Do you want to know the easiest way to avoid a wine hangover? Todd White, CEO of Dry Farm Wines, the world’s premier source of Natural Wine, shares the biggest culprits for hangovers, the reason for the lack of transparency in the wine industry and how his company goes the extra mile to ensure their wines are the healthiest option for your body and the planet.

Show Notes:

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Pretty ok (not great) transcript:

Welcome to another mostly green life podcast. As we have been spending more time talking to people about wine, we keep hearing a particular statement. People say, when they go to Europe and drink wine over there, they don’t get hangovers. And it turns out it’s not just because they’re in a Villa in France and very relaxed, which I was suspicious of for awhile.

There really is this holy grail tidbit that drinking the right kinds of wine can dramatically. Or completely eliminate the negative side effects. Todd white founder of dry farm wines is joining us today and we’re excited to learn more about his company and the wine he sells. Let’s dig in.

[00:02:21] Jess: So Todd,

so Todd, you’re an avid wine drinker and health enthusiast. When was it that you started learning more about natural wines? Were you tired of the headache and the brain fog and sought out for a better for you?

[00:02:36] Todd White of Dry Farm Wines: So about six years ago, six or seven years ago, I started to experimenting with a therapeutic ketogenic diet, which I did for a couple of years now, my diet, and since then over the last five years has been what I’d call modified keto, more like Atkins or super low carb.

But, um, while I started experimenting with a therapeutic ketogenic diet, which is a really significant commitment to a very disciplined. Um, program, I, for whatever reason, some people have adverse effects with alcohol when they, when they. Therapeutically ketogenic. So I just was feeling terrible. Wasn’t enjoying wine and I’d been drinking wine my entire life.

And, um, at the time I was living in Napa valley, which is the heart of the most important wine Appalachian in north America. And I, you know, I, I just found that I wasn’t enjoying wine drinking for a while and, um, didn’t really enjoy that either. So I, I went to, um, Looking around. I thought it was alcohol because the alcohol has been increasing in domestic wines.

Well, in wines all over the world, but particularly in domestic wines over the last 30 years, alcohol levels have risen quite significantly. So I thought it was just higher alcohol. So I started looking for low alcohol wines and there, and I was discovering some, um, in France and lower meaning 12% or. And American wines average now around 15%.

Wow. So I accidentally stumbled across the natural wine revolution, which was just getting underway at that time now, natural wine. So. Pretty wildly and well-known, but at the time nobody had even heard of the natural wine and the Tom was very confusing to consumers. I would say, oh, I drink natural wines.

And they’re like, aren’t all wines natural. And they’re not for reasons that we’re going to discuss and what’s wrong with commercial wines and why they make you feel bad. It’s also fair to know that there’s a number of factors that go into, as you noted early on Mason, there. There are cofactors that go into why you might quote, feel better drinking wine in Europe and among them is that you’re on vacation and your stress levels are typically lower.

And you’re also probably getting more exercise because when you’re in Europe, you walk a lot. Yeah. Right. And so there could be a number of perfectors people say the same thing about eating pasta and. Yeah, I don’t normally eat flour grains, but people will say quite commonly will, you know, I can eat pasta in Italy and I don’t seem to gain the same amount of weight.

This is when I eat pasta in the U S there’s a number of co-factors for that, right. It’s not just the pasta. So you’re moving around a lot more in Europe than typically you move around in the states unless you live in an urban area. So. But I’d stumbled upon the natural wine revolution and then learned what was going on with conventional wines in the United States.

And so not all wines in the EU are also good for you, right? Or better for you? It’s not. So they’re 56 additives approved in the EU for the use in winemaking in the United States. There are 76 additives approved by the FDA for use in winemaking. Now, in fairness to some of those 76 additives are natural and some of them are quite toxic.

And so the problem is the lack of transparent. So here’s what’s happening in the wine industry. And this is that happened in our food supply. And this new thing that’s happened in many industries. So the industry has had massive consolidation fueled by greed and money coming off of wall street. So public companies have rolled up the wine industry into a consolidated business and that’s.

That’s what’s happening. The problem is that now wines are made a massive factories, so they don’t want you to know that. So how

[00:06:53] Mason: many companies, how many companies control our, our wine supply

[00:06:58] Todd White of Dry Farm Wines: in the U S I’m going to tell you that right now. Okay. So, but what else is going to preface is everything. The additives what’s happening in the conventional wine industry.

