Secrets of the Wine Industry, the Benefits of Natural Wine, and Tips to Optimize Health & Longevity While Drinking with Dry Farm Wines.
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The following podcast is a Dear Media production. Mari has grown her to fitness and nutrition brand. Co-founder of Bloom Nutrition. Forbes 30 under 30 list. A successful entrepreneur. Someone who has lost 90 pounds. Today's guest is Mari Llewellyn. Mari Llewellyn. My friend Mari. Welcome to the pursuit of wellness.

Today on the show we have Todd White, the founder of Dry Farm Wines. He's a writer, speaker and leader in the organic natural wine movement. Today, Todd is here to tell us the shocking truth about the wine industry and what is in our wine.

By now, you've probably heard me speak about my love for natural wine and Dry Farm wines are sugar-free, lower alcohol, non-GMO and made with no toxic additives. I know natural wine feels so much better for me and my body and I'm so excited to learn why today and share with you all. Todd, welcome to the show. Great. Thanks. Happy to be here. Lots to talk about. We have a lot in common. A lot in common. A lot to talk about. I love natural wine and I have so many questions for you. I'm so excited. Nice.

Let's go all the way back to the beginning because it is interesting to me that you're passionate about health and wine, which I feel like is a little bit unique. So how did that come to be? It is unique because, you know, breaking news just in the last few weeks, there's been a ton of news articles about drinking alcohol in any amount is unhealthy. Probably you've seen these. They've been everywhere.

And actually, it surprises people to hear me as the wine guy. They think I'm selling wine to say I completely agree with that. The human animal is probably not enhanced by drinking alcohol. And it's probably unhealthy in any amount. That being said, I love to drink wine. I love the celebration of wine. I love... Just last night, we were at Juliet in Culver City. I told you, there were like 10 of us. We drank, I don't know, 10 bottles of wine or something.

And, you know, there's this amazing celebration around wine and dinner and friendship and laughter and banter and all the things that is the celebration of drinking wine. And we love that, even though as a health leader, as a wellness and longevity leader, I still think it's probably unhealthy. At the end of the day, alcohol is toxic, but that's the choice I make. The choice I make is that I want to drink because I enjoy it and I love wine and just have this obsession with wine. So how this all started was

I was always interested in biohacking or in optimizing the human experience through diet and consumables or what I call conscious consumption. So about eight years ago, long before it was fashionable, I started practicing a therapeutic ketogenic diet, which is a very specific diet, usually not sustainable for most people over a long term because it's a pretty narrow window of

eating, it's super high in fat, and it's just not very interesting. So over time, but I did it for about two years. During that same time, as I was experimenting with the ketogenic diet, I found that I couldn't drink wine anymore. And I was living in Napa Valley in the heart of the California wine country, the most important wine appellation in North America, and I was drinking a lot of wine. I've been drinking a lot of wine for many years.

And I found that I wasn't able to process wine. I thought it was the alcohol because sometimes people go on a ketogenic diet, they have a side effect that they can't process alcohol as well.

So anyway, it was just a bunch of co-factors. I didn't know what it was, but I thought initially it was alcohol. So I started looking for lower alcohol wines, which at the time were just not really a thing, right? Nobody was really talking about alcohol in this way at that time. Nobody in the wine business, still very few people talk about alcohol, but we sort of led that conversation as it began to emerge over the years. So I...

Started looking for lower alcohol wines. And in that process, I accidentally stumbled upon the natural wine movement, which was just getting underway in central France. And I met an American who was living in Paris who was...

kind of a leader in the emerging natural wine importing into the United States. And at that time, there was no natural wine bars. There was no kind of hipster scene around natural wines like there is today. Nobody even knew what a natural wine was. And we'll talk about what a natural wine means in a moment because it's a very confusing term to consumers because

And people ask me what I do. It's like, well, I drink and sell natural wines. Fortunately, I'm able to make a decent living doing something I love, which is drinking wine. And so and they'll say, oh, well, aren't all wines natural? And for reasons that we're going to discuss, they're not. So it was just an extension of my investigation and curiosity into health and wellness that sort of took me to natural wine quite by accident. And I wasn't thinking of it as a business. I was simply trying to find a better way for me to drink.

And then when I started introducing it to other people and to my friends, they're like, wow, I feel better. This tastes better. Like, where can I get this? And it's like, well, you can't. I think that's how the best businesses are started is through your own personal mission to find something that you actually want to drink or take or whatever it may be. Let's answer that question because every time I say I love natural wine, the first question I get is, well, what is it? And I have a hard time explaining what it is. So how would you answer that? It's super simple.

