How I Came to Live in a Barn: part 1

Friends! You've made it to Friday! Congratulations and welcome to the first installment of "How I Came to Live in a Barn."

As a quick preface to this series, from April to December of 2010 I lived in a barn. During that time I worked on a legitimately (though proudly uncertified) organic farm in Southern Kentucky. This series is about the many whims, fascinations and revelations that eventually inspired me to move from the grime of New York City to the dirt of Bugtussle, Kentucky, each piece of the story utterly invaluable to the next. Once we catch up to the present, I'll use the occasion to explain what I'm up to now, by that I mean, beyond the blaug of course. Shall we begin? Wunderbar.

Part 1. September Wines

September is a petite boutique wine shop in Manhattan's Lower East Side, specializing in small-production, organic, biodynamic and sustainably-produced wines. It gets its name from the harvest month of the Northern Hemisphere, and the fact that September is a pretty excellent month in general. The shop rests in a corner spot, its windows towering over the thoroughfare of Ludlow and Stanton with its facade illuminated by a brilliant set of interior light fixtures, ones of which I must have been asked about ten dozen times during my 4 year run as assistant manager there. Minimum.

I spent a healthy percentage of my 20's in that shop either tasting, talking about, or selling wine with all my might. My appreciation for the stuff grew exponentially in that time. What I liked about September was that the wines we brought in were a group effort. We tried to bring in wines upon which we all agreed. September is a store with neighborhood sensibilities whose selection has always been based on quality, not branding. The results of this method were that there ended-up being very few big-name brands in the store, but rather a constantly revolving selection of lesser-known gems that consistently happen to beat the brands in every category from taste to value.

Certain patterns emerged not only in the wines we carried, but in the wines I enjoyed personally. My preferences became increasingly centered around a specific style of wines that were unpolished and unashamed of it. Wine had never wowed me like these wines wowed me, and I realized that most of the wines I was falling for were unfiltered, organic, biodynamic or something like it. It was a trend I couldn't ignore if I were going to get my hands on more of them. Wines like the Hilberg Vareij, or Emile Heredia's "G" gamay for example, exemplified this and everything I liked about wine, and I drank a lot of bottles of them in appreciation. There was something alive about them––healthy even. Sometimes they seemed almost effervescent––other times they actually were. I wasn't particularly organically-minded at the time, but the quality of the experience was thoroughly undeniable, and helped make a valid case for why I should be.

The style of wine I'm talking about, we call "natural wine" for lack of a more appropriate term. Natural is a vague and untrustworthy label in reference to food, but it's remarkably specific in reference to wine; you can't fake a natural wine, they taste like nothing else in the world. If and when Yellow Tail decides to produce a "natural" wine (!!!), it will still taste like Yellow Tail, and that's how you'll know it's not natural.

We carried a number of natural wines at the shop, and more so as we all became increasingly enraptured with their genius. Truthfully, I liked wine before September, and before these, but I never obsessed over it. Natural wines consumed me and in next Friday's post, I'll explain how they changed my world, for this week however, I wanted to salute the place that introduced me to them: here's to September Wines - where oh where would I be without you? Parish the thought.

Cheers.

PHOTO BY TYLER MAGYAR