Natural Wine Memes and More!
Natural Wine at the LCBO! Store 511 at 49 Spadina Ave. (south of King St.) has natural wine again. They first had it (and lots of it) last December when they were permitted to order through the consignment program, bringing in wines normally only available through specialty importers. And now it’s back, not as much as before, but quite a few with wines from: Arianna Occhipinti, Domaine de l’Ecu, Agricola Tiberio, Ochota Barrels, and Jamsheed Harem, to name a few. The shelf talkers are highlighted to indicate “natural”, and the release date for them is from the year “1900”. And apparently the Product Consultants at that location are trying to make this a more regular occurrence 🙏.
Other Ways To Get Natural Wine. Low-intervention, biodynamic and natural wine importer The Living Vine is setting up shop. The Not A Wine Shop, Pop-Up Wine Shop will take place from October 17-22 at 96 Ossington Ave. It will feature a selection of wines that you can order, talk about with Sommeliers, taste for a fee, and even meet some of the winemakers that they work with. Also check out A Guide to Drinking and Buying Natural Wine in Toronto, which has already been updated thanks to some tips from readers 🙏.
Skin Contact Wine: Delicious or “A Wine to Suffer Through”? Last month the New Yorker had a piece on orange wine where the writer referred to it as “an especially dramatic example of aggressions against taste buds”. But then he said that his favourite one was Paleokerisio (a semi-dry skin-contact Greek wine that looks like a liquid sunset glow, and is sometimes available at the Danforth LCBO). Which was a bit confusing since he went on to basically dismiss an 8,000 year old way of making wine by continuing to say things like: “a full-bodied orange wine, with its uncompromising austerity, approaches an absolute limit: sensation without sensuality.” Poetic but harsh. The response to the article was as lively and enjoyable as orange wine is on my taste buds: Eric Asimov compared the piece to a mad Yelp review, NY magazine said the weird story reads like one long troll, and the Washington Post said the author’s critique was too narrow and focused on the “category’s most zealous adherents rather than the wine itself.” Anywho, I like orange wine (which is made by fermenting white wine on its skins), but like all wines, they are all different and can depend on the length of skin contact, grape varieties, winemaker, etc. “Maybe it’s not to everyone’s taste, but there are many moments of joy to be found for the people who do like it.”
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