Let's answer that and then let's talk about what went wrong in the wine industry and how did we get where we are today? Because that's a big part of the story. But natural wine has three pillars. Number one, natural wine is always organically or biodynamically grown and farmed. Now, that's super important. Biodynamic farming is a prescriptive advanced form of organic farming. Now,

There's a reason why that's really, really important. I'm going to share a whole bunch of shocking facts and statistics with you and a whole bunch of disclosures about what the government's doing and how they're in bed with the wine industry. We're going to talk a lot about a lot of things that are really surprising, like animal organs that are being used to make wine.

We're going to talk about some things that are like kind of you're like, this guy is crazy. No, no, no. Everything I'm going to tell you is verifiable by a simple Google search or to make it easier on you. You can go to our website where we already have the scientific sites. It's like reading a scientific paper. All the government documents are there. All the lawsuits are there. All of the claims that we make are all cited out to accredited third parties because it's so crazy. It's hard to believe.

So let's start with organic farming and why that's so important. Only 5% of wines in the world are organically farmed. I'm not talking about natural just. I'm talking about of all farms in the world, only 5%, and in California, it's 4% of

of wines are organically farmed. All natural wines are always organically farmed. Number two, natural wines are always fermented with wild native indigenous yeast. Now that's a lot of mouthful. What does that mean? Well, conventional wines, all the other wines that are not natural, are all fermented with GMO lab cultured yeast. And the reason for that

is that these wild native yeast, which are natural to every grape in the world. So when you harvest a grape at the end of season and you're preparing to press it for its juice and to make wine, there's yeast on the skin of the grape. It's a white waxy film. You can scrape it off with your fingernail. That's actually yeast that's been naturally collected through the air. It's native to the vineyard where the grape is grown. Every grape in the world has it. It's just that conventional wines, these natural,

toxic poisonous wines that you're buying from the store, they're not made with that wild indigenous yeast. They're made with a GMO yeast. And the reason for that is that the yeast, these lab cultured yeast have been modified

to be sturdy and stronger and easier to work with. While the wild native yeast is temperamental, difficult to work with, and you can't make wine in high volumes with it. So it's cheaper. It's cheaper, faster, easier. Everything we're going to talk about and all the facts I'm going to disclose to you about the industry, what I call the dirty, dark secrets of the wine world,

is all about money and greed. It's all about farming cheaper, faster, bigger yields, less risk in the factories where these wines are made. It's all about money, and it's all about scale. In America, we're really great at scaling things, right? This is kind of a unique American thing.

Across Europe and the rest of the world you don't see things scaled quite the way we do it. Yeah, same with the food industry. Exactly. There are nine companies that basically touch everything that goes in the center part of the grocery aisle. Nine or ten companies that the same thing happened in the wine industry. We're going to talk about that in a moment how we got here, where we are. Why the wines that you're drinking are what they are and why they contain what they contain which we're going to talk about what that is. Number three, the third pillar of natural wine is

is that it's additive free. Additive free. What do you mean additives? Well, let's talk about additives. But first, let's talk about how we got to the additives. Right. Because this is really a story around money and greed and government corruption.

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quick question if a consumer is looking to drink natural wine and they find a bottle that claims it's natural how do they confirm that it's actually natural well there's not really any way for you to confirm that there's no certification presently anywhere in the world although france this year

Supposedly is going to certify natural wines. Other than that, there's never been a certification other than dry farm wines. My company has a certification, which is beyond just natural. So natural is just the baseline for us. Then it has to be sugar-free, lower in alcohol, lower in sulfate. You know, all the things that we stand for that are beyond just being natural. So

So if it has a natural label on it, like let's say I go to Van on Rose, you know that wine store? I don't, but I live around the corner. So I just saw it the other day. I haven't been in yet. It's pretty great. I like it a lot. But let's say they have a natural wine. Does it necessarily mean that it has lower sugar and no additives? No. So that's a standard that relates just to dry farm wines. So dry farm wines said...

We really think of ourselves as a health company that sells wine. So I personally had these standards like sugar-free, lower alcohol. I had these standards that were important to me on my personal health journey. And so not all natural wines are sugar-free. Not all natural wines are lower in alcohol. Not all natural wines meet our requirements for lower sulfites. It's just a mixed bag. The only way to find these things out is to do lab testing.

