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• Feiring, Alice

In the fall of 2008, Alice Feiring, wine and travel columnist, author, and leading advocate for natural wines (made with nothing but crushed bunches of fruit) answered a dare to try her hand at natural wine making. That experience is entertainingly told with caustic wit in Naked Wine.

Naked wine is wine stripped down to its basics--wine as it was meant to be: wholesome, exciting, provocative, living, sensual and pure. Naked, or natural, wine is the opposite of most California wines today. (Alice calls them, “over-ripe, over-manipulated and over-blown.”) and makes her case that good (and possibly great) wine can be made in the Golden State, if only they would stop using additives and adjuncts in the process.

The word “naked” in the title refers also to the author’s skin-on-skin contact with the wine she helped make. She weaves her adventure, sometimes calm, sometimes wild, into this new (but centuries-old) world of natural wine, the most powerful movement rocking today’s wine world.