Living Wines Week!

LIVING WINES WEEK! CELEBRATE & KEEP NATURAL WINE ALIVE! 
We cordially invite you to a full week of free tastings that illustrate what we do here at Thirst. It starts tomorrow, Saturday March 1st at 5pm, with a class in which we'll pour pure, energetic wines that taste of the places they come from. We've also invited similar-minded friends in the wine world to pour wines they represent (see schedule below). 

What are Living Wines? 
Come see and taste for yourself. They're wines made with care in the vineyard by individuals who farm organically and/or biodynamically and who naturally ferment their wines with nothing added or taken away except, perhaps, a homeopathic dose of sulfur. These are the opposite of mass-produced wines that are commonly made with potentially hundreds of different additives and chemicals and often engineered with lab yeasts. We want to demonstrate the difference. Our goal is to bring you wines that are alive and give pleasure. 

THE SCHEDULE
Saturday, 3/1, 5-7pm: Launch with Staff and A Thirst Merchant Selection or few
Sunday, 3/2 5-7pm: Byron Bates, Goatboy Selections
Monday, 3/3, 6-8pm: Kreso Petrekovic, Zev Rovine Selections
Tuesday, 3/4, 6-8pm: Maya Pedersen, Louis/Dressner Selections
Wednesday, 3/5, 6-8pm: Steven Plant, David Bowler Wine
Thursday, 3/6, 6-8pm: Chris Terrell, Terrell Wines
Friday, 3/7, 6-8pm: FINALE! (with a couple of surprises)

Tyler on why he likes working at our shop: 

We sell the type of wine I like to drink.

There is no shortage of descriptors for the bottles which line our shelves, each suggesting a unifying theme for a wild, nuanced world of wine. At the end of the day, what matters is that the glass we fill contains a living, honest liquid which was extracted from the ground with both consideration and trust. I don't know if there's truly a word for that. To be honest, I'm not sure there needs to be. 

The kinds of wine we sell - and, in turn, I drink - are the kinds of wine which interrupt a thought. They create a pause in conversation, they confront us, and we're forced to react. "How is this just grape juice?" We pour these wines, we take a sip, and then we look at the glass. "This is so freaking good." Of course, there's a lot more to it. Through our tastings this week, I hope that we can create a discussion about what exactly that is. We can talk about soil and sulfur and governmental regulations and fermentation and packaging and grapes and all of that. That stuff is really important. Until then, we can keep things simple. 

I'm proud to sell wine which aren't afraid to make a statement. There is an energy in these bottles, and I have yet to find the right word for it. For now, I'll settle with "ours."

You Can Change Your Life

Laurent Saillard co-founded ICI, which was one of the first Brooklyn restaurants to focus on natural wines and was part of the wave of restaurants that opened about a decade ago that were referred to as New Brooklyn Cuisine. We used to love going there and spending time with him. He was always eager to share new and interesting wines. He left Brooklyn a few years ago and moved to the Loire to learn how to make the natural wines he'd enjoyed drinking and selling. He began by focusing on working in the vineyard. 

Now Laurent has made his first wine, a very small amount of fresh unsulphured Gamay made using carbonic maceration. Because of our relationship, and because we are one of the few shops that support independent winemakers who make wine fermented naturally without the use of additives, Laurent wanted us to be among the first to taste it. When we did, we were really impressed by its pureness and clarity.

The grapes for La Pause 2012 come from a plot of Gamay planted in 1978 that Laurent rents from Catherine Roussel (Clos Roche Blanche). Noëlla Morantin rented it from 2008 to 2011 but Laurent took it over in November 2011. It's organic since 1991 and they have been doing some biodynamic preparations since 2008. 

Gamay gets a bad rap but it arguably yields the most generous, pleasure-giving wines. Many of you, we know, are fans of Beaujolais from the likes of Lapierre, Foillard, Breton, Thevenet, etc., as well as Gamays from the Loire and California. There may be no other grape that gives more and gets less love. Wines made from Gamay grown right, in the right soils and naturally fermented, yield wines that you can enjoy by themselves but that also belong on the table.

Take a break and enjoy Laurent's La Pause! Put it in your ice chest and bring it along for a picnic, to your barbecue or the beach, or just chill it and enjoy it on your stoop.

Laurent Saillard La Pause 2012 is $20/bottle. For a limited time, order a sixpack and get 10% off ($18/bottle).

