I Miss the Old Days When Aesthetics Mattered

It wasn’t so long ago that the most intense arguments in wine were about aesthetics. They were philosophical, occasionally personal, and often quite nasty. But at least everyone was arguing about what wine ought to be.

Today, those disputes seem to have  been pushed aside by more immediate questions about declining consumption and whether another generation will take up wine at all. Debating the merits of Brettanomyces begins to look like a luxury when growers cannot sell their grapes.

Still, I miss the old fights. Remember these golden oldies?

The natural wine schism was probably the defining aesthetic battle of the 2010s. Traditionalists regarded many natural wines as badly made and full of faults.  A winemaker who released such a wine had failed to control the process. Natural wine enthusiasts heard that criticism as a defense of sterile, standardized wines. What traditional critics called faults, they sometimes experienced as vitality. The argument changed what many drinkers were prepared to recognize as a good wine. The dispute mattered because it concerned competing ideals of beauty. Should wine display polish and control, or should it reveal the unruly life of fermentation?

Of course before that there was Parkerization.

Robert Parker became the symbol, and often the scapegoat, for an international style built around ripe fruit, high alcohol, deep extraction, and generous new oak. His influence was real although not the only factor that contributed to ripe wines. Many people genuinely liked that style. Nevertheless, many wines did begin to resemble one another. A Rioja, a Napa Cabernet, and a Bordeaux might all taste of dense black fruit, sweet oak, and enough concentration to overwhelm dinner. Regional differences remained, but they had to fight their way through the winemaking. The backlash produced its own vocabulary of virtue: freshness, purity, tension, minerality. New oak became suspect. Concrete eggs, amphorae, and old foudres appeared everywhere. Grapes were harvested earlier. Alcohol levels dropped. Some of the resulting wines were more agile and transparent. Others were thin, sour, and praised for possessing qualities they plainly lacked.

Once again, the disagreement was aesthetic. How much power should a wine have? When does concentration become ponderous? When does elegance become an alibi for under-ripeness? These questions could not be answered by laboratory analysis. They required aesthetic  judgment.

Typicity produced a third battle. European appellation systems protect the idea that wines from a region should bear some intelligible relation to that region’s history. But tasting panels sometimes enforced that idea with all the subtlety of a building inspector. Wines made from forgotten grapes, unusual blends, extended skin contact, or unfamiliar cellar practices were sometimes rejected as atypical. Some ambitious producers chose to sell expensive wines under humble table-wine designations rather than submit to the approved regional style.

This dispute went beyond tradition versus experimentation. The more difficult question was what fidelity to place requires. Is typicity the repetition of an established flavor profile? Or can a wine disclose a possibility within the region that tradition has overlooked? A region that cannot change becomes a museum piece. Yet unlimited experimentation can make the name of the region meaningless. There was plenty here to argue about.

Those disagreements were for the most part a lot of fun. They were about defining what wine should be.

But now we are in a different world.

Global wine consumption fell to an estimated 208 million hectoliters in 2025, its lowest level since 1957, according to the International Organisation of Vine and Wine. Falling demand has exposed severe regional surpluses. California growers removed nearly 40,000 acres of vineyards between October 2024 and August 2025, roughly seven percent of the state’s wine-grape acreage. More removals are expected. (California Farm Bureau.)

Economic necessity will eliminate many vineyards. But the market is indifferent to aesthetic value. It does not know whether a vineyard produces distinctive wine, preserves old vines, or expresses a character that cannot be reproduced elsewhere. The vineyards most likely to survive are those owned by producers with access to capital, reliable distribution, and established customers. These are not measures of wine quality.

Meanwhile, the wine industry is fighting public health organizations over how alcohol should be understood. The World Health Organization (deceptively) insists that no level of alcohol consumption is free of cancer risk and supports more explicit warning labels. Wine organizations reply that wine belongs to agriculture, gastronomy, and a long history of communal life. And in moderate amounts contributes to psychological health.

No- and low-alcohol wines promise one route out of this impasse. But dealcoholization really removes wine from aesthetic consideration altogether. At least I haven’t tasted one worthy of aesthetic inquiry..

Wine is also being told to become easier to understand.  The labels are confusing. The bottles are inconvenient. The language is elitist. Younger drinkers move freely among cocktails, beer, cannabis beverages, hard seltzer, and nonalcoholic drinks, with no reason to grant wine a privileged position. The standard recommendation is therefore to simplify the message  and make wine more casual.

Meh. These debates are not so much fun.

I suppose some of this is sensible. We need to think about how to introduce wine to new consumers. But simplification can go too far. If wine presents itself as just another flavored alcoholic beverage, it must compete on convenience, price, and immediate gratification. Those are contests it may not win. Wine’s difficulty is part of its appeal. It rewards attention because it changes in the glass, carries traces of its origin, and refuses to taste exactly the same every time.

Perhaps the old aesthetic wars ended because the market fragmented. Natural wine, classical luxury wine, orange wine, polished Cabernet, and pale, high-acid reds can occupy separate commercial niches. Their advocates no longer have to persuade one another. They can retreat into different import portfolios, restaurants, social media feeds, and tasting groups.

The existential crisis has given these factions a common problem. Unfortunately, it has also made aesthetic discussion appear frivolous. Survival comes first.

But survival is not a neutral goal. Decisions about which vineyards to remove, which wines to promote, which formats to adopt, and which consumers to pursue will determine what kind of wine culture survives. If the industry thinks only about keeping the category alive, it may discard many of the qualities that made wine worth caring about.

I want wine to survive. I also want it to remain something worth arguing about.