[Bonus Episode] The Buzz on Natural Wine with Todd White

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It's amazing to me that this should be a thing like that. It even needs to be a discussion.

You know, it's shocking but the wine industry has spent millions of dollars to keep and lobby money in Washington D.C. to keep keep contents labeling off of wine bottles. Because these 76 additives, they don't want you to know what's really in it. They also don't want you to have nutritional information on it. So they don't want you to know how much sugar is in it.

Hey it's JJ and welcome to Ask the Health Expert. But this isn't just any old Ask.

The Health Expert session.

This is your bonus session. Yes, it's the weekend and because it's the weekend, we are gonna take some time with an amazing expert. So be on the lookout for these Saturday Ask the Health Expert bonus sessions where we're gonna go deep into an amazing subject with an incredible expert to give you actionable items that you can put into your life.

So one of the biggest questions that I get asked is can I drink wine on the virgin diet? Can I drink wine on the sugar impact diet? And the answer is it depends. It depends on the type of wine you're drinking. And if it's one specific type that's natural wines, then the answer is yes. So what the heck are natural wines and how do you know if you're getting them? Well, I brought my buddy Todd White, the founder of Dry Farm Wines, Wine that I drink. And you can learn more by the way@jjvirgin.com dry farmwines so let me tell.

You a little bit about Todd.

He is a self described biohacker who practices daily meditation, Wim Hof breathing, cold thermogenesis, a ketogenic diet and daily 22 hour intermittent fasting. He speaks all over on ketogenic lifestyle meditation and the Dry Farm Wines unique company culture. His entire team gathers each morning for meditation and gratitude practice. And Todd, he is just amazing. I've now known him for gosh, six, seven years I think and he sponsors our mindshare summit event each year. Brings all the wine in for all of our doctors and health experts. It's the only wine that we support as a company. But he's really educated me and turned me around. I grew up right outside of. I grew up in Northern California, like, 45 minutes from the wine country. And what I discovered when I was a teenager was that they didn't card. So we used to skip out on school and go wine tasting. And I grew up loving the big caps of the Napa Valley. And when I met Todd, I was like, I like the big caps. And he really educated me on creating a new palate, really learning to love wines that were a lot better for. For me. And that is what you're going to learn today is what the heck's natural wine? Why is it the only one that you should be drinking? And how to know what you're getting out there. So I'm super excited to have Todd White back on the show. This is a, like, really interesting session. If you're a wine drinker, you will want to listen up. And you also want to make sure that you become a member of Dry Farm wine club. So the best club that you can be in.

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All right, so, Todd White, welcome back to the show. My favorite wine guy of all time.

Excited to be here and talk about wine.

Oh, my gosh. I know you said, are we talking about wine? I'm kind of like, what else would we talk about? However, there's lots of things that we could talk about with you. I always love my time with you, and I need another Palm Springs trip with you guys. That was spectacular.

A lot of fun.

Yes.

I was at Palm Springs this weekend, actually.

Were you?

I just got back yesterday.

We're going in August, which is always the best time to go to Palm Springs.

Yeah, exactly. I can't think of a hotter time to be in Palm Springs, but we had an executive retreat in Palm Desert, and then I went over to Palm Springs and stayed a couple days with friends.

Nice. All right, well, let's dive into all things wine because I get so many questions and just kind of full disclosure. When I first met Todd and he started telling me about these wines, I was a California wine snob, and I was not a believer. And I always loved these big reds. And I was like, I drink wine, you know, Opus One, Cab, blah, blah, blah, blah. And Todd's just kind of looking at me. Okay. And I did the test. And what was interesting was the difference between drinking a couple glasses of California wine and a couple glasses of dry farm was the difference between being able to sleep, wake up feeling great, not having any belly bloat. Like, the difference was so extreme that now I rarely ever drink California wine because I know it's going to hurt me the next day. So I would just love to dive in, Todd, and go, I mean, what the heck is happening here? Like, what's.

What.

What is it with. With normal wine as opposed to what dry farm wine is that's causing all of this pain and suffering?

