Legitimating taste in cultural fields: Generational classifications and symbolic struggles in representations of ‘natural’ wine

Abstract

This article addresses the legitimation of taste in cultural fields by examining the role of generational dynamics in the field of fine wine. In the last decade, ‘natural’ wine has become an increasingly influential category in the fine wine field. The article explores how legitimating media institutions in this field represent natural wine, particularly as regards to the symbolic properties of cultural taste. The empirical material consists of articles published in two leading US wine magazines, VinePair and Wine Spectator. The analysis shows that natural wine was represented as a contested category whose aesthetic qualities were only partially legitimated. Moreover, generational and age-coded categories were deployed to construct oppositions between natural wines and other fine wines, as well as between their respective proponents. The aesthetic characteristics of natural wine were associated with emerging forms of cultural capital that partly challenged established aesthetic standards in the fine wine field connected to traditional highbrow cultural capital. Contestations over natural wine are therefore indicative of symbolic struggles over cultural taste in the fine wine field. In conclusion, the article contributes to research in cultural fields by analysing the relationship between generational classifications and contestations over aesthetic standards in the legitimation of taste.

Introduction

During the last decades, research in the Global North on the legitimation of taste in cultural fields suggests that elites display cultural distinction by adopting eclectic and ‘omnivorious’ tastes that cross traditional symbolic boundaries between ‘highbrow’ and ‘lowbrow’ culture (for an overview, see Karademir Hazır and Warde, 2015). Moreover, there has been a gradual delegitimation of traditional highbrow culture, for example, the arts (Savage et al., 2015; Prieur and Savage, 2013; Roose, 2015). A corresponding consecration of popular or lowbrow culture, is evident in cultural fields such as ‘alternative’ food (Paddock, 2015), beer (Thurnell-Read, 2018) and pop-rock (Purhonen et al., 2019). Research on tastes in fine arts, music and other cultural fields suggests that these patterns are age-related as older elites are more likely to adopt highbrow culture, whereas younger elites are more likely to dislike the latter and instead prefer popular culture (Lizardo and Skiles, 2015; Roose, 2015; Wright et al., 2013). This has been interpreted as a rejection of the cultural taste of older elite cohorts by younger elites, which reflects generational struggles over cultural taste in which traditional highbrow cultural capital is being challenged by ‘emerging’ forms of cultural capital (le Grand, 2020; Lizardo and Skiles, 2015). Whilst traditional highbrow cultural capital is legitimated by mastering historically canonised forms of culture, such as opera and painting, emerging cultural capital has cosmopolitan and urban associations (Roose, 2015) and involves the valorisation of popular culture through reflexive modes of appropriation and notions of trendiness (Friedman et al., 2015; Prieur and Savage, 2013). Generational categories are regularly deployed in public discourse to classify and (de)legitimate social phenomena (Bristow, 2019; Purhonen, 2016; White, 2013). However, in studies on cultural capital and taste, generational dynamics have been largely ignored (cf. Prieur et al., 2023). This particularly goes for research on the field of wine.

To this end, this article addresses the role of generational dynamics and emerging cultural capital in changing hierarchies of cultural taste, by focussing on how the category of ‘natural’ wine is represented in the field of fine wine. Fine wine has traditionally been a marker of elite distinction and the appropriation of a ‘taste for the particular’ (Smith Maguire, 2018b; cf. Bourdieu, 1984 [1979]: 53; Ho, 2021). In the last decades, however, the wine field has undergone processes of globalisation (Ho, 2021; Inglis and Almila, 2019) and democratisation (Howland, 2013). Fine wine has retained its rarefied status and is in some elite contexts still primarily associated with traditionally canonised Old World regions, grapes and styles (Ho, 2021). But increasing ‘omnivoriousness’ and ‘democratisation of terroir’ (Smith Maguire, 2019: 174) means that wines from historically non-consecrated parts of the Old and New World may now also be legitimated as quality fine wines (Smith Maguire, 2018b). Narratives of terroir are deployed to construct symbolic and economic value by linking a wine’s characteristics to the soil, topography, climate and historical traditions of the locality where it was produced (Demossier, 2011; Smith Maguire, 2018b). The democratisation of terroir means that authenticity and value claims with reference to this concept are embedded within wider narratives about provenance or the authentication of origin (Smith Maguire, 2013; 2018b), in which artisanal practices and local traditions of winemaking are central (Beckert et al., 2017; Wang, 2021).