Don't get fooled by bigger is better! It's all about the texture and the finish.

WE DELIVER.

To order click here or call 718-596-7643. To view our full selection come see us at the store. 

About As Natural As It Gets

We've long been drawn to the rustic elegance of the wines of the Northern Rhone. Hirotake Ooka is a Japanese winemaker working in the Northern Rhone who understands tradition but is making wines that transcend it. It seems as if he was born to make the wine he does. Wines that are pure, raw, and alive. He was quickly identified as a rising star in the natural wine world and was recently profiled in The New York Times. The wines he makes are about as natural as it gets.

Hirotake has taken a remarkable journey from Tokyo to St. Péray. He left Japan to study enology in Bordeaux because initially he was intrigued by Bordeaux wines. However while there his world was turned upside down when he tasted the brilliant wines of Thierry Allemand of Cornas and realized that he had to go to the Northern Rhone and work with him, which he did as soon as he could.  Now he has chosen to work the steepest, hardest-to-work slopes. Ooka, which ironically means big hill in Japanese, then named his winery Le Grand Colline (big hill in French). 

He makes very limited amounts of a few wines, most of which he exports to Japan or delivers to a few Parisian natural wine bars. We, however, have secured a small quantity of his two most approachable wines, Le Canon rosé and red, which have just arrived. These in fact are the ones that are the best way to get introduced to what he does. Enjoy them on a Brooklyn summer's day or night.

Get them while you can! The 2012 Le Canon rosé is made from a nearly forgotten red version of Muscat called Muscat de Hambourg. It's delightfully tart with pink grapefruit flavors. His 2012 Le Canon red is a seriously gluggable Syrah with dark plum and sour cherry notes. 

Order a sixpack for $97.20 plus tax (10% off!).

Chill your reds.

WE DELIVER.

Real flavors beat fake flavors every time.

Long before we opened our wine store in 2006 we were constantly on the lookout for interesting, delicious wines that we could drink that tasted like they came from somewhere specific. We soon learned that finding simple, honest wine is not so simple. It was this persistent thirst for a taste of place that finally drove us to open our shop.

The desire to find these kinds of wines went hand-in-hand with the food we wanted to eat. We don’t eat industrially produced overly processed foods so why would we want to drink wines made that way, which most people don’t realize is the norm -- that most wine, like most food, is made with tons of chemicals primarily to satisfy the bottom line.

Like many of you we choose to eat minimally processed food not just because it tastes better and gives us more pleasure, but also because it makes us feel good once having eaten it. It’s the same with wine and the proof is found in the bottles. A real wine has real flavors that occasionally surprise and challenge us to come to terms with it, to struggle to describe it, because it’s not made with fake flavors. Real flavors beat fake flavors every time.

Of course it would take a lot less effort to sell easily recognized brands but that’s not what we want to do. We don’t want to sell brands. We want to work with people we like that we feel make wines that say something unique in small batches without additives or chemicals that consistently delight and sometimes amaze. Wines that go with food, have a sense of place, and are meant for thirst.

Which is why last month we attended RAW – The Artisan Wine Fair in London. RAW was filled with talented artisanal winemakers from around the world who make, in the words of the organizers, “wines that are pure, kind to the planet, very possibly better for your health, and best of all they’re absolutely delicious.” There we saw a lot of familiar faces and many, many new ones. It was a really exciting two-day event and you’ll be seeing many new things in the store reflecting what struck our fancy. The London food and wine scene at the moment is really exciting. 

It's Not The "No Sulfur" Movement

It's not the "no sulfur" movement--we first fell for low-to-no sulfur wines from the Kermit Lynch portfolio when we were drinking them in Berkeley: Jean Foillard, Marcel Lapierre, etc. There's an incredible purity in a wine made without added sulphur. But used in miniscule quantities at bottling, it does little to no damage to the flavor of the wine, and helps to protect it.

When Kermit Lynch first began importing wine, he noticed that some of the wines he was receiving didn't taste the same as they did when he drank them in Europe. The wines were being cooked during transit. His innovation was shipping the wine in temperature-controlled containers and storing them in temperature-controlled warehouses, which now all of the importers we work with do as well. And it's why we keep our store cool year-round.

