This is going to be fun!
On Monday November 7th, I will be moderating a panel at the first New York Raw Wine Fair on how we think about naturalness in fermented products besides wine.
And how those products are positioned in a marketplace that has adopted natural wine as a standard that consumers have come to understand.
I’m honestly psyched about moderating this panel.
First is the people.
The quality and passion of these four crazy fermenters is off the charts.
Within the categories of Vermouth, Mead and Cider, they are the natural rockstars. The innovators and iconoclastic change agents for their disciplines.
Their stories, in a few cases, are being told to the New York wine community for the first time at this panel.
This is not only about fermented drinks, it is about a perfect wave of cultural change in our world.
The natural wine revolution over the last decade has been a mirror into a much larger, inclusive and global cultural change.
There has been a perfect storm brewing where a growing and influential segment of the population is thinking about what we eat, drink and how it is made. They are taking responsibility for not only the health of the planet but of their own health and wellness as well.
And embracing diversity not simply in the details of a biodiverse agricultural approach, but in our view of a more diverse culture, wired together by communities across the web.
I have called this the Ethos of Taste.
On this panel, we will see how these ideas come together for these individual fermenters.
How their products which are made so differently from wine, are indeed ‘natural’ and how that plays into the broader marketplace.
The four fermenters are:
Raphael Lyon from Enlightenment Wines (Mead, New York)
Géraud Bonnet from Ferme Apicole Desrochers D (Mead, Canada)
Jonny Piana from Fable Farm Fermentory (Cider, Vermont)
Bianca Miraglia from Uncouth Vermouth (Vermouth, Brooklyn)
If you care to offer me some advice.
I am in the process of creating questions for the panel and thinking through the format as we have only an hour for the session.
If you have ideas, share them.
If you have strong opinions on a structure that would work, I’m ready to listen.
A shout out of Thanks! to my good friend Isabelle Legeron.
Isabelle is the vision and passion behind the Raw fairs, held throughout Europe.
She is also a powerful and authentic voice for natural wine, for biodiverse agriculture, for the ethos of what we believe in and how it redefines scales of taste in wine and food.
Big thanks for letting me be part of this Isabelle!
So–come to the fair, to the tastings, to the sessions and the parties!
It’s going to be a full-blown bacchanalia like only the natural wine community in New York can put on!
Trust me on this, as there many winemakers in town and they will be pouring not only at the fair, but at wine bars and restaurants across in the city. This community seriously knows how to celebrate.
The Raw Wine Fair runs Sunday and Monday the 6th and 7th of November in Brooklyn. Details here.
See you there!
