Of course, this makes sense in our progress toward better food. Natural wine is as inevitable as getting back to real coffee — ground fresh sourced deep and bought fairly. But wine making takes longer.
Today decades after the coffee houses of the 60s where Italian espresso machines came back to America, I can drop into Dérive, a natural wine experience, in Santa Fe, New Mexico and find orange – left the skins on Savignon Blanc- and skins off whites mixed with Zinfandel to make a rosé as funky as punch. But not sweet. Yes. Skunky smell I like – whoa hold onto my tastevin.
I have to shake myself to get back the ability to a smell, to forget the last wine to concentrate on the next. I love wine tastings and missed them during the pandemic.
A wine maker from Mendocino County makes a Sauvignon Blanc and Chardonnay. I am a critical eater, a qualitarian, and I feel this next one – the Mendocino – goes with summer in the hot town of Pojoaque. (Home to thiswine store) but it’s fresh enough for a barbecue – just right for BBQ of the fish variety.
Fresh – that word is going around. I’m new, also said a taster next to me. I prompt her to say something like: I like Sauvignon Blanc. ‘I’m a Chard girl, but I like it,’ she said as we learned this one is made naturally. None of the California shard with that taste my tongue want to wipe off the front of my pallet. The charm that feels unnatural – a scharm.
We’ve just come from a trio of three wines from Sonoma with a more traditional taste of Chardonnay but also without the scharm – fine enough, but in the hype scene, so ordinary. Their trio was straw-colored, or orange because the skins were left on the grape longer. If these were the only ‘natural’ ones I was tasting, I would have sussed out the differences, but this – Dérive – is a free-for-all.
I’d already been through the skin-on experience, at the first table with a Grillo from Sicily that had that skanky Smell-I-love over a taste that’s clean, light and crisp. Now, with the Sonoma wine, I guess I’m liking body. With this wine body I feel of this earth when I smell and I am happy to be human so I taste it as ‘delicious water’ – no sugar no bubbles no sand but the hint of all those. As my nose leaves the glass the smell grounds me. I can imagine Chanterelle mushrooms. Or, a desired cheese, Mexican food, enchiladas with blue corn tortillas and a Chimayo red sauce – with the Semillon from Sonoma I now have in my bag.
On to the unfiltered hyper-blending, making-moonshine guy’s wine.(pictured) I asked him to say all the grapes in the wine twice just to hear the list of 10 including Malvasia, the sound as exotic as I taste. I’m thinking maybe dessert. The second was called Rosa but so complex: cloudy Rose so you could know you’re drinking not the stuff that goes down like Kool-Aid.
The third, a red with Cab Sav so forward it slid me to the table of the more traditional guy from New York bringing natural wines from France and Italy. From the Cab Franc, not hardy like the Southwest, to the Cahors with Malbec – these wines each had a place at my table, but not in my budget.
We bought the funky stuff, we dérived, we drifted through glasses smells tastes bottles and deviated. Just as the French Situationists of the late 60s commanded. Take a second look, a dérive, a drift through life taste smell, and maybe deviate from what one thought one ought to do.