10/25/25 -

Our weekend newsletter this week highlights New and Natural wines with a spotlight on the Auvergne, an obscure and peculiarly hip region in central France! Feel free to click on the image above to go directly to the collection, and if you care to read a disquisition on the subject of natural wines, and a biography of one of our featured wineries, keep scrolling!

Last month I had enough time in my day to read the monthly version of "Droplets" from our friend Aaron Ayscough, author of the "Not Drinking Poison" substack. One of the "droplets" was a recap of a call to "Re-Politicize Natural Wine" by wine-writer Antonin Iommi-Amunategui. I will recap the recap below, but it resonated with me, as I feel there is a type of backlash happening, perhaps more accurately, a tendency to shy away from the idea of (or phrase) "natural wine." It seems people in New York, myself included to some degree, are making excuses for wines that we love to drink, steering customers to "safer" wines, or avoiding using the word "natural" in favor of "low-intervention" or some other, less divisive term. Here's the recap, in Aaron's words:
 
"Back in March, French events coordinator, wine writer, and publisher Antonin Iommi-Amunategui published a perceptive opinion piece on the state of natural wine in Libération. He correctly diagnoses a banalization of the subject of natural wine among consumers, alongside a concurrent drift towards embourgeoisement among many of the historical actors within the community, and speculates that these two phenomena contribute to a present market-wide slowdown in sales. The solution he proposes is to re-politicize natural wine, by which he means to recapture the initial energy of the scene and emphasize its fundamental difference with the rest of the wine world.
“To those for whom natural wine is not just any commercial product, and first and foremost to the natural winemakers and independent retailers concerned, who indeed struggle more than ever: open up, engage yourselves, federate yourselves, run the risk to displease individuals as much as collectively…” Iommi-Amunetegui writes. “And repoliticize the pinard. I reckon it will give it a second wind, which the field vitally needs.”
 
I'm currently reflecting on this subject while sipping on a Cinsault from Hannah Fuellenkemper (a young American/German winemaker based in Auvergne, France). The wine has excited my palate and delighted me with very digestible acidity and fresh, vibrant fruit, and I can't help but regret my timidity when it has come to recommending wines like hers, especially as I know her personally and have followed her story over many years. I opened it at cellar-temp (around 55 F), and the wine "held up" as some of us say, for well over 4 hours before starting to show very (and I mean very) subtle telltale signs that it was made without additives (namely SO2 addition). In a setting with one or more friends, this wine would be gone before anyone cared to notice what some would call a "flaw," but in the good-old days was actually a reassuring thing. I can say I would much rather drink an energetic wine with a "timer" on it that was made from grapes farmed without petrol-chemicals and sulfur additions than a wine with no energy or verve that tastes exactly the same 3 days after opening and was made from grapes covered in pesticides, herbicides and fungicides and dosed with 150mg/l of SO2. For the record, I prefer more than anything a wine that mostly fits the former description (and perhaps has a small dose of SO2) but is pure, elegant, balanced, and better on day two than day one. I am personally very comfortable with small sulfur additions and I don't think we need to proselytize about sulfur. As it's now close to 8pm and I haven't sent this newsletter out yet, I'll cut to the chase. Today's offer is all about New and Natural wines, some you know, some new to the States, all made with minimal or zero sulfur addition and all made from grapes farmed without pesticides or herbicides in the vineyard. Temps for shipping are better now than any other time in the year, so order away and we'll get the wines to you asap!

-Eben Lillie

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ABRACADABRA!

Quoting our friend, and friend of Hannah's, Michael Fadem: "For background, Hannah is a modern day renaissance woman, law student, turned agriculturalist, turned winemaker with a gift for prose. Based in Auvergne, Hannah is making all organic wines; some her own grapes, but primarily negoce with grapes from friends or friends-of-friends in the natural wine world. She started off working in restaurants and writing for food and online magazines, eventually hosting pop-up wine parties around Amsterdam. Then she decided to test out wine life by going to work harvest in the Loire with the Cousin's and Saint-Lo, which led her to make even more connections in the natural wine world, and find her way to build her own project. Each bottle she makes is a labor of love, all pressed and poured by hand. For more information, check out the thoughtful write up by her English distributor.

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