Can Wine Change Your Life?

How one bottle changed mine on two occasions

Many of us have a version of this story: the wine that made you fall in love, the light-bulb moment when you realised it’s more than just a drink.

Chris Foster from More Natural Wine told me he finally ‘got’ natural wine when he was poured Marto Weiss 2016. In the film Sideways, Maya tells Miles that her game changing bottle was Sassicaia 1988¹.

My damascene moment came in October 2011. It sent me down a rabbit-hole so deep, I still haven’t managed to crawl back out.

That January, I’d created an amateur blog called The Morning Claret. Then I discovered something called the European Wine Bloggers Conference². It sounded fun, and it got me on a press trip to Friuli-Venezia Giulia - a Northern Italian region that had long piqued my interest.

That’s how I first visited Sandi Skerk’s dramatic cellar in the Carso - the thin stretch of Italy’s Adriatic coast that runs north-west from Trieste. We descended down metal staircases into the half-dark of the cellar, hewn out of hard limestone. Sandi served us barrel samples from all four of his white varieties - Vitovska, Sauvignon Blanc, Pinot Grigio and Malvasia Istriana.

Fermented on their skins for a couple of weeks, they exploded with unfamiliar aromas and flavours. My brain cells were particularly fried by the electric-pink hued Pinot Grigio.

Then came the alchemical moment: Sandi uncorked a bottle of Ograde, a blend of the four elements we had just tried separately. It was so much more than the sum of its parts, harmonious, full bodied, complete. I was stunned.

Reliving the moment

Eight years later, I got to relive the moment through someone else’s lens. Jason Kallsen is a Minnesota-based wine educator who was with me that October morning. At the time, he struggled with orange wines. Here’s what he wrote in his newsletter in October 2019:

Next to me was a British wine writer named Simon Woolf. Frantically taking notes and asking questions, I remember his energy level going up. I remember him whispering to those around us. I remember his joy, a joy in the wines that I wish I could’ve found.

The dude’s energy was palpable.

Jason perfectly captured my awestruck state in this photo - as you can see, I haven’t changed a bit:

I returned home determined to understand why Sandi and his neighbours were making such idiosyncratic wines. It felt deeply cultural.

Initially I thought it would be as simple as ordering a book and devouring all the available information online. But there was a problem.

I couldn’t find any English-language books about Friuli, the Carso or orange wines. The interwebs offered just enough to confirm that Sandi’s oeuvre was part of a movement, not the work of a lone maverick.

Visits to Gravner, Radikon and their acolytes helped piece together the story. In 2012 I travelled to Georgia to learn about amber wine’s ancient history.

But still I missed a book.

If you want something doing…

In 2015, the realisation dawned that if no-one else had written the history of orange wine, maybe I should. A year later I quit my IT job to make it happen.

Buy the book from me here.

The first edition³ of Amber Revolution was published in 2018. It set me on a surprise trajectory. I became ‘the orange wine guy’, the only specialist in the field. Soon after the book was published, I realised the Slovenes had adopted it as their own. And so had the Georgians.

The Italians, predictably enough, ignored it.

Seven years later, promoting and writing about orange wine - and the broader field of natural wine - has become my full-time gig. That glass of Ograde literally changed my life.

But this is not the end of the story.

Back to the present

Last month I was in Ningxia, China’s most famous wine region, together with winemaker Ian Hongjing Dai. On our last evening, Ian invited five friends to join us for dinner at a hotpot restaurant.

It was a tough evening. In theory all the guests had some English - Mandarin is not my strong suit. In practice, after the first hour the conversation migrated permanently into Chinese. I was tired and impatient for my bed. The meal felt as endless as the rotation of the giant lazy Susan on our table.

But Ian had promised we would visit Yinchuan’s one and only wine bar. Around 10pm, we made it to 蒲人Present Wine House. The sole surviving guest was Yujie Gao, from the winery September Helan. She hadn’t spoken a word to me all evening.

My mood did not lighten at the prospect of another hour listening to conversation in a language I couldn’t understand.

We arrived to an empty bar and a friendly barman who poured us a taste of what he had open. My expectations were low. Yinchuan is a provincial town, and Ningxia despite its fame doesn’t have an established wine culture.

Spying a Malvasia on the list, I pressed for details. It was a forgettable mainstream producer from the Friulian flatlands. But, the barman said with a twinkle in his eye, “I have another one.”

Here is the bottle he produced:

Suddenly we weren’t just having a glass. We were damn well taking the bottle.

Ian took a sip. He got it, instantly. “I can see I’m going to have to try harder next year” he said with a laugh, referring to his own orange wines. Both he and Yujie loved Ograde. It finally broke the ice between us. “It seems I just needed more of this wine to be able to talk English” she said with a shy smile.

The energy changed and the moment touched us all.

Ian and I hatched a plan for future collaboration. It involves the highest altitude vineyards I’ve ever heard of in my life. And it’s going to be amazing.

Ograde had worked its magic once again.

1. As it also did for the film’s director Alexander Payne, according to this article.

2. EWBC was an amazing get-together, later and aptly renamed to the Digital Wine Communicators Conference (DWCC). Created by Ryan & Gabriella Opaz together with Robert MacIntosh in 2008, its final edition took place in 2015. It is much missed.

3. A third edition is on the way