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For the True Nature of Wine, Try Natural Wine BY GAETANO MARANGELLI
Brad and Allie Kruse at Nonfiction Natural Wines.
Photo courtesy of Nonfiction.
Y
ou’re in the sunshine of an April morning in Athens. You’re in the amphitheater of a sanctuary on the southwest slope of the Acropolis. You’re at the Great Dionysia, the city’s festival of Dionysus, the god of wine. It’s 405 BCE.
Around you are thousands of people from Athens and the cities of the Greek islands, the Black Sea, Asia Minor and the South of Italy. In front of you is a stage, where performers are about to engage you in an act of worship to the god of wine. The ceremony you’re about to enjoy is a play. The premier of one of the greatest plays by one of the greatest playwrights of your age or any—The Bacchae by Euripides, a story set thousands of years ago about the true nature of wine.
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Society has been cultivating grapes, fermenting their juice, and drinking its alcohol for 8,000 years. But the wine we drink today is a new kind of wine: Wine made from grapes using herbicides, pesticides, and machinery; Wine processed with chemical additives, like products in a factory; Wine metamorphosed by the demands of commerce and the capacity of industry; Wine which has little to say to its 8,000 years of ancestry.
GRAPES, LOVE AND TIME But if Dionysus were to appear in the city of Milwaukee today, the god of wine could take refuge with Brad and Allie Kruse at Nonfiction Natural Wines, a temple of wine and its true nature.
Brad and Allie devote their shop to wines classified as natural. But natural describes how all wine was made from the beginning of its history until the middle of the last century. “Natural wine is simply wine made by humans, without the use of synthetic chemicals, and with minimal intervention in the cellar,” explains Brad. “Or as one of our favorite Austrian producers Franz Strohmeier puts it ‘Trauben, Liebe, und Zeit,’ which translates to ‘Grapes, Love, and Time.’” Natural wine specifies practices of both viticulture and vinification. It’s made from grapes which are cultivated organically or biodynamically and which are
