Natural Wine: Part 2

and dive back in to natural wines Part two. As Somalias and wine nerds and so on kind of began to realize that, like, you know, we should ask questions about how things are made. I think the general public has become aware of it at a similar pace, maybe like five years behind me. You know. The momentum in terms of the way that like guests and consumers ask about these things and talk about these things has become really powerful, I would say, in the last five years.

That's Amanda Smelts. She's the wine director at Estella and Cafe Ultra Parody so in New York. She's also a leading protagonist in the natural wine movement. Alright, cool, um, so why don't we just start off we have some working understanding of natural wine. But since there is no formal definition, maybe we could just get a definition from

Amanda Smelts about what you think natural wine is. I mean, there's no obviously there's no formal board because you know, it's a term that doesn't belong in the Ousford English Dictionary. But there's there's a fairly agreed upon working definition among those who work with not or wine, or who make it or who are around it a lot. And the idea is generally speaking, in the vineyards and in the sellers, nothing added, nothing taken away. So when it comes to farming,

that means you don't use that. This is probably the most important part. You're not using chemicals in your vineyards when you're adding anything to vine your you know, farming at all, it's it has to be organic compounds, ifting at all. And then when it comes to your seller work, I actually fermenting and making the wines, you're not adding

any chemicals. They're either or any other host of synthetic additives, colorance, all kinds of different stuff that is that are currently legal to be added to wine in the aim of making kind of the most transparent wines possible, And at what point in your career did you notice that natural a wine was something that might have been something that was more for people who were in the industry, so you're fellow wine nerds and maybe other industry people too,

something that as a buyer you started to notice people coming into your establishments and asking you about the process. For me, was a gradual one because there there was not such a clear distinction and not such a clear conversation at least here in the States about wines that were maybe made in a different way. The means of production were certainly not the thing that you started talking about first. When you're tasting, you know, wines with a

vendor or when you're listening to an importer talk. Mostly people are trying to you know, sell their wines and their products that they import, without kind of any conversation about how things are made. But that has changed a lot, I think, as the conversation about how things are made in terms of food and beverage around the world has changed definitely, and that sort of checks out with what we've been hearing from other folks that we've talked to

as well, and of course in my own observations. What it seems like you're kind of making the link here between a group of let's say, influential UM wine buyers and UM wine makers that really spawn from an environmental concern. Do you think that that's a fair kind of place of origin for the natural wine movement, is that it's

in relationship to an environmental practice. I think that there are two or three fundamental like like origin concerns or kind of themes that are behind it, But environmental concerns are is definitely ground zero. The only other one that I would say is actual quality of wine, Like people talking about like what does wine tastes? Like what are global tastes? Like what does it mean for there to be a global taste in wine? Because that was a really big issue. It continues to be a huge issue.

Most people don't think it's a problem, but ultimately a few people here and there started to pipe up and say, hey, why is it that all of a sudden, red wines taste very much the same everywhere from Rioja to Bordeaux to Napa Valley to Burgenland, Like why is it that I can crack open for red wines from all of those places and everything has the same style and the same seller work, you know, the same type of production.

Once people start to notice that, like it's almost like, you know, it's almost like you've had the wool poled over your eyes a little bit. You're like, wait a minute, I've just opened forty Napa cabernets and I can barely tell the different between all of them. You know, to the untrained eye, they all kind of taste the same. Or you could insert category here, you know, salving oblanc from wherever? What's going on here? And I think that's the second question of origin, is why does all this

stuff taste the same. So it's it's a question of both quality of wine and character of wine itself in terms of like consumption, and then obviously environmental concerns, which is where does this stuff come from and how did they get here totally, which again just completely checks out with the previous conversation that we had with the winemakers from the other right, who both mentioned, you know, environmental concerns as well as a pursuit of their own artistry,

kinds of wines that they wanted to make as part of their own expression as artists, which I found to be compelling as well. So I guess in terms of the discourse that is happening in a more insular community, let's say the wine community, and specifically the US wine community.