Why these factory made wines are making you feel bad, right? All the toxins that are going into these wines, everything I’m going to tell you is easily verifiable with Google search. So I’m not inventing any of this. I didn’t make that up. This is not marketing, speak. Everything I’m telling you is factual and easy to check.

If you want to know what the 76 FDA approved additives, you can just do a Google search. FDA approved wine additives, and the list will come up right off. The government website is wrong along with a lot of other posts where people have written about these attitudes, but here’s the reason that the public doesn’t know about it.

The wine industry controlled by these massive companies. So here’s the control where you giant wine companies make 52% of all the wine sold in the United States. And the top 30 wine companies make over 70% of us. So when you were in the grocery store into a bottle shop and you see these shelves and shelves of wine bottles, most of that wine is made by just a handful of companies and because the three tier distribution system for wine in the United States, which is also not only unconstitutional.

What’s the consumer. It is at a significant disadvantage for being able to get wines that they want these distribution systems control by these massive conglomerates, right? How wine gets into each state legally, because see alcohol is regulated largely state by state. So there’s the only thing the federal government has to do with, with wine is the FDA approved.

And then the label, the wine label has to be approved by the federal government. Other than that, getting wine into each state and distributed around to each state and into stores in your neighborhood, that’s all regulated state to state and in some cases, county to county. And so these, these distribution systems put any kind of small.

Um, they put any kind of a smaller winery at a Supreme disadvantage of being able to get their, actually their product into the store. Right? Because these networks are controlled by these distributors who are in bed with these huge conglomerates. And who are they?

[00:09:28] Mason: Conglomerates?

[00:09:30] Todd White of Dry Farm Wines: Well, the top three largest mining companies in the United States.

Um, constellation brands, Gallo, uh, which is private, which is still privately held. And, uh, I think that the four point I’m not going to quote at the moment because I haven’t looked at the list in a while.

[00:09:48] Mason: Yeah, well, yeah. Yeah. Gala was the one I was curious about because I saw a story one time about how they grew and how they’ve been able to make this amazing amount of wine.

And at the time it was kind of a fun entrepreneur story, but then realized. What that does to our, you know, system of choice and such is certainly not a good thing.

[00:10:09] Todd White of Dry Farm Wines: Well, two brothers is a great business story. Uh, one brother was, was the guy making the wine and the other one was the guy selling it.

neither are involved in the business anymore. I think both are even dead now, but so it’s in his great business story, but it, it didn’t do a whole lot for, for the health of your mind. these wines are made in massive factories in central California and these conglomerates, these huge wine companies hide behind thousands of brands and labels to confuse you.

They’ll put a farmhouse or a Chateau on the front. Right. But in fact, that wines being made in these massive factories and these factories are huge. They’re like football fields big, right? Because it takes a lot of tanks to make wine in this volume. And so they’re what we call tank farms, just wine tanks, as far as you can.

Well, I, and so this, what what’s happened is that in order to make wine in these volumes and at these profit margins, they’re not trying to make wine better or healthier. They’re trying to make it cheaper and faster. And the same thing for the farming and the Sydney thing for the use of irrigation, like the name of my company, dry farm wines means that we don’t allow irrigation in the growth of, of grapes.

So, and in fact, uh, in most of Europe, it’s illegal to irrigate a great pie, but in the United States, virtually everything is irrigated irrigate because it’s cheaper. You get more yield, a yield is the size of the cluster, and it might not surprise you when you fall a great burn with water. It weighs more.

And guess what food sold by the ton. So this is all about. And then the lack of transparency. Why is there not a contents label or nutritional information on a wine bottle? Because the wine industry doesn’t want it on there. So they have a very powerful lobby. They spent no millions and millions of dollars in lobby money to keep contents labeling off of wine bottles, not to mention nutritional information.

So if you want to know how much sugar, sugar in your wine. You, there’s no reason for you to know the only way, you know, if you have sugar-free wine, if you’re buying it from us, we lab test.

[00:12:28] Mason: Yeah. And there’s been a couple of other companies, but it has been really hard. I tried keto as well. For a while. And I did find that alcohol, I had a really adverse effect to it.

so it affected my ability to drink wine as well. And so very happy to have found dry farm wines at the time. At the time I was traveling too much and I couldn’t, I couldn’t get a delivery cause I couldn’t sign for it because I was traveling too much. But, uh, so then I gave up KIDO because I liked wine too much.

