Recently, a friend and I met for drinks at Pearl & Ash, the new restaurant on the Bowery known for excellent cuisine and one of the most dynamic wine lists in New York. We ordered a bottle of Eric Pfifferling’s l’Anglore Tavel rosé. By the time we’d finished the bottle, neither of us felt the familiar dizzying buzz of too much wine, nor had we consumed even a bite to eat. Later, with dinner, we downed two subsequent bottles of wine, both made in a similar style to Pfifferling’s. The next morning, after comparing notes, both of us woke unscathed. My friend made his early tennis match and played well; I spun strong at my morning spin.
The secret to our hangover free morning? Natural wine.
The initial wine, one of the natural wine movement's most beloved and hard to track-down bottles, is—unlike most wine you drink—made from ripe grapes and not much else. The fruit ferments with native yeasts. Pfifferling, like most natural wine producers, adds no sulfur dioxide aside from minimal amounts when he bottles the wine. Supplementary sugar, nitrogen, tartaric and malic acid, oak essence, mega purple, reverse-osmosis…none of these laboratory-created additions make their way into the vinification process, and the resulting wine tastes clean, pure, and textural. These are natural wines. Wines like your great-great-grandmother might have drunk.