You know, we seem to see headlines with greater frequency now about natural wine, and then these articles always kind of pop off in a way that feel oddly emotional people who are removed from these communities, so for for people who are are far away from the wine industry, and we see these really spirited exchanges like what are we supposed to make of that? And why is it that people feel so strongly about? Okay, this is such

a great question. So I'm gonna liken it to a thing first and then I'll explain in more practical I think terms. But the first thing I will liken it too is, you know, when everybody listened to opera in Vienna at the height of the Austro Hungarian Empire, and opera was the form, right, and somebody introduced the first opera in German, you know, like when German operas began to be the thing as opposed to say Italian opera

or and so on and so forth. I think whenever there's a major shift in a like deeply well known and well regarded esthetic media. Entire cultures are kind of rocked by it, you know, especially if the art form or the craft work or whatever it is. The cultural nexus is super important to people if it if it's closely associated, like in the case of opera, with national identity or cultural identity, if it's something that brings people a lot of meaning and a lot of joy and

a feeling of importance in their lives. Um when there are major paradigm shifts in those things, I think it takes on the hue of the personal because it's stuff that's deeply beloved by people. So if you follow wet Stone media closely, you'll know that there's nothing that I know more about or care more about than wine. In fact, I loved it so much that for an entire decade it was my job just to drink wine. Like Amanda, I was a sammie, which is how the French say

trained wine professional. But over time, as I began to rise up through the ranks in my career, I couldn't move beyond the overwhelming lack of diversity in the wine industry. The further along I moved, the bottles and the wine producing regions I was exposed to were fast and ever changing, but the people for whom I was opening those bottles were decidedly less so. So I decided to do something

radical in my mid twenties. I decided that I wanted to connect with the black and indigenous communities in the western Cape of South Africa, who were the overwhelming majority of the labor force but represented less than even a single percent of its ownership. I began to think of wine as a catalyst for social change, for historical and anthropological learning, for identity and origins. And in this work

there was an epiphany. It was that wine did not belong exclusively to the French or the Italians, no matter how hard my formal education tried to convince me. Through working with the families in South Africa's wine industry, I began a process that I would call decolonizing wine, a process that culminated in two thousand seventeen, where I traveled to the Republic of Georgia, often called the Cradle of Wine, to visit the oldest grape vine in the world that

is still being used to produce wine. We're in the village of Church Cardi and We're gonna go see a very very old vine. Do you see this is not a tree? So earlier today we saw one year old vines, which we're about that big, and four year old vines the oldest probably in the world. Huh yeah, it's the oldest in the world. Which is to gives us a grape, and it is to ali, it is for Senator yourself. This is the most amazing thing I've ever seen in

my life. This is unbelievable. And I think wine is in this special there's really special nexus between like you were just saying, agricultural product and environmental reality and a made thing, right, human artifact, cultural artifact, and an aesthetic object. It's it's not only one of those things, it's it's caught in the crosshairs of both. And so that means people who care about things as diverse as climate change, farming, music, art, cooking,

kilinary history, you know, I don't know, collecting things. There's like so many different angles through which people might care about wine because of that interesting overlay of you know, environment and means of production and farming and then aesthetic things that I think this is a truly major paradigm shift in the global culture of wine, and it is having the same sort of impact as something, you know, as profound as translating an ancient text from Latin into

Old English. You know, it's a stupid thing to compare it to because obviously wine isn't important as those ancient ancient texts. But but or say, as opera was to the Viennese. You know, I think that that's what's happening, and and that's that's why people are responding to it with this kind of vehemence. Because while wine is not art exactly, it does carry some of the hallmarks of art, and it definitely is craftsmanship, and it's definitely labor and

it's definitely farming. So there's lots of entry points through which you could really come to care for this strange living artifact, and lots of entry points in which it could come to represent your culture, or your history or even just your your sense of art, which means that it is weirdly very democratic. It means that lots and lots of different of different people can care about wine from all many, many different walks of life as long

as you have access to it. I think that's why people are heated because because it's it actually does have the power to move. It has the capacity to speak to many, many different people from lots of different angles. And because it speaks to so many, when there are big challenges or big changes kind of presented to the commonly accepted way of doing things worldwide, we feel the

heat a little bit. Wow, congratulations to you. That's officially the best description I've heard of this internal ire around natural wine conversations. You know, You've given me a lot to think about, because now I'm thinking about wine in a democratic sense, which of course makes me think about our own political system here and the challenges that Democratic Party has as a party of big tens and a

wide variety of ideas. On the one hand, it's very easy for people to find themselves in these broad politics, but on the other hand, when it comes to say, electing a candidate suitable to around, you know, much more difficult because the reasons that we've shown up to support, or the areas in which we see ourselves reflected, of course, are are varied, and that makes it hard. Yeah, that

makes it really challenging. So um, I think it's exactly the right analogy and helps me understand is there a social capital or is there kind of an idealism in people coming to this wine tint who never found a relationship to wine before. Is there some cash and people saying like, I'm into natural wine and therefore like I'm part of this movement now? Well I wish, I wish that my answer were no, But my answer is yeah, for sure, it's hip. It's become hip. But I think

