Winebits 783: Veritas, wine bottles, natural wine

This week’s wine news: Veritas, perhaps Dallas’s best wine bar, is closing. Plus, re-using old wine bottles and how not to report a natural wine story

• So long, Veritas: One of the best chapters in Dallas’ wine history will end when the Veritas wine bar closes. The Wine Curmudgeon will miss Veritas; it almost always offered interesting wine at fair prices, and owners Brooks and Bradley Anderson have been great friends of the blog (as well as terrific traffic ticket attorneys). I’ve interviewed winemakers at Veritas, including a Mondavi; held cheap wine book signings and shot a TV news segment about cheap wine there; and once filmed some talking head bits for a documentary about American wine that never aired (the pandemic cut off the funding). And I even talked myself out of a high-paying consulting gig during a business meeting with a couple of tech types who wanted to start a wine website. It was at that meeting that Ellie Cohn, Veritas’ long-tenured and much admired manager, took me to task for fussing about an orange rose. “Open your mind, Jeff,” she said. Ellie was correct about that, but it didn’t change the fact that the rose was oxidized and not particularly rose-like.

• Old wine bottles: How to use old wine bottles for something other than candle holders? The Lifehacker website suggests using them for watering plants — “wine bottles and watering cans are incredibly similar.” The point is that wine bottles and watering cans each have long necks, which are ideal for plants. I must admit: I’ve used empty wine bottles for a variety of things over the years, but never thought of this. One more point: Screwcap wine bottles work best, which doesn’t surprise me at all.

• Statistics? The Winestream Media – and to a lesser extent, lifestyle writers – always go gaga over natural wines, and almost every story makes some claim that natural wine is immensely popular. In fact, natural wine isn’t popular; the best statistics show it has maybe a couple of points of sales in the U.S., and those are concentrated among the wine elite. Nevertheless, this piece from something called Civic Science boasts “Millennials Are Raising Their Glasses to Natural Wines” without actually offering any evidence. In fact, the few numbers in the story say just the opposite – how about that 53 percent of the those surveyed say they’ve never heard of natural wine? This is not to say that natural wine hasn’t been influential or that it hasn’t generated much discussion. Rather, it’s to point out, as I always do, that if you’re going to write something, do the reporting first.