Which brings us to the delicious un-sulfured wines of Domaine Buronfosse in the Cotes du Jura, next-door neighbors to Jean-Francois Ganevat, and less than half the price. We can't stop drinking their Chardonnays, their Poulsard (their Cremant too, which is now sold out!), as they have a freshness that's really different from the oxidative Juras that many like but few actually drink.

Peggy & Jean-Pascal Buronfosse moved to La Combe de Rotalier in 1999 because they wanted to escape city life. They wanted to live in a bucolic setting where they could grow their own vegetables, raise chickens, rabbits, pigs. At first their dream was to have a mixed farm but viticulture gradually drew them in and they soon realized what they really wanted was to grow, raise and make for themselves what they wanted to eat AND drink. They gradually acquired a number of small parcels of vineyards. They studied on their own and through trial and error, as well as some guidance from Monsieur Ganevat, they found their way.

Come taste the Buronfosse Cotes du Jura wines with us tonight at Thirst as our dear friend Kreso brings it from 6 to 8 pm. You might like them so much you'll have wished you reserved a case of each...

Buronfosse Chardonnay Marcus, $18
Buronfosse Chardonnay Ammonites, $22
Buronfosse Cremant de Jura - already sold out!
Buronfosse Poulsard, $24 - almost sold out!

Click here to order some.

 

stay true, 

the Thirst people 

Howling at the Moon: Bruno Duchene

Something profound is irrevocably lost when machines flatten hills and monoculture is introduced. Rows and rows and rows seemingly ad infinitum of the same GMO produce, and hormones and antibiotics used when raising animals in factory farms, are ultra efficient, but also devastating and polluting, and tend to produce ingredients that are neither flavorful nor good for you.

Case in point: tomatoes. Local, in-season heirloom tomatoes grown organically out-do their so-called conventionally-grown beefsteak super-market clones in taste yet we in Brooklyn have a short window to enjoy them. In addition, they tend to be more expensive, harder to find, more delicate to handle, and thus prohibitive to distribute widely.

Along the same lines, winemakers organically working dry-farmed vineyards on challenging slopes with low yields, produce healthy grapes and expressive wines full of character reflective of where they're grown; in contrast to those made, for instance, by Big Brand Wine Companies (three such companies control more than 50% of wine sales in the US) who largely make wine from irrigated flatlands that are easier to manage, have significantly higher yields, and whose wines, to be charitable, lack character.

Bruno Duchene

Our winemakers relish the challenge of meeting their vineyards on their own terms and making from them pure, hand-made wines. For us, such efforts can be a revelation in a bottle, can unearth, as it were, a taste of "terroir."

Without exaggeration (and we say this rarely), Bruno Duchene -- no stranger to the delicacies of wilder nature (for a time, he was a dealer in wild mushrooms in the Loire Valley) -- is performing feats on arduous, sun-baked, terraced hills in Banyuls and Couillure worthy of the admiration we more often give to winemakers who work, for instance, the steep slopes of Cornas, the Mosel, or Valtellina. 

Four hectares (about eight acres) is plenty for Bruno to deal with. The yields are naturally extremely low on his organically farmed plots of forty- to sixty-five-year-old vines of Grenache and Carignan. In fact, many of his neighbors have abandoned their legendary sites because the vineyards are so hard to work; those who haven't often vinify this meaty grape juice in a manner that tries to out-do other Languedoc monster trucks or Chateauneuf-du-Papes. Bruno takes the powerful potentiality of his terroir and does a complete one-eighty. He ferments the grapes (grown organically with few treatments in the vineyard, no copper, for example) whole cluster with very little fussing about (in tech talk, no remontage and barely any pigeage), with most of the wine done in large vats and just a little with old barrel treatment for balance. The delicacy of his approach is akin to Eric Texier's style of just-enough extraction, which allows the wine to retain some translucency that gives a window to the flavors of a place; allowing for a new standard of what it means to say a wine is balanced when it's from this region.

Bruno Duchene's "La Luna" really is an absolute gamechanger, a vin de soif from a "heady" region -- the village of Banyuls, famous for their fortified Grenache-based dessert wines of meditation -- is here repurposed with a greater solar influence, drawing the wine's terroir up and out. If schist could float, this is it. Unmistakable aromas draw you in to taste a sap-like quality that's as succulent as can be, the Grenache is not over-done or too "varietal." The 13.5% alcohol, vivid palette, a breezy succulence on the palate, and as enduring as it should be without any extra baggage -- just the right amount of time in the sun.