Resonating with wider trends in cultural fields, especially those revolving around ‘alternative’ food and drink (Johnston and Baumann, 2015 [2010]; Thurnell-Read, 2018), the importance of producing wine with ‘authentic’ qualities has been coupled with a heightened importance about the environment and sustainability, resulting in an expansion of organic and biodynamic viticulture (Ascione et al., 2020; Parga Dans et al., 2019). Particularly strong ideological commitments to authenticity and environmental issues, through an ethos of transparency as regards viticulture and vinification (Black, 2013), have been accentuated with the recent emergence and increasing influence of natural wine in the fine wine field (Ascione et al., 2020; Black, 2013). This category has long lacked any legal classification, but in 2020, the Vin Méthode Nature charter was launched in France. This certification states that a natural wine is made with organically or biodynamically farmed grapes which are hand-harvested and fermented using wild rather than cultured yeasts and either adding no additives or only a small dose of sulphur dioxide before bottling. It has been argued that the ethos behind natural wine acknowledges the non-human agency of material properties in the winemaking process, such as wild yeasts, and thereby challenges established ideologies around taste and terroir produced in marketing discourse and appellation regulations (Pavoni, 2020).

The emergence of natural wine as a category, ethos and set of practices primarily goes back to the work of Jules Chauvet, a winemaker and chemist. His wine philosophy developed as a critique of the post-war doxa on winemaking, which prescribed the use of herbicide and fertilisers in the vineyard and the use of additives and other forms of intervention in the cellar. In the 1980s, Chauvet is said to have been particularly influential to a now celebrated group of winemakers based in Beaujolais whose wines were served in certain Parisian wine bars (Cohen, 2013). As networks around natural wine grew, the marginal position of its proponents in the fine wine field can be likened to that of an avant-garde (cf. Bourdieu, 1993: 16). Since the 2010s, there has been a global diffusion and institutionalisation of natural wine (Smith Maguire, 2019). A number of institutional actors specialising in natural wines have established, including winemakers, wine importers, retail stores, bars, restaurants, sommeliers, fairs, festivals and magazines (Cohen, 2013). Academic commentators have therefore referred to natural wine as a movement (Black, 2013; Cohen, 2013; Pavoni, 2020) or an emerging cultural field (Smith Maguire, 2019). Well-known proponents of natural wine include Master Sommelier Pascaline Lepeltier, Master of Wine Isabelle Legeron, wine writer Alice Feiring and rapper Action Bronson.

This article explores how natural wine is represented by legitimating media institutions in the wine field, especially as regards to the symbolic properties of cultural taste. I thereby focus on how the aesthetic characteristics attributed to natural wine are (de)legitimated in media representations and how these legitimation frames are related to wider socio-symbolic struggles in the field of fine wine. In particular, I address how generational categories are mobilised in these field struggles. Research suggests that natural wines are more popular among younger age cohorts (Vecchio et al., 2021). Yet, as mentioned, the generational dynamics that may be linked to such patterns have been largely ignored in research on wine. Smith Maguire (2019) argues that natural wine emerged as part of the democratisation of provenance and terroir in the wine field discussed earlier. Appropriating this wine category allows middle-class people to distance themselves from traditional forms of highbrow snobbery. In this way, ‘natural wine is situated within wider legitimacy frameworks of good taste’ (Smith Maguire, 2020: 172), which underpin the fine wine field and cultural fields more generally. Some academic commentators therefore claim that natural wine emerged, not only in tandem with increasing environmental concerns but also new tasting practices and aesthetic qualities in the wine field (Black, 2013; de Benedittis, 2019; Pavoni, 2020). Its aesthetic qualities, however, appear to be contested. In public representations (Smith Maguire, 2018a) and in interviews with artisanal winemakers (Ascione et al., 2020), natural winemaking is critiqued as a risky practice which may result in flawed wines failing to ‘express’ terroir. Yet, in other research, natural wine enthusiasts embrace the non-conventional taste characteristics of natural wines (Black, 2013; de Benedettis, 2019: 142-143) and see natural winemaking as a precondition for an authentic and transparent relationship to terroir lacking in conventional wines (Ascione et al., 2020; Black, 2013; Pavoni, 2020).

The present article builds on existing research to provide an extensive analysis of how the aesthetic characteristics of natural wine are legitimated and contested in public representations. It contributes to studies on the legitimation of taste in cultural fields by exploring the mobilisation of generational categories in contestations over natural wine and how they are related to symbolic struggles over cultural taste in the field of fine wine. The article also shows how such struggles are indicative of changing aesthetic hierarchies in this field, particularly in relation to emerging forms of cultural capital. By focussing on generational dynamics and emerging cultural capital, I address two interrelated but largely neglected issues in research on the legitimation of tastes in the wine field and beyond. Empirically, I focus on a North American context by analysing representations of natural wine in two leading specialist wine magazines, VinePair and Wine Spectator. Institutional actors such as wine magazines form ‘field-specific public spheres’ (Rössel et al., 2018: 454) and function as ‘legitimating institutions’ (Smith Maguire, 2018b: 7) which play a key role in attributing symbolic value to wine in the wine field (Fitzmaurice, 2017; Smith Maguire, 2018b). This is elaborated further in the next section discussing the theoretical approach of the study.

