How Natural is Natural: the Debate

The irrepressible Clark Smith has a l-o-n-g editorial up on Appellation America. Do check it out. A good chunk of it puts me to use more than it takes me to task. Clark owns Vinovation and sells wine technology which mostly helps produce wines I don't enjoy drinking. About half way through his article, he kicks off the Alice portion by putting me in Eric Asimov's company (I am flattered.) and then recalling the time he asked me to state my terms of what a natural wine is. He writes, ++The strange thing about Alice’s list is the omissions: electricity, stainless steel, refrigeration, inert gas, sterile filtration. None of it traditional, just post WWII innovations. Nobody argues that pumping over is better than punching down, or that gravity feed is inferior to pumped transfers. These are conveniences, not quality improvements. Why isn’t the Internet full of criticism of these powerful and dangerous technologies? ++ Note his use of 'traditional' above. I spend quite a bit of ink in my book talking about Clark and the word--a lovely four syllable one. Who knew it was so controversial? Clark for some reason believes me to be a Luddite who might as well be trying to ban the bottle and the cork from wine in the name of "tradition." Through the article he hammers the same argument about his technologies that chemical salespeople made to farmers who previously had been farming organically, "This is the modern way." The message is that there is something wrong with the person who doesn't want to step up to the new technologies. There is an attempt to shame people who aren't 'modern' thinking and who are afraid of 'new.' Anyway, the article had a sort of tabloid journalist sensibility with its 'gotcha' attitude, as if he were waiting to catch a vegetarian actor eating cheese or a Jewish politician eating pork. Meanwhile the vegetarian ain’t a vegan. The Jewish diner doesn’t keep Kosher. ** A few years ago, I was talking to Nicholas Joly who was embracing people like Clark and his technologies and the wines they give birth to. His reasoning was somthing like-- without the tyranny of fast food there wouldn’t be the rush to embrace slow.