On Gatekeeping v. Gatebreaking
Your job is to ask questions... and answer them honestly.
gate·keep·er
/ˈgātˌkēpər/
noun
a person whose job is to open and close a gate and to prevent people entering without permission
someone who has the power to decide who gets particular resources and opportunities, and who does not
As I’ve launched the conversation around Resilient Wine, I’ve encountered fantastic support (thank YOU!) as well as wonderfully thoughtful inquiries, challenges and critiques to the movement. Last night, while drinking inappropriately gorgeous Champagne with an insanely generous friend, the question of gatekeeping came up. Namely: Wouldn’t I, in defining an alternative to both natural and conventional wine, inherently become just a new sort of gatekeeper? Even more interestingly, who gets to gatekeep in wine at all? And most cringey: How much does gatekeeping inevitably play into the production, sales and enjoyment of wine as a whole?
The conversation sent me into a fantastical online deep dive into research that spiraled wickedly meta and sucked up hours of my time before I had to claw back out and simplify arguments for purposes here:
Gatekeeping isn’t unique to the wine industry; the production, sales and enjoyment of products and consumerism as a whole inherently brings on gatekeeping. It’s just that wine has a whole lot of extra baggage in this regard. And since I would argue that everyone deserves to be able to drink some form of wine, it has more to answer to and more of a responsibility to dismantle this gatekeeping challenge. This ties back into Part 3 of a Resilient Wine movement, and eventually I hope to use this space to consider marketing tactic case studies. But my point here is that beyond the generic gatekeeping in the wine industry as a whole, “natural” wine seemed to quickly pick up with its own quirky gatekeeping that, I gathered, was initially a response to the gatekeeping that “conventional” and collectible and elitist fine wine had used to keep young, diverse, less affluent consumers out. And therein lies the irony. The “douchey” or “broey” or “too cool”quotient in both camps became wholly exclusionary of one another as well as massive swaths of a more basic audience, such that I often described their “insiders only” movements as tracking in a circle, each starting at the top and moving in opposite directions until they ultimately meet again.
They’ve met again.
And so, instead of resilient wine lapsing into another case of gatekeeping, the goal is instead gatebreaking. To gate-break is to remove barriers to information, knowledge, access, or perception of expertise. I will try to do that here, but resilient wine isn’t my movement, it’s all of ours—makers, buyers, drinkers. This is especially on the buyers and drinkers. You have a job, which is to ask questions; you’re not allowed to skirt by as a dumb drinker merely asking, “Is this wine natural? GREAT! Give it to me!”
I want to know what questions you have as a buyer/drinker, so that I can help try to get answers. Post them in the comments below or send me a message! I am not a maker, but I love asking questions, and I love telling resilient makers’ stories here and elsewhere (I also do content creation for brands). I’m not asking for perfection by makers, but rather transparency and authenticity. I hope if you’re a maker that you will open up about your challenges, the reasons behind your tough choices, the hopes you have for future improvements in the face of these wild, perilous times. If you’re a maker and want to contribute—or you want help telling your story or problem-solving for issues you’re facing—I’d love to talk. Let’s open up the conversation, dig in, get a little dirty, hopefully plant some seeds that sprout more resiliency for all of us. Oh, and no fences!
The end user who asks questions puts more than a few of us on the production/distribution/retail side of the equation in the uncomfortable position of having to engage in conversation and eventually having to say the dreaded words "I", "don't" and "know". However, the more we're willing to listen to questions and engage in conversation, the better we are at doing our jobs.
As any person experienced in sales will tell you, the person asking the questions is in a dominant position. How much of the wine world's gatekeeping and pressure to align with any one of its several self-selecting tribes (natural wine, "bro" wine, old-school European, etc) is a knee-jerk pushback, spawned by our natural discomfort at not being in the dominant position when clients have questions?
And to what degree do the camps we line up in and the gatekeepers we align with actually preclude our clients' questioning? How many of us secretly- or not so secretly- don't want to deal with questions? Maybe it's good marketing to simply signal to fellow travelers that our businesses operate under the Apple/Patagonia rubric that "people like us do things like this", but in a world where the major trend in wine consumption is reducing consumption, shifting consumption to other beverages- or quitting altogether- it's hard to see how growth happens in an environment where consumers have to choose which tribe they're in before they can regularly enjoy a glass of wine.