[00:12:57] Todd White of Dry Farm Wines: Yeah. Nice. Nice. So it’s, you know, sort of it, so. You know, we’ve got these massive players, this lack of transparency, uh, some pretty nasty chemicals that can go into wine. The problem is you don’t know whether your wine contains these additives or not. The most toxic one is called die method by carbonate, which is if you look it up,

right, and this chemical is applied to tens of millions of gallons of water. It is used to treat the single most common bacterial fault in wine called bread mic’s. And which, if you have brought of my season your wine, then you’ll, you will lose this batch of wine, right? Because it becomes off, it has off putting aromatics.

It has off off-putting taste. They have a chemical defense. Wow. And so this is, this is what’s happening. So here’s, let’s define what a conventional wine is, how a bachelor wine is different Roger’s buyer and seller of natural wines in the world. And so, because largely we have built a health audience around people who care about what they put in their body and they care about the earth.

So they care about organic farm. And when we talk about organic farming, one thing we will clarify is that all natural wines are always organically or biodynamically farmed, and biodynamic farming is a prescriptive advanced form of organic farming.

Not. Organic wines are natural, but all natural wines are grown organically. So this is all kind of confusing. if you go in the store and it says organic wine, that doesn’t mean it’s a natural why for the, for the following two reasons. So there are three cornerstones that define natural wine. This is a worldwide understanding, even though there’s no legal classification for natural wine, everybody in the, in the wine world knows what natural wine is and it, and there are three.

Components to a natural wine that makes it different from conventional wine and conventional wine is everything that’s not natural. And I don’t care what you pay for it. If you pay a hundred dollars, a bottle or $15 a bottle, if it’s not natural, you’re getting components that you don’t want to put in your body.

And very often the less you pay for it, the more chemicals that has on it, or the more are alterations. So, but at $150, they still are not now. Or 250, or it doesn’t matter what you pay for it. So, and in the U S less than less than one 10th of less than 1% of us vendors are dry farmed. It’s just all Morley.

Everything is irrigated, which comes with a whole host of other problems, which if we have enough time, we can talk about why irrigation is bad for the vine bad for the planet, ultimately bad. But so natural wine has three cornerstones, one it’s always organic or biodynamically farmed, chemical free farming.

Number two, and this is the most difficult to understand it is fermented with wild native indigenous yeast. Conventional wines are fermented with GMO lab, cultured yeast. Why did they do that? Well, he wants. You can’t make wine in very large volumes using this indigenous native yeast because it’s fragile.

And so you’re, you just can’t make wine and great volume with it. And it’s very temperamental and requires a lot more effort to. God, the fermentation through completion. Yeah.

[00:16:52] Mason: Is it because the vats are so big, the yeast can’t even get around. Do you know that

[00:16:56] Todd White of Dry Farm Wines: he starts a super metal on their fragile?

Gotcha. Where are these lab grown? Used to be modified to be very strong, sturdy, easy to work. And the withstand a higher alcohol environment, higher high alcohol environment will kill a native yeast. So on the grape skin of every great Berry at the time of harvest, no matter what kind of use you use to ferment it, but every great Berry at the time of harvest has indigenous east on the skin.

It’s a white waxy film. You can let, like scrape it off with your finger now. And that indigenous native yeast is what natural wines are farming with. And what’s called a spontaneous fermentation. Yeah. You don’t have to do anything to, to ferment natural wine other than put the juice in contact with the yeast, which is when you press the juice out into a tank, the yeast goes Wolford and it starts to fund a spontaneous fermentation.

Now in conventional wine making what happens is that you press the juice from the berries. It goes into a tank. Then they pour software software, the oxide into the tank to kill the native. Because they don’t want the yeast competing. So they use solver the oxide to kill the native yeast, and then they are not isolated with the lab grown yeast.

Hmm. Right. And then the fourth thing is that natural wines don’t have any of these additives. And in our particular case, we also have a limit on the amount of sulfites that can be in Y. So we lapped us for so far. Now swell fights are naturally occurring. So fights get a lot of blame for making people feel bad when it’s generally not true, it’s

[00:18:38] Mason: just, they drank too much.

[00:18:40] Todd White of Dry Farm Wines: Well, the drinking, these additives and cower agents and other toxins and chemicals from. And, you know, potentially, you know, quite often found in, in, in domestic wines or glyphosate there, it’s just a ton of stuff and they wouldn’t know exactly what makes you feel bad. Here’s what we know when you drink natural wines, sugar-free lower alcohol.

Like we, so you feel better, right? I mean, it just, you feel better. The buzz is better. You don’t have these negative remanents the next day. Most people think. Most people just associate treating confessional wines and feeling the way they do is that that’s just what you feel like when you drink wine.

