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| As a child of the 70s, middle-class, middle American, middlebrow, mid-century, I gorged on processed food of all sorts. Breakfast cereals, I could write a dissertation on, but also frozen prepared foods, TV Dinners, chicken potpies, frozen pizzas, and above all else, Libbyland frozen dinners, my favorite of which was the Pirate Picnic because it came with a packet of Nestle’s Quik. This was not a function of child abuse or neglect but merely a result of hapless parenting by adults who were too old to be health food hippies, but were assimilationists too embarrassed to be seen eating the food of their parents’ generation, e.g., herring, chopped liver, tzimmes, and the like. The chemical feast of this parade of processed food wasn’t that bad, though I no longer eat this way today. And you know, a lot of wine today shares a lot in common with processed foods. Most wine today is made by following a scientifically controlled recipe, replete with winemaking additives and manipulation machines so that each vintage tastes pretty much the same as the previous vintage. There’s nothing wrong with these Fordist, commodity wines, and I do not judge folks who drink them—I don’t really care, I guess, but I myself no longer drink this way today. One way that scientific winemakers shape their thoroughly modern wines is by controlling alcohol percentages through reverse osmosis or a spinning cone: in a warm vintage, they might remove some alcohol from a high ABV wine that would otherwise come off as beastly and hot tasting. Today, we are tasting five wines that are naturally low in alcohol but are made that way naturally, without recourse to any of the armamentarium of modern, technical winemaking. But isn’t alcohol the reason that we drink wine in the first place, and the more booze the better? If you see wine as merely a vehicle to get yer buzz on I think you might be better off drinking White Claw, as it’s certainly a lot less expensive, and go ahead and stock up on it as it never goes bad. High ABV wines can be delicious, but on an unexpectedly warm winter day, they may not be what you want to put in your mouth. Typically, high ABV includes extra doses of overripe, pruney flavors in red wines, as well as mouth-filling extract that makes you not thirsty for another glass. None of today’s wines are pruney, all are under 12 percent ABV. They don’t come packaged in clever boxes like a Libbyland frozen dinner, but I think you might dig them, nevertheless. |
| Menti “Roncai” Vino Frizzante Veneto/Italy 2018 Craig Haarmeyer “Calaveras” Zinfandel 2018 Dosset Vino Rosso Piemonte/Italy (dolcetto) 2018 Sylvain Martinez “Onis” Vin de France 2018 (pineau d’aunis) Guy Breton “Mary Lou” Beaujolais Villages 2018 |