Manifesto
At suc suc, we drink wine
by the following principles:
Natural wine is
Everywhere
It should be served in restaurants, sold in stores, drunk at home, and taught in wine schools. The formal, stuffy, self-serious wine educational programs have a willful blind spot towards natural wines that is outdated and reactionary.
Natural wine is for
Everyone
It should not be treated as an in-group experience, made only accessible by “who you know”, “where you work”, or “how much money you have”. If natural wine is the people’s wine, as has been claimed, knowing about natural wine should be a more approachable endeavour..
Natural wine is
Important
It is the past and the future of the wine industry. We must scale down unchecked, chemical, abusive viticulture and reinvest in the earth and the people who care for it.
Natural wine is
Personal
It should not be treated as an in-group experience, made only accessible by “who you know”, “where you work”, or “how much money you have”. If natural wine is the people’s wine, as has been claimed, knowing about natural wine should be a more approachable endeavour..
Natural wine is
Misunderstood
It is not a catchall solution to climate change and industrial agriculture. Without a baseline of knowledge from buyers and sellers, invasive multinationals will capitalize on the movement’s purposeful lack of a certification system and the term’s fundamental meaninglessness.
Natural wine is for
Participatory
It represents a community of conscious, open-armed, & open-minded consumers who pay attention to what they drink. Now we must learn to pay attention to our own palates instead of social media and fancy marketing to figure out what we like.
Natural wine is
Cooperative
It does not represent people who claim to be natural but who engage in exploitative labour practices, sexual predation, malicious abuses of power, wanton discrimination, and other inimical acts. Now we must be intentional about the human principles of our community.
Natural wine is
Transcendent
It is more fun to drink. Minimal intervention in the winemaking process crafts artisanal wines with energy and spirit that do not sterilize the fundamental facts of divine fermentation into a mass-produced product.
Natural wine is
Current
It will move away from the pointless debate over whether it is trendy or passé and towards establishing itself as an important, viable, and permanent subset of a larger wine industry.
Natural wine is
In progress
It will not make it there if we do not define, diversify, and demonstrate a will to take ourselves seriously as a community through education, organization, communication, and demystification of certain winemakers as demigods and certain labels as unicorns.
Natural wine is
Theory
It cannot overcome the basic principle that wine is a luxury product, nor can it override the market system that commodifies all forms of consumption. Drinking natural wine does not imply any inherent ethical code and it will not make us better people. There are still serious barriers to entry.
Natural wine is
Praxis
It can offer a foundation upon which we can collectively construct a new vision of the wine world: open-sourced, inclusive, self-critical, convivial, and lighthearted.
Natural wine is
Just wine
Drink it if you like it and don’t if you don’t. We’re only writing a manifesto for the fun of it, after all.