Generational struggles in the field of fine wine

The (de)legitimation of tastes for natural wine in media representations is analysed by deploying Bourdieu’s (1993; 1996 [1992]) field theoretical perspective. Wine as a cultural field can be conceptualised as a relatively autonomous, stratified domain where a set of institutional actors engage in socio-symbolic struggles centring on how cultural practices related to wine should be classified and legitimated, especially in terms of their aesthetic qualities (Beckert et al., 2017; Smith Maguire, 2018b: 3, 7). Thus, ‘what is at stake in the wine field is the definition of the quality of wine itself’ (Beckert et al., 2017: 211). Fields are differentiated into subfields that are formed relationally vis-á-vis one another according to contrasting logics of value (Bourdieu, 1996 [1992]). In Beckert et al.’s (2017) analysis of the wine field, one pole or subfield is governed by a logic of mass production where wine is a standardised industrial product. The other pole – the fine wine field – is governed by a logic of ‘restricted’ production (cf. Bourdieu, 1993) and here wine is a singularised good (Karpik, 2010). Institutional actors in this field seek symbolic and economic profits by attributing authentic qualities to wine (Beckert et al., 2017: 210; Smith Maguire, 2013; 2018b) through claims to provenance and terroir and the wider concept of provenance (Smith Maguire, 2018b). Smith Maguire (2018b) here distinguishes between the three provenance frames of transparency, heritage and genuineness. The ability to legitimate the aesthetic characteristics of wine through narratives of provenance and terroir, typically by reference to the particular characteristics of vineyard sites and historical traditions of artisanal winemaking, are tied to unequal power relations and struggles for value between different field actors (Demossier, 2011; Ulin, 1995).

In fields where objects are valued for their aesthetic characteristics, determining their value is an uncertain process (Beckert et al. 2017; cf. Karpik, 2010: 133–147). The fine wine field ‘is an extraordinary example, as most persons are not able to differentiate between wines based on objective sensory characteristics’ (Beckert et al., 2017: 206). Due to this uncertainty, the field has ‘a well-developed infrastructure of evaluation’ (Smith Maguire, 2018b: 5), including intermediary actors such as specialist wine magazines and their critics. And ‘driven by field internal criteria of evaluation’ (Beckert et al., 2017: 210), they have key roles as tastemakers by selecting, classifying and (de)legitimating wines (Smith Maguire, 2018b). Because of their influential position in influencing cultural taste, I examine how specialist wine magazines represent natural wine.

For Bourdieu (1993, 1996 [1992]), the reproduction and transformation of aesthetic and social hierarchies in fields, result from socio-symbolic struggles between a dominant group of ‘incumbents’ who try to maintain their hegemonic position and the value standards it is based on, and a cohort of ‘newcomers’ seeking to overthrow the former, either by competing according to existing value standards or by seeking recognition for alternative value criteria (Bourdieu, 1993; Lizardo and Skiles, 2015: 10). As we have seen, natural wine is an emerging category in the fine wine field. In the present study, I examine whether and how this category and its supporters are positioned vis-á-vis dominant aesthetic standards in the fine wine field and their proponents. In relation to this, I explore two contrasting aesthetic standards associated with emerging forms of cultural capital and highbrow cultural capital, respectively. Moreover, as mentioned, I am interested in the generational dynamics of socio-symbolic struggle and position-taking in fields. As Atkinson (2020: 86) writes:

Those at the top tend to be older, of a certain generation, and those at the bottom tend to be new entrants, an upcoming generation. But that’s not an iron law, only a tendency, and people can “phase” in and out at specific locations (and for varying periods).

Social generations are age cohorts who share certain social conditions and experiences (Mannheim, 1951). These ‘generations on paper’ (Purhonen, 2016) may be constructed and mobilised as generational categories as part of socio-symbolic struggles in fields. Particularly influential are generational claims made by political and media elites in public discourse (Bristow, 2019; White, 2013). ‘Generationalism’ is here rather common and refers to ‘the systematic appeal to the concept of generation in narrating the social and political’ (White, 2013: 216). In the Global North, narratives of ‘generational wars’ in which ‘millennials’ and ‘baby boomers’ are constituted as antagonistic categories, have become frequent (Bristow, 2019; White, 2013). Generational categories risk being deployed in stereotypical or vague ways and constructed as homogenous groups (Bristow, 2019; White, 2013), ignoring differences in conditions and experiences among age cohorts or ‘generational units’ (Mannheim, 1951).

The role of generational claims in field dynamics is an understudied area. In the present article, I explore how generational categories and oppositions are invoked in representations of natural wine and their implications for aesthetic and social hierarchies in the fine wine field. To this end, I examine whether and how representations of natural wine in legitimating media institutions are indicative of socio-symbolic and generational struggles over cultural taste in the fine wine field. In relation to this, I also contribute to existing studies by exploring the role of emerging cultural capital and traditional highbrow cultural capital as competing forms of symbolic value in the legitimation (or not) of natural wine in such generational struggles over taste.

