For Bradford Taylor, raising kids, working on a Ph.D. dissertation and remotely running a popular wine bar and shop weren’t enough. He wanted to get back in the groove of owning a shop, of being “part of the whole world that comes with it.” Over the weekend, Taylor celebrated the opening of Diversey Wine, a natural wine shop sharing a hallway with next door neighbor, Cellar Door Provisions.
“It feels right,” said Taylor.
The proprietor of popular wine destination Ordinaire in Oakland, Calif., Taylor moved to Chicago two years ago with his wife and young family for her residency program at the University of Illinois at Chicago. The itch to open a shop built slowly over time, particularly as Taylor started to immerse himself in Chicago’s wine scene. Ordinaire is known for its natural and small-production wine selections, which helped Taylor tap into the local market — Red & White, Webster’s Wine Bar and Rootstock all adhere to the same philosophy, that is, minimal intervention and little to no use of chemicals in the vineyard or wine cellar.
“When I opened Ordinaire in Oakland, there was no wine presence,” said Taylor. “Consumers now have a greater knowledge and context of natural wine. There are a lot of torchbearers here, and I don’t feel like I’m building a community. I’m joining one that already exists — it feels great to join them.”
Natural wine is entering a new stage in the consumer consciousness, says Taylor. When it first started becoming popular in the United States, the movement had a bit of an anarchic edge, with passionate winemakers and distributors releasing wines that were an answer to fleshy, mass-produced offerings that taste too similar from bottle to bottle. “It was once a fringe movement,” says Taylor, “but that fringe, avant-garde quality is really integral to what makes natural wine so special.”
These days, natural wines are easier to find, thanks to distributors like Selection Massale, Louis/Dressner Selections and Cream Wine Co., but for Taylor, the wines need to do more than taste different. “They have to be different (from mass-produced wines), have a different identity,” he says. “How can natural wine maintain its edgy, radical quality? It’s our job in the natural wine space to be critical of each other and to push the conversation and the differences.”
Taylor is thoughtful about natural wine’s place in the greater conversation — “economically, we’re still a small fraction of the ocean of wines,” he says — but sees a place to question sameness and that most wine-centric of words, terroir. “I’m not so convinced that the appellation system solely controls the idea of terroir,” he says, referencing the common government-recognized regions in France, Italy and many other nations, which dictate a wine producer’s ability to label, say, Bordeaux or Barolo, versus natural winemakers who buck the system and “settle” for the unrecognized “table wine” designation.
“Appellations were built on this charted-out idea of terroir, certified and codified, but it’s an ahistoric concept,” says Taylor. “Geology affects a wine’s taste, of course, but ignores how the winemakers or their immediate family and villages consumed the wine. The wine’s style, that’s what a winemaker determines, and I think if we broaden our idea of terroir, it’s everywhere. Everyone can have it.”
Taking that approach, Taylor and his manager, MacGregor Parsons, are stocking the shelves according to producers, not grape varieties or countries. “So much of wine consumption ignores the people behind the bottles,” says Taylor. “We want people to think of wine as something made by a real human. It’s hard to make natural wine on a large scale — these bottles are worth trying for that alone.”
To that end, the shop will host producer-focused tastings on Sundays, often with distributors or Taylor himself pouring. He will stock about 100 to 120 different labels, with a number of options for each producer. Most bottles will cost $20 to $25, though options at both the low and high ends exist. Through a partnership with Cellar Door Provisions, Diversey Wines will craft the restaurant’s by-the-glass wine list and will also sell bottles plus corkage fee via that shared hallway. (Up until recently, Cellar Door was a BYOB restaurant, but is in the process of obtaining a liquor license.)
Because natural wines are made on a smaller scale, “it’s a problem to find inexpensive natural wines, but we’re always searching,” Taylor says. “We don’t compromise, though. The wines should still be farmed correctly and well-made. It’s what people are looking for.”
As a shop owner, Taylor sees this unwillingness to compromise on the product as one of his responsibilities.
“The wines are going to poke out and be different and have character, but people won’t necessarily know what to look for,” he says. “The casualness with which we serve and consume natural wines, how we talk about them, people are still surprised by the taste yet charmed by the lack of formality. We want to bust expectations about what wine can be.”
3023 W. Diversey Ave., 773-360-8365.
jbhernandez@chicagotribune.com
Twitter @joeybear85
