Extracts from Pascaline Lepeltier, a renowned French sommelier, discussing her new book and her philosophy towards wine. Lepeltier, who has won multiple prestigious titles as a sommelier, aims to challenge the traditional ways of learning about wine and invites readers to reflect on the subject.
Sommelier Pascaline Lepeltier
Wine is connected to agriculture and food, which are fundamentally political. It involves issues of production methods and quality. The problem is that the chain between the producer and the final consumer has become much longer.
We no longer know where our products come from. However, the more the chain is stretched, the harder it is to ensure that the environment we operate in allows us to eat high-quality food over the long term.
I am not fighting against agribusiness, as it has enabled incredible scientific advances and production stability. But its growing size leads to standardization of tastes. When I see perfect but tasteless apples in supermarkets around New York, with just water and sugar, it’s a disaster. Even though New York State is agricultural and wealthy, it’s difficult to cook with fresh produce there because it’s so disgusting. How far will we keep producing more at a lower cost?
Actually, we are too spoiled. We consume too much, waste a lot, and constantly have new products. And this disconnects us from the natural production cycles.
I was moved when the sociologist Bruno Latour said that “politics is necessarily ecological.” The house is the Earth, which we must stop destroying. The solution is not to consume less, but for each person to reconnect concretely with what they consume.
Wines can teach us to slow down, observe, and appreciate. I recently met young people aged 22, and 23 who knew by heart the latest natural wines from the depths of Italy or North Carolina but knew nothing about what existed twenty years ago.
They had never even heard of the critic Robert Parker! The classics, however, must be mastered in order to move forward. And turning natural wine into a caricatured entrenched camp caricatures this dynamic.
I choose wines that strongly express the person who makes them, the place, and the terroir, which for me is the original definition of a living wine. And I prioritize organic farming as much as possible. Then, in the United States, where glass is very poorly recycled, I look for solutions. I have reusable bottles from California.
I serve a macerated wine on tap, produced in the Finger Lakes region near New York, and vinified in Brooklyn, so it doesn’t need to be bottled. I also try to reduce the carbon footprint in transportation. For example, I buy wines from Grain de Sail in France, a company that transports them by sail.
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