As some of you may know, I’m into wine, even to the point of figuring out how I can start my own winery. And I’m continually inspired by winemakers stepping out into and shaping the world of natural winemaking. It just makes sense to let the fruit do the talking, ya know?
As far as my personal journey into winemaking goes, I completed my harvest apprenticeship at the City Winery in New York City in December. I learned about the basic stages of winemaking and launched a beautiful blog for the winery. The experience was priceless.
Since then, I sort of lost track of next steps. After all, I realized that starting a winery is time-consuming and expensive — the costs deadened me in my tracks.
But this week I’m picking back up where I left off. I ordered a number of books that will get me caught up on natural winemaking and even get me started towards making my first batch of wine this year:
- Wine Making the Natural Way
- The Joy of Home Wine Making
- Natural Winemaking at Home Using the Laissez-Faire Method
- Authentic Wine: Toward Natural and Sustainable Winemaking
- Naked Wine: Letting Grapes Do What Comes Naturally
Hopefully after reading up, I’ll be on my way to at least a few gallons of Swallow Winery wine — with or without a “winery” per se!
Along the way, I hope I internalize the history, criticisms and defining characteristics of “green” wines. For starters, and for those of you with not enough time to read five books on the topic, I ran across this infographic from Wine.com, which offers up some introductory thoughts on the space, defining natural, biodynamic, organic and sustainable wines. It’s a good start. Enjoy!
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Thank you Erica for this great infographic. It is a fascinating subject. Given that wine making is so finicky and wine seems to amplify the most minimal changes in weather, terroir, and handling, I wonder how green wine would compare with “old school” wine grown and processed under the same conditions.
Hey Manny! I’m totally with you. I think that “natural wine” (out of all four types mentioned in the infographic), would be the closest to “old school” wine, as you call it. 🙂 That’s because natural wines, as they are made with minimal intervention – you use the fruit as it is grown. I’d compare natural wines to lean startups or the concept of bootstrapping, because you create the best product you can with what you have, without adding any of the usual pieces of flair that actually hide problems. When you go lean, you have to be awesome, though, because otherwise the transparency is just so easy to see through. That’s why natural wines rock – they have to be good, because you can’t use any of the shortcuts of conventional winemaking.
I noticed you wish you could have a winery….one for sale in Roane County…VERY drinkable wines from there. Check out the post!
Thanks for the note, but I’m not quite to the stage of buying a winery. I’m starting out with home winemaking and then moving into potentially leasing a winery for the first few seasons… THEN, I’ll be open to buying a winery!