Beyond Glou Glou

(or What Does Access Mean in Wine?)

There are some nights in the service industry that devolve into Dante’s ninth circle. Every table needs help, your wine pairings can’t seem to make it to guests on time, and the previously amazing open-concept kitchen is giving every table a front row seat to a level of wrath that hasn’t been witnessed since the Old Testament.

In the middle of these five-hour sprints of nightmares, I created a mantra to get myself through it: “it’s food and wine, not life and death.” It was a salient reminder that while I love my career and will always take it seriously, my decisions in the dining room had the power to improve someone’s life, not save it.

It was a healthy exercise, and a mentality that I’ve found useful in a lot of facets of the wine industry. But I sometimes wonder if we’ve taken it too far. Oftentimes, I’ve seen workers in the wine industry assign value to consumers based on how much they were willing to spend. In these instances, guests and customers were turned into little more than walking dollar signs, and found themselves having to defend their budget. We may not think that we can change the world, but what about our small wine-stained corner of society? We shouldn’t avoid applying a critical and introspective lens to our industry.

To get to the heart of this issue, we first and foremost must realize that we work with (and love) a luxury good with IMMENSE accessibility issues. To put it simply, wine is expensive. Natural wine is even more so. And yet even with this knowledge, the industry seems to be built on pillars of judgment. Personal preferences and high-end palates are elevated to dogma. Those who disagree are left out of the club, and those who can’t afford to play are ostracized.

Coming from a working-class background, I was always taught that money and financial security were never a measure of a person’s worth. We were intimately aware of the value of a dollar, and high-end purchases were reserved for items that could provide value over years: education, transportation, etc. I unknowingly settled on a career that flew in the face of those teachings. Watching guests spend hundreds (and even thousands) of dollars on bottles of wine that would disappear within the hour was astounding, and something I never became accustomed to. I always felt more at home with the table that would plainly ask for the best bottle of wine under $70. I saw the faces of my parents in those guests, and it’s important that they feel just as comfortable as the high rollers.

It goes without saying that the price of wine, just like anything else, is a product of location, perceived quality, and prevalence in the market. But that doesn’t justify the barely hidden sneer on a somm’s face when a guest orders a glass of Pinot Grigio, or the disappointed sigh when someone’s retail budget is under $20. It seems to me that when we actively shut people out, we’ve missed the entire point of wine. We’ve perverted the sanctity of a beverage meant to invoke a sense of community and promote social gatherings.

To dig even further, how do we fix it? The problem is two-fold. In restaurants, it requires a complete restructuring. More expensive bottles usually means a bigger check, which translates to a bigger tip. Imagine what would happen if, as wine professionals, our livelihood wasn’t dependent on this structure. Would we be as likely to recommend bottles that stretched budgets to the max? I’d like to think that we’d be able to use our expertise to actually do our jobs: find wines that people enjoy, rather than wines that require us to justify the price tag.

Within the retail spectrum, I think it’s as simple as not giving into the hype. In the age of wine influencers and overexposed cloudy bottle shots, it’s easy to forget that everyone starts somewhere. Talking someone into a bottle $15 higher than their original price point might feel like a win, but it sends the message that what they can afford isn’t enough to truly enjoy wine.

To make it simple: It’s not life and death, but our decisions do make the difference between inclusion and exclusion.

-Kayla Mensah, @winegriot
Inaugural Major Taylor Fellow