I have a bit of travel advice for you: When you’re in a new city, find a natural wine bar. They’re usually situated in cool, up-and-coming neighborhoods and staffed by interesting folks who can give you recommendations for their favorite shops, restaurants, and things to do. The right bartender or server can be the key to the city, offering advice that you probably won’t find on travel blogs.
While the world of wine can sometimes feel elitist and joyless, natural wine is anything but—and it tends to attract open-minded and creative people with a zest for life (and sometimes a slight penchant for anarchy).
In conventional large-scale winemaking, big-name wineries often use pesticides, herbicides, and machines to grow and harvest grapes at an industrial scale. During the fermentation process, they’ll use additives to get a predictable product: sulfur to keep the wine from going bad, carbon dioxide for fizz, and in some truly bizarre cases, fish, egg whites, oak flavoring, or even Mega Purple, a super-concentrated food coloring to make the wine look and taste right.
But natural wine, also called raw or naked wine, is the wild child of the wine world. It’s made with little or no intervention, letting the grapes and wild yeasts create wines that are bold, funky, and full of character. Natural wine usually comes from small-scale producers who prioritize biodynamic farming practices and eschew monoculture to create a product that highlights the nuances of terroir. It’s farm-to-table, not factory-made.
If you’re intimidated by the world of wine, natural wine is a great place to start. Children’s Atlas of Wine, run by James Sligh, offers tastings and classes that dive into specific genres within natural wine, mainly through the lens of geography. “Wine tasting is really two totally different sets of skills,” says Sligh. “Learning how to pay attention to what’s in your glass, and—this is the tricky part!—finding language to name what you’re paying attention to. Wine is just another language.”
In recent years, the natural wine movement has taken New York City by storm. You’d be hard-pressed to find a wine bar or small plates restaurant below 14th Street that doesn’t offer natural wines. But beyond wine bars, some of the best restaurants in the city are bucking tradition and pairing fine dining with wine that’s fun, irreverent, and playful. Here’s where to experience it for yourself.