Yeah, I don't want to, like, pick on California in particular.

Well, because it's not just California, right?

No, it's not California. It's a global problem. And it really has to do with two things. The commercialization of. Of the wine industry from what was at one time, you know, really dominated by small family farms around the World, which has now been consolidated into a massive global conglomerate of only a handful of companies. So that's, that's, that's the primary driver. But you know, in addition to that, and it's important to consider, and particularly when you talk about places like Napa or Bordeaux, or you talk about places where cult wines are produced and then the reverberating effect that that has on other wine styles. So, you know, Robert Parker, who was the predominant wine critic in history, but has been the most influential wine critic in the last 50 years and the biggest in history, created the 100 point win ratings scale. And so wine is sold through, I just give you this, a little bit of history so that you understand sort of what happened. So wine is sold in one of three ways. It's sold by story or pedigree. It's sold by the label. You like the label because nobody knows what's in the bottle. And then, or it's sold through ratings. So you depend on an expert to tell you what to like. Right, Supposed expert. But since everybody's palate's different then, and then, and then aside from that, nobody before we came along was talking about how healthy or unhealthy wines were. That's a whole different topic we can get into. But just so this, this wine critic had a very heavy, big palate. He's a large man. You know, he's, he just had a, you know, fan of Coca Cola. He just has sort of a, a large, deep, rich palate. And so, but his ratings sold wines like no one else. And so if you could achieve a rating with him, say above 90 points on this 100 point scale, then it was very easy to sell your wines because again, when you walk into a bottle shop or the grocery store, since you don't know anything about wine, don't know anything about what's really in the bottle, you're either going to look at the, the label or you know, a name from its story or pedigree, or you've seen a magazine ad or you depend on a neck hanger. That's the thing that hangs around the neck of the bottle that tells you what the ratings are.

Yeah. And you know what I'm just thinking here, Todd? I'm thinking like, because what you're saying is absolutely true. You look at star ratings today, right? But the difference with star ratings is it's a whole lot of people giving their opinion coming to an average, not one person, not one person who has specific tastes. And this is based on a specific taste. Not like I'M assuming the rating wasn't based on all sorts of different factors.

Well, the problem with the taste. The problem with the taste that he prefers, and that became the standard quote, style. The problem with the taste is how you get to the taste. And how you get to the taste produces a wine that has certain characteristics. Heavy oak, heavy new oak, long extractions, which result in high histamines and tyramine and other histamine byproducts. And so or. And longer hang time on the fruit, which produces a higher sugar and a richer fruit at picking. And why is that important? Because that affects the overall taste and also the sugar byproducts and also the alcohol. So the higher the sugar at the time of picking, the higher the alcohol will be at the time that the fermentation completes. So higher alcohol, which alcohol is surprising to people who see me as the wine guy who's trying to sell wine. But when I say that alcohol is a dangerous neurotoxin. And so. And it makes us feel bad, ultimately. And so just lowering down the alcohol in wine has a tremendous impact on how you feel. And commercial wines have done just the opposite. Commercial wines have increased steadily over the last 30 years in alcohol, tipping nearly 15% on average in American wines. And that's because alcohol makes a bold wine, it makes a rich wine, it makes a big wine, it makes a dense wine. Which is why, as you know, our wines taste very different from the wines that you previously drank. Right. Which are richer. But you can also tell the difference in how you feel. If I drink those wines that you described you used to drink, I get an amazing immediate headache, right. Because of the extraction levels, the alcohol. And most importantly for me, I'm sensitive to new wood tannins and other byproducts coming off of new wood. And so if I drink wine that has heavy wood influence, it'll immediately give me a headache. And many other people as well, we don't know exactly why, nobody studied it, but it's a common problem, particularly for women. And so that's. So this winemaking style became the de facto standard now in many parts of Europe, Not from an intentional plan to make healthier or better wine, but in many parts of Europe, they couldn't afford to buy new oak, right? New oak barrels are about $1,000 each. And so these small family farms cannot afford to buy new oak. Therefore, they never used it. Right? And so just by sort of accident, not intention, you know, from the lack of. As many things are, the less is more from the lack of these sort of interventions, we end up with a healthier product that not only tastes better, but makes you feel better. Of course, you do know that there's. That, you know, there is that transition in your palate when you're accustomed to drinking these very heavy, dark, big, juicy, high alcohol red. And then you drink a lighter, low alcohol red. You're like, oh, this doesn't have as much flavor as my old wine. Well, that flavor got there in an unnatural way. Right. Which is what makes you feel bad because it's not natural.

