The Raw Wine artisan wine fair was held on October 27-28. It was the New York City stop on a 2019 tour that has taken and will take the fair to Los Angeles, Miami, Montreal and Berlin.
The Fair showcased low intervention, organic, biodynamic and natural wine growers and makers and afforded the opportunity for consumers and members of the trade to sample the wines and to speak to the people involved.
The mission statement of the fair states that “Raw Wine celebrates wines with emotion. Wines that have a humanlike, or living presence. They are also wines that are an authentic expression of a place”.
The Fair was held at the Knockdown Center located at 52-19 Flushing Avenue in Maspeth, Queens. This is a new venue for the event and the first time I have been to this venue. It’s a former factory and is a huge, brick fortress that’s almost a football field long that on the Sunday afternoon I attended, was crammed with tables of wineries pouring their wines. There were a massive selection of wines to try.
There were representatives of wine producing countries from the old and the new world including the United States, Italy, France, Spain, Portugal, Germany, Austria, Hungary, Greece, Georgia, Australia and Chile.
For the most part these are small production wineries with labels that I didn’t recognize with the exception of a couple of California producers. All styles of wine were represented including still, sparkling, pet-nats and orange wines. There was also a small selection of beer, cider and spirits.
These are niche wines that have gained more traction the last several years. According to BeverageDaily.com, the organic wine market represents 3.6% of global consumption but that number has doubled in the last five years. I can say that they have improved much for these types of wine from decades past. Still, many of the wines had the pungent aromas that these wines are known to have.
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