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“Looking at it under a microscope, natural wine looks like a small universe.” - Gilles Verge, natural wine grower in Burgundy.

One of the beautiful things about natural wine is that it’s alive. It’s full of native yeasts and beneficial bacteria.

From a taste perspective, that means each bottle of natural wine is a unique experience. Leave the same bottle open on your counter overnight and you’ll wake up to a whole new wine.

But the beauty of living wine goes beyond taste. All those yeasts, bacteria, and colorful compounds that make Natural Wine delicious also help you live a healthier life. The secret lies in your gut bacteria.

Right now, as you’re reading this, trillions of bacteria are thriving in your gut. These little companions outnumber your own cells - you’re actually more bacteria than you are human. Feeding the good bacteria in your gut can give you some glorious health benefits: staying lean, feeling happy, and even being more social.

For example...

  • Mycobacterium vaccae, a bacterium that’s naturally in the soil around you, significantly increased happiness in lung cancer patients who took it as a probiotic. 

Your gut bacteria can help you look and feel more vibrant.

That begs the questions: how can Natural Wine and gut health work together?, Can you enjoy the decadence of Natural Wine while maintaining a healthy lifestyle? 

How do Natural Wine and Gut Health Overlap?

Both Natural Wine and our guts are alive, which means they’re rich with precious bacteria and compounds that enhance your microbiome.

Polyphenols, the antioxidants that give red wine its passionate color, feed good gut bacteria like Enterococcus, Prevotella, Bacteroides, and Bifidobacterium. Polyphenols also remove harmful gut bacteria to make room for the new ones to grow. Two superb sources of polyphenols in your diet are red wine and coffee.

Flavanols and wine aroma compounds protect brain cells from dying in people who drink moderate red wine daily and ward off Alzheimer’s Disease in mice. The key is that the wine passes through the gut, where your bacteria break the flavanols down into compounds that keep your brain healthy.

Resveratrol, an antioxidant found in grape skins, makes mice leaner by fostering a balanced gut. You may have heard of resveratrol; it gets a lot of attention in the news, but the reality is that most red wines have nearly undetectable amounts of it. The wines that do have plentiful resveratrol are Malbec, Pinot Noir, Petite Syrah, and St. Laurent. Drink them to get your resveratrol fix.

Saccharomyces cerevisiae is a wild yeast that gives wine a spicy, fruity flavor. It’s good for more than mouthwatering taste: S. cerevisiae also increases absorption of zinc, magnesium, calcium, and iron through your intestinal wall and decreases stomach pain in people with irritable bowel syndrome (IBS). Commercial wine is sterilized to get rid of the majority of native yeast, but you’ll find an abundance of S. cerevisiae in natural wine.

Probiotic bacteria also form in wine while it ferments. Commercial wines are filtered to get rid of nearly all bacteria and sediment. Natural wine keeps those beneficial bacteria in. Among them is Pediococcus pentosaceus, a bacterium that attaches to your intestinal wall and protects it from pathogens like E. coli. Wine also contains lactic acid bacteria that have similar probiotic benefits as fermented foods like kimchi and miso, and unique wine probiotics that decrease gut inflammation in mice.

Anthocyanins in red wine are prebiotics that support a balanced gut biome by helping good gut bacteria take over bad gut bacteria.

Considerations When Thinking About Natural Wine and Gut Health?

A regular bottle of wine can damage the delicate microbiome within, although the harmful compounds are either far lower or entirely absent in Natural Wine.

Sugar can feed the harmful yeast Candida and other pathogens in your gut. Sugar hurts gut bacterial balance and decreases brain function in mice, too. Fortunately, all our wines are sugar-free because they’re left to fully ferment. The result is crisp wine that won’t cause bloating or dull your thinking the next day.

Alcohol is a toxin for your gut too. It increases gut permeability (leaky gut), which can cause gut inflammation. That’s one reason why every bottle from Dry Farm Wines is low-alcohol (<12.5% ABV). The high amount of anti-inflammatory polyphenols in natural wine may also counter the effects of alcohol.

Acetaldehyde is a fermentation byproduct that increases intestinal permeability and makes you feel hungover. During the final steps of fermentation, though, yeasts use up acetaldehyde as fuel, and bacteria break it down. We make sure the natural wines we stock have far less acetaldehyde because they’re unfiltered and ferment without human intervention. Low acetaldehyde is part of what keeps Dry Farm Wines hangover-free.

How to get the healthiest wine for your gut bacteria

The short answer is to get real wine, grown in accordance with nature.

Organic grapes. Grapes grown organically (without pesticides) have more polyphenols and antioxidants than conventional grapes do. Grapevines produce antioxidants as a natural way to protect against microbes and pests. Organic vines aren’t artificially protected by chemical sprays, which means they produce many more antioxidants to survive.

Natural Wines. Commercial processing techniques like extreme filtration damage or remove many of the good compounds in wine. Manufacturers often replace them with artificial coloring and lab-created yeast strains.

