‘Less work, more perk’: Jancis Robinson on keeping her new year’s resolutions

This time two years ago, we published my New Year’s resolutions. When I wrote them, I had never heard of Wuhan or Covid-19. Life was pretty good, and I was looking forward to exercising my freedom to travel to wine regions in search of material. Things turned out pretty differently, of course, but how have my resolutions fared since?

Drink more wine was my first resolution. In terms of volume, I have certainly kept that one. There are few wine enthusiasts who responded to lockdown by going on the wagon. Yet the spirit of my original resolution was to deplete our personal wine collection more rapidly, and in that I have failed miserably. The upshot of working from home for a wine writer is that instead of going to the wine to taste it — either to a region or to one of the many professional tastings “normally” held in London where I live — the wine has come to me, literally by the pallet-load. It takes more resolve than this northerner has to ignore dozens of opened bottles completely in favour of a much more expensive unopened one in my cellar. Of course, I have given most of the tasting samples away, but there have usually been favourites that I wanted to take to the dinner table, no matter how few people were able to gather round it.

My second resolution was to Try more natural wines, with an open mind. Unfortunately, only a small (though growing) proportion of the bottles that arrive on my doorstep qualify as orange (skin-fermented white wines made like red wines in contact with the grape skins) and an even smaller proportion are out-and-out natural (zero additives and minimal sulphur). The resolution ended, “I am too often guilty of shying away from the off-piste section of a restaurant wine list. I hereby resolve to be more adventurous.” Cue hollow laughter. Restaurant-going has been all-too-severely curtailed. I have done my best, but I’ve had far too few opportunities to be adventurous. So, having failed in 2020 and 2021, I’d like to repeat this as a resolution for 2022.

Try to stamp out the term “natural wine”, I also wrote. I added casually, “I rather like the term I came across recently in Australia: lo-fi winemaking.” Australia? The country seems impossibly distant today, yet there we were, taking the Karri Forest and surf of Margaret River for granted really quite recently. My point was that the term “natural wine” implies, very misleadingly, that any other wine is unnatural.

That word ‘clean’ is so emotive. Yikes, have I been drinking dirty wine all these years?

I’d still like to find an alternative expression, although a few months after I wrote this, an even scarier and more misleading term was launched, by actor Cameron Diaz and entrepreneur Katherine Power: “clean” wine. Apart from grapes, Diaz and Power promise that their wine contains “only” sulfites, added yeast and yeast nutrients, and is clarified with bentonite, a common clay used for firing. You wouldn’t find a hardline naturalista using added yeast and yeast nutrients, yet that word “clean” is so emotive. Yikes, have I been drinking dirty wine all these years?

A less emotive, more descriptive term is “minimal intervention” wine, but it hardly trips off the tongue. Regardless of the terminology, I certainly want winemakers to continue the trend of using fewer and fewer additives in the winery. The long-awaited application of ingredient listing for wine, expected shortly in the EU, should only hasten this phenomenon. Farewell Mega Purple colouring?

Be more aware of true sustainability was resolution number four. The concept of sustainability was the theme of JancisRobinson.com’s writing competition last year, and we were sent nearly 200 profiles of wine producers who were deemed by their authors to be going the extra mile towards saving the planet. I’m delighted there is, without question, a head of steam within the world of wine to be more aware of the ecological and societal cost of production. A growing band of producers are signing up to International Wineries for Climate Action, designed specifically to decarbonise the global wine industry. My website is one of 52 founder members of Sustainable Wine Roundtable, whose aim is to “make sustainability mainstream in the wine industry”.

The very process of fermentation gives off carbon dioxide, almost all of which disappears into the atmosphere, and some particularly emission-conscious producers are putting in place systems to capture it. Yet this is by no means wine’s biggest contribution to global warming.

Rap knuckles over heavy bottles was my next resolution. And I have stuck to it assiduously. Audits of carbon emissions associated with the entire life-cycle of wine show that the biggest culprits are the production and transport of glass bottles. Yet consumers still, quite erroneously, associate heavy bottles with quality.

On JancisRobinson.com we have been weighing wine bottles and publishing their weights whenever possible since last February. In this we have been aided by the paucity of in-person tastings and an increase in tasting from full bottles delivered to my door.

This means that we can call out those who use unnecessarily heavy bottles. It’s clear that many wine producers who regard themselves as the good guys — by practising organic viticulture, for example — just haven’t thought about the impact of their heavy bottles on carbon emissions. A common defence from those who do is that they deploy them only for their top wines and use lighter bottles for the majority of their production. Yet this practice bolsters the consumer perception that heavy glass equals a superior wine, thus perpetuating its use.

Roll on really efficient recycling. Some countries are so much better at doing this than the US and the UK, with their reliance on networks of very disparate local authorities. And how about refillable bottles in wine-saturated regions such as Bordeaux, Burgundy and Napa Valley?

I also swore to Explore eastern Europe, which has been a bit difficult to do in person, though in 2021 I did manage to taste wines from Romania, Ukraine, Cyprus, Moldova and Georgia (horribly heavy bottles from these last two) — some of them rather good. I need to research Czech and Slovakian wines further.

Other resolutions included Ask even more questions and Smile more often, neither of which have been helped by working from home during lockdown. But I really have tried to Write slightly more enthusiastic tasting notes and to attempt to put my new mantra, Less work, more perk, into practice — even if the second half of this is proving much easier than the first.

Follow Jancis on Twitter @JancisRobinson

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