Wine’s ‘Craft Beer’ Opportunity?

Late last year I ended up in a very heated discussion with a good friend from LA at a very beautiful Michelin starred South Asian restaurant in central London. He was waxing-zealous over the wonders of Natural Wine (my caps), very much as set in ‘opposition to’… well in opposition to…”Unnatural Wine”…? 

In fairness, there is a vast quantity of what the brilliant Emre Rende calls ‘Chateau Garbage’ out there, and in my youth I probably drank my unfair share of it, but somewhere beyond the Blossom Hills lies a great and varied topography of wine that would not make the cut for him as Natural but is brilliantly made with care, craft and sensitivity. But there was no way he was drinking it. “For fuck’s sake, there are Grand Cru Burgundys that are biodynamically farmed, and fermented using wild yeasts!” I could hear my voice slowly climbing above the genial rumble of the bar. “You just won’t drink it because it lacks the persistent secondary aromas of farm-labourer’s boots and isn’t called ‘PunchyCrunchy Joy Juice!” I paused. The dining room was suddenly a good few decibels less genial.

Let me be clear; I enjoy a lot of natural wines (my lower case) but there is also some that is just outright faulty; all sweaty horse and bruised Granny Smith – both the Apple and its long-dead propagator. There are also some awful ‘trad’ wines. Unimaginative, one-note, unbalanced. ‘Wine-y’ wines that I’ve come across at tastings where the only notes I’ve made read ‘it’s wine’. As a marketer, I love Natural Wine. It’s been a powerful disrupter for an industry caught in cultural aspic, in love with its past, and over-leveraged against its own fading myths.

I remember the first time I had “proper” Burgundy. I was in a restaurant in Hong Kong – the now deceased Serge et Le Phoque – with another good friend; J is big into wine, but definitely from the classically trained school. A contradiction in tweed, he looks like everything that I should hate about wine, but actually embodies in his irreverence and enthusiasm everything that I love – he just likes drinking tasty things… By our second bottle of that memorable Mercurey, we had declared loudly that tonight we were “getting Merc(k)-ed”. I was 30. It was a revelation.

My journey through wine began at University, driven not through desire, but by self-defence. A need to accumulate a protective layer of cultural capital to make up for the lack of economic or social that I arrived with. To know my way round a basic list well enough that I wouldn’t be out of place when someone’s parents came to town and took a handful of us out to one of the few Fine (in the sense of adequate, rather than excellent) Dining restaurants in our student town. Find a crisp, saline white to go with the fish, a glass of that Malbec that might work with the main.  But it didn’t go much further than that. Red vs. White. Light vs. Heavy. Crisp vs. Full. It was cultural camouflage and part of my survival kit for social mobility. Enough to stumble through a mid-market menu, or to know that the smartest thing to do was to ask the Sommelier what they were excited about on their list. And in the main, I avoided France. Hence the revelation that night in Mid-Levels.

France represented everything I feared about wine. Veiled Villages, Vieille Vignes, Variable Vintages. Why couldn’t that just print the grape on the damn label? France was the dominant paradigm for wine – especially in the UK and US; tradition, gatekeeping, obfuscation and arcane knowledge. It’s the diametric opposite of where food culture has moved more broadly, and probably why traditional wine feels like it’s in crisis. Its drinkers are dying, and there is not a single geriatric millennial in the western world who is going to be able to afford to buy a house with a cellar to stock. Or who wants to.

Against this backdrop, Natural Wine is everything Fine Wine isn’t, except made from grapes. Loud, unruly, playful. A rebellion by progressive producers who are sick of rules. Rather than Knowledge and Gatekeeping, it’s exploration and discovery. And with almost no proper definition for what it is, it is a piece of marketing genius – we are everything you don’t like about the ‘other’ wine. 

