Jamie Goode: Have we made too much of drinkability?

I love smashable red wines. Lighter red wines, pale in colour, low in alcohol with good acidity and no make-up – the sorts of wines that just about drink themselves. Uncork them, stick them on the table, and they’re finished in record time.

When I started drinking these wines didn’t really exist. We measured the success of red wines by their intensity and colour. I was a huge fan of deep, dark wines: the sorts of wines you could stand a spoon in. These weren’t the spoofy over-ripe dark wines that came to define the ‘international’ style of red wine in the heyday of Parker and Rolland; rather they were genuinely concentrated well-structured red wines of appropriate ripeness, which aged really well, but could be drunk young as long as you didn’t mind a bit of a challenge.

Lighter reds started emerging with the widespread rise of natural wine, roughly in the period 2010 onwards. Picking grapes early and extracting modestly – more of an infusion approach than extraction – and then doing a natural fermentation in large oak, concrete or clay resulted in reds of charm and precision, paler in colour. And then people began co-fermenting red and white grapes, or direct pressing a portion of the red grapes, also resulting in lighter-coloured wines.

The shift toward drinkability is not without its complications

A term emerged for these wines: glou glou. I loved – and still love – this style of wine, and drink it often. But there comes a two-fold danger with these wines.

The first is that if you extract very little and pick very early, there’s a danger that you can lose any sense of place. There glou glou style can be the dominant feature of the wine. I’m not suggesting that all wines should be terroir wines, and there is nothing wrong with buying a wine because it is smashable and delicious, even if you can’t tell whether it is from the Rhône or the Loire; Dão or the Douro; or Piemonte or Etna. But I’m not altogether satisfied if I buy a glou glou red that taste generic and I’m being charged R500 for it.

The second danger is that we could be heading for a stylistic uniformity, which is exactly what we were protesting about in the days of Parker and Rolland, with a never-ending stream of glossy, ripe, rich, oak-laden red wines in heavy bottles, and bearing many points out of 100.

If all that anyone with a natural leaning makes is placeless glou glou reds, then we are heading for trouble. It’s as if there is a natural wine style, which all the cool kids focus on, and then we have nothing else except for bold techno wines. What if I want to drink a richer, heavier red but I still want my wine to be made in a low intervention way from well farmed grapes?

As a wine drinker, I don’t want to be drinking the same wine every day. I’m curious in my drinking, and I’m also mood driven in my drinking.

I’m also aware that I sound a bit ungrateful here: I really love the lighter reds that are now being made, and when I speak to wine bar owners, they say that’s all that regular punters are asking for right now. Chillable, smashable reds. Gamay is even in demand, now, because of its effortless propensity to make these wines. I’m grateful, but we need to beware of heading into a sort of homogeneity of style. In the ecosystem of wine, we need to nurture all the different styles and see that they have their space.

There’s one other issue of concern here, and this is ageworthiness. I’m kind of in two minds about this. On the one hand, are older wines relevant to modern day consumers? Very few have cellars. Very few wineries release mature wines and restaurants and wine shops can’t afford to cellar wines before they sell them. And the requirement for ageing is just another element of complication and inaccessibility that could turn people away from wine. So maybe we should just focus on wines that taste great on release.

But on the other hand, the concept of the wine cellar and enjoying mature fine wines is thoroughly embedded in the narrative of wine. It’s part of why we find wine so fascinating. And some of the old wine experiences I have had are among the best wine encounters that I’ve been lucky enough to experience.

If people buy an expensive wine, then they’ll expect to be able to cellar it. It’s a sort of social contract. And the goal of cellaring wine is that it should get better and be more interesting, not that it should simply survive. I experienced a 10 year on tasting last year where many of the 10 year old wines were less interesting than if you’d drunk them on release. Many of the delicious (and expensive) new wave red wines taste brilliant young, but don’t gain anything from cellaring. At best, they survive. This is a slight concern: if everyone follows the same style, we’ll be impoverished in our drinking.

So let’s stay open minded about wine style. Let’s celebrate drinkability, but let’s not insist on it for all wines, because then we could be in danger of losing something.

• Jamie Goode is a London-based wine writer, lecturer, wine judge and book author. With a PhD in plant biology, he worked as a science editor, before starting wineanorak.com, one of the world’s most popular wine websites.