Low sulfites. Sulfites kill bacteria to stabilize a wine. The lower the sulfites, the more alive a wine remains. You can see the difference under a microscope - low-sulfite wine is vibrant with a diverse spectrum of wild bacteria and yeast.

Sugar-free, low-alcohol wine. Sugar and alcohol are the two biggest toxins in wine. That’s why all our wines are lab-tested to be sugar-free and low-alcohol (below 12.5% alcohol by volume).  

By drinking moderate amounts of sugar-free, low-alcohol Natural Wine, you’ll help keep the companions in your gut healthy and happy, and in turn, they’ll take good care of you. You can enjoy the pleasure of artisanal wine while supporting a strong body and a sound mind.

Ready to try pure, handcrafted Natural Wine? 

THE DRY FARM WINES PROMISE

Every bottle of Dry Farm Wines Wines must taste delicious. After all, even if a wine is grown to the highest natural standards, it needs to taste good to enjoy it. These wines undergo a meticulous tasting protocol by our wine team. They taste for purity, honesty, sense of place, and dynamic spirit. As a result, their Natural Wines are vibrant and elegant.

Not only are Dry Farm Wines naturally delicious, but they are also:

  • Sugar Free
  • Lower Alcohol
  • Lower Sulfites
  • Organically Farmed
  • Contain No Industrial Additives

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Turns out, that wasn’t the problem, it’s what he was drinking.

“I thought I was drinking too much,” says Todd White, Founder of Dry Farm Wines, now the world’s largest Natural Wine company.

In 2015, White started thinking about how drinking and wine fit into his progressive anti-aging lifestyle. A lifelong wine lover, White was also very careful about what he put in his body. He was practicing (and still is) a low carb, sugar free ketogenic diet, intermittent and extended fasting, daily meditation, Wim Hoff breathing, cold/heat therapies, and a methodical fitness schedule.

At age 61, White had been a frequent wine drinker for decades, enjoying a few glasses of wine with dinner every night. 

However, White would regularly experience sleep interruption and wake up with something most have experienced: a wine hangover. In fact, it’s probably quite common in the US. Americans drink more wine than any other country in the world, around 3 gallons per resident per year.

“Let’s be very clear, alcohol can be a dangerous neurotoxin,” says White, “but I didn’t want to stop drinking wine. I love the taste of wine, and the fun, social community around food and wine.”

Nevertheless, he came to believe lowering alcohol consumption was a key to optimizing his relationship with wine. He began practicing what he calls “conscious consumption,” a more mindful approach to drinking. Since he did not want to give up his daily wine rituals, lowering the amount of alcohol in the wine naturally became the one of key objectives.

A friend recommended he try low alcohol Natural Wines. “I had no idea what Natural Wines were,” White says. As it turns out, he was about to make a discovery much larger than just how to optimize wine consumption

What is a Natural Wine?

Today, Natural Wines are a trendy topic. They now commonly appear on wine lists in cities like in NYC, Los Angeles and San Francisco. But 5 years ago, they were virtually unknown.

Intrigued, White dove headfirst into research: what was Natural Wine exactly, and how was it different from other wines? 

What he found shocked him. The modern wine industry is much like the modern food industry. Industrialization has turned most wine in the world into a factory product that contains far more than just grapes. 

There are 76 additives approved by the FDA for the use in winemaking, including toxins like dimethyl dicarbonate. Many of the most popular wines are full of additives and high in sugar, with alcohol levels that have continued to increase over the last few decades.

As someone who watches carefully for additives in anything he consumes, White was shocked that he hadn’t known about this. Why are these additives such a secret? Because wine producers are not required to disclose contents or nutritional information on the label. This is no accident. The wine industry has successfully lobbied in Washington to keep contents labeling off wine bottles. Simply put, the wine industry doesn't want you to know what is in the bottle.

The Dry Farm Wines Difference

White wanted to take things a step further. Not only did he want to be drinking additive free pure Natural Wine, he also wanted to ensure that the wine he was drinking was lower in alcohol and completely free from residual sugar to pair with his lifestyle and goals. He began sending bottles off to a lab to test his wine for alcohol and sugar content. 

When he switched to drinking these lower alcohol, sugar free Natural Wines, White immediately noticed a difference. “It tasted more refreshing and I felt a different experience. My body was telling me I had found a better way to enjoy wine.” These wines were lighter, more food friendly, and very rare. He estimates less than 0.01% of the world’s wine production meets his high standard for pure Natural Wine. 

White then created the most strict certification for Natural Wines in the world. The Dry Farm Wines Certification process finds only the best of the best. The wines must be organically grown without irrigation, fermented with wild native yeasts, made without toxic additives, sugar free, lower in alcohol, and delicious. Each wine is independently lab tested for purity, and then evaluated by a team of wine taste experts. 

Today, White is on a crusade to educate more people about what's in their wine. He wants to empower people to make better decisions about what they put in their body and how they impact the health of the planet.

Start experiencing low alcohol pure Natural Wine

This article appeared on partners.wsj.com on May 23, 2022. 

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