Reclaiming our rustic nature

“Rustic, in the best sense of the word”….oh man, did they really have to use that word? My first thought when I read the review that accompanied the “Best of Appellation” Award for our 2005 Sangiovese. Rustic. In its traditional usage, “rustic” conjures up images of Honest Abe Lincoln growing up in his Kentucky log cabin. It connotes a simpler, unadorned, almost Calvinistic purity, an honesty backdropped against busy, relativistic modernity. Make no mistake about it, however, in the wine world “rustic” is NOT a compliment. It is not a word used to describe wines that are honest, unadorned and pure. It is a bludgeon used against wines that don’t follow the flabby, flaccid, over-blown cotton candy fruit-bomb that is the rage of New World wine. (come on Mark, don’t hold back, tell us how you really feel).

In the past, it is the word I have most dreaded hearing when my wines have been described by writers, critics, bloggers, wine shop owners. As soon as I hear that word, I’ve become conditioned to simply pack up my bottles and move on, my time wasted on someone who frankly is too conditioned to the so-called “New World Palate” to understand, let alone appreciate, what I do.
I have, in the past, assiduously avoided using this term in the winery, preferring to refer to my wines with industry approved words like “tannic”, “dry”, “varietally appropriate” (when using that term is…well, appropriate).

Over the last several years the wine world has been abuzz with the term “natural”. We won’t even get started on this phenomenon (a topic for another day), however, it is a term that I am asked about in the winery. In describing what “natural” winemaking means to me, and where I fall on the scale between highly manipulated and “all-natural”, I have come around to explaining that my approach to winemaking can be described as constructed in a simple fashion. Coincidentally, this is also a reasonable definition for the word “rustic”.
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So, there it is. I’m reclaiming the use of the word rustic. It is what my wines are after all.