Winemaker Ian Thorsen-McCarthy, owner of Behemoth Farm Winery in upstate New York, distilled his first spirit in 2012, when he was living in the Bay Area. At that point, he’d spent the previous three years in the cocktail world—in Nebraska and then at San Francisco’s Rich Table and Sharpshooter—and in natural wine, at Oakland’s Ordinaire. During his time traversing both worlds, he noticed a disconnect between the largely industrial products he was mixing into cocktails and the wines he was selling. Learning how to distill began as a way of making really specific vermouths to mix into cocktails, but quickly grew into something more.
Thorsen-McCarthy taught himself to make his own fruit-based eaux de vie by poring over old books, talking to distillers and experimenting, using his knowledge of the principles of natural wine as a guide. This meant insisting on sustainable farming and sourcing, native yeast fermentations and eschewing the use of chemical coloring and stabilizers. He’s blunt about what he aligned himself in opposition to: “The vast majority of alcohol we drink is garbage [made] from conventional, often GMO, crops, harvested and distilled by unthinking machines, adulterated by artificial colors, flavors and gobs of sugar.”
For years, Thorsen-McCarthy had been seeking out—online and in person—like-minded people, including Thad Vogler, the founder of San Francisco’s Bar Agricole and a longtime proponent of spirits produced with a focus on place and transparency. Aside from Vogler and the ultrageeky peers he’d met on message boards, he didn’t have a community of people looking to understand what “natural” might mean in the context of distillation. But in 2018, a routine Google search landed him on a document entitled The Natural Booze Manifesto. He became the first distiller in North America to sign it.
The Natural Booze Manifesto is a 12-point document written and released that same year by Theresa M. Bullmann and her colleagues at the Languedoc-based distilling collective, L’Atelier du Bouilleur. They wrote the manifesto as a convocational decree, of sorts; it aims to gather distillers who practice the same philosophy of spirit-making and to connect with other sympathetic members of the beverage industry. She emphasizes this element of connection over any need to force a set of dogmatic restrictions on producers, though. “I’m not there to control anyone,” says Bullmann. “I’m just there to ask questions and put people in contact.”
“At its core, the [manifesto’s authors] are raging against hyperindustrialization being pushed up against them.”
As much as people like to say that natural wine is undefined, everyone can agree on certain tenets: sustainable farming, human-scale production, native yeast fermentation and no chemical or mechanical manipulation (e.g., the addition of Mega Purple or the use of reverse osmosis). Tons of ink has been spilled on the subject of natural wine and what makes it “natural,” but until recently, that wasn’t the case for spirits. The world of spirits has had no bursting natty movement, no back-to-the-land rallying cry and no list of criteria you could see as an analogue to natural wine’s—until 2018, at least.
The manifesto may still be nearly unheard of outside arcane circles in rural Europe, but it’s quietly influential. Alsatian biodynamic winemaking icon and community builder Christian Binner has signed it. If you’re lucky, you can snag one of his vintage-dated bottles of aged eaux de vie made from fruits like cherry, mirabelle plums and gewürztraminer grapes. In southwest France, the influential distiller and winemaker Laurent Cazottes has signed, too. Maybe you’ve had a glass of one of his wines, made from local grapes like mauzac blanc, prunelart and duras, or tasted his culty tomato liqueur.
There are now dozens of examples of natural winemakers—from Vincent Marie (of No Control fame) to Julien Pineau in the Loire—who have added distillates to their offerings. Reading the Natural Booze Manifesto, it’s clear why. It could easily double as a list of natural wine criteria: quality farming (check), native yeast fermentation (check), unfined and unfiltered (check). Of course, alongside these well-understood (at least to a wine person) tenets are the addition of distillation-specific charges, like: “We distill in manually operated copper stills”; “We do not intervene in the mash”; and “We pay attention to the quality of our diluting water.”
All of these points stand in direct response to the status quo of the spirits industry, which is full of producers who hide their bad farming practices, reliance on chemical additives and stabilizers, and industrial-scale production behind quaint branding. “At its core, the [manifesto’s authors] are raging against hyperindustrialization being pushed up against them,” says Jahdé Marley, the spirits portfolio manager for Zev Rovine Selections, a natural wine importer.
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Marley uses the Natural Booze Manifesto as a tool to help natural wine lovers connect with spirits. To her portfolio she’s added the spirits of L’Atelier du Bouilleur, authors of the manifesto. They make distillates from ingredients that grow in their Mediterranean climate; among the spirits is Flouve, a grape eau de vie infused with a distinctive local herb of the same name that smells like freshly cut hay. Marley also works with Freimeisterkollektiv, a German producer that specializes in making transparently created spirits and liqueurs for mixing into cocktails, and Modern Ancient, a newer project by Workhorse’s Rob Easter that focuses on American heirloom grains. In addition to the work of Marley, there are other importers, like Nicolas Palazzi of PM Spirits and Charles Neal of Charles Neal Selections, who have been beating the drum for spirits driven by these principles for decades. And other organizations, like Tequila Matchmaker, are simultaneously working to bring greater transparency to spirits.
It’s important to note that the concept of natural spirits is neither new nor limited to North America and Europe. You’ll find these spirits produced from singular, centuries-old traditions of distillation all over the globe. Consider Michoacán, Mexico’s Ariana Buendia, who makes agave distillate out of a base that includes the uncommon but very traditional addition of pulque, or the Bethlehem-based arak distiller Muaddi, whose still is based on ancient drawings of Levantine designs. What is new is the gradual formation of a global community around these spirits that mirrors the early rumblings of revolution in wine that began over two decades ago, and has resulted in a reorganization of how we drink. Bullman’s Natural Booze Manifesto seems to understand that the moment may have finally arrived for spirits, too.
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