Natural wines6/24/2023 If “f-ed up” continues to proliferate, it may leave people longing for the quaint days of “funky.While you obviously don’t want to stress too much about finding the perfect match, the fact is that some wines work better than others with certain foods. “F-ed up,” instead, implies a desire for an all-out faulty wine, jacked up with bacterial defects. It seems to go one step beyond “funky,” which could be interpreted as merely describing an unconventional wine. Nelson, of Habibi Bar, said he hears this term a lot from customers now, as a way of expressing their preference for a natural wine. Yet it has a likely successor that may inspire even more vitriol: “f-ed up.” “Now everyone is.” The fear is that some drinkers, in seeking out trendy styles like orange wines, will automatically reject natural wines that happen to be crystal-clear and fruity. “Eight to 10 years ago, no one was into cloudy, skin-contact pet nats,” said Atwood. They not only got people to open up to the charms of challenging, iconoclastic, wild-tasting wines - they made it trendy to the point where some people refuse to drink natural wines if they don’t fit the stereotype. Those who spent so many years advocating for the widespread acceptance of natural wine were, perhaps, too successful. This sentiment comes up constantly in my conversations with people who work in restaurants and wine shops. Like many folks in the natural wine community, she’s frustrated that there’s been a wide-scale confusion of correlation with causation: Just because a wine was fermented with native yeast, unfiltered or treated with limited additions of sulfur dioxide doesn’t mean it will necessarily taste like a dirty dairy barn. Atwood is personally more “attracted to clean, crisp, classic wines,” she said, than to bottles that could be described as funky. “I don’t want consumers to walk away with the impression that it is an appropriate descriptor for all natural wines,” said Amy Atwood, who distributes natural wines throughout California. Find spots near you, create a dining wishlist, and more. The other main argument I hear a lot from the natural wine community is that the proliferation of “funky” has rendered natural wine into a kind of caricature, falsely implying to many people that all low-intervention wines will taste a certain way. “I think ‘funky’ is the new ‘mineral,’” Heymann added, referring to the controversial descriptor that’s also been accused of meaninglessness. (Heymann likened it to a ripe banana that’s just on the verge of turning black.) There are many wines that fall on what she called “a knife’s edge” - maybe they have a slight hint of that wild animal-like brett, or maybe just a little bit of a vinegary lift from volatile acidity, but they still taste good. “For me personally it would mean this is a wine that's flawed, but it is not so flawed that I can't actually consume it,” she said. Some people might have their own understanding of the word, Heymann pointed out, even if it’s not quite part of a shared lexicon. “Based on what I’ve heard, it can mean about 10 different things.” Heymann deals in extreme specificity - she leads sensory panels in which she tries to get subjects to determine the differences among notes of fresh cranberry, frozen cranberry and cranberry juice in a Pinot Noir - and there’s just no way to nail down a fixed, universally intelligible flavor from “funky.” In a scientific context, “we would never use that word,” said Hildegarde Heymann, a professor in the UC Davis Department of Viticulture and Enology. “Funky as a reference for wines ranging from unconventional to undrinkable fails the consumer because it is simply too vast,” wrote Emily Dilling in a strongly anti-“funky” article in Sprudge from 2020.įor sensory scientists, this vagueness can be agonizing. That everything-and-nothing quality, unsurprisingly, drives some people nuts. Does it mean that a wine has a specific microbial flaw, like the spoilage yeast brettanomyces or the mysterious defect known as mouse? Does it mean that it smells earthy, like soil and mushrooms, rather than fruity, like apples and oranges? Does it describe sensations that recall cider or kombucha? Does it just mean a wine that tastes different, new, unlike what you’d find at the grocery store? The obvious case against “funky” is that it’s too broad.
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