Eric Wareheim's Las Jaras Wines
In which I predict the death of natural wine.
This week I am reviewing two bottles of Eric Wareheim’s Las Jaras wines: a 2021 red-blend Glou Glou ($28) and a Waves white wine from 2020 ($12 per can).
A celebrity natural wine???
Eric Wareheim, for those uninitiated, is one half of the comedy team Tim and Eric. The two grew a cult following from the mid-aughts Comedy Central show Tim and Eric Awesome Show, Great Job! Their comedy style is predicated on trying to out-normal the other: simultaneously the straight man and the funny man, both deliver absurd lines with bureaucratic droll. If you have seen their comedy you will know there is a certain, um, autistic quality to their characters.
In fact, Eric’s wine enterprise emerged from his sketch comedy career. The Tim and Eric Show featured a recurring interview segment called Check it Out!, hosted by Dr. Steve Brule (John C. Reilly). In it, an on-the-ground reporter with what can only be described as a serious mental illness visits different places. In one of the more famous clips, Dr. Steve Brule goes to Sparkie’s Vineyards and chugs sweetberry wine, which gets all over his face.
Eric’s inaugural wine from 2017 was, of course, a version of this sweetberry wine (it quickly sold out online). Las Jaras now has 20 different wines.
This week, I tried two of them: the 2021 red-blend Glou Glou and the 2020 Waves canned white wine. Honestly, they were pretty good. The lightly-sparkling white was bright and juicy, with notes of melon and nice acid. And the Glou Glou was light and chuggable if not a bit “sweaty” for my taste.
Eric Wareheim has “foodie” written all over his Warby Parker-framed face. His Instagram is full of the classic Los Angeles restaurants: the approved Mexico City-style taco, the right Japanese milk bread. He says things like there are some great people in LA making doughs. You want to punch him in the face until you try the doughs in question.
I have to get this out of the way: I am a recovering foodie.
Growing up in Los Angeles — perhaps the greatest culinary city in the world — I became a large bitch. People here go clinically insane from the abundant fresh produce and sheer variety of culinary traditions. The allure of a Hollywood strip mall hawking northern Thai sausage that only 34-year old podcasters and I know about sort of ruined my life.
It made me sincere.
I hit my rock bottom in high school. I said phrases like “melting pot.” I participated in “dumpling crawls.”
This, I have come to realize, is not the way to live life. We should all be eating firm, pale tomatoes like we did in the old country (the Midwest). Living in New York, where food is prohibitively expensive and hole-in-the-wall restaurants are at least an hour train ride away, I have abandoned my ways. Someone get me an AA chip.
Naturally, Las Jaras fits into the foodie aesthetic perfectly. The wines are meant to be casual. Paired with a takeout margherita pizza. Stashed in a backpack to “watch an epic sunset” (Eric’s words, not mine).
Eric has made it clear he takes little part in the actual winemaking process. He’s more of a creative director. As he said in an interview with Wine Magazine:
“A big part of my job is the creative design look of everything. I’m a very visual person. When I got to wine shops, I still pick up a cool label.”
You want your natural wine label to look like a toddler drew it (why this is the aesthetic is beyond me, but I fall for it too). Las Jaras recalls this zeitgeist. The artwork is both figurative and literal, including the one designed by the hyperrealist artist Chloe Wise.
But what does this term 'natural wine’ actually mean? Essentially, the general principle is that the winemaker uses no additives in the barreling process (those additives could be sugar or acid).
But in practice, it means nothing. It’s an empty phrase. Natural wines as we know them are less about an actual process as they are a semiotic principle. Really, it means anything with a cute label.
Many roll their eyes at the treacly-quality of the current state of natural wines. As the foremost American wine reviewer Robert Parker tweeted in 2014:
J’accuse! As a technical criticism, he’s right. But natural wine disciples gripe that wines should be “fun” and “un-serious,” unlike the uber-stuffy wines Robert Parker prefers. To natural wine followers, like Eric Wareheim, it’s all about the vibes.
But I wonder what the shelf life is on the “funky” palate.
Like a hotter Nostradamus or the Mayans in 2012, I am here to predict the death of natural wines. Pack it up guys. Wine trends seem about as ephemeral as cronuts and frozen yogurt. Remember 2018 when everyone was drinking orange wine?
Things have to reach an equilibrium. The way people describe their preferred wine profile right now is downright feral. I have heard terms thrown around like “barnyard-y” “used sock” and “the meat of a rabies-infected squirrel.”
Maybe this is our cro-magnon (as opposed to our Chromatica) brain talking. If we cannot hunt and gather, and instead must work at offices with matcha lattes on tap, we must find something to connect us to the wild.
But this is only a guise. For all the conventions that natural wine is trying to break — pushing wine out of its old-world hierarchies — it feels like it’s just declaring a new proclamation. These wines are certainly not democratized: Natural wines are usually more expensive than their counterparts (Las Jaras price point of $25+ feels a little high).
And in trying so hard to seem un-serious, the wines ironically become more serious. I mean, talk to any attendant at a natural wine store and you will undoubtably be ridiculed by a denim-clad dude named Adam. And despite his comedy roots, Eric Wareheim is serious about his wine too. For better or worse.