Right. But that’s not true. That’s, that’s what you feel like when you drink these conventional wines. And so that, so yeah, that’s, it’s, you know, there w there’s no, there’s no need search there. W there’s very little sound research on nutritional studies of any kind. Right because you just don’t have control groups.

You don’t have, it’s very difficult in nutritional studies to have any control group, right? Because unless you are used presenters or something where people are detained and you can completely monitor exactly what they consume and create control groups, which is on ethical. Right. But that would be the only way that you could do it.

So we don’t have a ton of great. Scientific studies and there’s certainly none around wine. So we don’t really know which of these things are the culprits. We do know that there’s commonly sugar and sugar and alcohol don’t mix well together. And you’ll know that from, you know, if you’ve ever had a couple of shots of tequila, that’s very different experience on how you feel the drinking to Margaret.

Right. We know

[00:20:32] Mason: we’re in Texas. We each are know that we’re in Texas. So we get a lot of both, a lot of tequila shots and a lot of

[00:20:38] Todd White of Dry Farm Wines: margaritas. Right. So, you know, when you, when you drink, Margarita’s full of sugar, you feel a lot worse than if you were just to drink.

[00:20:49] Mason: Yeah. I even got a, did one of those glucose monitors, have you ever done a continuous glucose monitor?

Yeah, so that was really interesting and I was surprised at how well my body handled alcohol on its own, but a margarita from our favorite place. My. Biked my glucose to like hundred and 60 as like, gimme some rice and beans right now.

[00:21:10] Todd White of Dry Farm Wines: Right, right, right, right. No, it’s true. It’s true.

[00:21:13] Mason: And so the lower alcohol, is that, that related to the irrigation or is it part of the process to stop the fermentation before the alcohol gets to a certain point?

[00:21:25] Todd White of Dry Farm Wines: No, this is the why now we get into some wine making science, if you will. All right. So. Let’s talk about how wine is made, and then I’m going to address all of the issues that you just brought up. So wine. So the common, most common question we get is how are you wine sugar-free all right. And so I’m going to also answer that question in this wine making thing.

And then also how red wine is different. Why red wine has four times the polyphenols than the, the compounds that are thought to be healthy for. About four times more than the white wines. Uh, and that’s also how red wine gets its color, but let’s start at the beginning. So, um, irrigation does play a role in, um, in higher alcohol levels.

going to cover that as well. So when you make wine, you press the juice. From the grapes, it goes into a tank now for white wine, uh, for white wine, it will go free run juice right into the tank. And then you’ll start your fermentation. Red wine is different red wine juice goes into the tank and then the skin seeds and stems are removed from the press.

And they are also put in this. This is where red wine gets these additional polyphenols. So red wine contains just over 800 polyphenols flavanoids and a flavor noise, white wine, just over 200. So they get their extra polyphenols. The most famous one is called resveratrol. They get these polyphenols from skin contact, and then they get also the tannin structure that red wine has from contact with the seeds and the skins and the stems.

So

when, when you knock you late or when the yeast activates in a natural wine and spontaneous fermentation, the yeast starts to eat the sugar. And so that’s the food source for the yeast. As the yeast is eating the sugar. The output of that is ethyl alcohol and carbon dioxide. When the yeast, all the available.

And then the wine will be fully fermented and also sugar free because the yeast ate all the available sugar. Now here’s where the rub comes in on the higher alcohol levels. Higher alcohol levels come from the amount of sugar that’s present in the grape at the time of heart. And the wine world in grape-growing is called bricks, B R I X.

And that can be measured in the field with the device. So the higher your sugar is at the time of harvest. The higher, the corresponding alcohol will be because there’s more sugar for the yeast to eat. So

[00:24:25] Mason: I thought he died though, at a certain percentage of that.

[00:24:31] Todd White of Dry Farm Wines: Well, the world native yeast will die in a high alcohol environment.

And so, but the GMO one, no, because it’s been modified to withstand the higher. then when you, when you see these commercial yeast, these lab culture, yeast, you know, packaging on them, they’re for selling packages, right. It says, you know, we’ll stand alcohol up to 18%. Right. I mean, it has the other thing with these commercial geeks, they’ve been modified to have flavor components, right.

So if you want your wine to taste like it was grown in Italy, they have a yeast for that. Well, right. And so, and you will know that you understand that you’ll understand from the sourdough break baking craze during the pandemic that. That different yeast and part different characters and flavors, right?

Because everybody’s on the sourdough bread thing, you know, they’re like trying to find the best mother yeast who has the best mother yeast, because the yeast and parts have different character of flavor. So these. Now what happens in natural wine making and lower alcohol is that the food is picked earlier.

