‘Funk’
Wine funk. What is? Why do we say it? Why do (don’t) we like it?
What’s Funk?
‘Funk’ is the word that’s used to capture a set of properties that are outside the bounds of conventional winemaking sense. It’s a hard concept to pin down because of this negative definition. For a lot of people, the extent to which a wine typifies certain qualities that are traditionally thought of as flaws is the extent to which that wine is or isn’t funky. As time goes on, there seems to be some more positive qualifications for ‘funk’.
I have to rack my brain to remember my first taste of a really funky wine. It must have been during that initial foray into natural wine, when weird was the object —the clumsy and curious time when barnyard animals, guest soap, and Band-Aids started showing up in my tasting notes — an open time. Some wines were a little funky, off, but not.
The easiest analogy is the presence of funk in cheese. Some delicious Taleggio or Raclette can be musty or rotten on the nose. The flavors can be pungent and brazen — an affront. Cheese that’s gone bad (categorically, the kind that will make you sick), will share these qualities. Funk picks out this set of features where something has begun to go wrong.
For a while, I enjoyed picking out these strange traits and grouping them together into broader notions of natural wine. Eventually one learns to recognize the particular signs of one flaw against the next and the most important question follows: is this what the wine ought to be?
The more familiar a drinker is with this or that flaw, the more likely these funky notes will disqualify an otherwise balanced wine. It’s a shame, really, since all these years later I keep coming in contact with funky wines that cut across the divide between weird, “natural wines” and their traditional counterparts. Lots of funkier wines can be intentioned, expressive of terroir, articulate of their variety, and strikingly harmonious: wines that are exactly what they are supposed to be.
Tacitly, we might then say that funk is:
(1) A characteristic known to be a flaw that can simultaneously contribute to the harmony of a given wine.
The funky wines are the ones given meaning by dint of the the concept FLAW and the concept HARMONIOUS WINE.
Does all funk come as a result of a flaw? The short answer is yes, but it is extremely contentious what’s considered a flaw and what isn’t. Also, there are some flaws that don’t really come off as funky. TCA (or cork taint) is a flaw that produces a kind of musty, wet bathing suit aroma — a profile that doesn’t really read as funky. What separates the funky flaws from the wonted?
Lots of instances of funk seem to be of a loosely organic variety — the kind of sharp tastes and odors that come from rot or fermentation— a species of decay. The concept of ‘earthiness’ might be a neighboring idea, one that doesn’t connote a dirty quality or flawed character quite the same way that ‘funk’ might (even if the flavors are grounded in the same compounds). Looking at particular examples may bare this fact out.
Barnyard Funk
Domaine Vincent et Marie Tricot make beautiful natural wines between the Loire valley and the Rhone valley in France. This is the Auvergne, marked for its volcanic soils and old vines. The grapes they harvest for their wines were farmed organically well before the couple began production in the early 00’s. Following in the footsteps of Marcel Lapierre, Vincent and Marie were always dedicated to the idea of making wine without sulfur, in the typically non-interventionist style. They also practice reductive winemaking whereby the amount of oxygen present during fermentation is significantly limited.
Vincent and Marie make delicious, natural wines that — year to year — can be more or less funky, rarely to the wines’ detriment. The “Marcottes” cuvee is an old-vine Pinot Noir that can be pretty earthy. In addition to the bright and fresh fruit, emblematic of their natural approach, there are notes of onion, rotten eggs, burnt rubber, charred earth, leather musk, and barnyard. Part of this has to do with reduction (a result of reductive or anaerobic winemaking), and part of this has to do with an infamous, wild yeast known as Brettanomyces.
At a certain level of concentration, both reduction and the presence of Brettanomyces are considered flaws. The rotten, gassy, sulfuric odor of reduction can sit in a wine for hours, masking the winemaker’s intention. Brettanomyces (or Brett) can leave an overwhelmingly noxious musk on a wine: heavy, caustic, and fruit-stifling.
In the “Marcottes” (and with a lot of low-sulfur/no-sulfur wines), we have a pleasant conflation of these phenomena that can be a little difficult to parse. What qualities register as funky depends on your use of the word. In the kind of weak sense of (1) above, both of these potential flaws contribute to the funkiness and harmony of the wine. But there’s a stricter way to define ‘funk’ that disqualifies even the earthier notes that show up as a result of reduction. We might say that ‘funk’ refers in the following way:
(2) Spoilage bacteria/yeasts.
