We don’t have much room to store cases of wine, so rather than offering people the same old list of Syrahs, Cabernets, Chardonnays, Pinot Grigios and all the rest of the usual suspects we thought we’d make up a wine list of the strangest and most unusual wines we could find, sort of like a wine zoo for exotic animals.

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New = scary. New = weird. New = difficult. And nothing is regarded as weirder, scarier or more difficult than natural wines. They’ve become a huge trend in Europe in the last 5 years, with some bars and shops in Paris devoted solely to natural wine, or vin naturels as they call it in their crazy, mixed-up language that has a different word for everything. Natural wines are louder, funkier, stranger and vary more bottle to bottle than “industrial” wines and to enjoy them you sometimes have to completely and totally recalibrate your palate. I’ve been looking for one to serve at Dirt Candy and finally I found one that is different, but not so different as to be off-putting. It’s a wine that has all the crazy funkiness of the best natural wines, but it’s also accessible. If you’re comparing wines to bands, this is an entry point, the way the Cure is an entry point for post-punk or Philip Glass is an entry point for minimalism. You wouldn’t throw someone into a severely and rigorously minimalist composer like La Monte Young without easing them into the water with the more accessible Philip Glass, first.

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And so the La Stoppa Macchiona is a way to ease people into the funky, crunky joys of natural wines. It’ll stun your palate, but it won’t kill it.

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This is a wine designed to convert you. It’s exactly the kind of wine I’ve always wanted to sell at Dirt Candy: strange, different, unusual and not for everyone. It’s a high maintenance wine, and it can be overwhelming, but if you give it time, and approach it on its terms, it’s also extremely rewarding, like Dustin Hoffman in Rain Man.

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My drink box is full of natural wine.

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La Stoppa is the vineyard behind this Macchiona and it’s a family business, currently run by its daughter, Elena Pantaleoni, and focusing on older vineyards with low vine density, meaning it’s more expensive since they’re harvesting fewer grapes per acre, but the grapes are often of a higher quality.

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Making natural wine means you try to tamper with nature as little as possible. There are so many ways to manipulate the winemaking process and winemakers have such an array of sophisticated tools at their disposal, that refusing to use them is a bold step. Some natural winemakers say that they don’t “make” wine, but instead they “accompany the grape” along its journey, and while that’s incredibly pretentious it’s a pretty fair description of natural winemaking: hand-picked grapes, no added sugars, no added yeasts, no filtration, no reverse osmosis, no additives. Natural winemakers have come to the conclusion that too many producers are using too many artificial tools to futz about with winemaking and so they’ve abandoned a lot of the more commonly-accepted steps to return to a simpler, almost primitive, style of winemaking.

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La Stoppa winery.

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La Stoppa winery, looking less severe and medieval.

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There is no central body for natural wines, no board that determines if you’re natural enough, so it’s a varied field without consistent standards. Some of the wines smell like skunk in a bottle, and some have a deep, gracious sense of terroir that you won’t find in a wine that’s been made otherwise. There’s something about removing as many barriers as possible between the wine on the vine and the bottle on the table that can be a revelation (and, occasionally, a disaster).

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La Stoppa’s Macchiona is a blend of bonarda and barbera grapes and it’s a low-tannin, high-acid red wine that is funky on the nose and vibrant and spicy on the tongue. It tastes a bit like dirt, but in a good way: a slug of it coats your mouth and throat with a layer of earth from Italy, tasting like arid, dry, sun-soaked soil. But then, as it lingers in your glass, it slowly transforms into a mellower wine with a pleasant, green taste with multiple layers of minerals and fruit, unveiling itself more and more the longer it’s open. You can even taste it happening in your mouth if you’re a “slosh it around in my cheeks” kind of wine drinker.

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Macchiona is not a cultured wine. It’s raw, rough and brazen. The first time you take a sip it’s like being smacked in the face by an Italian vineyard. But it’s also a wine that has such a direct and explosive connection to the soil that it’s impossible to ignore, and it’s a wine that, more than almost any other, changes so radically as you drink it that it’s like an alcoholic roller coaster in a bottle. This is a wine that screams at you immediately after opening, and then, like an aging punk rocker, it slowly settles down to a shout, then a loud grumble and finally a muted roar.

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Macchiona starts like this…

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…and ends like this.

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You can read about La Stoppa and then more about natural wines either in the Guardian or in Wine Enthusiast magazine. Also, the New York Times has a piece on natural wines.

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