So the alcohol content. Let's unpack that. So you said that the wines now have up to 15%.

Well, no, they can be higher than 15 on average. U.S. wines are right at 15% on average. They can be. They can. They can be higher.

Okay, that's. So that's. One we should look for on the label. Now, obviously, the easiest thing is just drink dry farm wines. Like, that's our. Like we just drink dry farm wines.

We don't sell anything over 12 and a half, and we sell wines as low as 7%. And most of the wines I drink today are between 7 and 9%.

Yeah, because you're. The big challenge we have right now is when we go to a restaurant and we can't bring a bottle to the farm with us, we're in trouble. Because then it's like, how do you even know what you're getting?

You know, you don't. And it, you know, basically the best you can do if you're in a restaurant, you know, the best you can do is drink Europe. Right. So they're going to have less additives. Generally Speaking, there are 56 additives approved by the EU for the use in winemaking. There's 76 additives approved by the FDA for the use in winemaking. Generally speaking. Generally speaking, you're going to have fewer additives, but it depends on where in Europe you are. So, you know, I tend to default if I'm going to drink wine in a restaurant. I tend to default to colder regions. Austria, Germany, central France. You're going to find, in colder regions, you're going to find lower alcohol levels because the fruit is not going to get as ripe. And so the one thing I normally do, if I'm in a restaurant with any kind of a decent wine list, then I'd ask the wine director if it does. If it. If it's like, you know, if it's a. If it's a commercial wine list, like at a, you know, an Applebee's or something like that. I Mean, you're not going, oh my.

God, we're not going to drink wine.

You're not going to. I don't, that's a bad example. I don't know, there are nicer restaurants or, you know, even at Fleming's, you're going to have a primarily, you're going to have primarily a California focused list because they're from California and so on and so forth. But the Fleming's is a great example. You're likely not to find any low alcohol wine on Fleming's list. But if you're at a little bit bigger, more interesting list, you can ask the wine director, do you have any alcohol, do you have any lower alcohol wines in the 12% range? So, and the reason I say that is when you go to a lower alcohol wine, you're also going to get a winemaking style that is going to be less intervention.

By less intervention, you, less additives, people.

Who make less additives, less manipulation, lower oak or to no oak, you're going to have just, just less, fewer interventions. For whatever reason, people who make lower alcohol wines make a more natural wine. And so it just, it's just generally the rule, even if they're not natural, hating to use that word, more natural. The problem with commercial wines is with all these additives, manipulations and industrial farming is that they're really factory products. And so, so, so, and then you got the wine making style that we've already talked about. Those are the problems with, with, with these wines. And so you, when you find a lower alcohol wine, they're just generally fewer interventions. And you know, doesn't mean it's natural and natural wines. All the dry farm wine sells. So, you know, you hear a lot of marketing buzz recently about clean wines, right? And so there's been these companies that largely have tried to copy us and you know, sort of, well, you really.

You regally created an industry.

It's true.

I mean, it's so cool.

It isn't if you could believe that within wine we created a new category. Wine is one of the oldest products in the world and it's certainly very crowded and very competitive. But we created a new category. A few people have followed that with things they call clean wines. The problem is I don't know what clean wine is. I don't know what that means. I do know what a natural wine is.

Well, what does a natural wine mean? And is this like, is there actually any kind of certification or is it just what you're calling it? Can anyone call their wine a natural wine?

