Vinyl Wine

11/23/2022

The EP is our cheeky take on an 'Extended Play' record, which usually features 4-5 songs from a musical artist or group. it's our low stakes, high rewards monthly subscription that gives you a lens into the 'music' of the moment, in the form of wine, curated by Vinyl Wine owner and wine buyer, Mike Faircloth.

choose between Side A (2 bottles) or Side AB aka the whole EP (4 bottles). make a one-time purchase, or subscribe for however long you fancy. hint: Mike's got a killer taste, so don't think twice on the whole shebang.

this would also make a great gift! wines can be picked up at the shop or delivered to anywhere in the general NYC area (except Staten Island, sry).

10/13/2022

is back 👾
And the
HARVEST SALE
ain't over
TIL WE SAY SO.

!!! ALSO !!!
NEWSFLASH ::
Our new site
IS LIVE
even if we feel
ransacked, spooked and
a li'el DEAD inside ☹️
( and isn't as easy as one would think.)

How are you today?
Thirsty? Pensive? Prodigal?
Awe. Let us help.
Go check out our new site.
FYI: It's a WORK IN PROGRESS...so don't judge.
Thanks for being patient during this transition.
And buy all these wines.

Spend $30+ get 15% OFF
In-store / online.
Use code: HARVEST
YES, we deliver across NYC.

10/03/2022

boo x 2 👽
HARVEST SALE
still
HAPPENING
until
the end of
TIME.

Jk. Until all of these
cuvées are GONE.

Spend $30+ get 15% OFF
In-store / online.
Use code: HARVEST
YES, we deliver across NYC.

Mercury is direct. Giddy up.

10/01/2022

boo 👽
HARVEST SALE
begins
TODAY
until
all of these
are
86ed.

Spend $30+ get 15% OFF
When you buy
Any of THESE wines.
In-store / online.
Use code: HARVEST.
YES, we deliver across NYC.

NO, we cannot save your soul.
But maybe wine can.

New website
is also
coming
v
soon.
Stay
tuned.

08/10/2022

If you can’t be in Italy right now, then we can at least help ease the jealousy.

04/14/2022

Michael the Explorer goes to Spain...

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03/03/2022

Thinking about turning the shop into a vinyl karaoke bar that only serves tequila and highly allocated bottles of natural wine we thrifted from the black market. Make UES cool. Who's in?

🇦🇹

02/12/2022

Newsflash:: this is whey cooler than your average gin.

created this nonpareil libation known as their in a wooden barn, in a tiny town called Bovina, nestled in the Western Catskills, in late 2021. Details are everything. And you can find all of them in our linktree where I wrote a whole little spiel about who they are and the magic they are whipping up.

This gin is the . Yes, figuratively, and also literally. They add a touch of raw honey from the bees on the distillery's property at the very end, which adds that extra dimension of symbiosis (and subtle sweetness), in addition to its rounding and softening effects that bring total equilibrium on the palate.

Other ingredients: handpicked wild foraged apples from 100+-year-old trees on 's farm; Organic Assam tea leaves from ; dried apples and pears; and a tantalizing selection of botanicals like cassia bark and angelica root, among others.

BUT THE BEST PART!? They use their OG gin as the base, which is made with 100% up-cycled (yes that cloudy water stuff that gathers at the top of greek yogurt or soft cheeses and is typically thrown out which is so sad/lame). Sustainability is their middle name. And we love everything they do.

Grab a bottle before they're gone. $51.99 and worth every penny.

02/12/2022

02/03/2022

b-sides :: Lambrusco Mantova (Italy) Pt. II

🍇 100% organically farmed (Lombardia)
* lambrusco ruberti aka lambrusco viadanese
from

🌿dry, unctuous, medium-bodied fizz /
swirls of black cherry, blueberry & bramble /
roses & olives & tendrils of charm /
pure like an unlabelled bottle of vino from the local taverna / pairs particularly well with earthy flavors & cool, capricious weather / give it a light chill / & serve in good, wholesome company.

🔎 Native yeast fermentation via "pied de cuve" in stainless steel vats / skin macerated for 4-5 days for moderate tannins / finishes fermentation in the metodo ancestral (pet nat style) with minimal sulfur added.
..Up until the 1970s, most Lambruscos were vinified dry, and many were made in the 'col fondo' style (which is basically the Italian way of saying unfiltered, natural wine with lees contact.) Off-dry and sweet Lambruscos were few and far between.

