The ghosts of my wine drinking past + what's in the 'other bottle'. (Newsletter #2)
Spoiler: I used to love Franzia.
Last week I promised to talk about the ghosts of my wine drinking past. So here it is: I used to swear by Franzia. Well, actually... hold up. I should start with my relationship to wine:
Food and wine has always been a part of my life, but I didn't actually start drinking wine until I was in college. I thought wine was mature, chic, and made me feel grown. I liked the taste, but it was probably more image-based for me and I wanted to get drunk. So, 18 year old me spent my money on boxes of Franzia, because "you can get like FIVE WHOLE BOTTLES in a box for $10" or whatever they cost back then. I remember there was a moment in my freshman year, where my whole dorm went on a boxed wine binge FOR TWO WHOLE WEEKS. I honestly don’t remember if we even went to class, I just know that our mouths and hallways were stained red for a long ass time. Eventually, we switched to only drinking Riot Punch—but that’s a whole other story.
My dad would politely recommend that I drink a different wine, and even offered recommendations, but I refused to listen. Drunk to dollar ratio was everything to me. By my sophomore year, I started dating someone whose parents loved good and expensive wine, which I would be invited to sip with on occasion, so my palette quickly graduated from Franzia. I was ready and willing to pay seven whole dollars on a bottle. (Trader Joe’s hadn’t made its way to Colorado yet, so we were not blessed with Two Buck Chuck). Franzia was still a staple at most of our parties (drunk to dollar ratio, remember?) but when we had classy parties we would bring out a bottle of Yellow Tail or some other treasure that Liquor Mart wine aisle had. I thought about sharing photos from these eras, but it seems the internet has been scrubbed clean of any evidence of my ratchet boxed wine shenanigans.
This went on until about my senior year of college, when I had a different boyfriend, who was very cool and enjoyed bespoke/artisanal products. He lived next to a gourmet shop called Cured, which would eventually become one of my favorite places of all time. They carried hand-crafted/small batch goods and had a gorgeous wine shop. We soon became regulars, purchasing moderately priced wines to pair with our meat and cheese. I didn’t know it then, but Cured wine selection was my first exposure to minimal intervention wines.
Remember my definition about natural wine? Minimal to zero intervention. And remember when I asked: “if this is natural, then what the hell is in the other bottle?”
Okay well, today we’re going to dive into that a little deeper. People are usually surprised when I tell them their wine isn't natural. "What do you mean? All wine is natural…” They say to me. And I’m like, ehhh not really. If you can find a bottle of wine all year round, at any supermarket in the country then it is probably not natural. It is mass produced, and typically, has hella stabilizers, sugars, chemicals, enzymes, flavoring, non-native yeast, coloring, and so much more in it. In fact, the FDA allows up to 40 additives in a bottle of wine before they have to disclose what’s in there. 40 things that are not grapes or yeast!? Yes, you read that right.
The biggest difference between mass produced and natural wine is that natty wine typically only has three ingredients: grapes, native yeast, and tiny amounts of sulfur. It's like a nod to the OG winemaking days, before all the current interventions. Natural wines have minimal ingredients, indigenous yeast & fermentation, and a shorter shelf life. The natural wine making process (and use of indigenous yeast) offers a more expressive wine and reflection of the terroir. A bottle made like this, captures the year's seasons, climate changes, and history. You can really taste what happened that year, in that region and it’s a beautiful experience. I tried a wine recently that had a slight campfire-y taste, an expression of last year’s fire season.
Conventional wine (or standard wine) is a less expressive version of the grapes. This, I believe, is because of additives. Think of it as a recipe: in order to maintain consistent taste, color and to age better, conventional wine makers must use a standardized recipe to mitigate the risk of bottles not being made the way they were meant. Natural wines are made in an “un-engineered” format that increases the risk of something not going as planned and each vintage tasting different than the last, yet requires intuitive knowledge of the terroir or fermentation process. It’s being one with nature and letting it do it’s thing. Of course, there are caveats to the natural wine making process: natural wines are meant to be drunk young, not aged. They also can vary slightly in taste bottle to bottle—which is why natty wines tend to be “more adventurous” than your average wine. That being said, more and more wine makers are excelling at natural wine production becoming masters of their intuition and the wine making process, which is why I believe it's such a beautiful art.
Obviously, I’m only scraping the surface of this discussion—what I mentioned above only refers to what’s INSIDE the bottle, not how they got it into the bottle… which is a whole other can of worms, if you ask me. There is a much greater conversation to be had about these processes and how they differ. I am not a winemaker, so my knowledge is limited but from my research and conversations with wine professionals, this is what I have gathered: if you want to explore time and place in a bottle, go natural. If you appreciate the art and craftsmanship of wine making, go natural.
And that’s all I gotta say on that—until the next newsletter, when we talk again. Here’s some wine you should drink by the way: