Your plans of sipping beers lakeside in Leipzig or seeing the sun rise at the Stone Circle might be dashed, but don't set fire to your bucket hat just yet. There's still plenty of fun to be had this summer.
Up to six people are now allowed inside private homes in the UK, which makes this the perfect opportunity to hone your entertaining skills. For our new series, we've spoken to experts in food, wine, music and immersive events for their advice on transforming your kitchen, living room or broom cupboard into the hottest spot in town.
Have all your friends started drinking cloudy bottles of white or fizzy pét-nat in place of their regular park plonk? Isolation has coincided with the rise of natural wine as people rethink what they know about the drink. They're learning that you can enjoy their red wine cold or enjoy a grape which isn't white or red but orange, a hue that comes from leaving the skins in white wine to give it a funky taste and colour.
"There’s no real legal definition for natural wine which I think has done a lot to confuse people, but the way that we sum it up is that it’s wine made without industrial agriculture and without any extreme uses of pesticides or chemicals in the vineyard," says Brodie Meah, owner of the restaurant, wine shop and bar Top Cuvée, who rebranded as Shop Cuvée at the start of lockdown in order to offer takeaway and delivery on bottles. "It's wine made with as little manipulation or intervention in the winery as possible so in a natural way."
Meah used to work in Michelin star restaurants but found the pretentiousness and strict rules around traditional wine put him off. “Once I started drinking natural wine I saw it was all about rewiring what you brain thinks about wine. With natural wine you can learn through tasting and make up your own opinion. If you don’t know everything about a region then it’s not the end of the world."
With Top Cuvée he has seen the attitude toward natural wine shift in front of him by the reactions of the customers coming in. “A year ago when we first opened the restaurant people would come in and say, ‘Oh is this natural wine?’, and when we said yes they wouldn’t be interested. Now it’s the opposite."
A big part of the boom in natural wine is the increased interest in orange wine which Meah sees a lot of people in the shop keen to try it. "Orange wine runs on a spectrum: from a little bit of skin contact where you get a bit of dryness and floral taste all the way through to the really heavy and really funky orange wine. At the beginners end of the scale you’re really looking for nice floral aromas and a little added dryness."
He adds, "Once you go past that beginner stage and you’re into the more skin maceration stuff it kind of demands food of some sort because of the tannins and the body of it. These light orange wines are perfect for drinking in the summer but once you step it up a bit these orange wines are a bit full on to have without food. Something like butter coats your tongue which the tannins in the orange wine then strip that off so you’re basically in the perfect balanced harmony."
So why is this the tipple you should be serving at dinner this summer or bringing to share with friends in place of that trusty Riesling you've got on repeat order from Majestic? A lot of natural wines are juicy, light, slightly fizzy grapes which are best enjoyed cold and they're also easy to drink over longer periods of time or 'smashable' as the natural wine world (no, really) calls these kind of drinks.
"A big word you hear in natural wine is juice, or ‘glou glou’ [French for glug glug] when talking about wines are made in a way that’s really fresh, great to be drunk young and with a little bit of fizz," Meah says. "More conventional wines like big reds or robust full-bodied white wines lend themselves well to ageing which is great in certain circumstances but having a BBQ is probably not one of them."
Pét-nat, an abbreviation of 'pétillant naturel', are natural wines made with fizz to them, making them ideal for drinking in the sunshine and the way our brain connects sparkling drinks with celebration says Meah. "Also, because they’re sparkling that acts as a bit of a preservative and lends itself really well to more delicate grapes. You can get a really expressive wine that wouldn’t be quite so stable if it was a still wine."
When it comes to drinking chilled red wine not everything should be thrown in the fridge with the hope it'll drink well cold. "Red wines with not too much tannin are good to drink cold," Meah says. "Anything really juicy and fruit-forward lends itself well to chilling. With anything that’s tannic [has a lot of tannins] the dryness will be accentuated. Gamay drinks really well cold, and some of the Austrian grapes like Zweigelt and Blaufränkisch have big juicy flavours with very little tannins, Negroamaro is good too."
What are his picks for the bottles to buy this summer? "Claus Preisinger's Dope wine is great, it’s a rose with Blaufränkisch grapes so ticks all the boxes of if you want to discover new techniques. The flavour is absolutely wild and untamed, it’s such a delicate wine but got such depth of flavour."
Some people won't ever be convinced to join the natural wine brigade. But with the limited production and scarcity of bottles that these small growers make, there's also something exciting about a bottle you might not be able to ever drink again, unlike that aforementioned crate of Riesling that winemakers are working hard to make sure will taste exactly the same forever and always be around.
"Sometimes the new vintage comes out and you’re excited to get the bottle and it’s amazing and better than last year and sometimes it’s not as good, but that's part of the excitement," Meah says. "It's like the drop of a new trainer but unlike a pair of shoes wine is intrinsically designed to be part of a shared experience."
Like this article? Sign up to our newsletter to get more articles like this delivered straight to your inbox
Need some positivity right now? Subscribe to Esquire now for a hit of style, fitness, culture and advice from the experts