However, once exportation took off, the large Lambrusco producers began altering the wines’ innate structure (& ethos) by making uncharacteristically SWEET renditions of the red sparkling fizz to accommodate America's notorious sweet tooth.

For the next decade, sweet Lambrusco was the largest selling imported wine in the US. Until it wasn't. But its sweet tasting stigma has yet to fully dissipate, some 20 odd years later. Newsflash: DRY LAMBRUSCO EXISTS. And this one is as close to the real good stuff you'll find for a price you can't beat: $22.99.

As for country music, the 90s marked a radical departure for the genre as a whole. Pop country - like pop music - began to sound less soulful and folksy, and more manipulated/one dimensional. Kind of like what happened with sweet Lambrusco's heyday in 70s /80s era USA. Big productions, big money, and the burgeoning flame of the internet gave birth to country music's reimagined narrative. Nowadays, the amount of hybrid genres out there - like country rap or 'freak folk' - only make the case for going back & drinking/listening to the originals/classics/vitis labrusca that much stronger.

01/31/2022

b-sides ::

🍇 RUBERTI (Italy)
* Lambrusco ruberti aka Lambrusco viadanese (Lombardy)

🔎 What is Lambrusco? In a few words: a vinous anomaly. Often misunderstood & lamentably pigeonholed, it’s both a style of wine and *red*-skinned grape that is *Italian* and more often than not, made in the *frizzante* style. But for the record, Lambrusco is not always a red wine, and not always sparkling.

Its history is rich & farrrr reaching, to say the least.
In fact, rumor has it that Lambrusco is likely the oldest family of indigenous grape varieties in all of Italy—with at least 50 different known varieties in existence, ruberti being one of the rarest.

Alas, when most Americans hear ‘Lambrusco’ they think, “Ah, sweet sparkling red wine.”
And herein lies the core of confusion & the druthers of the b-side.

The story of Lambrusco reminds me a bit of country music’s post-industrial bastardisation.
Country music has its roots in folk (less a genre and more a stylistic umbrella), whose roots stem back to the African American spirituals of the 18th century, so on and so forth. What happened? In both scenarios, their reputations & origin stories were lambasted, exploited & somewhat distorted by Big Business & Big “Ag”.

If folk music “refers to a style of music universal within a community,” then Lambrusco (which derives from the Latin word labrusca, which literally means wild) is what I would consider a folk wine.

Originally vinified by the Etruscans — the ancient people of Italy — Lambrusco’s eminence as a wine of cultural posterity greatly persisted in the years leading up to the Second World War, where it
became the true “wine of the people”: a story-song tradition passed down from generation to generation.

Stay tuned for part II...

01/11/2022

From the INFINITE MIXTAPE archives ::

's Basadone grows on the rich clay & limestone laden soils of the Massara and Olmo crus in Verduno. For you nebbiolo lovers out there, the name ‘Verduno’ may ring a bell, and Barbaresco and Barolo may come to mind. While you’re not wrong, consider this an invitation to fall deeper in love with the region’s *original* treasure: piccolo. For centuries, this grape thrived in Verduno and its neighboring stretches; this grape had some serious clout back in the day; a pawn for both feudal bribery and bourgeois seduction.

Time elapsed, however, and with it, pelaverga piccolo’s prestige. Not to mention . After going nearly extinct in the second half of the 20th century, debased as a third-tier varietal, in 1972, viticulturist Gabriella Burlotto (basically) single-handedly saved it from such a travesty. She decided to plant an entire vineyard of it; and the results proved to be well worth the risk. Key words: intuition and foresight.

Today, wines made from this grape and region are known as Verduno Pelaverga and are essentially what put Verduno back on the map. Hats off to , and the numerous vignaioli they inspired to follow suit.

Practicing organic. Native yeasts. Unfined, unfiltered. Minimal SO2. Their ‘Basadone’ cuvée is an ode to the local name for ‘wild poppy’, whose double entendre, steeped in local lore, can be understood as ‘little kiss’ or ‘lady’s kisser’ for its supposed aphrodisiac properties.

🍇:: pelaverga piccolo

👃👅 :: Basadone feels like a visit from your fairy godmother. She’s elegant and whimsical and never without her bag of treats. Bright red forest fruits keep the verve alive, while traces of pink peppercorn reveal the wine’s present, but subtle tannic backbone. But, nothing shines more than the wild floral notes that Basadone is really all about: poppy.