If we had to make hydra-headed comparisons, this wine reminds us of the clarity of Yannick Pelletier's Saint Chinians but with the generous and then snappy quality of some of the best sans soufre Anjou rogues out there. As his acreage and yields are so low, you can imagine how small his production is. We have less than four cases (which is a lot!) available, so first come, first served.*

The 2011 Vin de Pays de la Cote Vermeille "La Luna" from Bruno Duchene is $25 per bottle, $89 for four.

*Those who purchase the "La Luna" cuvee will get first chance at his even smaller-batch Coillure AOC wines when they become available, thanks.

To order: email us, call us at 718-596-7643, or stop by the shop! 

New Year, New You: Elodie Balme

We at Thirst Wine Merchants believe there's a way to make a New Year's Resolution that dissolves headaches rather than creates them. Now the jury's still out on why it is that natural wines are decidedly better for you; whether it's the lack of extraneous petro-chemicals, added artificial flavors, artificial yeasts, or the healthier soil (and thus grapes) and natural yeast, resulting in sips with more flavor -- or the lower-to-nil added sulfur -- or other natural compounds that are not eradicated by herbicides or pesticides in the vineyard. We're not scientists, but a confluence of factors and experiences have us resolved to drink -- and sell -- only wines made as naturally as possible.

The young and talented Elodie Balme is a great example of our type of independent winemaker. She makes the kind of wine that we decided we were going to represent in our store when we opened in 2006. 2006, in fact, was her first vintage! She was selling wines when she realized she was more interested in making wine; she decided to study viticulture and oenology and to work part-time for the influential Marcel Richaud, who makes phenomenal organic, naturally fermented wines based in Cairanne, a village in the Côtes du Rhône, for almost forty years now. Marcel is also active in the association of natural winemakers in France (Association des Vins Naturels) and believes, as do we, that "real wine is wine that sees no chemical treatment, no filtering, no commercial yeasts and no other technique that would specifically alter a wine." 

Marcel encouraged Elodie to become an independent vigneronne, telling her "there's always room for you when you're motivated to work well." Elodie returned home to make wine and began re-calibrating what were her father's vineyards by eliminating chemical pesticides and herbicides and converting to organic farming informed by biodynamic principles. Her approach is centered on attaining eminently drinkable wines rather than following a set of dogmas in the abstract. 

  

Elodie also cites influences from numerous other vignerons, young and old, whose work we also sell in our shop from the Loire, Languedoc, Champagne. (Please inquire if you want to know more.)

Although Elodie's father has not been completely convinced of her natural methods (parents take time, no?) such as minimal sulfur usage at only the most robust stages of fermentation and bottling, we are inspired by her quick ascension to making thirst-quenching wines and are stoked to have locked down a nice allocation of her 2011 wines that just arrived and to share them with you. Elodie wants you to actually drink and enjoy some of these wines in their youth, and their ethical pricing reflects a commitment that allows you to relax about opening them now.

2011 Elodie Balme Vin de France Rouge

We'll start with her Vin de France from Vaucluse, which is made from Grenache, Carignan and Merlot. The Grenache comes from a single hectare (about two acres) of forty-year old vines in the sandy village of Roaix, river-side Carignan of equal age, and young vines Merlot (hence the Vin de France designation -- this Bordeaux varietal is not allowed under the strict Rhône regulations for Appellation status) to complete the blend. Elodie's Vin de France potentially takes the cake for the most versatile, drinkable, party-friendly Rhône red we've tasted in a while.  The balance is impeccable, albeit with ripe black fruit that's not intensely dry so you can enjoy it even on its own.

  

2011 Elodie Balme Côtes du Rhône Villages Roaix "Champs Libres" Rouge

Drink her Vin de France casually, but for more serious cooking, Elodie's single-village Roaix has a more roasted meat quality, with Mourvedre entering the blend to give the wine grip, texture, and tension, as well as serious depth on the nose and an energetic, vigorous finish.  Both wines are showing phenomenally well, proving that the Mediterranean sun of this region will warm your winter cooking appropriately.

  

Elodie's Vaucluse is $15 per bottle, the Roaix $18 -- buy a combo six-pack of four Vaucluse and two Roaix for only $89.

To order any of these wines, email us!