Katherine Clary - Wine, Unfiltered: Buying, Drinking, and Sharing Natural Wine

DO YOU REMEMBER YOUR FIRST EXPERIENCE drinking wine? Perhaps it was a sip of some inky, unknown red that your dad poured at the dinner table when you were youngan initiation into the secret world of adults. Or maybe it was from a plastic cup full of some box wine at a house party where jungle juice was present in equal measure. Maybe you dont even remember the experience but you remember the way you felt the next day. A bad wine hangover can be the stuff of legend.

I dont remember the first time I drank wine. I would guess that it happened sometime in my late teens, but the experience was entirely unmemorableas was nearly all the wine I drank in the years that followed. Red was a flavor, as was white, and that was where it ended. I knew there was more to wine, but the world of it allthe regions and varieties, the language and ritualsdidnt ever seem like one I belonged in. Wine snobs, Id think to myself and shudder, taking a sip of my shitty, chemical-laden glass of Pinot Grigio (or whatever had been put in front of me).

Sometime in my twenties I started to have what I suppose you could call wine preferences, and these preferences were repeated ad nauseum at restaurants and bars all over New York City. At some neighborhood Italian restaurant where Im sure the server had heard my refrain a million times before: Is it dry? I like dry red wine. At a nondescript bar where beer was really the thing to drink: Is it dry? I like dry white wine. By this point, I really enjoyed wine! Yet this was all I could say about itand perhaps thats because there wasnt much to say about the wine I was drinking. Admittedly, I was also scared of saying the wrong thing. Dry wine was easy to remember, always available, and typically led me to some wines that didnt taste like the strawberry wine coolers Id first tried as a teen in Arizona.

There is no shame in just drinking what you like or not even knowing what you like. Its totally fine to not get wine or prefer to not pursue it rapturouslythough I hope Im not wrong to assume that if youre reading this book, youre at least a little bit interested. Dry was the extent of my knowledge about wine, and I was fine with that. Because I had never worked in the restaurant industry, there wasnt a pressing reason for me to expand my wine knowledge. But I realize now I was only fine with my lack of understanding because wine kind of bored me. It all seemed to taste the same: Pinot Grigio was kind of light and lemony. Sauvignon Blanc was acidic and had what I had learned was called minerality. Pinot Noir was juicier than Cabernet Sauvignon, but hell if I knew what any of it really tasted like, or where it came from. Nothing ever pulled me in enough to explore it further. I was perplexed at people who were truly obsessed with wine. What the hell were they drinking that was so exciting?

But of course, there was an entire universe of wine out there beyond those dull, commercial wine robots I was drinking: wines so flavorful and fascinating and unique it was as if they werent wine at all. They were there the whole time (and of course, preceded me), just waiting for my curiosity to pique. A wine that tastes like apricots and chamomile, perfect for hanging out in the grass with your friends on a sunny day (yes, theres something other than ros for that). A wine that smells like smoked plums and seems to change flavors with every sip, perfect for writing that letter youve been meaning to write. A prickly, sparkling wine the color of onion peels to drink while stirring a pot, eager to impress a friend or two. Pizza wines. Wines that evoke emotion, a place in the world, life itself. They were patient as I galloped on drinking mediocre conventional wines. They were patient as I woke up the morning after drinking said wines with pounding headaches and a sensitive stomach, wondering what I had put in my body the night before.

Isnt wine just fermented grapes? Id think to myself. Well not exactly. Unfortunately most wine hasnt been just grapes for a very long time. And how was I to know that? Unlike food packaging, wine bottles arent required to list the myriad of additional ingredients that go into wine. (Well get into some of that in Theyre the things you might avoid in your vegetables, juice, or cheese so why are we not avoiding them in our wine? Moreover, how did that shit end up in wine?

Im not interested in dropping scary-sounding words just for the sake of it. A lot of the chemicals and additives that end up in conventional wine have been tested extensively and some people say you have to consume buckets full to have serious side effects. Still, if its not absolutely necessary for these additives to be in my wine, why mess with them at all? In my experience, wines without any of those chemicals actually taste betterin a great, honest wine there is usually nothing that needs to be enhanced.

This book is about figuring out how to get back to the grapes. Because there are wines out there that are essentially just grapesyou simply have to know how and where to look. And when I say just grapes, I mean that these wines lack the additives, synthetic chemicals, fertilizers, and flavoring agents that have become so common in modern wine. Theyre the wines that finally made me feel like paying wine forever.