Wine Will Come Back Because We Seek The Genuine in Life

How a Dry Riesling is a harbinger of the rebound for wine

At base, we who are mesmerized by wine find ourselves so taken because the beverage is without peer. Even in its most average state, wine is the beverage that uniquely represents a specific time, a particular place, and a group of people. It is the single human project that is the result of man’s subdual and then partnership with nature for the purpose of our varied appetites. Appreciating this unique status among all other beverages is the condition that will eventually bring wine back to the fore and overcome its current doldrums.

I have been consistently and publicly concerned about the state of wine sales in the United States over the past couple of years. I have been concerned with the retreat from wine by younger folks, the attempt to lump wine with cigarettes by the anti-alcohol brigade, the replacement of wine with cannabis and what that means for sales. And I’ve been concerned that inflationary forces have driven good wine toward prices that exceed what many pre-mesmerized people can afford.

And yet…I remain confident that this too will pass, with time.

Why and how?

Here is one reason why:

The 2022 Bahl Fratty Mendocino County Riesling is a wine that finds few peers among American-produced wines. It joins a small group of Rieslings produced in the U.S. that eschew sweetness and low acidity in this noble grape variety and present instead a racy, lemony, low-alcohol version of the varietal that will age beautifully, stimulate the intellect, and partner well with food.

The wine is made from grapes grown in what many consider one of the country’s most important vineyards. Cole Ranch is located in a remote, mountainous part of Mendocino County unexploited by other grapegowers and part of the smallest American Viticultural Area in the United States Planted over 50 years ago, the wines produced from its old vines are difficult to find and unknown by most wine drinkers.

The wine itself is the brainchild of Dan Berger, a dean of the American wine writing fraternity who probably knows as much about American-made Riesling as anyone else. He has championed American riesling in and outside California for decades through his writing and his wine competitions. Nothing makes Berger more excited than truly dry American riesling. Unfortunately, his moments of excitement were few and far between and certainly unprovoked by the vast majority of American Rieslings sold on America’s retail shelves.

So, he did it himself (encouraged by his wife who told him, “Then make it yourself!”).

He gathered together Mike Lucia—owner of Cole Ranch, one of America’s most celebrated winemakers Greg La Follette, and NY Finger Lake’s winemaking legend Peter Bell and asked them to help accomplish his plan to make an American Riesling that would get him and others like him excited. It worked on me and will work on others too.

Drawing your attention toward Dan’s Bahl Fratty Riesling is to emphasize the fact that the wild diversity of wine made in America and around the world can’t be matched by any other adult beverage. No collections of vodkas, gins, beers, whiskeys, seltzers, canned cocktails, cordials, or any other beverage with alcohol comes close to delivering up the nearly unlimited authentic example of the partnership between humanity and the natural world. No other beverage delivers so many examples of humans shepherding nature into manifestations of the mind meant to be consumed.

Wines like Bahl Fratty Riesling will find their way into the minds and mouths of Americans who, in a time when the artificial is both worrisome and celebrated, thirst for a chance to surround themselves with things and ideas that are uncompromisingly earthborn and truly genuine.

I am sure that this kind of cultural undertow—a yearning for a chance to touch and elevate what is real—will sweep up wine in its wake and drag it back into Americans’ lives in a way that it has not previously. This kind of cultural yearning will combine with a willingness to ignore the nonsense of the Authoritarian Karens who want to convince us that even the tiniest drop of Bahl Fratty will give us cancer, will be supported by technology that puts access to Bahl Fratty and other of the thousands of similar creations easily before us, and will be accelerated by a renewed economic landscape that can cultivate our search for a Community of the Genuine.

To their credit, the champions of Natural Wine have long hooked their work to this kind of cultural current. They have been the vanguard within the wine world of a movement to link viticulture and winemaking to something simpler and transparent. Though sullied by a stridency and willingness to degrade the work of non-natural winemakers, these champions are still a group to listen to when they discuss the meaning of the intimacy of the mind/soil connection necessary to produce their wines and what it means for the broader culture.

The connection between the likes of Dan’s Bahl Fratty Riesling and Americans’ inevitable yearnings for the genuine will be those who have been mesmerized by wine already; the folks who, when I mentioned on Facebook that this wine was unique, corrected me and pointed me toward numerous other examples of personal Riesling projects that exemplify a human commitment to exposing nature’s partnership with man. It will be the wine trade and the wine writers that show Americans the way back to wine.

It can be no other way. However, the path to wine as a connection to the genuine and authentic is not so easy to locate. It often requires a guide. Those guides won’t be found in supermarkets or among those slinging simple, cheaper, shortlived, common though tasty wines that fall off of the trucks of large distributors. Guides will be found among the already-mesmerized working at small wine merchants, among those with subversive intent writing about wine in publications that would otherwise be recommending “The best Pinot Noirs under $10”, and among Influencers, YouTubers, and Podcasters whose audiences are originally populated by those who have been first bitten by the potential of wine to satisfy searching minds and who are candidates for mesmerization.

After thousands of years of being a brand of glue that uniquely connects people to place and nature to culture, wine can’t be marginalized by modernity. It can be sidelined for a spell by social upheavals, momentary lapses of cultural focus, economic benders, the sudden appearance of newly legal weeds, and a period of new attention paid to baseless claims of health harms. But wine can’t ever be displaced as long as man seeks a common path to transcend the everyday drudgery of life and find grounding with what is genuine and earthbound.

Wine will overcome this moment and grow. Its star will rise as wines like Bahl Fratty Riesling remind the engaged of the power and transcendent meaning of wine. The wave will grow. The interest will build. The Truck Drivers of the middle tier will celebrate their good fortune. Wine will have its time again.