And so we took sort of this natural wine and we said, we care about these other things too as health leaders. And so, but to answer your question, if you go in the store on Rose, which is great, it is a natural wine store. They have natural wines there. And so the difference between them and what we do is that

They're buying those wines from natural wine importers who probably have vetted these farmers and know that they make natural wines. But every natural wine that we sell is made in partnership with these farmers that we know, we trust, and we vet, right? Every single one of them. And they're all in Europe? Yes. We don't sell any domestic wine. We have five growers in South Africa and six in South America. The rest of the 800 family farms that we work with are spread across Europe.

And so we don't sell any domestic wine because there's no U.S. wines that meet all of our standards and qualifications. There are natural wines made in the U.S. or good natural wines made in the U.S. They just don't meet our criteria, which, again, our criteria is beyond just being natural. Another part of the criteria, all of our wines sell for exactly the same price, and they're all very affordable for a fine handcrafted organic product. Yeah. I mean, they're $28 a bottle, and that includes shipping. So...

In the US, it's difficult to make a wine at that cost at retail because the cost of land is too high. Where these farmers that we work with, most of them in Europe, are multi-generational farms. They don't have any capital costs in the land. This land's been paid for for generations.

Right. These people have been on this kind of mission to do this for a long time. But before we get too far off the track here, let me go back to kind of how we got here. This consolidation in the wine industry, it's what in private equity or on Wall Street, they call it a roll up.

So the industry, like the food industry, you know, got just rolled up. So using public money, a whole bunch of consolidation happened. Same thing in the food business. Everything, as we talked about, nine or ten companies control everything in the grocery store, in the center aisles, right? And so if Kraft likes an avocado mayonnaise made by Primal Kitchen, Mark says in my body, they just buy the company. Mm-hmm.

That's kind of how it works. Same thing happened in the wine industry. So today, the top three wine companies in the United States make 60% of U.S. wines, just the top three. And the top 25 U.S. wine companies make 90% of U.S. wines. So when you go to the grocery store, into a bottle shop, a typical one, not the natural one that you're talking about, 90% of the wines that you see on the aisle, on the shelves, are made by just 25 companies.

And they all look so different because they have the different labels with the farmhouse, with the cat. Yeah, yeah, yeah. They don't want you to know, so they hide behind thousands of brands and labels.

They don't want you to know that they're all made by a handful of small companies. You kind of create this image for yourself when you see the label of the farmhouse. You're like, oh, this is from Susie. Except that it's made in a massive factory in Central California that's multiple football fields big. That's really how wine gets made. Now, how it gets marketed is completely different. So these massive companies who have huge influence in Washington, D.C., and the primary influence that they've had

that has been most successful for them is they've been able to keep transparent labeling off of wine bottles uniquely. Now, there's a reason for that. The wine industry spends millions of dollars in lobby money. Their primary lobby company in Washington, D.C., on their website, publicly opposes transparent labeling.

I mean, it's public knowledge. So you cannot put calories, carbs, sugar... You can, and we do. Our new label just coming out has full nutritional panel on it, contents label. I mean, contents have always been known for us, but we're now going at a...

pretty high cost nutritional testing in addition to the other analogy testing that we were already doing. We were testing for sugar, but not the full panel of legal nutritional testing, which is expensive. But we are now doing it. But yes, you can. You're not required to. Other than our new bottles now, there's not a single wine bottle that you can pick up and it shows you any ingredients or any nutritional panel.

Which seems crazy. It is crazy, but the industry has lobbied to keep that off because they don't want you to know about these additives. So if they were required to disclose them, you would know about what's really in your wine, which is what we're going to talk about next, is these 76 additives that are approved by the TTB. Now, how some of this happens is a reason. The FDA is the government agency responsible for

Products that you make, you have to work with the FDA to get labeling requirements. You see, the wine industry is regulated uniquely by the TTB, which is a taxing authority that operates under the Treasury Department.

So the FDA has nothing to do with the approval of wine ingredients or disclosures. If wine were regulated by the FDA, like other food and supplement products, they would be required to have the same disclosures that your products and other products are required to have. So the taxing authority, the TTB, their mission in life is

is not to help you make better decisions about what you're drinking. It's to generate tax for the Treasury Department. And those are just misaligned with your health. Yep. So let's talk about the 76 additives. These 76 additives are on a government document from the TTB. A few of them are natural and some of them are quite toxic.

