Find Wine That Doesn't Suck
I’ve spent my career selling all wine: bulk wine, boxed wine, canned wine, fine wine, natural wine – you name it, and I’ve sold it. Most of it sucks. But I’ve always found something simply electrifying in natural wine. I can smell and taste the energy, the life.
Creativity in the wine world is rooted in natural wine. They’re the rebels. The free spirits. The artists.
What is natural wine? I like to point people to Raw Wine’s definition, run by Master of Wine Isabelle Legeron:
“Wine that is farmed organically (biodynamically, using permaculture or the like) and made (or rather transformed) without adding or removing anything in the cellar. No additives or processing aids are used, and ‘intervention’ in the naturally occurring fermentation process is kept to a minimum. As such neither fining nor (tight) filtration are used.”
In other words, they can be as flawed as the people behind them because they don’t hide their quirks.
When made well, they aren’t complicated to understand and enjoy. When made poorly, they display a funky hard-to-understand-why-anyone-would-drink-this persona. I prefer the former, and bringing those wines into the USA from off-the-beaten-path origins is my business.
My search for natural wine recently took me to South America, where a burgeoning natural wine scene is taking shape in Brazil, of all places. Before that, I made a quick stop in Uruguay, an oft-forgotten wine destination not particularly well known for natural wine.
Proyecto Nakkal is changing that. It’s the only dedicated natural wine producer in the entire country. I’d read a lot of great things about them in Descorchados and wanted to get to know the wines more intimately.
I arrived at an old, brick barn-turned-winery with a freshly painted jet-black garage door and bold white lettering of the bodega. Modern juxtaposed with classic, much like the wines I was about to taste.
The winery was simple. All concrete with a few plastic fermentation bins. Dusty. No windows. One lone amphora to experiment with. It’s all they needed. Everything else, the land gave them. It was quiet, still enough for time to freeze.
We ventured outside to a picnic table near one solitary tree with horses grazing nearby. No vineyards in sight despite being in the middle of Uruguay’s historic wine region, Canelones.
There, I understood I was discovering something special.
We tasted all nine of their wines. Freshness is paramount to their identity, as is simplicity. Everything had a zestiness to it, a signature aura of ease.
Their pet nats were thought-provoking, especially the 100% Tannat rosé - the only bottle-fermented sparkling Tannat in the world. It reminded me of a much more expensive bottle of Champagne Rosé. A peculiar display for a grape that tends to produce some of the world’s most rustic, tannic wines.
What blew me away was that they used skin-contact white wine (orange wine) as a blending component for their white and red wines. Imagine eating unseasoned food your whole life and then encountering salt for the first time. This technique had a similar effect on their entry-level blends. The layers of exotic fruit and spicy aromatics were something I’d never encountered in a $15 bottle.
Natural winemakers generally share this love of creativity, experimentation, and discovering something new. I share that with them.
If you also share the joy in creativity, experimentation, and discovery, find a new favorite wine shop specializing in natural wine, talk to the people running it, and tell them you want to drink something creative. Sit back, and savor it. You’ve just discovered the best wines you’ve never heard of.