Research methodology

The analysis primarily draws on representations of natural wine published in two leading specialist wine magazines (cf. Fitzmaurice, 2017; Smith Maguire, 2018b; 2019), VinePair and Wine Spectator. New York–based Wine Spectator was founded in 1976 and is arguably among the most influential wine magazines in the world (Smith Maguire, 2018b). The print magazine sells around 375,000 issues with an ‘expected reach’ of 2.7 million readers (Wine Spectator, 2023). With an average age of 51 and average annual household income of about $337,482 (Wine Spectator, 2023), the magazine targets and attracts an older, affluent, elite audience of whom ‘a majority [are] professional/managerial individuals whose consumption patterns confirm their high levels of economic and cultural capital’ (Smith Maguire, 2018b: 8). In Bourdieu’s (1984 [1979]) terms, readers are likely to be positioned in the dominant fraction of the dominant class.

Founded in 2013 and also based in New York, VinePair is a web-based magazine, which claims to reach 35.2 million readers every month (VinePair, n.d.). Whilst Wine Spectator, whose audience can typically be classified in generational terms as baby boomers or generation X, VinePair boast that they are ‘largest digital media brand reaching millennial drinkers’. The latter are described as wine consumers of ‘the next generation’ (VinePair, n.d.). To give a rough indication of its audience demographics, web traffic data published on similarweb.com for May 2023, state that 66% of VinePair’s audience is 18–44 years old, which primarily places them in the generational categories of millennials and generation Z. Socio-economic data on the magazine’s audience demographics has not been obtained. However, although a fine wine magazine sometimes containing long form articles, VinePair has a popular image and broad appeal. Wines with a wide price range are featured. For instance, the prices of ‘The 50 Best Wines of 2017’ ranged from $14 to $350 (VinePair Staff, 2017). The magazine is therefore more likely to attract a broader audience in terms of their economic and cultural capital compared with Wine Spectator. In sum, given the contrasting generational positions of their respective audiences, Wine Spectator and VinePair are suitable points of comparison in relation to how natural wine as an emerging wine category in the fine wine field is represented.

Articles from both magazines published in 2017–2019 that include the phrase ‘natural wine’ were examined. A total of 110 articles in VinePair were identified through the Google Advanced Search function, whilst 71 articles in Wine Spectator were found using the magazine’s database on winespectator.com. As I will discuss further below, the larger number of articles from VinePair could be due to a greater recognition of natural wine as a category compared with Wine Spectator. I identified distinctions in the material through open coding. Codes were redefined, discarded or combined as analysis proceeded. Key codes identified in the material include trendiness, openness, place, production method, sensory characteristics and transparency. In the next step, codes were compared and contrasted to generate four overarching themes. For example, the theme about contestations over natural wine in relation to provenance and terroir was constructed by making connections within and between text segments were codes such as place, production method, sensory characteristics and transparency overlapped. Analysis was an open-ended, iterative process where codes and themes emerged in dialogue with theoretical frames and previous research (Timmermans and Tavory, 2012). This means that the theoretical framework was only partially formed in the beginning and developed gradually during the research process.

Representing natural wine

One of four themes identified in the material is that natural wine was represented as a trendy category receiving significant recognition. Natural wine was in both magazines and particularly in VinePair frequently described as ‘cool’, ‘trendy’ and creating ‘buzz’. To this end, natural wine was, as also suggested in other research (Ascione et al., 2020), portrayed in collective terms as a forming ‘scene’, ‘movement’ or ‘community’, typically formed among young people in cosmopolitan cities. Thus, in Wine Spectator, the Raw Wine fair was centred on ‘the movement that defines itself as “natural,”’, frequented by ‘young Brooklynites’ and set in ‘the hip Brooklyn neighborhood of Bushwick’ (Zecevic, 2018). Similar representations were published in VinePair, including in a number of city guides, such as ‘Inside Copenhagen’s punk-rock natural wine scene’ (Holland, 2017) and ‘A crawl through London’s cool, unpretentious, new-wave wine bars’ (Akkam, 2019).

In VinePair, the trendy, youthful and urban connotations of natural wines were often reflected in the images accompanying articles. One example is an interview with a wine professional described as a ‘trendsetter’ and ‘young gun bringing natural wine to hip, critically acclaimed restaurants’ in ‘NYC’s wine scene’ (Orlow, 2019). A photograph saw the interviewee dressed in a checked shirt with rolled up sleeves, slouched on a bench with a dog outside a restaurant whilst nonchalantly sipping a glass of wine. Behind her one could glimpse the flurry of young-looking patrons and members of staff in the restaurant. VinePair also described the aesthetics of natural wine labels as ‘colorful’, ‘edgy’, ‘hip’ and ‘zany’ (Goode, 2017; Grinberg, 2019b). One article argued that this meant that the ‘trendier label designs’ (Wolinski, 2018) of craft beer labels had spilt over into the wine world. The popular, trendy aesthetics of natural wine bottles differs markedly from traditional fine wine labels featuring châteaus, crests or other ornaments common, for example, in Bordeaux (Mullen, 2017).

