Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:09):
Natural wine is a term that doesn't have a rigid
or standard definition. As we learned from our friends in
Port one of the series, natural wine, in its essence
is really just about a non intervening style of winemaking
that adds nothing to the fermenting grapes or in the
vineyard from which they originate. From this definition, the question
many of you have been wondering is what is added
(00:31):
to wine? Isn't it just grapes? Well, let's address that
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
(00:54):
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
(01:17):
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
(01:39):
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
(02:00):
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
(02:21):
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
(02:45):
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
(03:07):
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
(03:27):
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
(03:50):
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
(04:11):
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.
(04:37):
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
(04:59):
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
(05:19):
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
(05:40):
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
(06:01):
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
(06:26):
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
(06:46):
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.
(07:11):
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
(07:34):
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
(07:57):
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
(08:20):
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
(08:41):
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
(09:03):
that's deeply beloved by people. So if you follow wet
(09:23):
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
(09:46):
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
(10:09):
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
(10:32):
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
(10:53):
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
(11:15):
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,
(11:40):
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
(12:17):
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
(12:40):
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,
(13:03):
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
(13:25):
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
(13:49):
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
(14:09):
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
(14:33):
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
(14:56):
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
(15:16):
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
(15:40):
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
(16:00):
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
(16:21):
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,
(16:45):
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
(17:05):
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
(17:27):
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
(17:48):
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,
(18:17):
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
(18:39):
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
(19:00):
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
(19:21):
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
(19:44):
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
(20:07):
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
(20:30):
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
(20:53):
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
(21:15):
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,
(21:36):
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
(21:56):
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,
(22:17):
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.
(22:39):
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.
(23:02):
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
(23:25):
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,
(23:46):
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
(24:06):
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
(24:30):
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
(24:51):
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
(25:14):
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
(25:37):
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
(25:58):
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
(26:19):
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
(26:44):
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
(27:08):
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
(27:28):
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
(27:49):
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
(28:10):
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
(28:33):
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
(28:53):
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
(29:15):
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
(29:37):
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
(29:57):
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
(30:19):
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,
(30:41):
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.
(31:03):
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
(31:27):
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,
(31:47):
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
(32:07):
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,
(32:27):
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
(32:50):
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
(33:11):
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
(33:34):
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.
(33:59):
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,
(34:20):
after all, and drinking wine, enjoyment is always the desired ye.
(34:41):
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,
(35:03):
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.
(35:25):
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
(35:51):
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
(36:13):
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
(36:43):
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.
(37:04):
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.