I Miss the Old Days When Aesthetics Mattered

It wasn’t so long ago that the most intense arguments in wine were about aesthetics. They were philosophical, occasionally personal, and often quite nasty. But at least everyone was arguing about what wine ought to be. Today, those disputes seem to have been pushed aside by more immediate questions about declining consumption and whether another generation will take up wine at all. Debating the merits of Brettanomyces begins to look like a luxury when growers cannot sell their grapes. Still, I miss the old fights. Remember these golden oldies? The natural wine schism was probably the defining aesthetic battle of the 2010s. Traditionalists regarded many natural wines as badly made and full of faults. A winemaker who released such a wine had failed to control the process. Natural wine enthusiasts heard that criticism as a defense of sterile, standardized wines. What traditional critics called faults, they sometimes experienced as vitality. The argument changed what many drinkers were…