Ranting is Bad....

I wrote this long rant last week for a store email ostensibly to promote a really good certified organic French wine we were selling. Wisely, one of my coworkers chopped it into sane-sized bits before that prose hit the internets. But that's what blogs are for, right? Here's the vitriol-laden totality of the thing, sprawling and soap-boxy. Um. Enjoy!

Intro -- Wine Value: First of all, to be an excellent value wine (or to be in our store, for that matter) a wine must taste good. Hopefully pleasant to drink and also interesting, thought provoking, distinct. Some retailers feel like that's all that matters: your enjoyment. I feel this is broken and empty way to like at food, nourishment, life. At 3CUPS we care immensely about compelling, delicious flavor, but we don't check our ethics at the office door. We work harder to find sustainably, traditionally and naturally farmed wines, in many instances made by small family farms that are an integral part of the social fabric of their homelands. Because we realize that simple, empty enjoyment is not the path to a fuller, happier life. We all vote with our dollars to create the world in which we live, work, drink. Agriculture, or the move away from healthy, natural forms of it, in favor of gigantic, chemical-driven agribusiness practices, shapes the world we live in. I don't want to sound preachy, but I do care about what I sell. I want real versions of the wine I love to thrive, to maintain a place in the social fabric, and preservation of this place is commerce-driven. This week's Weekend Wine is $10, certified organic, and tastes awesome. It's really not that hard a choice....

More of the Same... Some retailers offer their customers "whatever they want," wine made everywhere in every way, and act as if this is some sort of democratizing consumer advocacy. I find this approach to be disingenuous at best. Most people do not have the time (or inclination) to study in detail the intricacies of wine producing: techniques, styles across 1,000s of available brands. The added value of a retailer is supposed to come from our accumulated expertise, research, and trial-and-error sampling: we select products of quality that you can then chose from and reliably enjoy. That's what a selection is, right? We act as a filter protecting you from wine we think is bad (or usually just mediocre, or overpriced.) If we shirk this responsibility we become an unnecessary link in the wine supply chain.

Why this Weekend's Wine is (and should be) certified organic...Many places around the globe naturally produce exceptional and healthful wines. Grown without excessive chemical or mechanical intervention, these special areas make wines that are nourshing, and a joy to drink. Wines that are grown in a fields with chemical fertilizers, herbicides and pesticides are more industrial product than they are food. They often taste empty and exaggerated, and offer shallow pleasure at best: not a part of a healthy dining experience.

A False Promise... Chemical companies and manufacturers of agricultural machinery convinced farmers they needed these technologies to prosper. And through the course of the 20th century many grape growers were able to abandon traditional mixed-use agriculture to farm larger monocultures of grape vines. But did they truly gain wealth? Such technologies applied around the world also exert downward price pressure on bottles of wine, particularly so given the uniform and bland nature of the wines generally made using large-scale conventional farming practices. Many mid-sized producers are left with the costs of chemical farming, and few of the promised rewards.

Tradition and Quality... most importantly, for generations (and still today) very good wines were made without such agricultural "advancements." More farmers each year abandon them and return to clean farming methods. If you buy organic small-farmer wines, you are hastening this return to sanity.

Goisot: Makes My Current Favoritte Summer Wines

I keep getting pulled back to these wines. In the decade since I first tasted them I remain incapable of dislodging Goisot from my subconscious. It would be handy if I could: selling (even the best) wines made in the Cotes de Auxerre is arduous labor. Inside the bottle, all is well, compelling even. Elemental France is present in these wines: a mineral underpinning, as clear an example of the role of limestone in wine flavor as you are likely to find. But there is currently small market for Sauvignon Blanc (or Gris) from Burgundy, for Irancy, for whites that taste completely of Chablis but can't use that recognizable moniker on the front label. I've been selling wine long enough to know that relative anonymity is often a good thing: you won't have to take out a second mortgage to buy cases of Goisot wine.

Ghislaine and Jean-Hugues Goisot did not seem happy to be selling. I appreciate this ambivalence to trade. They looked glum, or at least reserved. They looked liked people who'd rather return to their vines or cellar. But they were stuck talking to me and my posse, and we were doing our best to coax more wine from them. At first they seemed reticent to sell us wine at all. This may seem odd, but it's entirely logical. Goisot is a place that remains off the radar of label-conscious and points-hungry buyers accustomed to wines that smell like tropical fruit, not herbs. However, the French wine press and in-the-know American wine lovers know that these wines are in the top quality echelon, in spite of (or maybe because of) being in a land left behind by modern wine. Since it isn't a high yield estate, the owners also had to make sure their wines go to the right places. In the end, something we said worked, and we now have a woefully small amount of the Goisot's special wine. We'll part with it, as long as we know it's going to the right places.... All wines at this estate are certified biodynamic by Demeter.

History broke St. Bris from Chablis. Wine bureaucrats and politics tore the areas apart in the early 20th Century. Through the soil runs an unbroken ribbon of Kimmeridgean limestone, a geologic line that winds north to the cliffs of Dover. Before phylloxera, the land around St. Bris in France's Yonne region contained tens of thousands of acres of vineyard and produced much of the wine needed to keep Parisians sated. But transportation improvements brought cheap juice north from the Rhone and beyond to France's capital, reducing the need for wine from St. Bris. Following the phylloxera epidemic there was waning economic incentive to replant the vineyards in this cool region at the northernmost extreme of Burgundy, where capricious late-season weather can often lead to disappointingly thin wines when not handled properly. A few estates hold on; Goisot is the best of them.