As a trendy category and wine movement, natural wines were in some articles portrayed to wield a wider influence to winemaking in the fine wine field:

even some of those producers who haven’t gone the fully natural route have found that this movement has made them rethink their approach to picking times, oak use, and sulfur dioxide additions. Across the wine world now, the trend is very much to work more naturally in order to best express the lovely regional flavors known to us as terroir (Goode in VinePair, 2017).

Other articles addressed the influence of natural wine among wine establishments and consumers. But despite the trendiness and wider recognition attributed to the category, natural wine was, as will be more fully developed later, a controversial category both legitimated and delegitimated by critics in both magazines. And despite the relatively frequent coverage of natural wine, there were instances, particularly in Wine Spectator, when the category seemed to lack recognition. Critics seemed to distance themselves from the category by using the qualification ‘so-called’ when mentioning the term or putting quotation marks around the word natural, which implied that natural wine was a term recognised by others but not necessarily by the critic. In other Wine Spectator articles, the category was largely ignored even though the topics discussed were closely associated with natural wine. One example is an article (Camuto, 2018) on a producer with a ‘cult following’ who farmed organically, fermented with autochthonous yeasts and used minimal amounts of sulphites – all hallmarks of natural winemaking. However, it was only towards the end of the article when a reference was made, in passing, to the winemaker’s ‘natural wine brethren’, implying that he was recognised within the wine community as a natural wine producer. This way of refraining from acknowledging the category may at least partly explain why there are fewer articles in the sample on natural wine published in Wine Spectator compared with VinePair.

Moreover, given its general trendiness and recognition, the category was associated with characteristics not traditionally used to valorise fine wine, namely, as a trendy, urban and youthful phenomenon associated with a popular aesthetics. As legitimation frames, these representations characterise emerging cultural capital rather than highbrow cultural capital. The latter builds on a logic of valuation based on mastering canonised knowledge (Prieur and Savage, 2013), which in the fine wine field includes acquiring knowledge about consecrated wine styles, regions and producers, such as celebrated vintages from the Bordeaux first growths (cf. Howland, 2014). Research suggests that emerging cultural forms may be contested and only partially legitimated (le Grand, 2020). As we will explore further, a similar conclusion can be drawn in relation to the category of natural wine. Moreover, the youthful character to proponents of natural wine and the movement formed around it will be examined in terms of generational classifications and oppositions.

Openness and snobbery

A second theme centred on the topic of openness (or lack thereof), among proponents of natural wine, towards other wine categories as well as the practices and individuals associated with the latter. The emergence of natural wine was typically conceived as either bound up with a democratic sensibility or an insular form of snobbery. In some articles, natural wine was portrayed as an unpretentious category free from snobbery and exclusion. In a VinePair article (Akkam, 2019), natural wine-oriented bars in London was described as ‘experimental, unpretentious spots’ with ‘affordable drinks in a relaxed setting’ and where ‘There isn’t a snooty nature’ around natural wines. A wine professional interviewed in the piece traced the emergence of these wine bars to the early 2000s when ‘there was a generational gap, and people were looking for a more diverse quality of wine in London. […] … there was a lack of places where we could drink orange wine and eat simple food’. A generational dimension was also alluded to in a VinePair piece (Orlow, 2019), discussed earlier, about a young wine professional in New York who organises ‘pop-up’ events in which ‘she engages with 20-somethings who aren’t necessarily part of the insular beverage community. She is eager to show how fun natural wine can be…’ In articles such as these, natural wine is associated with unpretentiousness, openness, simplicity and authenticity – orientations which characterise an omnivorious taste profile (Johnston and Baumann, 2015 [2010]). Implicit in these representations is that conventional wine establishments and the young wine professionals working in them lack these characteristics.

However, in both magazines, proponents of natural wine, again often cast in youthful terms, were said to display a snobbish, insular and dogmatic attitude toward traditional fine wine and its proponents. Take, for example, this quote from a sommelier in VinePair:

While I love exploring little known wine regions, and am genuinely happy when I see natural wines on a list, it often seems they’re accompanied by an almost visceral disdain for classic wines/regions/styles that many guests love. I’ve noticed a creeping tendency in young somms to talk down to guests who just want a glass of something they’re familiar with. And while I completely understand (and encourage) the desire to turn people onto something they’ve never experienced, more often than not, it’s done in a derogatory manner (McKirdy, 2019d).

In this narrative, young sommeliers’ taste for natural wine was formed relationally through displaying a distaste for ‘classic’ fine wine. Similarly, a VinePair article (Grinberg, 2019b) critiqued how natural wine was positioned in a wellness culture catering to the ‘millennial market’, where natural wines were claimed to be ‘better for your body, and therefore more virtuous, more pure’ compared with other wines. Yet, ‘spreading the idea that it’s better than all other wines, natural wine enthusiasts are ironically engaging in the same elitist mentality that the movement formed in opposition against’ (Grinberg, 2019b). Alluded to here was that fine wine had a tradition of snobbery, which the new category of natural wine, associated with the generation of millennials, falsely claimed to counter but instead ended up reproducing.

