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| Half-goat, half-boy, tonight we have a towering figure of the natural wine world, Byron Bates, in the shop to pour us a selection of French natural wines from his import portfolio. Byron is, at first glance, a fellow well met: you might want to decode him as a dissipated frat boy, and at 6 ft 4 in, replete with a faded polo shirt, untucked, demonic laugh, crushing bro handshake, and a nearly-deafening voice incessantly exclaiming, “my man!” you understandably do want to decode him that way, but you’d be dead wrong to do so. Behind that mien of free-flowing jollity, of “let me top that glass of wine up,” of, “are you going to finish those fries?” lies a wine mind like a steel trap. After years of working the floor in various early natural wine adopting restos in Manhattan, Byron set off on a small, fragile boat to France to see what he could bring back to the New World, and we have come to depend on him to bring us discoveries such as the wines of Brendan Tracey. Tonight, Byron is in the shop tonight with five wines from his book, three from the Loire, as that is the center of his wine universe, and an essential geographical location for us, too, plus two wines from elsewhere in France.
Manoir de la Tête Rouge “Tête en l’Air” Crémant de Loire 2015 |