Perhaps this is a bit more of a local bias than anything else, but as a wine rep, I find myself perusing the shelves at lots of stores. It takes a trained eye to see the personality or the plan (if there is one) of any given store, and it often raises more questions than it answers. However, something I've noticed recently trolling the trendy high end supposedly "natural" grocery stores is that their wine selections seem to be anything but.

Now I know the part of the reason: most of these places are your average grocery store on the block with better interior design. They generally pay their wine people pretty poorly and can expect poor wine buying, naturally. Walking through Wal-Mart today I noticed a big center aisle display of wine right in front of the cash registers fully stocked with the usual suspects. Of course I'm not surprised; one can chalk it up to an inevitability of the market. Yet why when I walk into my local luxury grocery store do I see the same exact sort of display stocked with the same exact wines? Upon further investigation I see many labels that are made at any one of several different facilities pulling fruit from dozens if not hundreds of sources—many with more of a mind to preserve high production than to preserve quality.

I've heard straight from the mouths of several winemakers I've met that there's a real hesitation to put the word "organic" on any wine labels, even if they already qualified, for fear that it would hurt their image in the market. How can this be? I know the provenance of all that so-called "natural" produce is spurious as best, but when a certain sector of the market is climbing over itself to buy produce at twice the cost because of an organic label—and well they should—why wouldn't they accept the same for wine? Is this a simple case of small natural and organic producers playing to their own fears and selling themselves short? Why do these grocery stores take so much time to get really nice, if pricey, produce and totally overlook those same virtues in wine? I'm sorry, I'm not buying that the market won't bear it because damn it, no one has even tried that I've seen.

As with produce, I think, large aggregate interests have done their best to not even begin to tell the public at large what naturalistic wine making entails, largely because it doesn't suit their interests. And the poor conscientious winemaker who has worked so hard to work with the vines and the fruit in a natural and harmonious way to ensure top quality shies away from putting their hard-earned title on the label? What a shame. I wish I had more answers to these questions, but I honestly can't think of what can be done to solve the problem.