Toward Metamodern Wine
Wine evolves along with culture. Wine commentary, too.
Wine isn’t static. It evolves according to our changing understanding of nature, science, aesthetics, nourishment, thirst, the works. When I look at some of wine’s newest gestures, like the ascendency of natural wine, or regenerative viticulture, or wine’s integration into new rituals and occasions, I see genuine departures from modern paradigms in both practice and attitude.
As a writer, I use narrative to make sense of these shifts. I read my peers’ writing along with academic literature about wine writing itself, digging into papers by critics, economists, mathematicians, philosophers, historians—anyone training their gaze and research methods on it.
I’ve mostly focused on the developments of the last half-century, but more recently decided to broaden my scope and consider antecedents. I’m developing a big spreadsheet tracing the evolution of wine as cultural production, specifically using the lenses of premodernism through modernism, postmodernism, and metamodernism.
Critical frameworks like these help make sense of protracted, often messy cultural arcs, but they aren’t neat and tend to bleed into each another at the edges. We can always find prophets ahead of their time, and artifacts that kick around after culture’s moved on. My goal with this exercise is to look at how each era influenced the ways in which wine was thought about and discussed, and to consider what that means for wine commentary. This swiftly became an epistemic exercise: How do we decide what’s true? And how does language serve those truths?
I’m planning a longer paper on all of this, with more examples and citations and further expansion on my findings. My purpose today is simply to sketch these ideas to invite feedback and insight.
Before I get to the discussion, a disclosure of bias: My academic training is in Western artistic and literary production and criticism, and my wine expertise is essentially adjacent, so I used the Western rubrics with which I’m familiar. A scholar working from another cultural vantage point would have a different take (and I’d like to read it).
Wine in premodernity
During the premodern period, by which I mostly mean pre-Enlightenment, wine quenched thirst but was also central to ceremonies and rituals. It was used to purify, supplicate, even medicate. Wine was used as a commodity to enrich both Church and State. Wines were celebrated for their typicity, their adherence to character. Wine producers, too. Farmers worked at the mercy of their territories but also within strictures of generational expectation. And everyone, peasants and priests alike, drank the local wine, because all wine was local wine.
People put their faith in tradition, in the wisdoms of the past, but they were not anti-technology; no society survives long without embracing innovations to make it safer, healthier, happier. But new technologies were pressed into the service of perpetuating rather than renovating wine’s historical and regional forms. Wine narratives centered questions like Does the wine feel of this place? and Is the wine the way it’s supposed to be?
Wine in modernity
Starting from the late 19th century, European wine production was decimated by phylloxera, then two world wars, rebounding only as vineyards and economies recovered. Wine production became less manual as we put faith in the machine of progress. We applied insights from science to both vineyard and cellar, and wine became technologized, industrialized, mechanized—for better and for worse. Mass production and global distribution expanded access. Wine became part of culinary practice and performance, a new social signifier.
By the mid-20th century, wine commentary was likewise modernizing, propelled first by a professional commentariat but later by rationalists who strove to erase wine’s contingencies. Whereas early writers tended to characterize and personify wine in loose and personal terms, scientists and scholars (like Ann Noble and Maynard Amerine) and credentialing bodies (like WSET and the Court of Master Sommeliers) began to develop more rigorous frameworks for evaluation and description. They developed taxonomies and hierarchies that proposed correct and incorrect terminologies. Wines could be declared technically sound or technically flawed, measured not only by our own biological apparatus but also by new lab instruments. A goal, or at least one effect, was to flatten wine’s subjectivities and standardize the messy signals from the sensorium. Wine wasn’t drunk, it was tasted.
The poets were also making wine modern. Robert M. Parker Jr. is a handy straw man for the type, but he did not work in a vacuum. By the 1990s the world was thirsty for writing that felt less clinical, and a newer crop of commentators offered consumers fresh, readable prose. Critics invented scoring with numbers that felt simple and elemental—literally elemental, like the grades Americans had received in elementary school. The twinning of a poetic voice and a score moved wine, and marketers rapidly adopted the style and cadence; today it’s impossible to tell the difference between such texts.
Wine in postmodernity
In the late 20th century, wine, along with the rest of culture, entered postmodernity. Wine grew more appropriative and integrative as makers rummaged the past for earlier forms but combined these with newer ideas. They rejected some interventions but kept others, picking and choosing to meet stylistic, technical, or mercantile objectives. (One advocate of such practices published a website and book called Postmodern Winemaking.) Meanwhile, climate and agriculture scientists made us skeptical of claims that technology will save us.
Wine began to oscillate between strict forms (perpetuated by convention or regulatory diktat) and inventive rejections of such mandates. Some makers went deliberately off-piste, creating wines with goofy backstories; it was a winking gesture but not without financial consequences, red or black. Some winemakers became superstars. Some superstars became winemakers. Crass commercialism and consolidation into global brands gave rise to yet more cynicism. Cacophony was chorus and verse. The motto: Anything goes.
