Natural Wine, Privilege, and the Pursuit of Cultural Authority
"Private choices often reveal
wider historical shifts."
This did not happen in isolation. Around me, people were rediscovering the countryside, heritage seeds, fermentation and, long before the pandemic, baking sourdough bread.
At the same time, I felt increasingly uncertain about my own position and career. I also rejected the effects that capitalism has on life and the planet. Natural wine therefore felt like the right focus and relatively easy to access.
But why did all these practices emerge at roughly the same historical moment? Why did so many people, often with remarkably similar educational and social backgrounds, begin to turn towards craftsmanship, the local and authenticity—whatever that even means?
Kirstin Munro argues that artisanal production should not be understood as a refuge from capitalism but as one of its contemporary forms. Rather than existing outside the market, authenticity itself has become a source of economic value.
Earlier, Luc Boltanski and Arnaud Esquerre described an "enrichment economy" in which stories of provenance, heritage, craftsmanship and uniqueness increasingly became commodities. They looked at the sixties and seventies movement of rejecting Fordian corporate capitalism and the rise of small scale artisanal endeavours
What appears as resistance to industrial capitalism is actually often deeply entangled with its latest transformations. Increasingly, even the aesthetics of the present moment seem like a reprise of that period.
“Capitalism has an extraordinary
ability to commodify the rejection
of commodification.“
So natural wine is not simply an alternative to capitalism. It exemplifies a form of capitalism that increasingly derives value not from mass production but from singularity, narrative and authenticity - story. It demonstrates capitalism's remarkable ability to commodify the rejection of commodification.
This work therefore functions as a Shakespearean mirror, but also as something like a Claude Glass, a device once used to frame a landscape. By turning my gaze towards one aspect of this phenomenon, I inevitably leave others outside the frame. I am interested in the social and class-political function of taste and in understanding how even seemingly progressive politics produce distinction. Natural wine is particularly emblematic of this.
“The countryside is being
reimagined after having
been priced out of cities”
Being priced out of big cities, the countryside began to appear as a possibility for me. In my case, Sicily. But it could just as easily have been Brandenburg, the Dordogne, the Hudson Valley or almost anywhere else. For generations, the metropolis symbolised opportunity, culture and progress.
As housing and urban life became increasingly inaccessible, the countryside acquired new meanings. It promised affordability, authenticity, slower time and proximity to production. It is being reimagined to recover a meaningful life beyond increasingly unattainable urban centres.
I am privileged. I belong to a segment of Western society: the children of a generation for whom everything expanded, who were told that we could be anything and therefore expected to be at the centre of everything.
This is a specific social formation: predominantly white, educated millennials in Western Europe and North America, many of them children of the post-war middle classes.
But something did not materialise. I was not automatically where I thought I would be.
This study is therefore not a universal account but an auto-ethnography of one historically situated class fraction that remains privileged relative to much of the world, yet increasingly encounter the limits of that inheritance.
I found one thing peculiar about natural wine: its diffuse apparent rejection of all classic winemaking. Yet, as Todd Cavallo, a natural winemaker I met during my fieldwork, pointed out, what natural wine is actually in opposition to is mass-market supermarket wine. Somehow, however, it had come to reject classic wine altogether and claims to reprise traditional winemaking.
“Burgundy and Bordeaux have
become so inaccessible,
young people will never
encounter them“
Frank Cornelissen, one of the movement's most influential producers, explained to me that Burgundy and Bordeaux have become so inaccessible that young people in the West will probably never really encounter them, even if they train as sommeliers.
An editor at the British magazine Decanter told me the possibly apocryphal story of a Burgundy estate producing natural wine for the European market while reserving its classic wines for Chinese and Russian billionaires. Wine, one of the defining markers of Western bourgeois culture, had in some sense left its own social world.
We could no longer afford what we considered its highest expression. Our holy cow, the market left us behind. This must hurt. So may natural wine happened in part, as a replacement: still exclusive enough to signify distinction, yet accessible enough to remain within reach of a particular class.
"Every rejection of hierarchy
risks creating a new one."
Wheeler, who works in a natural wine restaurant in Hudson, New York, described this as the "Williamsburg phenomenon": straight, white, middle-class men who found themselves without jobs or opportunities after the financial crisis of 2008 created increasingly esoteric fields in which they could become gatekeepers. This immediately reminds me of Munro's analysis.
Ironically, later in my research, I watched Wheeler himself dismiss a more traditional winemaker's attempt to produce natural wine because it was "not funky enough." For Wheeler, wine had to be funky. Taste had become performance. Natural wine was no longer simply a rebellion. It had become a replacement — a new language of distinction
“What do people do when they
no longer know where
significance comes from?”
Natural wine is one answer to a much deeper question. What do people do when they no longer know where significance comes from? The search is not really for authenticity but for purpose. A generation that remains privileged by global standards nevertheless confronts the erosion of the future it expected to inherit.
There is little for me to complain about in material terms. Yet so much in Western culture is built upon the expectation of individual significance, and that expectation seems increasingly fragile.
Nevertheless, a creeping sense of irrelevance has set in. Somehow, it is not enough simply to exist. So we search for ways to matter. Taste became one of them—a way to position ourselves and to defend that position.
Biodynamic Wine, Class, and the Future of the Rural
Natural Wine, Gentrification, and the Flight to Authenticity
Natural Wine, Belief, and the Production of Authenticity
Ways to matter