I feel a very strong impulse to discover those small, artisanal wineries and their hand-made products. Get enough of them on the market, and they can be a sizable force for greater diversity in wine. And they need not be wildly expensive. Not at all.

Fredric:
You know that I am on the purist side of the wine life. But having also been a grape grower and winemaker, let me tell all starry-eyed purists that life isn’t black or white, and that holds true for winemaking.

There’s nothing wrong with Alices’ list–until you face nature and try to make a living at it instead of write about it.

The moment a human gets involved in cultivating grapevines and producing wine, the process suffers from intervention, whether it is our purist interventions or the overdone manufacturing of wine.

The issue is not to leave grapes and wine alone; the issue is to respect them and, through minimalism, work with what you’ve got, but you need also to be ready to take action when disaster looms.

Just to be clear: I grow my own produce because I want clean, fresh, unadulterated food–I grow vegetables in winter in a greenhouse. I feel the same way about wine. I want it as natural as it can be. But I also recognize that neither process–growing food or producing wine–can ever be natural unless we simply let nature do it all by itself.

To even hint otherwise is idealism without basis.

Thomas

Totally agree. We are not at odds here at all. But Baldo Cappelano in Piedmont said it the best, I think. “Look, up the road to Serralunga there is Swiss man who has cows and sells milk. I love that milk, straight from the cow. But I can’t always get there. Sometimes I have to go to the supermarket. There has to be room for both kinds of milk and both kinds of wine. Here is the crime; industry pretends to be artisan and trusting people believe them. This is the crime.”