we should push at and poke at why it's become hip. Right, it's because of what you say. You say, Okay, at least on the surface, natural wine seems to present this thing that is more democratic, it's not just superficial. It arises up out of you know a handful of people France, you know, California, you know, lots of Australia, like lots of different places, being like I don't want my wines

to taste like everybody else's wines anymore. Like there's something really unnerving there, and and you don't know any better. You just keep drinking them like whatever, it's no big deal. But the moment that someone presents one of these wines to you and you go, holy crap, that tastes so different from anything else I've ever seen what's going on here? Is it wrong? Is this? Like? You know? And I watched that happen literally every day at my job, Like

all the time. People are like, Oh, I don't know. This wine is so different? Is it? Is it bad? I think it's bad? You know. So when you when you have that much of like a jarring kind of encounter with something that you can smell and you can taste and you can feel in your body, Okay, so now you're like, whoa, I'm awake? What was going on before? And the answers that are behind what was going on

before are not cute, They're disconcerned. They're disconcerting. And when you start to get a little bit of an understanding on what has happened, i e. Like the mass industrialization of wine across the globe, that you start to think like, I don't know, I don't really I don't love that. H of course not the same as the conventional wines, which were made to taste like the other. Perhaps they were made to taste like wines that had performed well

in the meat. If we don't know anything about natural wine, and we've only been drinking nine dollar mile back from anywhere from Australia or to Argentina. What is the experience that we can expect as a consumer as a drinker when we are drinking natural wines versus wines that don't share that label. Well, it depends a little bit again on the means of production, because under the wide umbrella of natural wine, they really can taste quite quite different.

And I think to me, fundamental thing you should expect first is that everything you've ever tasted in wine before that is going to change. So like the first thing you can expect is difference, and I think that is that's crucial, right because it means that you are reintroduced to your own senses and you hear them say this

is different from my previous sense memories. Now that can those wines can be maybe not so perceptibly different from a conventional wine because maybe they were, you know, put in used oak barrels, and maybe there's a little bit of a sulfur dioxide application, and maybe there's a slightly more ripe fruited style and they're a little bit more polished, and so maybe to the uninitiated they won't be that clear right away, but there are some where, maybe because

of the means of production again, what happens in the cellar and the lack of preservatives added. Sometimes these things can smell and taste really wild. And so the way that I translate wild is you know, often people will smell them and be like, whoa kind of sour. People

will struggle for words to describe it. Other times it's like wow, really heavy, like, because the aromas can be explosive like that, Like the actual bouquet of wine can become the type of thing that I will often say like jumps out of the glass and you barely need to put your nose near the glass to smell it and sense it because it's aromatically so supercharged. So the range of experiences can be kind of different, but I

mean actually quite broad. But as a first principle, everyone should be prepared to smell and taste something that is unlike anything they understand as wine before. Right. That makes sense because in people reflecting back to you, these potentially unusual smells which are reflective of nature, you know, something sour,

something yeasty, something funky, something dank. These are all characteristics presumably that the winemakers themselves are trying to bring forth and and present right, So um, in the transparency that you're alluding to, part of what the offering is in the transparency is the expression of the wine without the manipulation of you know, some of these other chemical inputs or even winemaking inputs, so that people can you know, experience the full breadth of whatever the land has to say.

You know, one of the things that you have you have to know about kind of conventional winemaking or more industrial winemaking is that I alluded to it earlier. But many, many, many, many forms of additives are legal, both in the United States and in the EU and kind of all over the world, depending on you know, country to country. And some of those additives essentially have an origin that are from either animal material or protein material, like you know,

eggs and egg derivatives are really common. They're used as clarifying agents, you know, just the same way that like, if you're not specific in a restaurant, you may be surprised to find that there is, say, for example, gelatine used as a stabilizer or as a textural thing, and the gelatine is you know, animal derived as opposed to or or when you're thinking about cheese and say you're a vegetarian and you're you know, you find out that like, okay,

animal renn it. You know, it's the same thing with winemaking. And again like this is about signing a light on the way things are made. I mean, I know I see a lot of I see a lot of like media articles and so on that are click baity these days that are like, oh the death of the term natural and can we stop using this word? And can you know, I don't know. Wittgenstein said all of our problems come down to problems of language, right, and so it's just talking about whine at all is a challenge.

