11/20/2023 0 Comments Super natural monopoly![]() By definition, all of the following wines are released in minuscule quantities, even compared to previous touchstones. Some reinterpret classic regions through an unexpected lens (unfortified Jerez table wine nonsparkling Champagne) others dig deep into wine’s postmodern toolkit to tap the potential of formerly obscure corners of the globe. Each example listed below illustrates a different facet of what desirability looks like at this exact moment. ![]() Now highly allocated rarities (a problem for another article), they’ve paved the way for a far wider-and weirder-spectrum of expressions to come to the attention of wine’s new collector class.Īs a paradigm, then, the new luxury is probably most successfully unpacked at the single-bottle level. No longer relegated to the sidelines, the scene has quickly formed its own canon of classics that Pinch Chinese beverage director Miguel de Leon has dubbed “blue-chip natty.” More often than not, its members consist of minimalist pioneers (see: Clos Rougeard, Pierre Overnoy, L’Anglore’s Eric Pfifferling) whose wines circulated for years as secret handshakes before exploding to viral acclaim. But just ask any buyer who ever tried to secure an extra allocation of Gut Oggau: Natural wine can do bougie too. We tend to associate the movement with the rise of our new casual era of wine consumption, citing the ascension of pét-nat and chillable reds as proof of wine’s great 21st-century democratization. It’s no accident that so many defining features of the new luxury materialized alongside the wider mainstreaming of natural wine. Willfully embracing variability and idiosyncrasy as prerequisites for greatness, they aspire to capture that elusive sense, as author and Noble Rot magazine editor Dan Keeling puts it, that “this wine couldn’t come from any other place.” Unlike the blue-chip benchmarks of old, which tended to follow a familiar commercial recipe (“check out that new French oak!”), today’s most coveted bottles resist being reduced to any single style. If the meaning of luxury has evolved, it has also become more difficult to pin down. Over the last two decades, this has created an opening for a new raft of equally sought-after wines that speak to the values and taste of right now. ![]() It’s rather that the classics no longer claim a strict monopoly on greatness. To be clear, he’s not arguing that grand cru Burgundy and first-growth Bordeaux no longer qualify as great.
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