Veteran wine importer Jenny Lefcourt, one of many unique champions of pure wine in america, has simply come residence to New York from a tasting at La Dive Bouteille, the biggest pure wine exposition on this planet, that includes tons of of winemakers and hundreds of attendees from across the globe. Twenty years in the past, on the identical tasting, Lefcourt remembers, “there have been in all probability 12 winemakers there and possibly 50 individuals [attending].” As a lot as issues have modified, setting foot within the Loire Valley introduced Lefcourt again to the location of her wine awakening within the late Nineteen Nineties, the place the light-bodied reds of the area impressed her importing enterprise.
“What kind of drew me personally, my very own private palate to wine, had been glou-glou wines, even when no person was utilizing these phrases,” Lefcourt tells me. “After I first began working in pure wine there wasn’t even actually the time period ‘pure.’ There wasn’t actually any time period.”
The following 20 years have seen pure wine skyrocket, and with it, “glou-glou,” a time period that appeared to emerge spontaneously within the aughts to explain the intense, revelatory Beaujolais wines of Marcel Lapierre. In response to Lefcourt, the French like to explain these wines as “digestible.” The pure winemaker Stefano Bellotti as soon as described his pursuit to make wines that, above all, “win you over” and that “you do not take into consideration, that you simply take nice pleasure in consuming.”
Glou-glou’s playful, virtually twee power is a transparent and intentional divergence from the perceived austerity of extra conventional wine tradition. Right this moment, it has change into an all-purpose infinitive—a noun, an adjective, a verb—that captures the free spirit of pure wine, but additionally its burgeoning free enterprise. “Glou-glou” has lent its charms and identify to a journal; to wine outlets from Luxembourg to Vietnam; to a star wine from Eric Wareheim, who at this level may be higher identified for his juicy reds than his absurdist comedy. On this age of pure wine evangelism, “glou-glou” has change into a defining mantra, whereas concurrently threatening to flatten the boundless world that impressed it. Glou-glou, wrote the wine author Simon Woolf, “has now change into a meta-profile for pure wine total.”
It’d be simple to think about “glou-glou” as “rosé all day” for the pure wine set, a New Age “It’s toasted.” However as is commonly the case, what’s new is definitely fairly previous. The time period was first seen in Le Médecin malgré lui (The Physician In Spite of Himself), a 1666 Molière play a few contemptible drunkard, who at one level coos a tune of candy nothings to a bottle of wine: How candy and fairly are your little gurglings; my destiny would make many jealous if you happen to had been at all times full. Oh, bottle, my expensive, why are you emptying your self?
The phrase is a French onomatopoeia used to indicate the sound of liquid squeezing its method out of a slender opening. The “glou-glou” of wine is the sound of, because the British thinker Barry C. Smith put it, “a second when every part within the rush of expertise is briefly stilled.” (“Am I imagining issues after I say that good wine makes a distinct, light gurgling, surging sound when poured from the bottle?” Smith requested within the 2007 essay assortment Questions of Style: The Philosophy of Wine.)
It might take greater than three centuries for “glou-glou” to lend its nomenclature to a model of wine: vin de soif, thirst-quenching wines low in alcohol and tannin, popularized by the Beaujolais area of France and lauded for his or her recent, juicelike nature. Critics of glou-glou’s rising dominance within the pure wine world, together with Woolf, recommend the strategies of attaining such juiciness (together with carbonic maceration) deny a wine full entry to the terroir it was born of, and thus standardize an almost-universal taste profile; that’s, they recommend glou-glou is a minor-scale repetition of Parkerization, a paradigm the pure wine motion has stood in stark distinction to.
Maybe it’s most instructive to see glou-glou as a microphenomenon inside one thing bigger. Its rise has are available lockstep with one other phrase that has outlined the previous decade of drink tradition: “crushable.” And the purpose of convergence between the 2 buzzwords is one thing being thought-about by the largest beverage conglomerate on this planet, in case there was any doubt that glou-glou has moved past area of interest wine circles. After I talked to Karmen Olson, the improvements lead at Anheuser-Busch, in 2021, she talked about exploring the idea of glou-glou for brand new beer tasks.
“It means one thing much like ‘crushable,’ however there may be this nuance that’s more durable to explain,” Olson stated. “I’m working with our brewers on setting this up: What does ‘glou-glou’ imply? How may it’s translated to be related for beer? And so they’re not fairly greedy it. Gluggability isn’t solely about slamming a drink. It’s not about consuming it shortly or with out thought. It’s barely much less intentional than a extra advanced wine or one thing, however I don’t understand how else to explain it.”
In fact, there may be irony in making use of corporate-level design considering to glou-glou, in contemplating the long run so deeply that one loses sight of the now. In response to Bellotti, “If you do that you might be intellectualizing wine, and wine would not give a shit about being mental.”