And I can tell you that from having to do it every day, you know, trying to find language that that approximates what two different people mean when they're attempting to relate sense experience with this, you know, aesthetic and agricultural object before them being smelled and tasted and consumed by them. Adding in the subjectivity of the human experience and the difficulty of you know, coming to agreed upon language. We have to do the best we can right to

understand each other. So if we're trying to describe an entire paradigm shift in how people attend to their vineyards, how they harvest their fruit, how they ferment that fruit, how they usher that fruit into a completed state, bottle it and send it off to people to be consumed. And it's very very different from industrial and you know, slightly more conventional methods. What then are we to say, right, that just took me like fifteen words to try to

describe to you all the steps in the process. We have to find some kind of signifier that enables us to continue having the conversation. I think the reason that people are all up in arms about it is that there's this you know, sort of ridiculous thing where people are like, well, you know what, what wine is unnatural?

And it's just like, well, now we're playing semantics, right, and we're not actually pointing at the root issues, which which are farming and the finished product, and like how much are we asking questions about where do things come from? What is the origin of my drink? And we're obsessive

about definition and we're obsessive about that. To me is there is the bigger picture question and the rest of it is sort of I don't know, squabbling over the crumbs, you know, you know, categorizing instead of being interested in disc active and qualitative understandings of things. Right, this is

us getting caught up in, you know, in labeling. And I would love to recenter questions about means of production back on everybody's mind and on everybody's lips, because they are really serious questions attended about like health, beauty, and yeah, justice too, not to mention economics and power. You know. So I'm totally fine with the term if it gets me talking about those things that people you know, cluche,

I know, I love. I'm starting to develop a newfound affinity for this phrase natural wine for all the reasons in which it has been a conundrum in trying to explain or describe. I think that's kind of the magic of the term, especially if we were to extrapolate, you know, this like democratic analogy, and I think one of the stifling elements could be trying to appease so many different factions. Yes, and I totally I think that we actually could see

a lot of how that can go wrong. Organic as a label in which the certification to get the label is inherently excluding people who otherwise tons of farmers, tons of farmers practices, right, so in a way, you know, organic is able to be co opt and in a weird way, a less effective or less exhaustive, you know, words to describe who is actually acting in the most environmentally progressive or responsible way with natural wine, and saying that we have a roughly agreed upon term that is

about nothing added and nothing taken away. You keep alluding to it as a signifier, which I think is actually a lot more closely aligned with the way that human beings are able to understand social cues and able to understand, you know, big ideas that we understand perfectly well are not absolute. Human beings are intellectually mature for the most part enough to understand that nothing is purely absolute, or

a few things are. And so when we talk about things as less absolute than say organic, it actually opens up a space for us to to go deeper because it doesn't leave people out. It's less exclusive because it can't be co opted, because there's no formal language for it's just a signifier. This okay, So this is exactly

why I actually I kind of love the term. I love it because some people will be like, well, it's a slippery slope, and you know, big businesses can co opt this idea of natural and and you see it now.

You see like big grocery stores abroad and elsewhere trying to like make their weird natural wine and they're just you know, they're you know, there's a there's like co opting as always every subculture, every subculture tries to get co opted or like is you know, there's an attempt toward that kind of at any point, right, But I

kind of love that it is slippery. It's that's literally all that's happening here, as opposed to understanding practice, you know, and as opposed to getting a deeply narrative and a deeply qualitative and an experiential understanding of things which require time and effort and dialogue and study. You know, all of that stuff is hard, and everyone wants to just be able to be like, well, this bogus because you know, the terminology doesn't make any sense and who knows what

they're talking about at all. Like that's that's such a quick way to be intellectually superior because you feel as though the definitions are not clear enough. I love that this pushes back against that a little bit. You know, it's really more like are you trying to be correct or you trying to be understood? Absolutely? Absolutely, and do you just want to be the smartest guy in the room. Because wine is a really sensitive place for that button

to get pushed as well. You know, given that wine has been traditionally and especially it's especially bad in the States, associated with having some level of kind of sophistication, and therefore it is elitist because of those associations. People really want to define wine in this way that makes them feel like they have mastery of it and they have knowledge of it, and that's that's the social capital they're looking for. But like wine eludes these things, the practice

of fermentation eludes these things. Wine when it is living and when it hasn't been stultified by industrial process, it is it's alive in the bottle, it's alive in the barrel, it's alive in the tank, and it changes. It's a moving target, right whether you whether you're in your first fifteen minutes of a bottle or your two hours in. If that wine is sound, you're going to be experiencing something different kind of at every moment. So what does it taste like? I'm like, I don't know. Mark fifteen