Two of them are acute toxins. Acute toxin has a clinical definition, meaning that a single dose or multiple doses over a 24-hour period can be fatal. So two of the 76 additives are acute toxins. Twelve of them are classified as health hazards by the National Institutes of Health. That's another government agency. So one government agency is approving them. The other government agency is saying 12 of these are health hazards. Wow. Two of them...

are four additives that are derived from six different animal organs, including pig stomachs and cow pancreas. What is the reason for the animal organs in wine? Don't put animal organs. They make these additives as a derivative from and required to be from these specific organs. It's on the government list. You'd see it if you read it. So if someone were...

they could easily be consuming animal products by drinking wine. 100%. Our wines are vegan. Our wines are animal product free, but yes. And you wouldn't know because there's no label. There's no way to know because there's no labeling. Oh my gosh. This is crazy. On the list of additives, it actually says bovine pancreas. That's a cow. I forget the word they use for pig, but it's the derivative of what a pig is. So, okay, what are the...

harmful health hazards that you mentioned? Well, there are 12 of them, all names that you wouldn't... The most fatal is called dimethyldicarbonate. It's one of the two acute toxins. Eight of them are derived from black molds called mycotoxin, including an ochratoxin A.

So, if you're concerned about mold, like Dave Asprey had a big thing on mold in coffee. If you're concerned about mold, there's a number of ways that mold can get in wine, but eight of these additives are derivatives of black mold. Okay. I actually wanted to ask you about mold because my husband has mold sensitivity and he has completely stopped drinking wine because he doesn't know when one's going to trigger him and one doesn't. Well, our wines are tested for mold. Wow. That's awesome. Now, the reason...

Fortunately, we don't have to do that in most cases because the propensity of all our own wines come from the EU. The EU requires mold testing on wines. It's a legal requirement. The U.S. does not. And so our wines are tested for mold and specifically ocrotoxin A, which is the worst of the black molds. It's ammonia phosphate.

Copper sulfate. I mean, there's a long list of these chemicals that are going into wine. Not to mention, let's get back to farming for a second because this is really important. This is another fact. Because 96% of U.S. wines and 95% of wines worldwide are grown with chemicals and toxic farming. Herbicides. And pesticides. Yes.

The reason that's super important to think about and why you should be drinking organic wine is because grapes are the number eight dirty dozen of fruits and vegetables that retain the highest residual of these toxins after farming. That's a fact that they used to be number six. They've crept up in the last couple of years to number eight. There's an environmental group that publishes this dirty dozen list every year talking about which fruits and vegetables...

retain the highest degree of residual chemicals from farming. Grapes is number eight. I think potatoes is one, right?

Number one, I think, has actually now become strawberries. No. I think. Wow. But you can get organic strawberries. I love an organic strawberry. But anyway, so you've got these chemicals in farming. You've got these chemicals in additives. Here's the wine industry response to all this. The wine industry responds in two ways.

Number one, they say, and I quote this because they've said this publicly because they've been sued twice now over these issues. And so they say, we meet all federal requirements for disclosure. And that's a true statement because there are none, right? Right. And then number two, you know what? These chemicals in both farming and additives are not present

in high enough amounts to be harmful to you. And I would say two things to that. Number one, we don't know if that's true because there's absolutely zero scientific evidence to prove that. We don't know if these chemicals are harmful or not. And second of all, if I have a choice as a regular wine drinker, I drink wine every day unless I'm on an extended water fast.

As you know, I'm super interested in fasting. So unless I'm on an extended water fast, I drink wine every single night, usually a bottle or so, right? So if I'm going to drink wine on a regular basis and I have the option not to consume these chemicals in any amount, I will choose that option of a natural wine without these chemicals.

Even though I don't know, neither do they, whether these chemicals present in wine that they don't want to talk about and they don't want to disclose. Right. If they're so fine, why don't we just disclose them? Right. So they don't want to disclose them that they want to say there's, you know, they're not harmful to you, but there's no scientific evidence of that.

But I have this choice that I can drink a wine without them that actually tastes better. And guess what makes me feel better? Right. So that's just the choice I make is to drink the additive-free, chemical-free, organically farmed wine because that's the choice I have.

