Can You Feel the Funk?

Why natural wine aficionados don't like the term funky

You don’t have to spend too long hanging around in natural wine circles before someone mentions the F-word. I’m not talking about bad language here. Someone pops a bottle, you take a sniff, wow… “that’s funky”. It just slips out.

I’ve spoken to several wine retailers and importers in the last few months who say they have banned their staff from deploying tha funk as a descriptor. The latest mini-protest comes from More Natural Wine, Berlin’s dynamic wine duo Chris and Anika Foster. Chris's recent Instagram video has him explaining to camera that the term is meaningless and therefore valueless.

This got me thinking. What do people really mean when they say a wine is funky? Why do they use the word at all, and why do people like Chris regard it as an unhelpful or even potentially confusing term?

Let me start with why I would describe a wine as funky. To me it is a kind of catch-all code-word to describe something that is outspoken and a bit on the wild side. But it’s more than that. My use of funky is generally positive. It’s about the kind of dirt that makes life interesting, it’s the blue veins of a ripe stilton cheese or the tang of a super-fermented kimchi. It’s not full-blown bacterial spoilage or the outright disgusting smell of a rubbish bin.

In that sense, the word holds more nuance than you might think. But that’s just my take. What if we probe a bit deeper into funk’s murky origins?

Where the funk did this start?

The word funk is as old as the hills. Merriam-Webster traces the etymology back to 1680, at least in its original meaning of “an offensive [or foul] odor”. It starts to get interesting around the early 1900s, when ‘funk’ or ‘funky’ pops up in the context of jazz and blues. Increasingly from the 1950s and 1960s it is associated with mainly black music genres, and specifically with music that was more syncopated, more ‘groovy’ or danceable and by implication more carnal.

The association with sweat, bodily exertions and bad smells morphed into something related but different. A funky groove is a bit ‘dirty’, it might make you want to dance or think impure thoughts. This then carried through into the funk music genre, pioneered by James Brown and popularised in the 1970s - a genre that prioritises highly syncopated, danceable rhythms and bass over melody or harmony. You move and sweat to these grooves. You get funky.

What I take away from all of this is that funk and funkiness in music means the party’s gettin’ started. Let’s have fun, let’s dance, let’s forget about our worldly cares and just get on down with our primal selves.

Who wouldn’t want a wine that makes you feel like that?

Why y’all hatin’ on da funk?

Chris’s riff - which chimes with others to whom I’ve spoken - is that the term funky is too vague. Perhaps one drinker uses it to describe a wine with notable volatile acidity (the acetone or nail polish remover-like aromas that can develop with some uncontrolled fermentations). Another links funkiness to the farmyard-like aroma of brettanomyces. And still others just use the term indiscriminately for wines that are just, well, a little different to what they were expecting.

My question is this: can most wine drinkers really be expected to deploy such precise technical language? How many people walk into a wine shop and say “hello my good man, I’d like a wine with lightly playful volatiles, produced from a stressed fermentation with a soupcon of brett on the finish?”

If a large number of wine fans, geeks, even retailers keep using a term, it must have some kind of social capital, some underlying meaning that is instinctively understood. We’ve been here before with terms like minerality. Not everyone can precisely define what it means, but most have a vague idea that it describes something that is neither fruit nor flesh. It has some kind of usefulness otherwise it wouldn’t have been absorbed into the lexicon. There are even online wine retailers who categorise natural wines according to their funkiness. Like this one or this one.

Funky, to me, is an emotional or intuitive way of reacting to a wine, just as it is an emotional or even physical way of reacting to music. If I feel my hips swinging to the beat, the word funky is not far from my lips. But there is nothing precise about the definition. A funky groove is hard to pin down - After all, it don’t mean a thing if it ain’t got that swing. Personal taste is involved too. I find abstract electronic music funky. Some need Prince or Fela Kuti (OK, I like those too). And yet two music fans can look each other in the eye on the same downbeat, mouth ‘funky’ at each other and smile in silent enjoyment.

It’s the same in wine. We might not all define it identically, but ‘funky’ is a reaction, an immediate response to smelling or sipping a beverage that grabs our attention and perhaps suggests carnal, physical, musical or otherwise multi-sensorial pleasures. It could also suggest something negative. Perhaps the more classic wine fan will channel the 17th century definition of funk to express their distaste.

I’m reminded of Dariusz Galasiński’s writings, where he suggested that wine writers and the trade should stop trying to be gatekeepers of their own language. If funky has value as a conversation starter, as a shared language that natural wine fans (maybe all wine fans) can get behind, then let’s embrace it. It doesn’t matter whether we concur on the exact definition. All wine language is imprecise. I’ve blind tasted with professionals where one taster insists a wine is raspy, tannic and harsh, and another says it is velvety, soft and delicious. Everyone brings their own cultural and biological baggage to wine tasting, whether they like it or not.

There is more: If you cry that there is no value in applying what is predominantly a musical term to wine, take a look at this exercise from neuroscientist Gabriel Lepousez (seen here as a slide from a presentation he gave on behalf of the Wine Scholar Guild last year in Amsterdam).

As humans, we are remarkably adept at what Lepousez describes as cross-model correspondence - or what I would perhaps describe as inter-sensorial associations. Take a room full of wine experts (or probably novices, I doubt that it matters), as Lepousez did that day, have them taste a wine and then ask them whether the wine is “Kiki” or “Bouba” and there will almost always be a consensus. We make immediate associations based purely on the onomatopoeic quality of these names. And I think we do the same with funkiness.

So I’m down with a bit of funk. I love it in music, and I love it in wine, at least if that means you’re going to pour me something unconstrained, free and just downright joyful.

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