I’d like to make a brief aside at this point to say that since working part time in the industry, this is a drinkers problem, not a wine-people problem. Everyone I’ve met within the trade has been enthusiastic, humbling, willing to share. Some of the most impressive folks in the industry I have come across have been nothing like the wine stereotype perpetuated by the Anglo-Saxon wine drinker’s pretensions. But the industry is too habituated to their conceits. Fine wine needs to change how it goes to market, before its existing market are all dead. And this is where Natural Wine comes in.

Though it’s slaying a very different enemy, I can’t help but see the parallels between the Natural Wine movement and what Craft Beer has achieved over recent years. The latter was a reaction against a mass-produced product that was losing all character; a push back on poor intrinsics. The former is more about the narrative, the extrinsics. Not what’s in the bottle so much as how we talk about the bottle. A rebellion against a rules and hierarchy that’s made a humble agricultural product an unapproachable ritual of ‘shoulds’ for many. 

I did a lot of work for ‘Big Beer’ during the ascendancy of Craft, and the biggest unlock came when my clients stopped seeing Craft Beer as a category, but as a pressure group. It stopped being about Craft Beer (my caps again…!) but instead simply it was about ‘better beer’. Major Brewers started purchasing new lines, levelling up the quality of their core; some such as Carlsberg even took out full page apology ads to say sorry for the mass produced p*ss they were previously putting out. Many tweaked formulations or returned to a more essential version of their core recipes. They experimented with new variants and flavours. Fast forward ten years and we have suburban fridge doors lined with Lime Sours and Imperial Stouts. Wetherspoons have tens of taps often offering local brewers on their lines. Big beer listened, learnt, and levelled up. Cask is having a renaissance, and Guinness Stout – once seen as an impossible sell – is the UK’s biggest beer. Craft still exists, and there is still a hardcore of true believers. But for most of us, beer just got better, we benefited, and we moved on.

I can’t help but see the natural wine movement similarly, offering a similar opportunity for TradWine to learn. Yes, part of it is about flavour, but TradWine has plenty to offer that suits the growing desire for lighter, fresher, styles. The more important part is transparency, play, discovery, honestly in the winemaking process, letting the grapes speak. Which many TradWine makers are already practicing. They just aren’t preaching yet. To be honest, it starts to sound a little bit like Terroir rebranded. There are powerful intrinsics which are yet to be unlocked. Against a backdrop of structural decline in alcohol consumption, people are buying and drinking less but better when they do consume, a competitive set from a consumer perspective that is bigger not just than wine, but that total beverage alcohol in its entirety – from Aperol Spritz to Escape Rooms, to THC gummies and Padel, Natural Wine’s rhetoric just sits better with this competitive set. Meanwhile TradWine is under pressure.

I’ve mentioned practical elements already, from moderation to modern living spaces, but there are still the old rules, the lack of a contemporary narrative or modern experiential element to TradWine that resonates with most folk under 50 who have the disposable income to spare. Elements of the whole model are already in crisis – just look at the structural decline of En Primeur sales.

The window is still very much open though to respond to what the Natty brigade have demonstrated, to learn from the insurgents. How I would love to take on the Head of Marketing role for somewhere like BB&R or the Wine Society; rebrand in-bond storage to some sort of cloud-collecting, ‘gift-to-future self’ service (yes this is bad, no-one is paying me yet to work up the answers, so consider this a placeholder…), dial up the stories that exist in these storied Chateaus that resonate more closely with the modern millennial drinker. Open a bar in Shoreditch showcasing the timelessness of Trad. (‘Little Brother’ by BB&R was one of my better WIP efforts here…). Look at labels and packaging, as some of the more progressive producers in these traditional regions are already doing (Jubare’s Pouilly-Fusse is a great example of this). Lastly, there is probably a need to accept that structurally, there will be a right-sizing. The human need that drives us to share a glass will always exist, but the range of tools on offer to fill that need have never been broader, and there may be too much ‘mid’ wine out there, delivering a poor experience hidden behind old rules…