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And I feel like it's evident in just conversations I'm having with my peers, with my producer just now. Everyone's waking up with hangovers after a drink or two in the U.S. If you have a glass of wine or two in the U.S., I know I do, wake up with heavy eyes, a headache, you have that dry mouth. When I'm in Europe or I'm drinking dry farm wines, I'm waking up and I'm feeling the same as I usually do. And there has to be something to that.

Yeah, absolutely. When I'm drinking or when I'm on an extended water fast and not drinking. Now, of course, I'm feeling different from fasting. As you know, there's a physiological process that you go through in fasting. But I don't feel materially different from drinking or not drinking as it relates to drinking. Now, all I drink are low alcohol, sugar-free, organic, pure natural wines, lab-tested by us. That's all I drink.

And, yes, I mentioned we were in Julietta and Culver City last night where we took wine with us. So in California and most states, you can pay a corkage fee. And that corkage fee will range from $5 to $50. Depends on where you're at. Depends on the market and the city you're in. If you're in some place like Miami or parts of L.A., it's going to be on the higher side if you're in California.

The smaller markets, they'll be lower. Or it depends on the type of restaurant that you're in, too, depending upon the kind of budget range. If you're in a lower-priced restaurant, usually the corkage is lower. You can call or just ask when you get there. And like at Juliet, the policy there is you can bring two bottles in, or they will waive.

the corkage fee for every bottle you purchase from them. And they have some natural wines on their list. So we ended up buying a few natural wines from them that we know. So every restaurant's a little bit different. If someone were to go out for dinner and they don't have the knowledge that you have, they don't know the producers, what is the best way to order wine without...

getting all the additives and the chemicals? Like what's the best order? Unfortunately, there's just not. Now, if you live in our neighborhood, because we discovered this morning we live in the same neighborhood. If you live in our neighborhood, there's going to be a lot of restaurants that will have natural wines on the list. They may not be lab testers are certified by us, but they're natural, right? And they may not be low alcohol, which is really important to me because alcohol is toxic and a dangerous drug.

And if you don't drink today, I'm not suggesting that you start. But if you're like me and you do drink, then my job and goal is to help you think about how to do it better. You know, in the biohacking movement and the health movement, there's a bunch of people who say, well, you should drink tequila, right? It's distilled. It's pure. If you pay enough for it, you're likely to get pretty pure tequila. My problem with tequila is it's 45% alcohol.

And so I just don't want to consume alcohol in that amount. Alcohol is what I call a domino drug. What I mean by that is that the more you drink and the faster you drink it, the more likely you are to drink more, which leads to negative effects from consuming too much alcohol. Spirits also tend to kind of, because they're so high in alcohol, they tend to charge you up with energy and keep you up, which leads to other problems.

shenanigans and behavior late. Poor decisions. Wine, yeah, wine will at some point you'll just go to sleep. Right? You're not going to be drinking wine and being out at one or two in the morning. Spirit's a different thing. So the other nice thing about me for wine is that it will, you will at some point just go to sleep. Right? And so

I think, yeah, but let's use a restaurant in our neighborhood that I eat at a lot. It's kind of this crazy, funky place called American Beauty. And their corkage is like $25, right? And they also have natural wines on the list. There's a lot of places in like Venice or Culver City or in the L.A. area where you'll find natural wines.

If you're in Brooklyn or you're in the Lower East Side in New York, there are a lot of places where you'll find natural wines on the list or oftentimes restaurants that only serve natural wine because it's consistent with their farm-to-table philosophical beliefs about organic farming and how you should eat and drink. So oftentimes in these farm-to-table beliefs,

Restaurants that are sort of farming forward, they will only serve natural wines. But if you live in Kansas or you live in Dallas or, I mean, your access to natural wines is just going to be super, super limited or like Charlotte, North Carolina or even Atlanta. Even, I live in Miami Beach, even in Miami, which is a large, very sophisticated international community,

There's virtually no natural wine there. I mean, a tiny, tiny bit. So let's say you're living somewhere that has no natural wine options. What is the best thing you can do when you're out to dinner? The best thing you can do is order European. And within that, you can ask if there's a wine director or a somm there. I mean, you can ask. But if I'm drinking blindly, so to speak, I don't know the producer, I'm going to...

I'm going to drink from a European region, a Pinot Gris from Italy. I'm going to usually drink white or rosé. I don't drink reds usually if I don't know the producer because red wines come with a whole different sort of composure. Because of how red wines are made, they're just a little bit more questionable. White wines, and then I'll usually put water in it.