This definition would describe ‘funk’ in more of a referential sense than as a conceptual role (as in (1) above). It picks out Brettanomyces directly, which is a good thing since Brettanomyces is as proper to ‘funk’ as any potential flaw — just because it is so correlated to barnyard funk. Mushroom, cabbage, and rotten egg flavors proper to reduction may well be a little funky as tasting notes, but many people would balk at the notion that reduction is strictly speaking an emblematic ground for funky wine.
Mouse
This second definition also serves well to account for another standard case of funk in wine, namely mousiness or mouse-taint. Mouse taint is self-explanatory; it presents itself as a kind of caged-mouse, metallic flavor on the very finish of a wine. It’s undetectable on the nose just since the acidity of any given wine masks the flavor. Only after mixing with the pH typical of human saliva does the compounds specific to this flaw become detectable. This is more often than not considered a flaw, but some natural wines are not too diminished by it. Many staunch fans of natural wine will argue that this trait can contribute to a wine’s balance.
For a long time, it was unclear the extent to which Brett accounted for the compounds responsible for mouse-taint, but recent studies have concluded that the major source of the compounds responsible for these flavors are spoilage bacteria (Lactobacillus, Oenococcus in particular).
A mousy wine is most definitely a funky one in terms of our referential definition (2). A mousey wine is or isn’t funky in terms of our conceptual role definition (1), depending on the extent to which you take mouse-taint to necessarily be a flaw. It’s contentious.
Convention
There’s a final, colloquial sense of ‘funk’ that might give a definition some grip. Instead of leaning on the concepts ‘funk’ comes in virtue of, or picking out what ‘funk’ may refer to, we can describe it as a kind of cultural convention within food/wine. ‘Funk’ is sometimes just the following:
(3) An agreed way of talking about a loose set of earthy, putrescent flavors and smells common in food, fermented products, beverages, soil, plants, etc.
This definition has a little more latitude than (1) and (2) in its ability to pick out funky flavors and scents in wines that aren’t really all that funky, particularly in wines where these notes come as a result of terroir or varietal character. But it also allows for downright funky wines where the source of these characteristics are unclear.
A few examples:
Joan Ramon Escoda and Carmen Sanahuja run a totally organic and biodynamic vineyard in Catalonia, in the Conca de Barbera. In addition to their grape vines, the family grows olives, almonds, and vegetables. They keep horses, sheep, cows and other animals, all in service of a diverse biosphere which ideally contributes to the richness and complexity of their cult wines.
This holistic approach is becoming more common despite some of its mysterious results. It’s highly debated how and if soil type can really contribute to the taste of a wine, let alone what kind of animals you have grazing next door, or the amount of chamomile you bury beneath your vines.
Still, any serious wine drinker will tell you that these wines develop incredible qualities (funky and otherwise) that are totally singular. I can almost always tell the wines from Escoda-Sanahuja for this reason. They give off a gamey, livestock smell that is unique to their cellar. Joan Ramon is always experimenting with storage containers, fermentation methods, varieties and the rest, so it is kind of a mystery where exactly these animal notes come from.
Good, clean funk?
Speaking of animal, there’s a village in the hallowed land of Burgundy known as Nuit-Saint-George that’s known for Pinot Noir with typical notes of leather, truffle, fur, game, and (can I say it?) funk. There’s certainly no conventional sense in which you can refer to Burgundy from the Cote d’Or as funky, but our conventional definition gives us license to talk about the funky notes that are clearly indicative of this variety in this terroir. And why not?
Great examples come from Domaine Jerome Chezeaux, an extremely traditional winemaker with a very light touch in the cellar. In the past few years his wines have seen a marked boost in quality. The 2013 “Rue de Chaux” is a little young, but right from the start smells like a sweaty horse or a rabbit pen.
Funk in wine is a slippery concept. All these definitions help to disqualify each other, so there isn’t really a good way to pick out a set of all funky wines, all funky wine notes, or all the ways to talk about a funky wine. Best to just taste and get an idea for yourself. Here are some more funky wines to try:
2016 Partida-Creus “VN (Vinel-lo)”
2014 Clos Fantine “Cuveé Courtiol”
2014 Domaine le Briseau “Lucky!”
2014 Catherine et Pierre Breton, Bourgueil “Nuits d’Ivresse”