No, they can't. They could, but they wouldn't. It just doesn't happen. This natural wine community is very small and sort of self policing, if you will. There's dry farm wines, has a certification. So for our wines, we do have a certification that is over and above just natural, but the foundation is natural. And I'll tell you what a natural wine is. Now there's no international certification for natural wine. France did announce in 2020 that they would be the first country in 2022 to certify natural wine. And this is a great step in the right direction because now we have a country. And Europe is also talking about label transparency. So Europe is talking about 2023 or 2024 requiring contents labeling on wine bottles. And we're a huge advocate of that because we think you should know what you're drinking.

It's amazing to me that this should be a thing like that even needs to be a discussion.

You know, it's shocking, but the wine industry has spent millions of dollars to keep and lobby Money in Washington D.C. to keep contents labeling off of wine bottles. Because these 76 additives, they don't want you to know what's really in it. They also don't want you to have nutritional information on it. So they don't want you to know how much sugar is in it and how many carbs are in it. This is not good for the business because none of it's favorable news.

I don't understand. Every other beverage is required to do that.

It's required. Wine is the only major food product that is not required to have a contents label, not required to have nutritional information.

And the sugar basically goes along with the alcohol content, is that correct?

Well, it's a little technical, yes and no. It does at the time of harvest. So the higher the sugar in the berry, the higher the sugar in the fruit at the time of the harvest, the higher the corresponding alcohol will be be. More sugar equals more work for the yeast to do. In eating the sugar, the more sugar there is to eat, the more alcohol it creates. And so just imagine a little Pac man, which is like the yeast. And the yeast is eating sugar, that's its food source. And the byproduct of that in wine is ethyl alcohol and carbon dioxide. So that's how wine is made. The more sugar there is to eat, then the higher the resulting alcohol becomes.

So the riper the fruit, the sugary, the more sugary the wine?

No, not exactly. Now, how wine becomes sugary or how sugar gets in wine, it's not added. It's a winemaking style where the winemaker. There's a little device that goes in the wine tank during fermentation that tells the winemaker exactly how much sugar is left in the juice, how much sugar is remaining that the yeast hasn't eaten. Now, if the yeast is allowed to eat all available sugar, as is in the case in dry farm wines, then you have a sugar free wine. And some commercial wines are sugar free. You just don't know which ones. But as a winemaking style, this little device tells the winemaker exactly how much sugar is left in the wine. So when a desired amount of sugar is left in the wine, depending upon the style of the winemaker, how much sugar he wants to leave behind, he pours sulfur dioxide in the wine and kills the yeast before it completes the fermentation and before the yeast eats all the available sugar, leaving residual sugar behind in the wine. That's how sugar gets in wine. It's not added.

So isn't that on the label, though? Residual sugars?

No.

No. So there is no way to know this.

The only way to know is if you buy wine from us because we do lab testing on every wine and then, you know, we, all of our wines are sugar free and we reject natural wines all the time because they contain sugar.

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All right, so let's go back to natural wines.

This.

It's like. You know what's so crazy, Todd, is how I've had so many, so many conversations with you, and every time I'm like, I get more stuff.

Well, it's confusing because the term natural is confusing using the word natural wine. See, when natural wine decided to call itself natural wine, they didn't think about all the bastardization of the word natural in American food products. See, so you've got all these, you've got all these food products in the health food community as well, calling themselves natural because they're not organic. But they want to suggest that they're organic by calling themselves natural or sustainable. So they'll say sustainable or natural. That's common in the food market and it's perfectly legal. They're using the word natural because they're not organic and they're trying to fool consumers. Well, natural wine is always organic. So in order to be considered a natural wine, it must be formed, farmed organically or biodynamic. And biodynamic farming is a prescriptive, advanced form of organic farming. So if it's a natural wine, and again, there's no certification for that, but if there's a natural wine, it's organic or biodynamically grown. Number two, there are only three characteristics to a natural wine and they're very rare. One is the farming. Number two is that the wine is fermented using wild native yeast that's indigenous to the vineyard where the grape was grown. So on every grape berry in the world, no matter where it's grown or how it's grown, every grape berry in the world has yeast on the skin of the grape. It's a white waxy film at the time of harvest. In commercial wines, they kill that yeast. They do that because these wild indigenous yeasts are too unstable. They're difficult to work with. You can't make wine in very high volume and you can't make wine at very high alcohol because the alcohol will kill the native yeast. Instead, what they do is kill the native yeast with sulfur dioxide, and then they inoculate the juice with a genetically modified commercial lab grown yeast, which is modified.