And this also relates to irrigation because warmer irrigation is that when you, none of this, most of this is common sense. When you think about it, when you feel a great, very full water, you have diluted the character of the fruit and its flavor. So what do you have to do? You have to pick it right. Where the sugar levels are higher in order to have proper phenolic flavor to make the wine.

So irrigated grapes are being picked at a much higher sugar level because they’re full of water, right? And that higher sugar level then corresponds to a higher alcohol level. When the fermentation completes. Now you have other things happening in conventional wines and how sugar gets in them is that the conventional wine maker.

Americans love sugar, right? So the conventional winemakers, they don’t add sugar to the wine. how sugar gets in wine is that they stop the fermentation before the yeast eats all the available sugar leaving what’s known in the industry is residual sugar behind. And so when you make wine, there’s a little device that goes in the.

It’s quite simple, but it tells you exactly how much sugar is left to be fermented out. And so when you reach your desired level of fermentation you again, pour sulfur dioxide into the wine, which is a legally approved additive, and that kills at least and stops the fermentation with exactly the amount of sugar.

Now, how prevalent is sugar in American war? Well, we did a lab test. So we tested the top 20 selling wines last year. And that list is easily available online. The tops that have 20 selling wines and other plot point best-selling wines in America, only two of them met our standard for sugar free. So basically most wines contain.

Some amount of sugar that we deem unnecessary and unhealthy. So our wines, every single wine we sell is lab tested. And among the things that we’re testing for in purity is sugar. I don’t want to drink sugar in my wine, not avoid sugar in most everything. Uh, because I, I believe sugar is the most widely addicted and abused drug on the planet.

It’s also fair to know. And this surprises people to hear me say this, but because they think I’m here to sell wine. But when I make this following statement, alcohol is a very dangerous neurotoxin and it ruins millions of lives every year, and many people shouldn’t drink at all. Right. And so what I sought to do was educate people about if they choose to drink what they should be drinking and what I’m drinking.

Because of the reasons that we’ve already discussed, because I, I would have to quit drinking. I don’t drink anything but natural wine. And so I would have to quit drinking if I hadn’t discovered this because conventional wines were making me feel bad and having had a contemptuous relationship with alcohol in my life, I don’t drink spirits.

And you know, I, I don’t, I, I don’t, I want to be able to continue to try. Uh, and tweak in a healthy way. And if I weren’t, didn’t discover these lower alcohol natural wines, I probably wouldn’t be able to drink. And

[00:29:32] Mason: so the ones that y’all cause y’all curate these, right, and these are independent vintners that you work with, but you, they reach your ma meet your rigorous standards.

And so you have a collection of variety boxes. Are you in endorsed them and resell them in the U S or how has that relationship.

[00:29:52] Todd White of Dry Farm Wines: So we work with around 800 family farms, small family farms around the world. We do not sell any domestic wine made in United States. So there’s no us natural wine that meets all of our criteria.

Now it’s fair to say. There are somewhere around 40 or 50 ish. Um, natural winemakers in the United States. Uh, they just don’t make wines that meet our criteria.

[00:30:21] Jess: Like the two you mentioned previously, those had too high of a sugar. What do most of us wines fail at? Like where do they usually they don’t make

[00:30:29] Todd White of Dry Farm Wines: the mark.

That’s a great question. So it begins with irrigation. So most us vineyards are irrigated. You cannot on irrigate event. You have to start, you have to replant the vineyard once its own irrigation, it’s addicted. And if you take, uh, uh, a great fine off of the irrigation, it will die. Uh, because. Th th the wound structure is not properly developed to source the nutrient and water that the grapevine needs because the irrigated grapevine has a very compact root structure because it gets all of its nutrient and water from the surface to a little tube just about the trunk.

So the root structure is about three, three or four. Round and about three or four feet deep because it gets all of its water and nutrient from the surface, an unengaged grapevine can have a root structure that can span 30 or 40 feet, right? Because it’s, it is constantly struggling to, with these capillary hairlight tiny, tiny roots are constantly struggling to break apart pieces of soil and mineral to extract nutrients.

And water to survive. So if you take, if you take an irrigated grapevine off of irrigation, it will die. So you have to begin dry farming at the time of planting. It’s very laborious. It’s difficult to get vineyard started. So basically you plant a great, fine, uh, uh, you know, you plant the very small, uh, cutting.

