Summer drinks heading back to nature
Wild Things fest gives city taste of ‘natural’ wine, beer and cider
Looks as if Toronto’s in for some pretty wild times this summer.
Well, for one day, at least, with the launch of the Wild Things Festival on June 9 that celebrates low-intervention wine, funky beer and hazy cider at Propeller Coffee Co., 50 Wade Ave. in the Junction Triangle.
This inaugural event is a test run that co-founders Tara and Crystal Luxmore (a.k.a. the Beer Sisters), Erica Campbell (Society of Beer Drinking Ladies) and sommelier Zinta Steprans are hoping becomes a larger, annual event. So far, all signs point to more of this in the future, given that a couple of hundred Torontonians have already shown an eagerness to walk on the wild side, as tickets are selling fast.
Once there, novelty-seekers will be able to sample natural and low-intervention wines including Southbrook’s famous orange wine, wild-fermented craft ciders from outfits such as Guelph’s Revel Cider and funk-forward beers from Rouge River, Little Beasts and other local brewers.
What is it that defines all these drinks as wild? Well, it’s different in each category, but what they share in common is an interest in methods such as spontaneous fermentation and indigenous yeasts, which produce different flavour profiles — sometimes not even the flavour the brewers or winemakers intended.
“I’ve been thinking about it for a while and I feel that wild fermentation is really having a moment in alcohol,” Crystal Luxmore says. “I think it’s kind of a flavour profile for alcohol that we haven’t seen in North America in a long time. I love beer, personally, but what’s really interesting to me was that wild fermentation’s moment cuts across categories — wine, cider and beer.”
Until recently, most modern alcohol producers — especially the large ones — have exercised tight controls over the fermentation process, the stage in which the flavour is established. Across categories, brewers and winemakers have developed special proprietary yeasts that shape flavour and ensure consistency.
“As soon as you add yeast, you’re controlling the flavour profile,” says Steprans, who works with the Living Vine, a small agency that specializes in natural, organic and biodynamic wines. “And winemakers have a sense of what they’re adding, be it red cherry or raspberry or more fruit. But if you use the yeast that’s already on the grape skins, you get more complex flavour profiles. And you never really know what’s going to happen.”
Most big alcohol producers in the second half of the 20th century determined that the best way to keep customers coming back was to make sure every bottle tasted exactly like the last one. Consistency (maintained, largely, through yeast and aging techniques) was the top priority for big brewers and winemakers. Consumers, however, have radically changed over the past decade or two. Craft beer drinkers and natural wine lovers no longer care if they get the same taste over and over again. Overall, consumers are more adventurous now, typically seeking out variety and novelty. In response to this demand, we’ve seen the rise of “wild” ciders, natural wines and funky beers.
Luxmore thought it would be interesting to use this synchronicity to bring wine, beer and cider lovers together, noting that there are a lot of events and festivals devoted to wine or beer, but few that try to cross-pollinate between categories. We might tend to think beer geeks and wine snobs have little in common, but the Wild Things Fest is trying to change that, given that the flavour profile of the moment cuts across several categories.
Actually, there are major differences among the methods used to produce natural wine and many of the funkier beers and ciders. Funky beer, for example, is often made by buying specific yeasts or bacteria and deliberately infecting the beer. Low-intervention wine is made according to an opposing philosophy, namely, just letting the wine be what it wants to be. And the range of flavours is also quite different, since you might sample a bitter-herbal orange wine, a funky cider with a barnyard finish and a super-tart beer all under the umbrella of “wild” drinks. But there is a unifying theme, Luxmore says.
Across all of them, you taste a little bit of earthiness or a bit of a rustic feel,” Luxmore says about how to define this new “wild” category.
“More importantly, you get a taste of how everything had been fermented before you could pick whatever yeast you wanted,” referring to the fact that commercially available yeast really only became a thing in the 20th century and, before that, wine and beer-makers just hoped for something good in the air, soil or on the skins. “So it’s kind of like a taste of history.”
Given its popularity, it looks as if it’s the taste of the future. More wild times are coming to a bar top and kitchen party near you.