How I Came to Live in a Barn: part 2

Welcome to Friday and another edition of "How I Came to Live in a Barn," the series that strives to connect drinking to farming as relevantly as humanly possible.

As a quick preface to this series, from April to December of 2010 I lived in a barn. No electricity, running water, twitter or bagels. 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 drop everything and go farming. Once we catch up to the present, I'll use the occasion to explain what I'm up to now––beyond the blaug. Is this preface going to appear at the beginning of the entire series? Almost definitely. Ready? Wunderbar.

Part 2: Natural Wines

In last week's post I gave a shout-out to September Wines, the shop I helped manage for nearly 4 years. Their selection is made up of small-production, organic, biodynamic, and sustainably produced wines and it's where I was introduced to the subject of this week's posting: natural wines. Isn't all wine natural? Well, the most concise answer is... sorta. A lot can be done to remove wine from its natural state. In the same way that root beer was originally made from the fermented roots of Sassafras; the vast majority of wine these days is made more like Barq's than actual root beer. Make root beer someday, it's a very different monster, with health and medicinal qualities I doubt A&W strives to exploit. 

So defining natural wine is simply defining wine itself. Wine, in its essence, is fermented grape juice. It's the combination of grape sugars being consumed by yeast, the byproduct of which is alcoholic fermentation. Under the right circumstances, this results in the fermented beverage we call wine. Famed fermentation enthusiast Sandor Katz once said that fermentation is simply choosing what we want to happen to something. All living things will either rot or ferment––from our perspective, become either compost or preserved nutrients––we're just choosing their destiny. Natural wines are as close to that natural process as possible, without excessive filtration, use of industrial yeasts, sulfides or chemicals. This applies to both growing and vinification. Back then however, I had no idea what natural wines were, or why they tasted better than other wines, I just appreciated that they did.

I had booked a trip to France for the upcoming fall and a friend at Domaine Select had suggested I visit their new champagne producer. He was biodynamic, "right up my alley," he said, and made the appointment.

No wines taste quite like natural wines, and I was rendered endlessly curious because of it. When the opportunity arose to visit one of these biodynamic producers, I leapt at it, hoping to get to the bottom of what made these wines tick. That autumn I met a dude who offered me a more tangible understanding of biodynamics, and a better understanding of how sensitive of an agricultural product wine is. Unexpectedly, like my first experiences with natural wine, this compounded my curiosity infinitely. Next week, we'll tell the story of Bertrand Gautherot's many effects on my world, and how he helped perpetuate my growing love-affair with natural wines; a love-affair that started innocently enough, until one day I found myself living in a barn, more sober than I'd ever been. Ironically, all thanks to wine.

Happy Friday!