There was a quiet announcement this week that Alice Feiring has been chosen to chair a new award, Free Wine, at the annual Italian wine event Vinitaly.
Bravo!
Alice is a friend–all heart, smarts, passion and spunk. She has also been pioneering natural wine with unabashed frankness and tenacity for as long as I can remember.
One one level, I wanted to raise a glass and point to my post from 2012 where I imagined that the natural wine movement was indeed going mainstream.
That is naive of course.
Too simplistic a retort for a uniquely complex market with wildly nuanced relationships with a variety of consumer wine segments.
In the last 5-6 years the wine world has changed dramatically. We are in a renaissance reveling in innovation and excellence.
Small lot producers have populated the top of the wine lists and the top shelves at retailers the world over. Somms champion them, special events showcase them, the retail model pioneered by Chambers Street Wines here in New York has been innovated on everywhere.
It is certainly true that with winemaking innovation occurring everywhere I can buy an unsulfured bottle of amazing wine every day at below market prices 100 feet from my subway stop.
But something of far greater import is going on.
Beyond me certainly.
I believe that the process of aculturation that happened with organic food and ingredients, driven by stores like Whole Foods is just beginning to happen to the wine world.
Not everyone who shops at Whole Foods buys organic products. A very small percentage of consumers shop there at all, but from an awareness level of organic and farm to table produce, the explosion of green markets in urban centers and the scores of startups connecting farms to city residents, what they popularized has certainly trickled down.
Way down to the middle of the market. To every strata of generational uniqueness from the millennials to the baby boomers.
From what Alice Waters pioneered to the fortunate few in Berkeley back when to the Falafel stands in every neighborhood using organic produce and offering gluten free pita today.
This change has contributed to the rise of the wellness market where it touches how we view the world as consumers and what and where we buy with our expendable incomes.
Wine is not food of course.
And while many classify it as a luxury item they are missing the point.
Over the last two decades wine has slowly started to become part of the fabric of our culture.
It entered as a luxury item certainly, and in our unformed cultural state, our standards for taste were dictated by the unambiguity of the Parker point scale that kickstarted a movement that subsequently grew up and disowned it.
And by a host of pundits who aloof from the realities of the marketplace have defined excellence to their own standards. Not necessarily incorrect just increasingly more irrelevant and arcane.
This is why I’m excited about Alice’s work with Vinitaly.
Certainly there are many events and shops, blogs and tastings that are highlighting the changes in our wine world.
But what needs to happen now is—and I can’t believe I’m saying this honestly—not for natural wine to be known and adopted more widely but for a new era of wine as part of our culture to begin.
For new awareness by more people and a corresponding open language of appreciation to be created at a consumer level.
This will happen not only through the enthusiast wine community that I am very much a part of.
But through new communities and clubs that approach this in their own ways.
Smart groups who by understanding their markets and the unique way wine is part of their lives, will find a way to make it feel natural to them. New language to express what they like. New ways to buy and socialize it.
We are in the very primordial days where broader market segments are creating their own communities of interest and understanding about wine.
Where the consumer will internalize a vocabulary of appreciation of wine that is natural to their own speech. That is based on enjoyment and grounded in the curiosity that people naturally want to understand what satisfies them. To simply have fun.
That is what we do with food.
That is what we will do with wine. As part of our culture and part of how we interact with people.
So why is it important that Alice is chairing a new series of wine awards? Being given a microphone of influence to the market?
Alice is someone with very strong opinions, unique tastes but she approaches wine with openness, complete transparency and an understanding that it is about people and enjoyment.
She is simply completely unafraid to be different and that is what we need.
She may look at something obscure like the trend towards no sulfur added wines, but she will evaluate them, in her own words, for “emotional impact, liveliness and drinkability”.
She will bring the unique and the interesting to the many in language they can make their own. With approachability for people to learn from and enjoy.
This is why I applaud this.
A changing of the guard from the old generation to a new kind of expertise.
A new openness to change that speaks to enjoyment and the connection with a changing marketplace of people with a new set of beliefs.
A world where an ethos of taste can be a new criteria for excellence.
Big congrats Alice! Choosing you is the wise choice for all of us!
