On November 13th I attended the fall edition of the Raw Wine Festival. The festival, which was also held in London and Berlin as well as New York City, showcases wines from around the world made with few, if any additives.

Their mission statement is: “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 event was held at the Knockdown Center at 52-19 Flushing Avenue in Maspeth, Queens. It’s a music venue in an over 100-year-old brick building that was once a glass factory and a door factory.

This venue is huge, pretty much like a brick airplane hangar. It made for a experience different from the Spring edition of the festival when they hosted the event in Bushwick. That event was mobbed with most tables three deep to get to the pourer. This place was so huge overcrowding wasn’t an issue this time around.

Natural wines are a niche market that has grown tremendously in the last few years. At this event there were over 200 wines from all the major wine producing countries of the world and a few from outlier countries such as Georgia, Slovakia, Macedonia and Switzerland. The United States was represented with a handful of wineries from California, Washington, Oregon and New York with the largest showing of wines from France and Italy. All types of wine were poured with still, sparking, red, white, rose and pet-nats.