Summer Wine

Big Natural Wine Energy. Vice's Gregory Babcock wrote All About Tinto Amorio, the Natural Wine Brand Taking Over TikTok, and his prediction that "it’s gonna be a BIG NATURAL WINE SUMMER." During lockdown, Babcock learned about wine by taking courses, researching wine regions, and looked to understand the difference between “conventional” and “natural” wines, recognizing that the latter is a broad term:

Admittedly, the term is a fairly broad one; while there’s no hard-and-fast definition, the general understanding is that natural wine is wine made with as little intervention as possible, eschewing external additives or chemicals to create wines that celebrate the unique—often unpredictable—process and properties of wine.

Babcock’s wine of the summer is Tinto Amorio, which he first learned about via Refinery29 and TikTok. It is a minority-owned, family-run winery, started by Anish Patel, a former investment banker-turned-natural-winemaker, with proceeds of sales supporting local food banks. Tinto was started with a “desire to make the best natural wines from California, and to bring more transparency, sustainability and less pretentiousness to the wine industry.” Their website goes on to explain that they “don't promote drinking culture but rather mindful enjoyment.”

Brooklyn Wine Bound. In the Financial Times' Pure joy: the best of Brooklyn’s cool natural wine scene, Sarah Andersen writes about the emergence of BKLYN as a prime location for natural wine bars and restaurants. Andersen shares her top picks across the borough which include Williamsburg’s The Four Horsemen, which was co-founded by LCD Soundsystem’s James Murphy, and Sauced; LaLou in Prospect Heights and Oxalis, next to the Brooklyn Botanical Garden; Nura, an auto-body-shop-turned-restaurant in Greenpoint, with an intentionally small wine list that focuses on unique and indigenous grape varietals, and their sister restaurant Otis in Bushwick; and Fort Greene’s Rhodora, which is zero waste and carbon netural, and its sister restaurant June in Cobble Hill.

Modern Wine Culture. Punch's This is Wine Right Now explains how wine is in flux, guided by social media, natural wine pop culture, and a new generation of drinkers. The article looks at what is shaping This New Wine Moment™️ highlighting some of the producers — such as Christian Binner, Roberto Henríquez, Wild Arc Farm, and Cirelli, to name a few — and trends: natural wine is now a nightlife complete with playlists, pét-nat club kids, and wine jockeys (hello San Francisco’s Bar Part Time and L.A.’s El Prado); swapping formal stemware for anything else; the new language of wine and changing ways to express how a wine tastes/feels (see: crunchy, glou-glou, funky, and crushable); and the evolving definition of wine with the onset of hybrid grapes, co-ferments, and herbal infusions.

The Summer of Breton Cider. In Esquire's Why Breton Cider Will Be the Drink of the Summer, Charlie Teasdale writes about the growing momentum for cider. Breton cider is made in Brittany in northern France from unsweetened apples of the region, which has more than 600 varieties, and Teasdale writes that it has been mostly overlooked. Until now. Natural wine bar Top Cuvée in London has always featured cider, Kerisac to be specific, and thinks Breton cider will help “spearhead the burgeoning cider revolution”:

Partly for the fact that it’s delicious, but still complex, and it’s lower in alcohol than wine, which appeals to our new sense of measured sobriety. And partly because a strong, buoyant natural-booze market has been well-established, and cider can placate people looking for the next big thing.

The first time I had a cider that made me realize that cider doesn’t have to be cloyingly sweet and overly fizzy was when I had Coat-Albret (imported in Ontario by Le Caviste Importers), a natural and upasteurized Breton cider that smelled sort of like cheese and was rich and flavourful. In Breizh Cafe in Paris it is served in an adorable ceramic bowl, as is the time honoured tradition, and pairs well with a galette, a savoury buckwheat crepe.