I usually put just spring water, bottled water, cold bottled water in the glass, maybe about one-third to a half. So half wine, half water. So what that's doing is drawing down both the alcohol content, because most of these wines are going to be 13% or 14%. So when I mix it with water, that's going to cut the alcohol back. In addition to that, if there are any toxins in there that I'm not super excited about, it's going to cut those back too. And it also...

If the wine is too heavy in the way it tastes, it will also just lighten it down and freshen it up. So for my palate, because of the way I eat, I eat whole, organic, natural, real food as often as I can.

then, you know, my palate really wants to drink something that's fresher and lighter. Yeah, I love that tip. I've been doing that ever since I heard you say it, and I think it's genius. Everyone will look at you a little bit weird, but that's all right. Yeah, and it's just like, it's just the way to sort of minimize your exposure to whatever's in there. And it's delicious. I'll often put ice in there too and make it like a whole experience. So we keep bringing up European wines. What is the biggest difference between the U.S.,

European wine industry. Why is European wine so much better? It's the consolidation story, right? And so you've got smaller producers, while not natural, it's not scaled in the way that we have scaled in the U.S. It's not consolidated in that way. Also, there are fewer additives approved for the use in winemaking in the EU. There are only 56. The farming practices, largely the same.

4% of wines are organically farmed in California, 5% in Europe. So the farming practices are not that different. For me, I think farming, organic farming is really important because we're talking about the restoration and preservation of living soils and the animals that live in those soils and the animals that... I just think that the prolification of chemical farming, which started in the 1920s, has been super, super toxic to the earth.

Right? And so, you know, we're always promoting organic farming and supporting anybody who does it. So the farming is not that different. It's just it's a winemaking style in part in that the wines are just a little bit lighter. They're just not quite as heavy handed. Right? And but there's still no disclosure. There's no ingredients label on European wines either.

The industry doesn't support it there either. There are additives that are used. It's just that they're not used quite in the same way, I suspect. But we don't know that. I'm an expert on European natural wines. I'm an expert on U.S. wines. I'm not an expert on European non-natural wines. But I do know the experience that you're talking about, and we hear this consistently from virtually everybody who travels. Yeah.

You know in France how they have that little green sticker that says bio, like biodynamic? Does that mean natural? No. Biodynamic or even organic farming doesn't mean the wine's natural. So you could go into, say, a Whole Foods as an example, and you'll find wines that say organic.

Just because it's organically grown, which we support and believe that you should support as well, it doesn't mean that it's natural. Because while it's organically farmed, it may be fermented with GMO yeast or it could have other additives in it. We don't know that because there's no disclosure on the bottle to tell you what's in it. We do know the fruit, by law, was organically farmed. So...

Let's talk about organic farming one more time because this is really important. When you go to the farmer's market, and this is a story about natural wines and how they're farmed. When you go to the farmer's market and you look at the vegetables and the fruits and you're like, wow, these are so amazing and vibrant and beautiful. And you look at the farmer that grew them as usually some hippie, right? And sometimes these things are so beautiful, you just want to take out your phone and take pictures of them because they're so amazing, right?

Because those fruits and vegetables at the farmer's market, those were grown by a small family farm, right? Those were grown by some hippie, right, who puts love and their spirit into the growth of that plant and its harvest.

Now, that's different than what I call industrial organic farming you'd see at Whole Foods. You don't take your camera out in Whole Foods and take pictures of those vegetables even though they're organic. And we support that. It's just a different thing. And the same thing for natural wines. When you have the love and the spirit of a small family farm, these hippies, if you will, that really believe deeply in what they do.

You end up with a different product that tastes better and is better for you and better for the planet. Yeah. And you at Dry Farm Wines, you guys source directly from those people. Yes. And we know them. Yeah. And we go to Europe and spend time with them and we stay with them and we eat with them. Yeah. I mean, we have a whole team of people who do this. So,

Yes, we hear them talk about it. When you go to a natural wine farm, there's no tasting room. It's nothing like that. It's not a hospitality experience. The first thing the farmer wants to do is take you to the vineyard and pick up soil and talk about the soil content and the living soil. And you'll stand in the vineyard for an hour while they talk about the soil. That's really their thing is like living soils.

And when you do get around to tasting wine, it's at their kitchen table or it's on a wine barrel in the cellar where wines are fermenting and aging. So it's a completely different thing when you go to like the small family farm that, you know, makes wine.

a small amount of wine overall, oftentimes they have other revenue sources like olive oil or other agricultural products that they may sell because with natural wine and this native yeast fermentation, you just can't make it in large volumes. I want to make sure we touch on sugar. How much sugar is in a regular wine? Well, it depends. So it depends on a number of factors.

