After a current whirlwind afternoon of consuming for my podcast, “Disgorgeous,” my visitor and pal Camille Rivière predicted, with evident pleasure, “the top of glou-glou.” Contemplating the supply—Camille has lengthy been a pure wine importer, a category of people that have, historically, been gonzo for glou-glou—this felt like a stunning little bit of sea change.
For the previous decade, glou-glou has been the tip of the spear of pure wine worldwide, after which dozens of wine bars, shops and Instagram accounts have been named, and for good purpose: It’s enjoyable as hell, and you may drink gallons of the stuff. Nonetheless, it looks as if the aesthetic of pure wine edifice is shifting away from the glou-glou idiom, which, for higher or worse, outlined it in the course of the 2010s. Name it a goth section, name it an finish to pure wine’s poptimism period, name it a artistic explosion, nevertheless it’s clear that, at the very least on the bleeding fringe of pure wine stylish, we’ve entered a post-glou world. If glou-glou is pure wine’s snotty punk Three Imaginary Boys, the long run appears lots just like the post-punk majesty of Disintegration.
Glou-glou has been outlined to dying in almost each food and drinks media outlet (together with this one!), so I’ll be temporary right here: Glou-glou wines look, style or really feel like Sébastien David’s Hurluberlu cabernet franc, one of many the ur-examples of the idiom: carbonic, chillable, chuggable. Should you’ve been consuming pure wine for any size of time, you understand the rating. Once they entered public consciousness within the early 2000s, glou-glou wines had been a breath of contemporary air and a response to a stultifying wine scene of factors and legacy magazines and interminable BIG RED WINES. Within the intervening years, glou-glou wines turned the gateway for a era excluded and alienated from “conventional” wine tradition—and, alongside the best way, they turned shorthand for pure wine writ massive. Think about, if you’ll, “Boys Don’t Cry” as a synecdoche for the complete canon of the Eighties. You could possibly do worse, clearly, however one thing could be lacking.
That one thing lacking, after all, is individuality. Jess Miller, of Little Crow Vineyards, a one-woman labor of affection within the Willamette Valley, says that glou-glou wines, whereas straightforward to provide and in demand, have a “stamp of the method,” on them. “It’s like what occurred with oak and Robert Parker,” she says. “It’s a mistake to outline high quality primarily based on a course of.” Miller is fast to say that carbonic, “contemporary” wines don’t necessitate anonymity, however that there’s typically a stage of complexity they will’t aspire to. “Glou-glou wines are only a department of the pure wine tree, not the entire thing,” she says. “It’s time for everybody to climb as much as the remainder.”
“Name it a goth section, name it an finish to pure wine’s poptimism period, name it a artistic explosion, nevertheless it’s clear that, at the very least on the bleeding fringe of pure wine stylish, we’ve entered a post-glou world.”
Additional “up the tree” appears lots like what was on full show on the current Wine From Right here pageant in Richmond, California. I used to be significantly entranced by the Châteauneuf-du-Fargosonini, the brainchild of Alejandro Fargosonini, an experimental filmmaker turned outsider winemaker. His entire lineup was thrillingly turbo, however I spent a very long time excited about his first wine, a direct-press grenache aged for 2 years beneath flor (which was later recycled to start out what he calls a “shitty solera”). Tasting the wine, I used to be struck by the thought that pure wine hadn’t a lot grown up because it had grown out; the power that was directed into making thirst quenchers and occasion wines has been turned in a bewildering array of instructions. All in all, I spent 9 hours tasting, and there have been perhaps three wines I might have thought-about glou-glou (and so they had been, after all, scrumptious).
Even the winemakers related to the glou-glou model have embraced the complete spectrum of winemaking. One of many extra attention-grabbing tastings was with Evan Lewandowski and Sara Morgenstern of longtime natty stalwart Ruth Lewandowski. They’re maybe greatest often known as makers of the megahit Feints area mix, which is without doubt one of the defining cool-kid American glou-glou wines. What actually received my thoughts whirring was the one purple they had been pouring, a zero-zero sangiovese with stem inclusion, a gnarled and majestic wine that was about as removed from easy and chuggable as you can get. This was a love letter to previous California, natural and sapid, and displayed a deft hand with sangiovese’s troublesome stems. “We actually like purple wine,” Evan Lewandowski, the winemaker, instructed me, grinning as if revealing a secret.
Proclamations of the top of glou-glou are clearly an exaggeration. There’ll at all times be area for energetic, typically foolish, mild wines. However it’s clear that glou-glou isn’t the sine qua non of pure wine anymore; the motion isn’t content material to only play the hits. Pure wine’s post-glou period goes to be fecund, bizarre and wild—and, I’m certain, oftentimes resolutely dismissive of the previous. I’m right here for the goth section, dream rock pivot and the ill-advised metallic forays, all of which is able to, I’m certain, show that pure wine is way over crushable and foolish. I’ll even be right here for the inevitable glou-glou renaissance, when the entire edifice goes pop-punk once more. Generally it is advisable hearken to Kiss Me Kiss Me Kiss Me on repeat for seven hours, and it’s good to know there’s a bottle for that.