And then in the beginning you dig a big hole next to it. You pour water in that whole. Right. In order to get the roots, to start growing down and searching for water and you give it enough water to allow it to survive while it develops root structure. And that goes on for a couple of years. Right. And then you stop that while it has enough words and it has survived.

It’s planting. So you had, so it begins in the very beginning. You can’t. Uh, uh, vine off of irrigation. So in most cases in the U S that’s that that’s the beginning of it is that is that they’re not dry for.

[00:32:56] Mason: And then years of drought, do people lose, do vintners lose vines if they have a long extended

[00:33:02] Todd White of Dry Farm Wines: drought?

No. Now they’ll tell you differently, but anecdotally, there’s a few points of interest here. First of all, irrigation did not come to domestic grape farming until the 1970s prior to that, everything was dry front, uh, further great bonds have been surviving in some of the harshest climates on the planet, all over the world for about 10,000 years.

Right? So places like. Where it’s just super, super hot and it’s very, very Rocky it’s evolved into so volcanic island. Um, and so the, you know, it’s super hot and dry, super Rocky soil is a great example of like a place where you would think or Greece. Right? Same, same things. Super hot and super Sandy. Rocky.

Yeah. Have you ever

[00:34:00] Mason: had a Texas. So there’s actually, there’s a thousand different varieties of grapes that grow in Texas. We’re super hot here as well, but there’s also one of the things that has prevented Texas wines from gaining much traction was a thing called Pierce’s disease, but there’s also a crazy story that Texas rootstock saved the French wine industry, where some routes from Texas, because we had so many different versions.

We’re able to, uh, export one of them that worked really well to where the, in whatever the disease was and the French soil at the time. Yeah. Yeah. So it, so I thought it was interesting that Texas wine for the most part sucks. And yet it was, it’s very important to the wine industry as a whole.

[00:34:50] Todd White of Dry Farm Wines: Yeah. I’ve never drank, I have no idea, but so then, so then.

Organic farming is, you know, is, is, uh, is also an issue. But, but, and then, but the bigger thing is irrigation and alcohol levels. So we don’t sell anything over a 12 and a half percent. And in aware and American wine-making, there’s a style of wine making. It’s just typically higher in alcohol. When I say style, it’s a certain taste.

You know, that people, alcohol adds density to whine. And so when you remove alcohol, not remove it, but when you have lower alcohol wines, they taste different. Uh, they’re not that big rich, bold Cabernet kind of thing that a lot of Americans like. And so, um, so alcohol and sugar, both add density and mouthfeel to wine.

So when you drink a natural wine, it’s lower in alcohol and sugar. It’s much lighter. It’s fresher. you know, but this is consistent with the way I also eat. Right. So I eat a diet that’s lighter, fresher, you know, the wine tastes that way too, because it, for several reasons and it’s higher, it’s lower in alcohol it’s sugar-free and also hasn’t been sterilized.

commercial wines, finally, they get sterilized. So commercial wines get a heavy dose at bottling of sulfur dioxide to sterilize and kill any living bacteria in the bottle. Natural wines do not. And so, which is why they blocked her. David Perlmutter is a New York times selling author and the connection between our gut microbiome and our brain, and is an expert on the gut.

Microbiome has written several times about our wines because natural wines contain living bacteria. So the, there are beneficial living bacteria in natural wines that do not exist in commercial wines because they’d been sterilized and that causes them to taste differently to where natural wines are more alive and natural wines are also not preserved.

You don’t lay a natural wind down for 20 or 30 years like you do. And conventional wines are sterilized to preserve them. most natural wines are drank within a couple of years

[00:37:19] Mason: Yeah, we’ve gotten, we’ve tried a few, you know, here in Austin, it’s relatively hard to find natural wines.

Whole foods has a little section that luckily is growing, but we, I would say probably just, what do you think of a third one out of every four to five bottles, we get ends up with a little effervescence because it is alive. Some of that fermentation still. Um, tends to happen and having experiences with the dry farm wines, uh, wonderfully.

[00:38:04] Todd White of Dry Farm Wines: are very temperamental. Th th th the effervescence that you’re speaking up typically comes from post bottle fermentation because yeah, because there, because it’s, the wine is still living and so you can’t, we don’t buy those wines.

Um, some people, all of them, um, we, we have a very specific aesthetic. Um, we don’t, there are a lot of natural wines that are. Uh, if you’ve just bought them out of whole foods or, you know, at a retail you’ll encounter these kinds of funkier. Kind of, off-putting a little bit natural wines and a lot of people embrace that.

It’s not a style of wine that we purchase.