🌿💞:: Pairs beautifully with a wide variety of foods (think antipasti) & good with a light chill, though not necessary. / 👂 (also: Sade’s Lover’s Rock) / 🍷 drink year round; age up to 3 years.

12/28/2021

Well, feels like we are heading into 2022 less optimistic than 2021 -- when it felt like nothing could be worse than 2020. Crazy that we find ourselves here, but here we are...

My plea to you today - Tuesday, December 28th - is please, please, please help us out at Vinyl Wine by shopping for New Year's Eve throughout the week (as opposed to waiting 'til the night before/day of). And even *better* if you order for delivery or pickup! You can shop online, set your order to "Pickup at the store" and we will have it bagged and ready for you by the time you arrive.

New Year's Eve is our busiest day of the year. In a normal year, it is insanely difficult to navigate the day due to the size of our shop. Last year, when we were limiting the number of customers in the store, as we are again this year, the line was down the block!

So to protect our staff, and even more unsettling with the current news - the KIDS! - we are asking you a big favor this week. If you like to shop in the store and ask questions about various wines versus shopping online, then please give me or one of my staff members a call at Vinyl and we'll be happy to converse some options beforehand... and even process your final order on the phone so it's ready for you to pickup. We know this is less than ideal, but we're confident we'll be able to operate more seamlessly because of it.

Thank you for bearing with us and continuing to support Vinyl Wine. We appreciate you, a lot.

Wishing you all a healthy and joyful end of 2021..and cheers to a new year of things hopefully getting much better!

Michael, Owner of Vinyl Wine

11/29/2021

From the INFINITE MIXTAPE archives ::

Gaioz Sopromadze's 2019 Krakhuna is like dreaming of a place that doesn’t exist; a feeling both familiar and uncanny, like a jungle in a snow globe in a pyramid made of paper mâché, and the tears of your ex lover falling from an orange sky. You drink this and suddenly you’ve lost your words.

Hyperbole is a sexy figure of speech, isn’t it?…And often something us epicureans can exercise in the world of wine and food and ersatz places like the . It’s a sapiosexual , Hyperbole, and a clever antithesis to the banality of small talk. Theatrics and goofiness aside, this is a wine that triggers you.


Georgia, the country. Georgia, the so-called ‘birthplace’ of winemaking. Georgia, where some 500+ native varietals are cultivated. This is Ancient World wine from a top shelf producer making sui generis bottles. Krakhuna can be yours for $30.99.

Gaioz was one of the first commercial producers to put Western Georgia's IMERETI back on the proverbial wine map (and if it wasn't for impeccable taste, we'd likely have no idea). His choice to farm organically, and only with grapes native to his region, thus comes at little surprise - is no exception. Grapes are crushed and added to the qvevri where they macerate on 15% of the skins for 4 months. Wild yeasts, no additions, no added sulfites, and no f'n around.

🍇:: 100% krakhuna

👃👅 :: hazy mirabelle hue that fills your nostrils with an intoxicating abandon of tropicalia…like a piña colada floating on a river in an alpine forest, drops of honey dripping from the sky (it keeps getting weirder and better at once). A dry minimal skin contact wine with myriad flavours, plus great acidity and tannins to hold it all together.

🌿💞:: pair with spice, umami, or any exotic flavours your palate fancies / 👂your fav afrofuturists like Sun Ra, Badu, or our girl aka Honey Bun / 🍷 drink now or in the near-distant future.

11/12/2021

Big News! We now deliver everywhere in NYC! Order online for curated cases and all the natty goodness!

10/19/2021

From the INFINITE MIXTAPE archives ::

's 2020 Primesautier is like spending a rapturous evening with Wednesday Addams and Patti Smith; lots of brooding, candles, poetry, sinisterly whimsy…this is a wine that evokes a genteel goth vibe, if there ever was such a thing. From Niagara-on-the-Lake, a sub appellation of Canada’s largest appellation, the Niagara Peninsula, here is a wine that screams autumn sweaters and spook.

François Morissette is a pragmatist; weaving together aspects of Fukuoka’s ‘do-nothing’ farming philosophy with Steiner’s principles of biodynamics, he’s thoughtfully concocted his own non-dogmatic recipe for achieving purity of place. He cares less about consistency and more about authenticity. For François, no two bottles are ever the same, and no two seasons ever alike. Grapes are always hand-picked and sorted, spontaneously fermented with native yeasts and bottled unfined and unfiltered.