Around the turn of the 21st century, Western wine media started to fracture. There was a fresh reappraisal of good-bad dichotomies and a sense of freedom and new possibility. A handful of prominent critics broke from established publications to create their own scoring and rating bodies. Smartphone apps made everyone a critic, ranking and describing wines in their own terms. The wine influencer was born, a disruptive market force. Wine commentary followed wine into its postmodern phase, and the so-called correct approaches proposed by the modernists started to look narrow and insular.
And exclusionary. When Zimbabwean sommelier Tinashe Nyamudoka learned the WSET grid, he had to do mental gymnastics to write the “correct” European fruit on the exam. Ditto when formal tasting grids found their footing in Asia; they got transliterated into local flavors, but those modifications didn’t explode the paradigm, they just mapped it to a different botanical vocabulary. Many cultural commentators rightly started questioning wine’s elitist tropes and making necessary noise about wine snobbism in the form of racism. I took stock of my own privilege and assumptions to understand how my writing should change.
Toward metamodern wine
Wine is entering a new phase, along with the rest of us: metamodernism. Modernism was characterized by rationalism, certainties, faith in technology, progress, and absolutes. Postmodernism was characterized by relativism, appropriativity, skepticism, and irony. Metamodernism is about idealism. It’s about shedding postmodernism’s ironic detachment, which, it turns out, stifled progress by discouraging playful experimentation. Metamodernism is appropriative like postmodernism, drawing inspiration and technologies from all prior periods, but the imperatives are different. Rather than yoke appropriations primarily to commercial objectives, feeding cynicism, practitioners harness them toward broader ideals. They seek to re-animate wine, to revitalize and revivify it.
Metamodernism is creeping into wine commentary. The new approaches emphasize personal, subjective experience over standardizations. The writer needn’t act as a laboratory instrument; instead they’re invited to activate both somatic and emotional response centers. And metamodern wine commentary doesn’t attend only to the wine, it enlarges the discussion context, situating wine within a suite of broader cultural phenomena. It weaves wine into culturally significant rituals, performances, and occasions where it wasn’t previously invited. Some examples:
Impresarios like Jermaine Stone and the successful Vin e Hip-Hop event last fall in Burgundy, a dance party with famous wines that were decidedly not the center of attention.
Commentators who reject the “anything goes” shrug excusing faults and flaws in natural wines. The new commentary embraces a more nuanced and mature argument: That natural wine is a fresh expression of forms refined over ages, and it should be both interesting and delicious.
Practitioners like Jason Haas of Tablas Creek, a pioneer in regenerative organic viticulture who blogs and speaks extensively to share strategies with industry peers. He knows wine is not a zero-sum game.
Writers like Bodhi Landa, a sommelier whose writing is circumspect but never cynical and whose keen insights are powered by a depth charge of generosity. Or like Regine Rousseau, a multilingual poet writing at the intersection of wine and culture, mingling fiction with fact to paint a complex and kaleidoscopically emotive picture of wine.
All of these gestures imply we’re entering a new era of wine commentary, one that celebrates wine playfully, intuitively, holistically. One that honors science and insight but mixes them with healthy doses of expressive creativity. One that un-freights wine of its inherited cultural baggage and treats it more like a background hum in our exercise of pleasure. One that I call hopeful, and a good way forward.
Image: “Busy Dreams” ©2026 Meg Maker
Great stuff, Meg. Just followed Regine, too, so that's for putting her on my radar!
To Tom's point, it's hard not to see the 21st Century Postmodernist rise coinciding with the world wide web, not just the cheap blogging platforms but also the ever-increasing global connectedness. These viewpoints could be hashed out in large, diverse groups for the first time. Wines were traveling to more countries than ever before, more access, which leads to more questions, more desire to be included from all corners. And then the questioning of tradiitions and rules that no longer held the same necessity for "authenticity" in an information age.
One other though to add: you mention Phylloxera, but there's also Prohibition which was America's Phylloxera (it own blight that devastated it's wine industry and demanded a nearly equal length to recover as it took Europe: roughly 50 years.) While Europe was recovering, they struggled to compete with American wines. Then that reversed, Europe recovered in full, establishing thier designated regions and regulations as American wine all but vanished, before staging its own comeback.
I sometimes wonder about the emergence of simple, cheap blogging platforms and the explosion of new voices that emerged on their back. There was a certain transgressiveness that the bloggers reveled in and the established media noticed. These voices were clearly a response to your "modernists," but don't strike me as entirely postmodern. I think it would be interesting to incorporate the evolution of technology with your analysis of changing approaches to writing about wine. Or at least evolutions in communication technology. I think it's perfectly clear, for example, that the emergence and ubiquity of social media has helped change the way we think and the way we think and write about wine. Really fascinating subject.