[00:38:47] Jess: We find it disappointing when we come home, we find it disappointing when we come home with one of those funky wines are like, dang it. I don’t even think I can finish this one. You know,

[00:38:57] Mason: I

[00:38:57] Todd White of Dry Farm Wines: can’t drink it, but it is celebrated in much the natural wine world. I mean, pet Nat, you know, for.

We like classic wine flavors and classic wine or right. And so when you make a natural wine, because you’re not correcting these faults using chemicals, right, then you have very little control that the process has to be very precise and the seller has to be super, super clean to avoid these bacterial infections.

And so that, but again, since they’re not using chemicals to correct them, once you have a fault, it ends up in the bottle and people drink it. But it’s just not wine that we, you know, our customers know that we have a very specific and strict aesthetic. First of all, the wine must be delicious, right? I mean, if it’s not great wine, I’m not interested in drinking it, no matter how it’s.

I mean, it has to be delicious for sure.

[00:40:06] Mason: And speaking of how much you drink, what I’m curious, what is the most amount of wine you’ve consumed and we’re still functional then?

[00:40:18] Todd White of Dry Farm Wines: Well, a lot

[00:40:21] Mason: quantify

[00:40:21] Todd White of Dry Farm Wines: that hazard. So a lot, but I just typically speaking, I drink, I drink usual. 21 and two bottles per day.

[00:40:36] Mason: Wow.

Jessica thought that was a you misspoke.

[00:40:39] Jess: No, I heard that. I heard that on one and I rewound it cause I was like, that makes me feel a little better. He drinks one to two per day. I don’t drink one to two per day because we don’t always have the most natural wine here. We’re transitioning to having a hundred percent natural wines at our house.

Um, so that’s made a big difference, I would say for sure. And how much we can drink and how we feel the next day. Just for all of the reasons you’ve of course. Just

[00:41:00] Mason: talk through. So for all of our listeners, Get hooked on dry farm. You might just be able to drink two bottles a day.

[00:41:08] Todd White of Dry Farm Wines: Well, I, you know, I, I have a functional meditation practice in the morning.

I get up pretty early. Um,

[00:41:17] Mason: yeah. And you fancy yourself a, a biohacker right. What w you know, what else is in your routine that you think, you know, kind of helps with this?

[00:41:28] Todd White of Dry Farm Wines: Well, I think the most important thing in my routine in addition to being ketogenic or super slow carb, um, is that I’ll eat once a day and I’ve been eating once.

So I last eight it’s, um, it’s about four o’clock here in the afternoon. Um, I last ate last night around seven o’clock and. Uh, I’ve been eating once per day for about five years now. And so I think intermittent fasting was in addition to being ketogenic, intermittent, which being keto eating wants today makes it super easy.

I think intermittent fasting and extended fasting. So the only time I don’t drink wine on a daily basis, I don’t drink during the daytime either. It’s fair to note. Um, that’s very unusual for people in the wine business, but I don’t drink during the daytime nor does any of us. How do you handle conferences?

Well, when we’re at conferences, we always, we typically only serve in poor in the evening. Right? So at the end of the conference, like five or six o’clock in the afternoon, typically, um, the, uh, so I think fasting and then I regularly do extended water fast. and on a water fast, I don’t drink. So if I do a three or five day water fast, I don’t drink wine on those days, but I think fasting in addition to, um, I do have a lot of other stuff as well.

Fitness do you do? Um, I do. I do Wim Hof every morning. Uh, just with, as a part of my meditation practice, then I also do hot and cold thermogenesis. I have a cold plunge at home. I have, uh, I have. Um, I’m in a rented apartment at the moment on Miami beach where I came for the winter, but at my home in California, I have kind of the setup

[00:43:26] Mason: and here as well.

We love doing it on

[00:43:30] Todd White of Dry Farm Wines: love, cold plunge. And so it’s, so that’s, you know, that’s kind of most of my routine, but I think fasting, if I had to say, you know, what are the two most important practices in addition to. You know, a slow carb diet is, uh, would be fasting and meditation meditation really allows me to live a more peaceful life.

And I think one of the cornerstones of living a very healthy life with a long health span is to keep, you know, our stress levels very low and meditation is for me, probably the most effective way to keep. So that stress level in check.

[00:44:11] Jess: Yeah. And something we’ve learned and loved about dry farm wines, as well as the company culture that you’ve built and fostered.

And I hear that you guys start with a daily meditation and open with a gratitude practice. Do you attribute that to a lot of the success in the company and the success in your employees?