Oh, my gosh.

Which is modified to be sturdy, easy to work with. You can make large quantities of wine with it. It's very predictable. There's nothing wild and fragile about it. It's a very predictable, lab produced product and it'll withstand a high alcohol environment. It can also be purchased in flavor profiles. Now, what do I mean by that? Well, if you grow a grape in Central California in this industrial, terrible farming environment, and you want to produce a wine that tastes like it's from Italy, they have as yeast for that. Just like when you make sourdough bread or you make any kind of, you know, the yeast imparts flavors. This fermented yeast imparts. You know, they impart different flavors. Well, the same thing for these lab yeast, they modify them to impart flavor profiles. Right. So this is all really science and chemistry, Right. In a factory. And so you know that. So that's. So a natural wine, number three, is additive free. So it's not been manipulated in any way with additives or chemicals or toxins.

What are some of the additives like the most common ones that are added to wines?

Well, I mean, the most common is sulfur Dioxide. That's the single most common because it's used by virtually everyone. Because it sterilizes and preserves wine. That's the most common. We don't know if it's harmful or not. It's been used by. It's been used since the Romans to preserve wine, probably. Okay. But, you know, some of the others. The most toxic one is called dimethyl dicarbonate. And it's. It's used to treat the common. The most common bacterial defect in wine called Bretta mice, which produces the taste and smell of kind of a barnyard sort of. It can have a number of different aromatic and flavor profiles. The most common one is sort of barnyardy kind of smell. And it's considered a technical fault in wine. It's also the most common technical fault. There is a chemical produced in California under the brand name valkyrin, but it's dimethyl dicarbonate. And if you look at the wine additives approved by the fda, you won't see valkyrin. You'll see dimethyl dicarbonate. And if you look dimethyl dicarbonate up on Wikipedia, you'll see that its primary hazard is that it's toxic. How.

How is this going on? Like, how?

Well, because nobody knows about it. And. And so it's because no one knows, and nobody knew before we. I didn't even know. I lived in the heart of the Napa Valley for 22 years, and I didn't know anything about this. I made wine in Napa in 2005. I don't know anything about this. People in Napa don't talk about it.

Wow.

People in the industry don't talk about it. You know, it's. It's just. It's a chemical that's used to fix a problem, right? You're making wine, it has this problem. You buy this chemical, you fix it, right? Nobody really talks about it. And, and so. And it's approved by the government, right? And so it's. It's. I'm telling you, I, you know, we. I talk to people all the time in the industry here. They don't know anything about what I'm talking about. A defoaming agent is another, you know, is another nasty character. So see, when you move wine from one tank to the other, so you have to. You have to move wine from tank to tank somewhat frequently, or from barrel to barrel or tank to tank. You ferment in one tank, you age it in another, so on and so forth. Wine gets moved around a lot, and you can move it by pumping, right? And so with this big hose, it's like a three inch hose, and you pump the wine from one tank to the other. Well, when you do, it creates foam, right? Just like when you pump lots of liquids, they foam, right? So it foams a lot. And if you're a natural winemaker, you just pump it slower and you wait for the foam to subside and you pump slower and so on and so forth. Your commercial winemaker, you've got this, you know, you're pumping millions of gallons. You pump it over and. And it foams and you spray it with a defoaming agent to make the foam go away. Right. So I mean, it's just all these things that, and they're super common. It's just kind of like it's just a day at work for these people. I mean, they're just like they, you know, they're making millions of gallons and hundreds of thousands of gallons of wine. It's just a day at work. It foams, we faint, you know, we defoam it. You know, somebody thinks about it.

Yeah, well, because you've always done it. So. So I mean, the big question is, and I remember we were together last summer and it was like, you know, you're looking at going, oh my gosh, we're going to run out of wine. Like, how the heck are you finding the growers to be able to, to get this wine at this point?

