Haters Gonna Hate.

Why is everybody so scared to talk about the good they're doing?

Let me boast and also maybe make a lot of people mad for one quick second: This lil’ Substack’s last post was shared on Wine Berserkers! I was particularly delighted by this not just for the uptick in views here but because it was shared by an old, notoriously particular customer of mine (whom I am quite sure will not remember that he was a customer of mine in two retail shops for which I worked). I had a real moment, shall we say, as I read through the comments on my article on Wine Berserkers—which is a platform I never visit because, IMHO, it is made up of an audience I usually find somewhat (sorry not sorry) obnoxious: older, wealthier, whiter men (they literally have avatar photos of themselves, so I can tell) who, through their comments, come across often as… mmm… let’s call it douchey.

There. I said it. I may now never get a job in this industry again because I’ve offended the old guard. Watch me eat my words… but until then:

My favorite comment came from a gentleman who also recently posted about his horizontal 1988 First Growth Bordeaux tasting, which is obviously not douchey or privileged at all, so clearly I am highly concerned with capturing him as my core audience here. He said specifically:

“What an awful style of writing - verbose, repetitive and weirdly non-informative - I’ve made it half-way through and have learned absolutely nothing. Is the target audience accounting and wine-obsessed 12 year olds? It reads like a transcript from a TikTok influencer.”

I am so delighted by this, y’all!! First of all, maybe I should be a TikTok influencer. Note to self. Second of all, hello to all the tweens out there reading! And third of all, I now intend to be as verbose and weirdly non-informative as possible. Out of spite. Because I’m a very mature grown up.

Did you know it was hot out this weekend, and we used the AC, like, five times?! I typically hate AC and much prefer fresh air coming in open windows, but this weekend, y’all!

JKJKJK. You can find me on TikTok if you want more of that inane content ;)

Here, I wanted to get to my point already in even bringing this up. It’s not just to spite the ‘88 Bordeaux collector. My point is that this critique is so typical. Haters gonna hate. It got me thinking about a comment from the brilliant Kiara Scott Farmer of Brookdale Estate in Paarl, South Africa, whom I interviewed recently. Kiara said this: “Big initiatives are often not talked about because they tend to bring about big critiques. As soon as someone hears what you’re trying to do right, they want to point out how it’s all wrong.”

Snap.

I was interviewing Kiara about Brookdale’s resiliency practices, trying to understand if and how the challenges in the South African wine industry differed from those in California. Kiara is regeneratively farming 67 hectares of land (24 under vine, a small chunk of which are Old Vine Project certified) in the Paarl region of South Africa. When the estate was started, it was cleared of alien vegetation and extensively replanted with native trees, shrubs, and flowers alongside vines to restore balance to the land. Kiara is a minimal intervention winemaker crafting around just 4,000 cases annually in the solar-powered winery. They just light-weighted their bottles, and the entire estate prioritizes sourcing as many supplies as locally as possible. Any one of these initiatives is deserving of its own entire resiliency spotlight and a round of applause. But none of those is the big initiative I really wanted to hear more about, and which Kiara seemed almost reluctant to chat through.

Why? Haters gonna hate.

Brookdale is owned by Tim Rudd, whose father is Sir Nigel Rudd, a famous and successful chairman of several public companies who was also knighted by Queen Elizabeth II for services to the manufacturing industry. Hence, one would assume Brookdale was… er… adequately funded to begin with. Already, within the little and proud “natural wine” community, that initial money stream can ping smirks (driven by jealousy—heck, even I’m jealous). But when I check my envy, that access to capital makes me excited about Brookdale, not dubious. Unlike many precious liberals or the natural-wine-as-exclusive-culture cohort would seem to imply, I don’t believe profit is a dirty word; instead, I believe profitability is critical and should be passionately pursued, because without it you cannot sustain or go on to do more good. Profit gives you the opportunity (and yes, I’d argue, the obligation) to give back and help others up around you, or to reinvest in doing more good for our planet and people.

Aptly, Brookdale pays their workers above the government-required fair living wage, and their team of vineyard workers is full time and locally sourced. “Our team is typically made up of about one full-time person per hectare,” Kiara explains (above, Kiara had said they have 24 hectares under vine currently). Both the full-time piece and the local piece are important, as those are both decidedly atypical characteristics for a larger wine estate where seasonal, part-time, specialized laborers are often brought in from elsewhere around the world, then let go when harvest or pruning is finished. At Brookdale, their team of locals—often from apartheid suburbs like that which Kiara grew up in, where gangs and addiction still unfortunately run rampant—gets taught not just how to train the vines, but also skills like how to drive, education around sustainability and why these more hands-on methods matter to the environment, even proper wine tasting and service etiquette. “This is the hardest but most important part,” Kiara tells me. “Teaching them why we do what we do, and encouraging them to have a better living; things like providing education around alcohol and abuse. Instead of keeping them away from the finished wine like it’s something they can’t be trusted with, instead bringing them closer to it to try and change something for them generationally.”

I was thrilled with this and implored her to go into more detail. “Well,” she responded, carefully choosing her words, “we don’t really talk about this because it’s very vulnerable; we can come across as boastful, and we are opening ourselves to critiques.”

Kiara continued to explain herself and Brookdale, admitting that forward-thinking initiatives—in general, not just at Brookdale—take time and multiple attempts to get right. Rarely do things go the way you initially hoped or planned, and you constantly have to circle back to reevaluate, to fiddle with the process or approach, to learn and adapt. Those first attempts, especially, open you up to so much critique from naysayers, from the doubters, the old-school, the stodgy or the fearful. You cannot innovate and make meaningful progress without making your first attempts and inevitably failing—or frustrating and upsetting others along the way.

So to my friends jumping in here from Wine Berserkers, who think my writing is “verbose, repetitive and weirdly non-informative,” welcome. Keep reading, or don’t. You should get around to opening that ‘88 Bordeaux; it’s not getting any more exciting. I’ll be busy over here with my ‘22 Old Vine Chenin Blanc from Paarl, stoked on the education it’s granting to its vineyard crew, trying to better understand packaging waste, trying to tease more P&Ls out of producers, hoping to grant us all a little more more resiliency. Haters gonna hate, but as Kiara summarizes, “You live and learn. And right now, we’re learning a lot.”