends on what you expect from your wine, how well you understand how prices reflect what went into a bottle of wine, and how much money you have to spend. I often think a $40 bottle of wine is a better value than a $10 bottle, because I am factoring in how much I will enjoy it and how much positive vineyard and winery practices are worth to me. On the other hand, the reality of money is that I currently can’t afford a $40 bottle of wine, so does this mean I have no wine? What a tragedy that would be! On a larger scale, this isn’t even about what you or I think of the value of wine; it’s about how wine producers and marketers increase consumers’ perception of value in wine. Where is your sweet spot where you think you’re getting quality for price? I find most of my best values - wines I think are pleasant and interesting to drink but don’t eclipse the rest of my grocery bill - in the $15-20 range, but it’s possible to go even lower if you look for deals or buy from regions that represent good value. Portugal! Chile! Lesser known parts of Italy!

• When it comes to making and selling wine, is it possible we’re listening to the wrong people? There’s snobbery about large producers who make popular wines. I share this snobbery, even though I work for one of them. There’s gatekeeping around creative approaches to wine and beverage programs, and I’ve been prone to this, too. Perhaps we should listen to the people who are successful, and also - the horror! - to the consumers themselves.

• I sometimes tell people that I got into wine because it’s the perfect Venn diagram of nerdiness and hedonism.

  

  To be fair, what I see as hedonistic is often pretty nerdy, too. For example, if you also wish to be nerdy about wine, I recommend to you the Matthew’s World of Wine and Drink Podcast. This week was a great interview with Henry Jeffreys about English wine. My only complaint is that for the most part, I can’t actually get these wines in the U.S., and cannot add them to my nerdy or hedonistic lineup.

• It’s baaaack! Last week I made a joke about the old Riunite commercial, and now it’s being revived: “Riunite on ice - still nice!” Let’s be honest, I don’t hate the idea of a Lambrusco Spritz, although I’d probably go a bit drier than Riunite.

Housekeeping

You may already know that I started a second section of this Substack to write about my process of leaving the church and becoming a professional wine nerd. Water into Wine is a somewhat separate entity, so if it comes to you and you don’t want it, you can follow these directions to opt out of those posts but keep receiving all the wine, all the time. The same directions apply if you want to receive only my reflections on that journey and not the wine-centric posts of Just a Smidge. Look for a new Water into Wine post later this week.

In my ideal world, I would be making enough of a living from writing and teaching about wine that I could take the time to focus on finishing up my WSET diploma (getting qualified for more educationally-oriented positions), and set aside the time it will take to write this memoir as a whole rather than as blog spurts. You all are a big part of that, and if you would like to help me reach that goal, please consider either becoming a paid subscriber to Just a Smidge or Water into Wine, or leaving a virtual tip through Venmo at Stacey-Midge.

The Best Thing I Drank This Week

We had a big anniversary party this week at work, and I got to sample a bunch of rare library wines that should probably make this list, but you know what?