Chew on This…

In our on-going journey to reframe organic in the wine world, we’re going to play with the term, living wine.

Wine in general needs to open a while, and we’re talking more than an hour. Imagine wine that gets better for several days once opened, maybe 3, 4, or 5 days.

Okay, you get up in the morning, you stretch, breathe, get some water in you, a little coffee, step outside, breathe some more air, go for a walk… you’re waking up, and you start to find your mojo for the day.

If a wine is alive why wouldn’t it need it’s own version of that? If we expect a wine to taste great as soon as it’s opened, we might be missing the story of the nature of natural wine. Many wines do taste great upon first sip, then kind of lose it within that first day. That gets my curiosity juices going. Is the winemaking a little too involved in creating a flavor dynamic to immediately satisfy our tastebuds? What is natural wine? What is the nature of wine, and the idea of terroir expressing itself in a wine?

I like the question, is the wine living? To get a little Star Wars, does the wine have lifeforce? I was recently discussing this with Randall Grahm of Bonny Doon and we spoke about the winemaker minimizing distortion. That when a winery uses designer yeast, drip irrigation, harvesting super ripe grapes, using lots of new oak, and over cropping, one of the things that happens is you distort the terroir to signal factor. How can a winemaker create the clearest non-distorted signal possible? What we’re talking about here is keeping the lifeforce intact, and making wines that express sense of place.

I’m drawn to ask, can wines that are full of life do a better job of supporting life? I’m thinking ConsciousWine is about living wine, wine that’s full of life, lifeforce, and reframing organic in the wine world in a way that supports people, place & planet. Now that’s something to chew on!