Would you like some Más Vino? Newsletter vol. 1
First newsletter droppin hot into your inbox! Pop the cork and pour yourself a glass!!
Welcome to a newsletter about (natural) wine.
Omg it’s Más Vino Please newsletter time!! If you’re reading this, you’re either my mom or my friend or you want to know about wine. All of those are great things, btw.
As you know, my little #winetok quickly turned into a community of dope ass natural wine lovers, who I became friends with on and offline. I started having really great conversations about wine and wanted to continue the convo, so I thought a newsletter could be a good place to start. Direct to your inbox, ya know? I won’t talk to you about wine like I know something about it that you don't, because frankly, there are people who know a lot more about it than I do.
Natural wine is a complex subject and I want to help bring it to more people in a fun, digestible, relaxed, and inclusive way. At the end of the day, I’m just a girl who drinks a lot of wine, and who happens to like to talk.
My intention with these newsletters is to build a community around natural wine, connecting us through shared knowledge. Someone on Tiktok once told me that natural wine was ‘classist ' and I was like ‘okay rudeee’ (and also not true). I told them that sharing knowledge helps dismantle the notion of ‘classism’, and so that’s what I intend to do here. I want to share wine knowledge, recommendations, commentary and cool ass people in the industry with everyone. Good wine is for the people!!
So anyway, now we’re here doing the first newsletter and I figure a good place to start is to talk about what ‘natural wine’ actually means. The term ‘natural wine’ is pretty vague and, depending on who you ask, means one thing or another.
When I talk about natural wine though, I’m referring to wine that is made with minimal to zero intervention, coupled with having deep consideration for the environment and the community surrounding it. In my opinion, you cannot talk about one without the other. Natural wine should inherently refer to cleaner wine making practices, regenerative agriculture, and protecting the rights of those who plant, grow, pick and produce our food and wine.
To the naked eye, the natty wine movement looks trendy and cute from the outside with its jewel-toned bottles, exclusive small batch production, and hip, insider wine shops. It-girls (the ones who really know what’s up) in their cowboy boots and vintage denim swear by it on their Instagram stories and all your favorite restaurants make a point to share their natural wine selections and that they only got like, "half a case of this wine”.
If your introduction to natural wine looks and sounds like the last couple of lines, that’s cool. That’s how most people were introduced to it, myself included! But while you sit there, marveling over this hard-to-find orange wine, feeling chic af, I hope you’ll pause and consider: if this is natural then what the hell is in the other bottle (we’ll talk about this in the next letter!)!? And more importantly, what happens before it gets to the bottle?
Why Should You Care About Natural Wine?
Natural wine is delicious and beautiful, and most definitely a craft. It’s a space where people go to work every single day to grow or pick or make something by hand.
Before your wine is poured into a glass, it’s already been touched by hundreds of hands (not in a literal, gross way). From the growing, watering, picking, fermenting, barreling, bottling, packaging, marketing, selling, shipping, cargo, importing, the shops, restaurants, sommeliers, etc etc etc, TONS of people are involved in the process of bringing you your wine— and that most certainly should come at a cost.
If your bottle of wine costs less than $8, think about all the people I just mentioned and ask yourself if everyone involved was paid or treated fairly in the process. Food for thought, huh? This isn’t to say that natural wine should be expensive! Absolutely not! In fact, most natural wines are reasonably priced around the $25 mark, some of them below $20.
My point is: wine has a lot of humans behind it who deserve to be taken care of and treated fairly, and paying a price for a hand-crafted, lovingly produced item is totally worth it ❤️
I’ve rambled a bit, and I want you to get back to drinking some yummy wines so I’ll sign off here, but before I go, check out these wines I’m loving below! And thank you for subscribing to this newsletter! The support has been immense and I’m so excited to see where this community will take us.
See you in two weeks, where I share the harsh truth about my Franzia boxed wine past and the differences between natural and conventional wines.
-Mas Vino Please
Wine Picks: SB Winery, Meinklang, Rootdown Cole Ranch