Thinking & Drinking: Shower Wines
Wedding shower wines, that is. Plus: cheap Burgundy, South African chenin splurges, and melons.
Big news over here at the Everyday Drinking headquarters: your humble correspondent has earned himself a major certification. Yes, some of you have been studying for years and years to gain advanced WSET certifications—and that’s great; I salute you. My certification is nothing like that. It took less than five minutes, but I am now a fully ordained minister. Yes, I am now officially among the clergy, a man of the cloth.
No, I didn’t have a sudden come-to-Jesus moment. I got ordained because I was asked to officiate the wedding of my niece Mia and her fiancé Derek this fall. I am honored and it’s going to be fun.
There’s been a bunch of wedding-related festivities all summer, including multiple wedding showers. For the most recent shower, I was tasked with buying some wines for the event, a mix of nice bottles to try.
I let someone else handle the bubbly for the mimosas, and focused on getting seven different still wines. We wanted to offer a mix of rosé, white, red, and orange wines that would appeal to wide mix of ages. They had to be wines that were accessible, drinkable, and good value—and above all, they had to be unfussy and fun. If people wanted to taste and think about any of the seven wines, great. But mainly, these should be wines that would glide into the background.
I did my wine shopping at a suburban liquor store in Marlton, New Jersey that I frequent, called WineWorks. It’s not a boutique wine shop specializing in special, small-production wines. It’s the sort of place where most Americans buy their wine. This store does a brisk business in the kinds of industrial, manipulated, additive-laden, artificially-priced wines that we railed against a couple of weeks ago. Josh, Chloe, Meiomi and the gang are all there, along with the usual suspects of Seaglass, The Prisoner, and Caymus.
In the “Sysco-ification of Wine,” we depicted a broken system, where shady distribution practices choked out choice. These relentless distribution practices have warped wine consumers’ perception of what good wine costs.
This is why the anti-snob “drink what you like” message not only fails, but ends up unequally promoting bad mass-market wines, protecting them from any kind of qualitative comparison with better wines. These mass-market wines are so ever-present and over-available that they’ve superseded even the average consumer’s own personal taste. But that omnipresence is not by accident. It’s the result of careful business decisions by corporate wineries and their distributors.
We faced a lot of criticism and pushback to this article from the “drink what you like” crowd. The main argument seemed to be this:
“I think we have to celebrate on ramps. These kind of takes, I think, hurt the industry overall. If people want to drink Caymus, fine. If they want to drink small producers and underrepresented regions, dope. But they’ll never get to the latter if we’re dismantling their path forward.”
There are two falsehoods in this position. The first is the fake idea that there are “starter wines” that provide “on ramps.” I’ve already dealt extensively with that untrue statement.
But more damaging is the false dichotomy suggested, as if there is only Caymus and other big brands on the one hand versus tiny producers on some mountaintop nobly hand-crafting a few hundred bottles per year on the other. But there are thousands of wineries and wines that fall between those corporate industrial wine brands and tiny artisan producers. What we were depicting was the pervasiveness of the manipulated wine…versus literally all other wines. “Wine-based products” with zero transparency versus wines made with integrity. That choice is what the American distribution tier, through its consolidation and tactics, is choking out. There are plenty of big wineries who make honest wines that are getting blocked out of distribution as well.
As I shopped in WineWorks for the wines for my niece’s shower, I was simply looking for good wines that cost under $20—basically the same price points as those mass-market industrial wines. Fortunately, WineWorks happens to have a very good wine buyer, named Charlie, who stocks the shelves with great-value selections next to all the big brands.
The wines I found for the wedding shower could be served by the glass on any wine list across the country, and would be a marked improvement over those manipulated mass market wines. But only if the American wine distribution system wasn’t rigged.
I invite you to look at my list of seven wines below, argue with them, suggest your own alternatives. Meanwhile, everyone will be enjoying drinking them at the shower.