Drink California Wine?

 

I saw a series of videos recently from California winemaker Patrick Cappiello that has risen above the muck of social media and received attention.  The first video that made a splash was his frank discussion about why he was shifting out of dogmatic natural winemaking as he noted many of his wines weren’t stable and tasted badly after some age.  Cappiello has a larger profile than most small winemakers as most of his past career was spent as a high profile New York Somm that led to some awards in well known trade magazines and presumably led to friendships with folks in media.  Within a week, large publications like Robb Report were trumpeting clickable headlines about The Impending Death Of Natural Wines! 

Now, the Natural Wine Community doesn’t like that kind of talk at all, though to be honest the bloom seems to be off that rose, doesn’t it?  This led to various saber rattling from the loud but small group of natty devotees despite Cappiello’s reasonable assertion that he needed to make a product that delivered what the consumer expected on purchase, and for him the best way to do so was to filter his wine and add SO2.  There was a brief but probably needed conversation about the priorities of the producer, following The Commandments of Natural Wine, the need to have a reliable product and what concessions are necessary on either end.  Spoiler alert, it’s the extremists that ruin it for everyone.

The whole thing reminds me of the punk rock scene in the early 1990s.  I can’t tell you how many passionate letters flew around in the pages of the Maximum Rock N Roll fanzine debating if ANTiSEEN was more or less “punk rock” than Gaunt while 99.8% of the population was rocking out to Aerosmith’s “Crazy”.  People fought to the death about "the rules" of something most people on the planet didn't even know or care existed.  It's like when I hear friends going fucking crazy about playing time on their 11 year old's travel soccer team.  Look, nobody cares except the five of you involved and the rest of us want to be kept out of it.  In regards to the natural wine debate, it's absurd.  Wine is just something to drink for almost everyone.  Chill the fuck out.  The guy is just trying to make his wine taste good so he can sell it.  Still, any conversation about wine is good for the wine world, so good on ya mate!  Keep low in that bunker!

Cappiello has a very good grasp of media, and got rolling on a new topic while he still had some momentum.  He then turned his attention to the glut of unsold California wine, and in another nod to my punk rock analogy, urged viewers to “support the scene”.  (Video here) https://www.instagram.com/patrickwine/reel/C3x80gEP1yV/   He challenged viewers to only drink domestic wine and not imported wine for 60 days.  I have sort of mixed feelings about this.  On the one hand, it’s a win for everyone in California locally to start glugging down Cali wine at every opportunity as it keeps the money in the community.  This becomes neighbors spending money with neighbors and the rising tide lifting all boats.  However, the problem is twofold.  Let’s use that punk rock analogy again…  On the one hand it’s true that not all punk rock fans are coming out to hear your particular band play, but the real issue is that there’s a whole bunch of young kids coming into the scene that think punk rock overall is fucking lame.  Like it or not, they like DJs and they ain’t coming to your show.  In this case, the “punk rock show” I’m talking about is the about 600 million gallons of wine made in California annually and the “DJs” being “Mighty Swell Rocket Pop Spiked Seltzer”.  That seltzer has “rizz” as I understand it, but I might be wrong just like my mom used to call one of my favorite teen bands “The Pink Floyd”.  Let’s not get tangled up in that though and keep this moving.

In the United States there are now 11,691 wineries.  That’s up 400 from 2021 and 1215 more than 2020.  Supply is up!  Here’s the bad news.  Demand is down 20% for American wine.  That is a sobering number.  It’s hard to know how much unsold wine producers are sitting on because no one reports “We made a bunch of cabernet and no one bought it” on their website.  On the low end in the bulk market 2022 was the smallest crop in a decade and large volumes of bulk were sitting around unsold even at massive discount a couple years later.  The head of the grape growers alliance is urging to remove 50,000 acres of vineyards, tearing them out, which is 9% of the overall Cali acreage.  That’s brutal, but the numbers don’t lie.  You gotta rip some of that shit out of there.  Nobody is buying what you’re selling.

Now, I don’t like the angle of “Hey, you need to support California wine because we are out here doing it and we need it”.  Look, I didn’t tell all of you fuckers to open wineries in a market with shrinking demand.  You did that.  I don’t owe you shit.  Maybe I want to knock back a couple “Mighty Swell Rocket Pop Spiked Seltzers”, listen to some shitty Jack Harlow songs and get ready for a few years from now when I see the Seltzer guy that owns that brand confused as to how his brand collapsed because everyone moved onto Tequila Suppositories or whatever the youth market embraces.  It’s not on me.  Your punk band can be badass, but if a guy playing the trombone with his anus fills the ballroom with paying customers, he’s playing the big room and you’re in the lounge.  That’s how it goes. 

Here's the thing though…  I like the effort.  Here's what I like about what Cappiello is doing.  Just like a punk rock band, he’s out there putting up fliers and sending out emails to get people to come to his show.  He’s working.  This is no slick pre roll video.  This is DIY/get your hands dirty stuff.  There are a staggering amount of wine industry people that have their head in the sand thinking “People will naturally come to us.  They always have in the past.”.  Yeah, and the newspaper business thought they were bulletproof too. 

Cappiello is using this window of people paying attention to keep the conversation about California wine, and presumably his own wine, ongoing.  The consumer has the attention span of a mosquito.  People aren’t going to buy you if they forgot you exist.  In a nod to the ostriches in Wine waiting for people to miraculously discover their product, the wheel probably will finally spin in your direction again.  If it does, it’s because of the work that folks like Patrick Cappiello are doing to “support the scene”.  It’s a drag that he will do the work and then Corporate Wines will reap the benefits, but just like how The Offspring will play some monster shed at a festival this summer, Guitar Wolf is still out there doing his thing.