Wine is broken
The world of wine is broken.
An inflammatory statement, but one that I think has some basis in truth. Despite there being some ten thousand different grape varieties on the planet, we rarely see more than thirty being planted. This has led to the creation of genetic monocultures across the globe. As students, we’ve learnt to ask exactly which clones of the same varieties are being planted: 667, 777, 778, - the exact same genetic material transported from Nuits Saint Georges to plots of land as far as nurseries can propagate.
It’s no surprise that with such an abundance of opportunity pests and diseases have learnt to love Vitis Vinifera; from the dawning of the international era, the history of viticulture has seen a litany of reactions to major pest and disease waves.
Downy and Powdery, the mildews came first - harbingers of troubles to come. Phylloxera followed, destroying agricultural societies and tearing apart the structure of rural European economies. Our response - the grafting of European varieties to American rootstocks, was genius. A blunt barber surgeon approach to creating hybrid vigour.
Pocket knives, tape and wax; bench grafting gifted viticulture the glorious chimera that is the modern vine. One that is sustained by a diet of sprays and treatments, a sickly patient whose progeny have colonised the world. A world made simple by the advent of mass media and advertising that makes us all desire the same things.
It’s no surprise that we dream in Burgundian and Bordelais archetypes. Post the second world war, the US was ascendent and its GIs had all fallen in love with France; the nascent mass media grew up with a paradigm luminated by the city of light. France was culture and her wines were the greatest. We copied the French and devoted countless hours to reverse engineering her greatest treasures.
An entire industry was born: devoted to trying to emulate the agricultural products of what is really just a few hundred hectares of vines.
Lafite, Latour, Petrus, La Montrachet, Romanee-Conti and Hermitage. Placed side by side these vineyards would be walkable in an hour. Their spiritual children, however, span the globe and utterly dominate the wine world’s internal dialogue.
This, I believe, is a problem.
Wine needs to be desirable; its nature is as a pleasure, something sought after, something shared in good spirits.
It is up to us to change the narrative, to reconfigure the messaging that creates markets. We already have a beautiful upswelling of interest in organic and regenerative viticulture, something that dovetails wonderfully with a generational interest in undoing previous generations' damage to the world.
Sadly, I don’t think this is enough.
I think we need to create new archetypes - newly desirable things that can be made from less disease prone plants grown in a less monocultural fashion.
We need to be adaptable.
I’ve taken my inspiration from lichen; they’re a symbiotic relationship between funghi and bacteria that both appear in the most barren places and yet are also a signifier for land that’s bereft of pollutants.
I want to create a wine that exists free of the strictures of cultural history; a wine that can celebrate the new world of hybrid grape varieties - varieties that have been bred to co-exist with mildew pressures. I want to create a demand for less chemical dependent viticulture, and I want to make it fun.
Some Mondays grew out of the barren wasteland of Mondays for hospitality staff.
Lichen by Some Mondays is my vision to create wines that people want to drink and that can be made with less stress on the planet.
I want to see rooms of people laughing over bottles made from vineyards teeming with life and wines from vines that haven’t needed the crutch of copper sulphate to help them over the finish line of organics. Vines where integrated pest management isn’t a Gordian knot solvable only by chemical force. I want to celebrate the new hybrids.
PiWis, Germany’s mushroom resistance, is, I hope, a way for us to grow a new world where the wines we love are not a shackle on biodiversity. I want to use my position in hospitality to introduce people to beautiful new things that can be grown in a way that makes regenerative viticulture easy.
Lichen by Some Mondays is my proof of concept. I want to make a dark rosé, skin contact white hybrid from German PiWi vines. I’m taking inspiration from the natural wine movement and the way it has grown in influence in the culturally influential hubs of our biggest cities. I want to use this wave of interest in different styles and what I think of as liminal wines to drive a demand for wines made from unknown hybrids that are easy to farm organically.
To put it simply, I want to remake the archetypes around which the wine world revolves, to make them that much more sustainable and positive environmentally.