🍇:: lemberger (aka blaüfrankisch) with a bit of cabernet franc and merlot.

👃👅 :: licorice, orange peel and underripe strawberries on the nose, followed by a thrush of damp earth. On the palate, a red carpet of spicy red fruits rolls into an echo chamber of ebullient harmonies. Synesthesia. A wine of immense proportions, fine tuned by a master in no disguise.

🌿💞:: pair with game-y meats like duck or rabbit, aged cheeses, or any exotic flavors / 👂 (also: Patti Smith & Soundwalk Collective’s 2020 PERADAM) / 🍷 drink any day of the week this autumn. It’s that good.

“The gateway to the visible must be invisible…” -

10/11/2021

Vinyl & 𝔻-𝕀 𝕎𝕀ℕ𝔼
🍇
Edition III of VINYL & shifts its gaze from print & publishing to importing & distribution. /////

Conceived in 2017 and born in 2020, .wine offers a glimpse into the future. A future built on cooperation; a future where wine sourcing is more personal and less restrictive, and where importing those special cuvées is more possible -- more direct. Building a natural wine portfolio on the one hand and an ”importing as a service" platform on the other, meet Brett Taylor and Jason Lee, co-founders of D-I Wine.

Discover the full story via the ETHOS ~ LOGOS ~ PATHOS pages. Links in bio.
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Products of the late 80s / an amalgamation of right and left brain inclinations / equally epicurious / from Rochester & Chicago / based in NYC since the early aughts / natural wine in 3 words: playful, delicious, unexpected.
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“The original concept was to support shops that do direct imports (e.g., Chambers Street) and small importers with niche portfolios (e.g., folks that use Fruit of the Vines),” which has since evolved into a two-prong approach. Momentum is gained by action. Growing their own portfolio is thus essential before the original concept can truly take off.
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Having just returned from their first sourcing trip in France, the mood is bright and the future is promising. Expect more delectable wines from Alsace, the Jura and the Languedoc before the end of the year.
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ᵀᴴᴵᴿˢᵀʸ? Vinyl & D-I Wine 3-pack available now. / $58 + tax / A portion of proceeds from all packs will go to benefit , a NY-based collective composed of local chefs and food-loving visionaries who are working to create an intersectional, community-based, food-centered space focused on providing resources, nourishment, and support for q***r, Black, trans, and/or Indigenous communities of color in New York City." / & finally, sign up for our newsletter to get Vinyl & ///// straight to your inbox.
~
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09/27/2021

🍇 PAÍS (Chile) Pt. II
..Before país became país, it was known as listán prieto, (born in the Castilla-La Mancha region of Spain), and then listán negro (when it moved to Spain's Canary Islands off the coast of Africa). In the early 1500s, a fleet of Spanish missionaries and conquistadors traveled across the Atlantic, a mass of listán negro seeds in tow, and a ruthless vision of continental colonialization. In 1524, Cortez arrived in Mexico and immediately ordered his settlers to spread 1,000 ft of vines per 100 native Indians. The seeds were spread northbound from Mexico City, towards Querétaro, Guanajuato, and San Luis Potosi where they were immediately cultivated by missionaries and rebranded as the 'misión' grape. These vines marked the first European grapes to be planted in the New World.

Around the same time, Spanish conquistadors were making their way down to South America. Entrypoint: Chile’s influential port city of Concepción. And thus set afoot the beginnings of viticulture in South America, with listán prieto, who later became known as país (and collectively in South America as 'creole') as its progenitor. To this day, the Itata River Valley remains one of the world’s largest areas of ungrafted vines, with some país vines up to 300 years old.

In the mid-2000s, after years of debasement and exploitation, país was redeemed. And of all possible people, its revival is most credited to a European: Louis-Antoine Luyt, a French somm turned enologist residing in Chile. A full ironic circle, to say the least. Many other Chilean producers quickly followed suit, namely Roberto Henriquez (influential winemaker in Chile’s southern cool climate Bío-Bío region) and Manuel Moraga of Cacique Maravilla.

Pipeño is essentially Chilean's version of natural 'glou glou', though with a slight twist. Red or white grapes are destemmed then pressed and left to ferment on their skins before ageing in a raulí barrel, American or French oak won't do.

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