Lou Wine Shop

Many years ago, I knowingly announced to my Korean American friend Laura that I adored banchan, and of course preferred the stinkiest, well-aged kimchi, a wretched attempt at gaining credibility in her eyes. She responded, “that’s not how we like to eat it.” I was confused: isn’t kimchi supposed to be over the top and downright funky, located somewhere between a boiled shoe and the seashore? Over time as I ate more Korean food and then even more, I realized that I just hadn’t yet eaten sufficient kimchi to properly know it. One person’s funk is another person’s home. What once came off as funky to me no longer seemed so—it was just what I wanted to eat (and today, over-aged kimchi in my house ends up not as a condiment but in kimchi fried rice). My parents raised me on a diet of ptcha (NSFW), pickled herring, kishka, and the like, and I acknowledge that these foods may seem funky or even repulsive to those who are not initiates. When I ask customers what they mean when they ask for a funky wine (and I’m not being disingenuous, I genuinely want to know), I typically get the response, “…something…kombucha-like?” As a kombucha aficionado that that strikes me as not right—good, sound kombucha doesn’t taste funky at all, at least to me.

Read pretty much any published primer on natural wine and the most common word that folks use to describe it is the adjective “funky.” Now, the discourse surrounding wine funk is often enervating and sometimes it just feels like the ascription of funk is that it is any wine that is remotely heterodox. For some, a funky wine is anything that fails to resemble the over-oaked, over-ripe, over-familiar cabernet or chardonnays that only the normies drink. If you’ve only ever tasted ultra-ripe, plushily oaked chardonnay that are the vinous equivalents of an overstuffed loveseat, your first taste of a lean, zero-oak, cool-vintage Chablis, made from the same grape may seem downright funky if only because it does not conform to your confirmation bias. For others, funk is a sign of the brettanomyces yeast beast, responsible for so-called barnyard aromas; for others, it’s the fart party of hydrogen sulfide compounds such as mercaptans, and yet for others, it’s the vroom-vroom volatile acidity produced by acetobacter. And then there’s the spectrum of the feral, gamy aromas of aged meat, likely a function of wild yeasts such as pichia or wild bacteria (I want to believe that feral aromas arise from biogenic amines such as the poetically named putrescene). To be sure, there is a distinction between the grassy manure bouquet of an ungulate herbivore such as a cow, and the baby diaper aroma of an omnivore, but I’m not sure that’s an important distinction to cleave to.

At the shop, we try to avoid messed up bottles that cross the line from wine to shoe polish. Such bottles are no longer wine, and messed up bottles strangle the messages that even the simplest natural wine might try to transmit to us if we could only decipher the signal through the noise. Some of the wines that pass muster are indeed off-kilter, but only because they’re made with archaic grape varieties (e.g., the pineau d’aunis we’re tasting tonight) that refuse to conform to any modern notions of how a wine should behave, or have a distinctive, sanguineous quality, but only when grown on iron rich soils (such as the Marcillac we’re tasting tonight). Some are odd, but hopefully only a first, because of artifactual dimensions of their elevage (we’re tasting a Santa Cruz chardonnay aged under a natural layer of wild yeasts that form in the barrel, called sous voile in the Jura region of France). And still others, such as the romorantin-based Cour-Cheverny we’re tasting, push the edge of the envelope with regards to sacred notions of balance in wine—this grape naturally wants to yield a prodigious amount of acidity, so much so that I recommend an antacid for the faint of stomach.