The primary determination of how much sugar is in wine is going to be set by the winemaker. So when you ferment wine, you press the juice from the skin, from the grapes, you put it in a tank, and then it's inoculated or has a spontaneous fermentation with native yeast. If it's commercial wine, it'll be inoculated with the commercial yeast.

Anyway, the fermentation process is that yeast activates and the yeast starts eating the sugar, kind of like a Pac-Man, right? And that's the food source for the yeast. There's a little device that hangs in the tank that tells the winemaker at any given time how much sugar is remaining in the juice. If the wine is allowed, as our wines are, to fully ferment, the yeast will eat all available sugar and the yeast will die from a lack of food source.

The wine will then be sugar-free and what's known as fully fermented. What's happening in commercial wines now is that the winemaker terminates the fermentation process using a toxin called sulfur dioxide, and they kill the yeast, leaving residual sugar or what's called RS behind in the wine. The only way to know how much sugar is in a wine is to lab test it because you can't always taste it.

So wines legally can range from zero to 300 grams per liter. Now a wine bottle is 750 milliliters. A liter is a thousand milliliters. So it's, it's a liter is bigger than a wine bottle, bigger than most wine bottles than your standard wine bottle. We lab test every wine. We do not allow more than less than one gram per liter

in the bottle, which by law and statistically is sugar-free. We lab tested the top 20 wines last year, top 20 selling wines in the United States, not all made here because there's a couple of them that are imported.

including one from Australia with a yellow ammo, you might know. Oh, yes. So we lab tested the top 20 best-selling wines. Only two of them, 10% of them, met our criteria for sugar. The rest of them were higher. Now, that's not to say that our wine or natural wines are always, you know, are the only wines that are sugar-free.

There are many commercial wines that are also fully fermented. It just depends on the style of the winemaker, right, and what they're trying to achieve. Sugar gives mouthfeel. It gives finish. It makes wine taste different. But to be clear, wine, it's not added sugar. So you'll see ads on social media about wines, no added sugar. Sugar is never added to wine. That's not how sugar gets in wine. It's left. It's left behind. Got it. Exactly. So—

But, you know, I don't eat or consume sugar very often. It's super rare. Sometimes, like in a hotel room.

you know like but i usually i usually have the mini bar stuff taken out of the room just because i don't want to be tempted with it later it's like one of my travel tips the mini bar is a tough one yeah exactly well there's gummy bears and you know like at at 11 o'clock at night they seem like a really good idea i know the gummy bears or the snickers and they're laid out in this beautiful way right right and it's just like i just can't so for me it's because i'm i'm

a weak creature in this way. So there is that rare occasion, but generally I live a sugar-free life because I think sugar is a super, super toxic drug that's unregulated. And so I just generally try to avoid it. I do as well. I have very adverse reactions to sugar. I do too. So I feel like I can tell when wine has sugar in it.

because of my- I can tell. I might not be able to taste it. I can feel it. Yes. Immediate brain fog for me. Right. Agreed. Same thing with food. And I feel like so much food nowadays is pumped with sugar for no reason. Like sausages. I always talk about this, but I don't know why in the US they put sugar in sausage, like maple. It's incredible. I'll tell you another place that sugar hides that I didn't think about until last year and I was kind of outraged about it. I got the flu for the first time. I never had the flu before.

And, you know, I went to the drugstore to buy some kind of over-the-counter symptom relief treatments. And they're all filled with sugar. They don't tell you how much. Yeah, when you look at the ingredients label, it has sugar or

Some derivative of sugar, right? High fructose corn syrup. And these drugs, I mean, universally, like it's hard to find a sugar-free, over-the-counter symptom relief drug. I always just do capsules because I don't want to drink the sugar. And this is unbelievable. There's no nutritional information on these drugs.

Which I think is crazy because they're filled with sugar. It's crazy. They want them to taste good. It's DayQuil and NyQuil, correct? Yeah, and the other one that you drink, it's like you make a tea out of it. It looks like a powder. Is it the vitamin C powder? Yeah, yeah. Airborne powder? Yeah, yeah. Airborne? Yeah, all of those. Oh, it's insane. It's insane. It blows my mind. Okay, before we wrap up, are you into wine pairing with food?