This can be related to research on omnivoriousness and emerging cultural capital which suggests that displays of openness and tolerance are bound up with ‘new’ forms of distinction (Friedman et al., 2015; Johnston and Baumann, 2015 [2010]). Moreover, by appropriating an emerging category in natural wine and rejecting traditional forms of fine wine, proponents of natural wine were portrayed in somewhat similar terms as the contested figure of the middle-class hipster. Like the natural wine aficionado, the hipster has been cast in public discourse as a youngish urban person who appropriates emerging cultural forms and denigrates traditional highbrow cultural practices associated with an older generation of middle-class people (le Grand, 2020).

Due to its connotations of snobbery, some wine professionals interviewed in the magazines distanced themselves from the natural wine category. Wine Spectator wrote that a winemaker whose ‘wines could be characterized as being in the natural-wine category’ was reluctant to use the term as he ‘thinks… [it] carries with it a certain snobbery’ (Worobiec, 2017). And for some commentators, the contestations over natural wine reflected a new polarisation in the field of fine wine. As a critic in Wine Spectator wrote: ‘The malice and spite are omnipresent. Supporters of so-called natural wines are venomous in their disdain for those who do not subscribe. And, of course, those in opposition… are equally derisive’ (Kramer, 2017). The following two sections will explore how opinion is divided around natural wine in relation to its sensory characteristics and relationship to provenance and terroir.

Sensory characteristics

A third theme identified in the material was that natural wine was a contested category as regards its sensory characteristics, which were frequently represented as deviating from dominant taste conventions in the wine field. The flavour profiles of natural and ‘regular’ wines were sometimes juxtaposed:

Generally speaking, there’s a noticeable difference in the appearance, aromas, and flavors of natural wines versus ‘regular’ wines. [...] Cloudy looks and funky flavors are how many consumers think about and classify natural wines. […] … ‘funky’, ‘sour’, and ‘barnyard’ descriptors [are] often attributed to the style … (McKirdy in VinePair, 2019a).

The non-conventional flavours of natural wines were, as also noted in other studies (Ascione et al., 2020; Black, 2013; Smith Maguire, 2018a), frequently criticised as ‘wine flaws’. This was especially the case in Wine Spectator, as in this quote from a sommelier:

The trend I would love to just disappear is the whole idea of winemakers hiding behind flawed wine by calling it ‘natural’. […] We’re just in this whole trend of, ‘Oh, we’ll call it natural wine and let it taste like brett [brettanomyces] and mercaptans and V.A. [volatile acidity] and all sorts of other terrible flaws’. I can name hundreds of natural wines that are fantastic, but I think more and more what’s been coming out, that hipster trendiness of ‘totes nat wines’ has just been a lot of flawed winemaking (Wine Spectator, 2018).

The figure of the middle-class hipster has been denigrated for adopting superficial cultural trends simply for being trendy (see le Grand, 2020). Similar critique was sometimes directed against natural wine enthusiasts. Thus, in the quote above, references to natural wine were said to be used to legitimate poor winemaking for the sake of ‘hipster’ trendiness. In the same article, another interviewee expressed a similar opposition to the ‘natural craze’, but added: ‘I’m just a cranky old sommelier who still can’t understand why people don’t drink more Sherry and Riesling’ (Wine Spectator, 2018). In this statement, the interviewee’s unfashionable taste in wine was connected to his ‘old’ age, and natural wine enthusiasts cast as belonging to a younger cohort than him. Implicit generational classifications and oppositions can therefore be read into the statement.

However, natural wines frequently received favourable reviews, which in Wine Spectator meant high scores in their famed 100-point scale. Particularly, natural wines with an allegedly ‘unflawed’ taste profile – sometimes described as ‘varietally correct’ – were legitimated as high-quality wines. Thus, one wine was described as ‘a perfect introduction to natural wine and a varietally correct, go-to bottle’ which is ‘proof that truly good natural wine should simply taste like good wine’ (VinePair Staff, 2017). By referring to what a ‘good wine’ should taste like and casting varietal correctness as a quality criterion, natural wines which seem to meet established aesthetic conventions in the fine wine field may be legitimated.

Yet, conceptions of wine flaws were neither unambiguous nor unchallenged. Some VinePair articles argued that some ‘flaws’ can be beneficial in smaller amounts. As a winemaker commented about the presence of volatile acidity (VA) in wine: ‘it is like many other “flaws” in wine; a little is awesome in balance’ (Grinberg, 2019a). A moderate presence of ‘brett’ (brettanomyces), which contributes to ‘barnyardy’ and ‘funky’ flavours, could be described in similarly positive terms. Particularly notable was that in VinePair the non-conventional aesthetic characteristics of natural wines were sometimes represented in positive terms without being articulated as flaws. Thus, in one article, natural wines were said to have a ‘kombucha-like vibrance’ (Mason, 2018). In another piece, a wine distributor claimed: ‘Sour wine is not something anyone intends. Generally that’s vinegar… That said, there are a lot of cool sour flavors in natural wine’ (Andrews, 2017). Here, desirable forms of acidity (‘cool sour flavors’) were distinguished from flawed ones (‘vinegar’).

