Taste: Mark’s notes on it are as follows: “It’s like, they start off as a nice-enough kid, a little rough and tumble. Then, they get into punk, 6 shots of mezcal and a fist full of acid. Don’t like it? Your problem!” Bright funky strawberry fruit, charred herbs, round palate—a salty, fruity, bitter bomb.
Organic Farming
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About the Wine: Organic. 50 % old vine Grenache from Sable vineyard and 50% Syrah from the Forest Floor and House Block Vineyards, both in Blewitt Springs in Kaurna country on the Fleurieu Peninsula of South Australia. The grapes are foot-stomped, then pressed off into stainless steel tank for co-ferment; it’s bottled with some RS to enable it to become a pét-nat in bottle. Unfined, unfiltered, zero SO2 added.
About the Producer: Mark and Alicia didn’t think they were going to be winemakers when they met at a hardcore show in Sydney in 2003. In fact, they didn’t even think they’d get together – it would be a year before they actually had a date, and eleven years until they got married in the NYC courthouse, “Drinking porrons of ploussard.” That was still when they “had real jobs,” and before they moved to South Australia to make some of the most out of control in control natural wine we’ve ever had.
Wine wasn’t the original goal - Mark Warner and Alicia Basa first got radicalized on produce, thinking about food provenance and where they should spend their money. Farmers markets were a straight path to the bottle shop, and before they knew it, they were working their first harvest with James Erskine of Jauma and picking up their entire lives to give winemaking a go. According to Mark, “I had kind of a shit job back in Sydney that I didn’t want. Thought this would be a polite way to get out.”
From Jauma they made a beeline to France, working with Sylvian Martinez in the Loire, visiting friends in Arbois and then to Catalonia, where they worked closely with Nuria Renom. After their return to Australia, they gravitated towards the late Taras Ochota, who taught them to eschew standard natural wine mysticism in favor of experimenting and rigorous testing. By 2016, they were harvesting on their own, just a tiny nearby vineyard, and cobbling together an idiosyncratic theory of natural wine with an almost aggressively anti-romantic viewpoint, often at odds with other no-sulfur winemakers. “We don't do the woo woo stuff, we still aren’t sure about what works all the time so we’re happy to use, like actual tools. We [in the Australian natural wine community] have all made wines that turned into yogurt, so we had to dial in to see what was fucking us.”
As of now, it’s safe to say that Borachio has dialed in, releasing fully no additive wines each year with both admirable stability and a clear vision of what they like to make and drink: salty wines made from grapes no one wants to pronounce (future vintages are going to feature a ton more sciaccarellu than one would expect), or according to the ever poetic Mark, “easy-to-drink wines without the gross bits like tannins and alcohol.” Their home territory ranges from McLaren Vale to Mount Compass on the Fleurieu peninsula of South Australia, a roughly Mediterranean climate with deep pockets of sandy soil, which Mark and Alicia regard as their secret weapon of sorts, supercharging the acid in the finished wine. High acidity, the couple asserts, is the key to no-sulfur winemaking. “We’re selling romance and dreams. Wine is an escape and for you to have that escape I need the PH to be below 3.5.”
To get PHs that low, the duo have become blending enthusiasts, utilizing chardonnay, especially, as an acid kick. “We use it to lower acid so we can fucking sleep at night.” While this sounds simple, it’s incredibly effective – and, anything that doesn’t pan out correctly, they distill or make into their house vermouth. All of this has added up to some of the most energetic natural wines in our portfolio - wines of poise and grace that still, somehow, retain the feeling of being entirely unplanned, as if a collection of atoms just decided one day to make something delicious and vibrant. On offer today are a collection of the 2021s and 2022s, which is a rare treat as their wines tend to get snagged and drank immediately – with age, the wines become “what they should be.” The 2021s, especially, have benefited from a few years of age, with some of the spikier notes replaced with gentle curves. We’ve always been truly absolutely nuts about these wines, and are super thrilled to be going direct with them and offering waaaaaaay sharper pricing so that everyone else can see what the fuss is about.
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Certified Organic. Taste: Golden yellow with hint of pink and persistent bubbles. Fresh white fruits such as apricot and white peach as well as citrus notes of lime and Valencia orange. The Pinot Noir contributes notes of brioche and toast.
