travel & verification

as most of you know, i recently traveled to France for the wine fairs. It’s the off-season for the winemakers and is a great opportunity to reconnect, taste the coming vintages and meet new winemakers. Of course, most of the Salons or wine fairs have not taken place during the pandamic so this year was quite special and soooo fun!

So the first 4-5 are Montpellier and then the next set of 5-6 are in Angers & Saumur. The most famous is called La Dive but there are now a lot of them - like A LOT!!! So while it’s super fun to talk about traveling to France to taste wine (and for the record, it is really fun to travel to France to taste wine), it is also exhausting as F!! I’m not complaining - just saying it isn’t all cake & ice cream or croissant and pain au chocolat - LOL.

anyway, one of the most important parts of these trips is also verification. There have been a number of times that I visit a winery or chat with the winemaker/ grape grower and discover that the wine is not actually natural. Or maybe they are converting but aren’t quite there yet. This trip I found several producers who used to be natural have started spraying due to the weather conditions or are using more sulfur than is acceptable to me or using lab-created yeast or….. you get the point!

point is - verification is super important! if you just believe what you read online or believe the person who is trying to sell you the wine - you may inadvertently buy or sell wine that is not natural. I’ve been a quite a number of restaurants/ bars/ shops who claim to be selling only natural wine and seen not-natural wine on the shelf or on the list. and it’s not their fault so i’m not laying any blame here - i think most of the time, they simply don’t know!

and tbh, our definitely of natural wine at the shop is probably more rigorous than some; however, as a cancer survivor and with some of you (my community!) being highly allergic to a lot of those additives, I take this verification and selection process very seriously!