Expanding Your Peripheral Vision with Henry Glucroft
Words by Jennifer Green | Photography by Kyle Johnson
With all the hype surrounding natural wine, people forget the hardest thing to do is make the damn stuff. Unless you’re Henry Glucroft, in which case it’s what you lead with.
“Imagine getting up at 4 in the morning and putting fires next to your vines so they warm up,” he says, at once whimsical and serious. “Frost will cause them to snap right off. When the land is so expensive, very few people have the guts to have bad harvests. A thousand bottles of champagne at risk — you might feel the need to get out of bed.”
Over the past two years we’ve gotten to know Henry, almost every time we’ve hung out he’s commented on the backbreaking work winemakers do — a grounding reminder in the zeitgeist that now swirls around natural wine.
“Natural is a gray area,” he's spelling out over tacos at La Lonchería, the delicious Mexican luncheonette a block from Henry’s eponymous shop in Bushwick. On a previous visit, we had witnessed a nearly naked patron burst through the front door, clearly still tripping from the night before (we thought that kind of thing only happened in LA, but we were new to New York at the time). The mood is a bit calmer now. Henry keeps glancing furtively out the window, not for any morning-afters but for traffic cops, since he’s double-parked next to a construction site. He succeeds in making strategic eye contact and winks out the window. “He’s a nice guy. I’ll be fine,” Henry says and turns back to me, all sunshine.
“The most basic, quick definition [of natural wine] is nothing added, nothing removed,” he continues, then pauses, chewing on his syllables. “But a natural winemaker from one region versus another does not face the same challenges. Based on those potential challenges things might be a little different. Maybe for the winemaker that has to ship their wine in the summer to the US a few ppm (parts per million) of sulfur is not the end of the world, versus somebody in Upstate New York who can get their wine to market without it going on a boat in the summer,” Henry concludes, ever the wry and cheerful diplomat.
Henry and I had first crossed paths in a cramped treasure trove called La Carte des Vins on Boulevard Beaumarchais in Paris. It was February, the twilight of La Dive Bouteille, and I’d stumbled in a jet-lagged stupor off the street and into the shop. Stéphane, the owner, is notorious for “not knowing” where anything is, although he’ll stare at you from behind the counter as you rifle through his delightful mess of bottles, peering over his glasses with a curious disinterest. He was doing just that the moment I met Henry.
“Get this girl a bottle of Xavier Caillard,” Henry demanded playfully of Stéphane the moment we introduced ourselves and realized we were both visiting from New York. Suddenly at our beck and call, Stéphane sheepishly produced a medieval-looking bottle of Les Jardins Esméraldins, an ethereal beauty worthy of an endangered species list. Stéphane will reward you if you care enough. Henry had proven that he knew his shit, only to gracefully hand me the prize.
Henry’s Menagerie
A month later we would convene again in Henry’s lair, this time in the deep recesses of Bushwick, the province over which he himself resides. Because Henry’s the benevolent purveyor to all, he only had a few minutes but he made them count. “Here, take this, this and this,” he said, pulling from the labyrinth of shelves in his own shop. “This one’s on me.” I was on my way to Mexico City to wrap our third issue of Glou Glou and had already learned that wine is the best currency. This time around, I had an empty suitcase I was ready to fill with liquid gold. Henry understood. He himself was speeding out the door to deal some of his own.
For a man who lives in a mountain of magnums he’s pretty easy to spot. You’ll walk in and his head will be the first thing you see, bobbing between the bottles that form the peaks and valleys of his shoebox-sized shop. You’ll notice his joyful hair and the smile playing at his lips as he realizes he’s brought another enthusiast into the fold. Before you know it, he’s your dealer.
If you’re a New Yorker and someone knocks on your door with a package from Henry’s Wine + Spirit, it’s probably him.
If someone answers your online order, it’s him (99% of the time).
If someone is crawling through his space on 69 Central Ave to find the last bottle of a coveted vintage, it’s him (90% of the time; 10% is “brutally excruciating” and to no avail).
His singular aim: increase the “peripheral vision” of the people who enter his shop. “The biggest thing you can do, Henry explains to me over our spread of salsas, is to “take somebody who comes in wanting something and [explain] that what they really want is a bigger thing, you know, something more than what they asked for.”
Take a person who’s looking for a specific variety and comes in proclaiming they want a Pinot Noir. Henry would say: “wait a second. Why don't you try this Austrian Trollinger? You're looking for a lighter style of wine. Well, I've got a cool Trollinger from Austria that's something you've never had. But I really think you'll like it.” Henry takes another bite. “You know, doing that more and more often is going to make the market a much more interesting place. However objective you think you are, there's always a way of seeing something through a different lens.”
It’s like talking to an optimistic Walter White. Henry’s constantly honing a customer base that’s emblematic of new wine drinkers across the country: teetering on the brink of rabid obsession yet scared to show any vulnerability. Henry says that’s ok. Embrace it. Nobody knows everything. But try this.
He is their soothsayer. He can turn any wine into blue meth.
“My greatest recent realization is it's incredible how many people are into natural wine and really at a consumer level,” Henry muses. “Just like, how many people are geeking out about it, almost as if they would about new bands and music…
…People come in, we have conversations and my question is, where do you work? And they're like, oh, no I'm just a fan. I'm like, wow, I love you. You're just into it and not for any economic reason. Just pure passion.”
The drinkers are certainly coming in droves, but oftentimes Henry’s bringing his circus on the road. “I’ll definitely do days where I have a Google Map and a two hour itinerary and twelve deliveries across the city. Brooklyn and Manhattan. I mean, if it's more than a forty minute drive and I don't have a lot of deliveries lined up or it doesn't work into me visiting my grandfather on the Upper West Side or something like that, then I'm sorry, it's going to be UPS,” he elaborates. His grandfather is also a customer, theoretically. Henry describes him as a classic New Yorker who, at 95, was drinking Tanqueray martinis for lunch up until two years ago, when his family forced him to downgrade. Now he’s onto water and Gamay. (A waiter in France converted him: “you want something good? Light? You just have to drink Gamay.”)
As persuasive as that waiter was, his advice is just a sliver of the bait Henry serves up every day. He’s constantly advising the fans he’s lured in: “I'll translate to customers. I'll say, hey, this wine just landed off the boat. I would buy it now because the marketplace is not going to have them in a year or two but I would wait six months on this bottle.”
Instagrammable labels prowl the shelves like wildcats caged in a zoo, ready for their photo op, but Henry’s not jaded by the fact that customers may be attracted to certain cuvées simply because they’re hard to come by.
Instead, having their attention presents a rare opportunity: to preach the good word to a captive audience.
“I’m anti-establishment at times. So screw [government policy]. You should still try and be organic. You shouldn’t be adding chemicals in the vineyard,” Henry concludes, pivoting back to the discussion of what makes a wine ‘natural.’
“There is no fixed rule. There are so many climates and regions. Maybe one winemaker doesn’t have the resources to have cows on the property, which would be the ideal way of getting natural fertilizer. But perhaps they do have incredible plant biodiversity. 2Naturkinder has bats to avoid pesticides, and the bats eat all the bugs. Not everybody can do that, or wants to, but if winemakers are truly in tune with terroir then they can get as close as possible to chemical-free farming.”
In turn, these very real decision points turn into selling points. Back at the shop, Henry pulls out a bottle of 2Naturkinder from the shelf. “See, there’s a bat on the label. Now you’ll remember it,” Henry says as he shuffles hurriedly to move some cases toward the door, more deliveries to make on the campaign trail for natural wine. He has a point. And he has our vote.