minutes or like mark three hours. You know, I wanted to taste like yesterday? What's it tastes like today? Same object? Right? But time and change and feeling have altered the experience of the thing that's experiential understanding versus definition, right and categorizing. And I don't know, maybe that's why I fell in

love with wine, because it is elusive in that way. Okay, so now that we've engaged in some wine philosophy, let's talk about the thing that's probably more important than any other, which is how to drink. So when you're tasting wine, the first thing you'll want to do is look at the wine. No really, I mean like, look at the wine. See what it looks like. Is it shiny and golden around the rim? Is it pale and brickish? And the center core transparent or opaque? Not that what you see

is always what you get with wine. But what looking at it does is it forces you to pay attention. And since wine is a multisensory indulgence, paying attention will be your greatest resource for enjoyment. The next thing to do is to smell. And when I'm smelling wine, I have this two steps approach. First, I take a whiff, not a huge one, just like a grazing one. And this is a habit I developed from my sunnier days, where I would smell hundreds of wines each night, primarily

just to make sure that they were okay. If it's not okay, what's most often the case is that it smells a little bit like wet, moldy cork. If detected, it is this pungent and unpleasant smell. When you go to a restaurant and you order wine. Have you ever noticed how they first give you like a little teeny taste. Well, this is your window to detect a flaw. If you're unsure, don't be afraid ask if there's someone there to validate

your suspicions. Almost always, even if it's on the edge, the house will do the right thing and get you sorted with a new glass. Okay. So then after that initial grazing with I pick up my glass and I give it a big swirl. You know what I'm talking about? The thing where people who seem like they know a thing or two about wine are always doing well, what they're actually doing is bringing oxygen into the glass. And it's this invitation of oxygen that really allows us to

smell the true character of the wine. After you give it a whirl, give it a world. But a sort of disclaimer is that when I taste, I am ashamed to say that I do the thing where I make the slurping noise. I mean, I'm not obnoxious about it. I take a small sip and with the tip of my tongue on the roof of my mouth, I bring in the air sort of like an inverted whistle. The wine moves along my mouth, along my palate, and then right before swallowing, I give a good swish, kind of

but not exactly like a mouth wash. The part that comes next is my favorite part. It might last a second or several minutes, but it's the finish or the contemplate of moment, just after the wine goes down and the brain begins to make sense of what it just had and how all the parts fit or don't fit together.

But of course, you could also just like you know, drink the wine, pay attention to what you like or dislike, try to find the language from a dialogue with the bartender or the internet to synthesize whatever you just tasted. This level of engagement will help me better enjoy wine, because, after all, and drinking wine, enjoyment is always the desired ye.

So if you've made it this far, then it is without a doubt clear that wine is really special to me, and this two part series is really special to me. So thank you for listening. I hope you've gained a deeper understanding and appreciation of natural wine and understand why it's been at the center of a discussion in the larger cultural conversation about the things we eat and drink,

how they're made, and where they come from. I hope that if you have the opportunity to try natural wine, that you do so, and you can check out our website if you'd like to see some of our favorite wines from many diverse winemakers who we would love for you to support and are sure that you will enjoy it.

Thank you, Amanda Smelts, wine director at Estella and Vino Parody So in New York And to write out, we'll play another clip from Wild Grapes, a short film I shot with my dear friend and brother who was also a partner at Whetstone, David Alexander, from our two thousand eighteen release of Wild Grapes. What I came to understand is that this day was not a day of remembrance, rather a revival of spirit. Wine is central to Georgian culture, and once again I'm taken by the earnestness with which

it permeates daily life without pretension. This ceremonial but informal inclusion affirms my own mission to demystify one, to shed it of its formality, and in doing so share the gift of a new tongue, a language that, once learned, deepens our capacity for pleasure and connects us to a collective human history. Special Thanks to my business partner who makes all things possible at Whetstone are co founder Melissa she Thanks mel. Thank you to Selene Glazier, who is

our lead producer. To Cat Hong, our editor, to habn Obasa Lassa and Quentin lebou Are production interns. To our friends at iHeart Radio for helping us bring you this podcast. To Gabrielle Collins are supervising producer, engineer J. J. Pauseway and executive producer Christopher Hasiotis. I'm your host, the origin Forager, Stephen Saderfield, and we will be back here next week with more from Whetstone Magazine's Point of Origin podcast.