Can Wine Be Punk?: Lessons From Wine Riot
By Caroline O'Donovan in Food on Jun 3, 2012 7:00PM
“Can wine be punk?”
That was the question everyone at Wine Riot was trying to answer.
Well, at the very least, it was the question I was trying to answer. The other people at Wine Riot, held this weekend at Union Station, were largely there to taste new wines and “be exposed to new brands.” They definitely accomplished that; I personally found a Cabernet Sauvignon from Chile called The Seeker with a sketch of an early airplane on it that was definitely being marketed to me. I confirmed that it, in fact, was by asking the marketing representative who said, “You’re exactly right.”
Wine Riot is the brainchild of Tyler Balliet. He grew up in Wisconsin, where he said for years his family exclusively drank “shitty beer” and cocktails. “We had a thriving wine scene in the 1800s,” Balliet said, “but Prohibition screwed up everything.” Liquor was easier to smuggle, and thus we became a nation of cocktail drinkers, according to Balliet. A few years ago, though, his family discovered wine and started drinking it regularly. That gave him an idea.
Wine Riot is as much an advertising event as it is a wine tasting but it’s also an educational experience. Balliet hand picks the vendors, trying to make sure they represent each grape growing region and that only the finest blends are available. While those vendors pour out sip after sip after sip of Riesling and Merlot and Charonge, Rioters can sit in on seminars, visit the photobooth, or apply temporary tattoos (to their arms, chests, necks, or all of the above!).
“If you don’t want to learn, you probably shouldn’t come to this event,” Balleit said to me just outside Crash Course room A on Saturday, “There’s cheaper ways to get drunk.” And oh, was there a lot to learn. Rieslings don’t have to be sickeningly sweet, for example, and there is a name for wine made from fruit that is not grapes. It is called fruit wine, and some of the best in the country, according to them, is made by St. James Winery in Missouri. I told Cindy Klinefelter, their marketing rep, that the only Missourian wine I had ever drunk came in a jug, was purchased at a gas station and was sweeter than Manischewitz; she promised she could find me something sweeter, and poured me a taste of St. James’s finest blueberry fruit wine. Klinefelter says she personally prefers dry reds from California, but says the Midwestern market demands sweet wines, saying, “I mean, we put soda in our baby bottles.”
Other local wineries have a little more faith in the sophistication of the Midwestern palate, and one man even believes Midwestern grapes may just save the wine industry. They already have once, pre-Prohibition, when French grapes were blighted. Now, out in sunny California, the grape growers are worried about global warming. Matt Phillips of Lynfred Winery in Wheeling explained to me that the grapes that grow in Midwestern soil have a naturally thicker skin than Californian grapes that makes them more resistant to fluctuations in temperature. The winemakers of California are already trying to breed their grapes with Midwestern ones to toughen them up. These kind of genetic shenanigans happen all the time in the wine industry, of course, which is the reason the Illinois Sparkling Wine Co. has a spicy French wine called Franken.
“We’re trying to start a revolution,” Baillet said of Wine Riot’s end goal, which is to make people ages 22-35 think and drink wine. “People don’t realize it, but just twenty years ago, if you said you were going to make wine in California, people would have thought you were crazy.” Now making wine in California is such an accepted practice, you can even have family feuds about it. Jake Beckett is the man behind Chronic Cellars, a wine label characterized by its skulls and general badassery. Beckett’s dad, however, is a 66-year-old former marine who owns the Peachy Canyon Winery. Beckett has worked in his father’s vineyards all his life, but his dad won’t let him use the family grapes or land for his wine. “I guess he doesn’t like all the skulls and stuff,” Beckett said.
Chronic Cellars is, in other words, the Three Floyds of Wine Riot: renegade. If Beckett made beer, he’d make blistering IPAs and crushingly dark stouts. What does rebel wine taste like? “The Purple Paradise is very fruit forward,” Beckett told me. The Winery’s website says it has hints of strawberry jam. I spoke to Julie Adams, creative director at Band Digital, who agreed that the wine industry is hugely defined by marketing. “It’s like, the wine is bad, but it’s okay because you say it’s organic?” Adams joked. She thinks if we eschewed wine glasses for something less dorky, like high balls, you might see more people drinking wine. Still, Balliet says there are plenty of ways to piss people off in the wine industry, and his mission is to keep helping it lose its reputation for pretension.
After a day of Rioting among the finest wines of South Africa and Portugal (and some of the truly worst orange infused wines of Italy), I went home and bought two bottles of “sweet red wine” for $6.99 and made Sangria. I liked learning about wine, but I’m not sure it changed my approach to drinking it. One Wine Riot tip I would consider is making wine cocktails. As Dana Fares of Quady Winery told one gentleman, “There is no shame in ordering a spritzer.” I took a particular shine to the Vya, an herbal, Vermouth-like wine on ice. Look out for Quady this summer; Fares is relocating to Chicago to market Quady’s sweet wines and cocktail recipes.