Ethnographic research suggests that some natural wine enthusiasts embrace the ‘flawed’ flavours of natural wines as authentic (Cohen, 2013; de Benedettis, 2019). This was also evident in both magazines and made through generational claims, sometimes categorising natural wine drinkers as millennials. For instance, the president of a ‘food development firm’ claimed in a quote that ‘our Millennial clients are not dissatisfied with these so-called faults; in fact, they view them as badges of authenticity’ (Steiman in Wine Spectator, 2017). Similarly, a VinePair article (Andrews, 2017) claimed that the sour and bitter flavours found in natural wines were part of a taste trend, prevalent among American millennials through culinary socialisation, also behind the popularity of kombucha, yoghurt, sourdough bread and certain types of ciders, cocktails and craft beers. These young consumers were contrasted with their parental generation: ‘Whereas their parents might have gone for jammy Cabs and Zins, younger drinkers are embracing the bitterness that balances out the fruit in natural wines’ (Andrews, 2017). ‘Jammy’ is a negative descriptor for fruit forward, full-bodied wines lacking in acidity. Thus, aesthetic distinctions between age cohorts were made through reference to generational categories.

In sum, whilst many natural wines attained legitimacy according to dominant aesthetic principles in the fine wine field, the material may also point to the emergence of alternative taste standards challenging conventional standards of wine quality, with at least partial legitimacy, that draws on a generational and age-coded discourse. As I will discuss in the Conclusion, these representations may be indications of a wider generational struggle over cultural taste in the fine wine field.

Provenance and terroir

A fourth theme in the study was that natural wine was a contested category as regards to claims to provenance, which is a concept which also encompasses the notion of terroir. Both concepts are central legitimation principles and means of symbolic and economic profits in the fine wine field and their construction involve the naturalisation of social processes and unequal power relations between different actors in the wine field (Demossier, 2011; Smith Maguire, 2018b; cf. Ulin, 1995). Provenance concerns the authentication of origin, namely, ‘where a product was produced, by whom, how and when’ (Smith Maguire, 2013: 368). In the magazines, provenance was constructed through narratives about the winemaker, the winery, the locality and methods of production. One Wine Spectator (Camuto, 2019a) article told the story of a wine producer taking over the estate where his ‘family [had] been cultivating wine grapes… for more than 400 years’ and ‘risked everything’ to reorient production from bulk wine to ‘quietly produce “natural wines”… long before it became cool’. Moreover, whilst “‘surveying the family’s prized sloping vineyards from a nearby hilltop’, the winemaker was quoted saying: ‘All the great artists were inspired by how nature creates’. We can see how a biographical narrative about the winemaker was embedded in the historical legacy of the winery and a winemaking philosophy intimating being motivated by artistic ideals, economic disinterest and a close bond to nature; thus linking the three provenance frames of transparency, heritage and genuineness identified by Smith Maguire (2018b) in her research on the legitimation of taste in wine magazines.

Resonating with other research on fine wine (Wang, 2021), references to local traditions of winemaking were also evident in articles where natural winemakers were credited with bringing back traditional, indigenous grape varieties, marginalised by the spread of ‘international’ varieties like chardonnay and cabernet sauvignon. Moreover, natural winemakers were said to champion traditional vinification practices; for example, by fermenting wine in amphoras, such as the qvevri, used in ‘the cradle of wine’ (McKirdy, 2019b), Georgia, since 6000 BC.

Categories of generation and age were sometimes used in provenance claims and particularly in transparency frames, as in this VinePair interview with a sommelier:

My generation craves transparency and [wants to understand] the behind-the-scenes of everything that touches our lives. So, it feels like a new era where consumers are really diving deep into, and caring about, the natural practices of how a wine is made and who the person is making it (McKirdy, 2019c).

Transparency frames are central to the legitimation of fine wine (Smith Maguire, 2018b) and ‘alternative’ food and drink (cf. Johnston and Baumann, 2015) more widely, although age-related and generational classifications have been understudied in such research. Narratives of ‘minimal intervention’ winemaking were integral transparency frames in representations of natural wine in both magazines. A Wine Spectator piece about a new ‘community’ of young, Australian winemakers oriented towards natural winemaking noted that: ‘As elsewhere around the world, many young winemakers are adopting less-interventionist winemaking approaches’ (Worobiec, 2017).

Yet, due to its lack of official classifications, natural wine was also delegitimated as a nebulous category which lacks transparency. As a Wine Spectator commentator wrote: ‘There is no legal definition for natural wine, and no definition agreed upon by its proponents. It is entirely unregulated. That means consumers have no guarantee that one wine is any more natural than the next’ (Mustacich, 2017).

