Dry Farm Wines - Todd White - Pt. 1

Welcome to The Best 5 Minute Wine Podcast. I’m your host Forrest Kelly from the seed to the glass. Wine has a past. Our aim at The Best 5 Minute Wine Podcast is to look for adventure at wineries around the globe. After all grape minds think alike. Let’s start the adventure. We go on a different journey. We don’t drop into a specific winery.

We are speaking with Todd White, founder, and CEO of Dry Farm Wines.

Yes. Dryfarmwines.com. The only health-focused natural wine club in the world. We’ll get into the intricacies a little bit later. But first, let’s get where the inspiration came from.

Well, Dry Farm Wines was not intended to be a business in the beginning. So I do remember a specific inspiration that was a specific wine like a Pinot Noir from Mosel, Germany, that I was drinking at Zuni Cafe in San Francisco. That led me to the exceptionally inspired by natural wines. So I wasn’t thinking of Dry Farm Wines as a business at that time. I was just had discovered quite by accident the remarkable taste and texture of natural wines. And as a result, that kind of started me down the path of investigating natural wines and at a deeper level, which eventually led to the business.

Okay. Before your mind gets too far down the road of traditional wine thinking.

The first thought from Todd is we think of ourselves as a health food company, not as a wine club. This is a health food company first. So the second point is less than one-tenth of one percent of wines in the world are naturally grown and produced.

Why do you let your mind marinate around those two thoughts? Todd continues to educate us on the philosophy of the company.

Well, I mean, nobody. We created the category of healthy wines and sort of branded, as we think of ourselves as a health food company, not as a wine club. So we just happened to sell wine, have healthy food. So no one had really captured lab testing and quantifying wine around health quantifications. So we were the first to do it. Really were the only one to do it even today. As a result, when we started educating people on what’s really in commercial wines, not just organic wines. So organic is a farming method. You can have organic wines, but they’re not natural. Natural wine is a very specific protocol and category. And it’s very rare. Less than one-tenth of one percent of wines in the world are naturally grown and produced. So natural wine is a very specific category that has a very clear and specific understanding around the world for people who are in the natural wine business. We just happen to be in the right place at the right time in trying to solve a problem from ourselves. I wanted to drink healthier, lower alcohol wines that were sugar-free and met other criteria that were of interest to me. It turns out that the same concept was of interest to a lot of other wine drinkers. And so it’s always been my feeling that regular wine drinkers, meaning that people who drink daily as I do, people who drink wine every evening, most of them think they probably drink too much. Right. And so offering them a lower alcohol alternative that’s also natural and sugar-free, which is of interest to our customers. There just wasn’t any offer out there in the marketplace that did so, combining that with a long public speaking television appearances. You know, Podcasts that have aired to millions of people and our business just grew very rapidly. And also, as people tasted the wines, you know, they taste better. And so that’s sort of what led to us becoming one of the fastest-growing private companies in the United States. That concludes Episode 1 of our conversation with CEO and founder Todd White of Dry Farm Wines in our next episode.

There are 76 additives approved by the FDA for the use and winemaking, and not all of them are good for you. We’ll get into that next time. But first, it’s time. Boys and girls for our listener voicemail. Hi, this is Amber from Chicago. My question is, what’s the difference between organic wine and regular wine? I’m curious to know if it’s chemicals and is there any kind of regulation around it? What do I need to know? Looking forward to hearing your answer. Well, Amber, it’s a very complex question. Organic wine is made from grapes that have been grown without the use of artificial or synthetic chemicals such as herbicides and pesticides. But by saying it’s organic doesn’t necessarily mean that it doesn’t have additives. And as we learned earlier from Todd, just because it says organic doesn’t make it the best wine.

Thank you for listening. I’m Forrest Kelly. This episode of the Best 5 Minute Wine podcast was produced by IHSYM. If you like the show tell your friends and pets and subscribe. Until next time, pour the wine and ponder your next adventure.

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