[00:44:28] Todd White of Dry Farm Wines: Well, COVID has changed a lot, so we were just now. Going through what we just had a multi-day meeting, um, on sort of a new utopia.

So we discovered, so we used to meet in person every morning at 10 for an hour of meditation gratitude. And then we took that on design, Darren to the, um, Then we took that on to zoom during the pandemic, but we found that it didn’t translate the same way over zone as a group meditation, as it did in person.

So then we changed every most people have an individual meditation practice as do I, but so then that changed. And now we, we also discovered during the pandemic that we didn’t really have to be together in order to. Run a successful business. And so now we’ve, now we have created what we’re calling the new utopia, um, with, we are establishing for office hubs across the country, and then allowing people to live wherever they want and come into these hubs in and out for, uh, sort renewal.

Um, so we tell it everything’s changed from what we were to what we’re becoming because of the pandemic and our view of distributed work. So people, we just discovered that while we love each other, we don’t want to come to the office every day anymore. Right. And we didn’t need to, and that was never a concept that we really thought about before.

Cause we enjoyed being together so much actually. We got more done in 2020 from a work product point of view than we ever had in the company. At the same time, we continued to grow very fast, which used to be more at home, drinking, more drinking earlier and not going out. Right. And so, and I. We speculated.

There’s a reason we got so much done in a, in a way of actual kind of work product is that we all like each other so much winning at where the office together, we spend a lot of time talking. Right. And not working. And so, yeah. So we’re, we’re now kind of experimenting with what we call the new utopia for us before.

It was very, it was very kumbaya. It was very much the circle of love. We were together every day, but then the pandemic changed all that. So now we’re going down a different experience, a different experiment to create what we’re calling the new utopia of distributed workplaces, so that we don’t come together in the same way that we did.

And we don’t think that I ever returned that way for us. And that’s both a little bit sad because it was kind of a great thing before, but then. Kind of exciting because we’ve all found that we want to live in a different way. And so we’re trying to find that new utopia. Very

cool.

[00:47:39] Mason: Well, there’s been a ton of amazing info here.

We’ve learned what dry farm wines is all about how best to avoid hangovers with wine and some tools for mugging. If you’re unable to avoid to wrap things up a little bit, what’s your hope going forward for dry farm wines or for your future or for the future of. What, what, what are you thinking about? I

[00:48:00] Todd White of Dry Farm Wines: mean, we would love to some transparency.

We’d love to see contents and nutritional information on a wine bottle. That’s not going to happen. It’s not likely to happen. The industry forces are just too great. Um, not enough people really care, uh, or, you know, so there’s a small group of people who care. I mean, when I say small few million people who probably really care and in the escape of the population, that’s just not a lot of people.

So our audience cares deeply and your audience cares and the thousands of other people who endorses their audiences care, but the general public probably does it. Uh, so, but transparency in labeling. The utopia and the wine business so that, you know what you’re drinking. You make a choice. If you want to drink time, I thought I carbonate you can drink it if you choose it, but that’s not likely to happen.

I think, you know, for us, you know, we have a loyal and large customer base who, who cares what we do, and it’s big enough for us to sustain, you know, a successful business and do what we want to do in the world. So. You know, our, our goal is just to continue to educate and reach more people with better wine.

And, um, and just to continue the education process and let people make the choices that they want. Right. If this is important to you, we offer you a choice. If it’s not important to you, then drink whatever you want. Take. Drink, whatever to you don’t know that you’re drinking. So, uh, so that that’s, that’s kinda how we view the world, but I also want to mention it.

So for your audience, we have a special offer that I’m going to give you a link that they can go to and they’ll get a one penny bottle in their order, compliments from us, um, to your guests. And they only need to go to dry farm wine. Dot com that’s dry farm, no S on the farm wines with an s.com forward slash mostly green life.

Then they’re going to get to a landing page. You’re going to see your handsome pictures and they’re going to see this special offer. And then they’ll get a great curated box of natural wine. I’m sure that’ll be in your show notes. Yeah.

[00:50:22] Mason: Yeah. We’ll put

[00:50:23] Jess: that in the show. We’ll definitely include it. And thank you so much for that.

I’m sure they will all enjoy it.

[00:50:29] Mason: Well, thanks so much for your time today. And we look forward to continuing to drink dry farm wines. And I look forward to increasing my daily intake to one to two bottles. See how I do

[00:50:42] Todd White of Dry Farm Wines: anyways. Thanks so much for having me. It’s a great time. I really appreciate you guys for having me on your show.

Thank you so much.

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