It depends on – so we have a wine app. You can take a picture of a label and it gives you tasting notes. It gives you recommendations. It tells you about the farm. It tells you all about the wine and the grape. So it depends. Like if it's light red, like really light red, then it pairs well with fish or even shellfish or even oysters. But typically speaking, you know, for shellfish or oysters, I would probably drink a white or rosé.

You know, for a medium-bodied protein-like chicken, I still probably drink red wine quite commonly. But again, it depends on the wine...

making style. So if a wine is like super big and oaky and rich, like a big red, you know, big California cab or something, you can't eat that with fish. You can't drink that with fish. I mean, you have to have a very sturdy, heavy protein, elk, beef, kind of, you know, venison, because the wine is just so big that it overpowers the food. Red wine is an example. White wine pairs with everything. The question is, what does red wine pair with?

And so it depends on the composure of the wine, you know, how light, how the alcohol content has a lot to do with it because alcohol adds density and heat to wine. It also hides some flaws in wine because of the heat, it can hide some inherent flaws. When the alcohol is lower, like in our case, we only sell lower alcohol wines. When the alcohol is lower, the wine has to be more pure in order to taste correctly. And so...

And we've talked about the toxicity of alcohol. I just think it's better off general just to drink lower alcohol wines. And what do you think people should start with from your perspective?

website? Like where should they begin? Probably a mixed box that kind of gives them some rosé, some white, some red. And then that allows them to sort of begin a journey of discovery. Unless they're like some people are, I only drink white wine or I only drink rosé or I only drink red. Okay. Well then, you know, we have programs for all that, or we'll custom a box for you or, you know, pretty much if you ask, the answer is always yes.

Love that. I've done a mixed box with you guys and I really enjoyed it. I'm coming to the end of it though. So I will be coming over to get more. Now it's time for the question we ask every guest. I started this podcast because I believe everyone's pursuit of wellness looks different. What does wellness mean to you? For me, it's based on a number of things. One, I think meditation is the foundation of adult wellness. Until we can take charge of our mental health and quiet the monkey,

Meditation is the most effective means of doing that from my point of view. And so I think meditation should be the foundation of a quiet mind. I think a quiet mind is the foundation of mental health, which is the most important thing we have to put first. Number two, I think about longevity. So my pursuit of wellness is really in support of my longevity and supportive expanding my health span.

And so I think the single most important two things I do on that is fasting, which my goal there is to maintain a very low blood glucose. I think that elevated blood glucose and consequent hyperproduction of insulin is the foundation of many chronic illnesses that the world suffers from, along with stress and cortisol release, which meditation helps with. But for me, I look at life as

and extending my health span because as you age, you actually get a lot smarter and a lot wiser and your life actually gets a lot better. Even though we kind of idealize youth and we think that it's sort of this fountain of greatness, it's actually not. Actually, I'm 62 and so the older you get, actually the better it gets. The problem is that for most people, the older they get,

they begin to have the onset of disease. And so their health span is no longer, for some people who've achieved financial success, you know, by the time they get there and they're in their 60s, they're not able to enjoy. So I think about extending my health span

And health span is if we're going to all die of the same five diseases. The question is when does that disease onset? Does that onset at 80 or 90 or does it onset at 55? And so for me, it's all about focusing on the extension of my health span that allows me to sort of continue to optimize the human experience.

I love that message. I really enjoy that because I think a lot of us getting older kind of have anxiety around that. Oh my God, girl, you're not getting older. Are you kidding me? I just can't even on that. I can't, I can't even period, even period. I can't hear that. Oh my God, you're so young. Are you kidding me? It's so comforting to hear that though. Like it's comforting to look what I'm faced with at 62. You look amazing. I would have had no idea. I have to say. So now I'm going to start like upping my wine drinking because I'm thinking it has something to do with it.

Clearly, yeah. I'm going to start doing that. Where can people find you and Dry Farm Wines online? We are Dry Farm Wines on all social media. So we're super here for fun. And I am Dry Farm Todd. See you.

P-O-D-D on all social media. Love it. Thank you so much. Thank you. Thank you for listening to today's episode. Go comment on my last Instagram at Mari Llewellyn with the guest you want to see next. I'll be picking one person from the comments to send our bloom greens to. Make sure you hit follow so you never miss my weekly episodes. If you enjoyed the conversation, be sure to share and leave a review. See you next week. Please

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