Good morning and happy spring!

Dear everybody,

  March behaves prototypically this year; it comes in like a lion and out like a lamb. I read it in a cartoon calendar. Let's hope the same is true this year for the vineyards of France, anxious about frost. It feels like a strange and precarious time for the wine world, especially our little corner. Is natural wine still trending up? Did we order too much orange wine? Is this mousey? Are people even drinking anymore? 

     Here at Steven Graf LLC., we sure are! Here's what we're drinking this week. Florian and Mathilde Beck-Hartweg make wine that perfectly embodies the staying power of "natural wine" in the market, and its influence on agriculture in general. It's been the mission of vignerons like these to push forward the organic movement into the natural and regenerative revolution that we are the evangelists of today. We're selling not only a superior product, but one with a very strong message. At first, this message was political: "fuck factory farming, fuck commerical agriculture, fuck the AOC system." The wines kind of tasted that way, too. What our favorite winemakers do now has taken the ethic into the aesthetic and turned this message into an artistry. Their aim is to make beautiful and terroir specific works of art that are incidentally "natural." They are farmed in a way that regenerates soil, traps carbon, enriches nitrogen content, and makes contentented plants with wonderful fruit. Yeah, there's a lot of wine in the market these days, but that's a victory of winemakers hellbent on showing that there is a better way to make wine not simply because it's the right thing to do, but because the earth is an organism that's tuned to our greatest aesthetic experience if and when we treat it right. If you know these wines, you love them.