Particularly divisive in both magazines was the authenticity of natural wines in relation to terroir. In such contestations, the sensory characteristics of natural wines, addressed earlier, became central. In VinePair, natural winemaking was sometimes legitimated as able to express terroir. Take, for example, this quote by a winemaker:

Eliminating as many chemicals as you can from the equation means you can take advantage of natural yeasts, which exist in a kind of feedback loop with healthy, vibrant, living soil. […] Going natural means allowing the terroir to speak for itself, rather than imposing yourself onto it (Deitch, 2017).

But it was more common to claim that due to its tendency to result in wine flaws, natural winemaking masked terroir, that is, failed to impart the particular soil, climate and topography of vineyards to the sensory characteristics of wines:

Taste through a range of natural wines, and sometimes you’ll find they taste more of the process than the place. All the effort to grow the vines organically or biodynamically by working the soil and avoiding chemicals, and the merits of special vineyard sites themselves, can be lost in the winery if rogue yeasts or bacteria take over, say, or if too much oxygen enters the wine (Goode in VinePair, 2017).

This failure to impart the unique terroir of a particular locality into the bottle meant that natural wines were said to have a similar flavour profile. In a recent ethnographic study, sustainable winemakers in Italy expressed similar reservations about natural wines vis-á-vis terroir (Ascione et al., 2020). The contestations over the aesthetic characteristics of natural wine explored in this and other themes can, as I will conclude next, be linked to wider symbolic struggles in the fine wine field and their generational dynamics.

Conclusion

I have suggested that natural wine was represented in the two magazines as a contested category with an ambiguous status whose aesthetic qualities were only partially legitimated and involved the construction of generational and age-coded oppositions. I will now discuss the implications of these findings on struggles over the legitimation of taste in the fine wine field and in cultural fields more broadly. This article has focused on cultural representations and the social practices of institutional actors in the fine wine field have not been explored. Another caveat is that the empirical material has been produced for a North American and English speaking audience, hence, findings may not be readably transferrable to other settings such as those in the Global South. In Hong Kong, for instance, traditional fine wine styles are markers of distinction among young elites (Ho, 2021).

The analysis demonstrates that the aesthetic characteristics of natural wine could be legitimated either by reproducing or challenging existing taste criteria in the fine wine field. This may reflect how emerging institutional actors in cultural fields can receive legitimacy for their practices by following and hence reproducing existing aesthetic standards. Yet, such newcomers may also seek to gain recognition for their activities by challenging field doxa and redefining the aesthetic criteria by which practices are legitimated. The contestations over the aesthetic qualities of natural wine in both magazines could indicate the existence of socio-symbolic struggles over cultural taste in the fine wine field between an established group of incumbents seeking to uphold existing aesthetic standards and a group of incomers championing the emergent category of natural wine who challenged those dominant taste criteria. The emergence of natural wine, then, may be bound up with a struggle between orthodox and heretical actors to retain or impose new principles of cultural taste in the fine wine field. Moreover, the study contributes to research on cultural fields by addressing the role of generational dynamics in the legitimation of taste and aesthetic change. Generational and age-coded classifications were prevalent in the oppositions constructed in the material, which could imply that advocates of natural wine and its alternative aesthetic standards to a greater extent belong to younger age cohorts and proponents of established fine wine styles are dominated by older age cohorts.

The struggles over aesthetic standards between proponents of natural wines and other fine wines, and their generational dynamics, can be related to wider contestations in cultural fields over emerging forms of cultural capital and highbrow cultural capital (Friedman et al., 2015; le Grand, 2020). Natural wines typically signalled forms of cultural distinction (trendiness, youth, urbanity and popular aesthetics) that break with the legitimation frames of traditional highbrow culture and rather characterise those of emerging cultural capital. But as these forms of valorisation were sometimes challenged as expressions of a ‘new’ form of symbolic exclusion directed against conventional fine wines and their proponents, there is a tension between democracy and distinction, as well as prestige and denigration, in representations of natural wine which are also reflected in academic debates on the status of emerging cultural practices (Friedman et al., 2015; le Grand, 2020). The establishment of natural wine may therefore be indicative of the increasing yet partial legitimacy of emerging cultural forms in the fine wine field. Again, generational and age-coded classifications are integral to the oppositions between emerging forms of cultural capital and highbrow cultural capital.

Lastly, the fact that natural wine was a category coded in generational and age-related ways, may partly account for why VinePair, with its target audience being millennials, published more articles about natural wine and more often legitimated the category compared with Wine Spectator, whose readers have an average age of 51. Media outlets tend to orient themselves towards their key audiences’ views and interests (cf. Baker et al., 2013). With their younger readership, emerging and trendy categories like natural wines would seem to be a suitable topic for VinePair to cover. In contrast, Wine Spectator’s readers would more likely be invested in historically consecrated categories, styles and regions of fine wine. Thus, the different age-profiles and generational positions of respective magazine’s readership can possibly explain their differences in coverage of natural wine.

In conclusion, this article contributes to research on the fine wine field and cultural fields more generally by highlighting the relationship between generational classification and contestations over forms of aesthetic standards in struggles over the legitimation of taste.