"Orange wines are a sideshow and a waste of time"

“What’s the point of experimenting? We know how to make really good wine. Why do we want to throw away the formula and do something different?”

Hugh Johnson, interviewed in the Washington Post, October 2016.

Recently I've been wondering whether the whole arena of natural wines was becoming so mainstream, tolerated and understood that maybe there was no more need for advocacy, extolling of virtues or defending of corners.

We are after all living in an age where "natural wine" gets written about in Vogue magazine, and orange wines are downed enthusiastically with nary a second's thought, from London to New York and all points inbetween.

Not so fast. Just when you thought the last narrow minded, reactionary wine hack had hung up their chintzy tastevin for good, along comes the next candidate. I had a taste of vintage vitriol back in August, with some extraordinary comments from semi-retired supermarket wine supremo Malcolm Gluck. Anyone who grew up in eighties Britain will recall that Gluck…