Well, it remains a very significant challenge. So we, we like to keep about 60 days of wine inventory on hand. Right. This makes managing our life a little easier. Right now we're at 14 days of red wine. So if we couldn't get red wine delivered next week, we run out in 14 days.

I'm telling my team to order me. Right, me now.

Right, exactly. Right now we've been at 12, 14 days of red wine inventory. Our warehouses are virtually empty. We've been, this has been going on for months now because of the container shortage in China and Europe in order. So first the containers start in China, then they end up in Europe, pick up wine there. And then because of COVID there's been all kinds of problems associated with container traffic. And we have to use refrigerated containers because the wine hasn't been sterilized. We can talk about that in a moment. It's unstable. Right. And so it has to be refrigerated or it would spoil. And so now commercial wines are not like that because they've been sterilized with sulfur dioxide. And what happens when they kill the wine or sterilize it. It also kills all of the friendly bacteria that are beneficial to your gut microbiome. Dr. David Perlmutter has written several times about these bacterias that are existing and living in natural wine. When you taste natural wine, you taste more alive. Right? It's not that dead heaviness, that standard wine.

It is such. Now that you've trained me and I see the light, it's so different. It's like eating fast food and it's just fatty and heavy. And it has a.

It has a single flavor profile, right? It's. It has like a flatness about it that's because it's been sterilized. Natural wines have not been sterilized. Therefore they're still living. But the point of my telling you that we can't just put them on a boat. They have to be refrigerated. And so these refrigerated. There's a limited number of these refrigerator containers and so that have been used to bring medical supplies and all kinds of stuff. So it's just been a tremendous problem getting wines well over from. So we don't sell domestic wine because there's no wine made in the United States that fits all of our criteria. So all of our wines have to come from outside the US and so moving it around is a bit of a challenge. But you know, we're the largest buyer and seller of natural wines in the world. So we're supply is an issue. There are more and more farms that are converting to this way of life. But it takes three to five years to convert a farm from industrial or from commercial practices to organic. A minimum of three by law, but usually five years or so before health of the soil can be restored to farm organically. Right. The soil will regenerate itself. Fortunately, the earth is pretty clever in that way. So it will. You know, there's a tremendous amount of interest in regenerative farming right now with regenerative soils, we have a foundation that sponsors grants and gives money to this very issue of regenerating soils and bringing the life back to living soils.

Is that even possible in Napa Valley with all the fires and all the flame retardants and all of the non organic type of farming. Is it possible for a smaller grower to even be able to get their soil clean with all the water runoff and everything else?

I can't speak to the retardants, but I can tell you this. There's a terrific film, if you haven't seen it's A documentary. It came out two years ago called the Biggest Little Farm. And it's a story, it's a 10 year documentary, 10 year or so documentary about a farm in California that from this young couple through the help of the scientist and philosopher. But it's a great documentary, I've probably seen it five times. But it's the story of this industrial farm that this young couple took over and regenerated into a biodiverse living farm. And the entire story of how that happened and all of the parts of nature that participated in the connected energy that is natural farming. Nature had a couple billion years to figure out evolutionarily that everything in nature is connected and that everything is interdependent upon itself. And so when you get rid of all these chemicals in this polyagricultural farming that really started in the 1920s with the advent of chemicals. So prior to the turn of the 20th century, all farms were, I'm sorry, poly agriculturally farmed. In the 19. I said reverse. In the 1920s we started mono. Mono agricultural farming, which is chemical farming where we're growing a single crop. Mono. A single crop on a farm. Farming was never done like that before because nature doesn't support mono farming. Nature supports biodiversity, nature supports having livestock and birds and bees and orchards and a biodiverse living farm. Nature doesn't know how to respond to mono farming. Where there's one crop, right, Chemicals know how to respond to that. And that's what started in the 1920s with the advent of chemicals. That's also when Rudolf Steiner develop biodynamic farming in, in Austria. And so that's, you know, in, in response to chemical farming, that's when the whole thing started. So prior to that, you know, farms were, were biodiverse. And that's the way nature works where everything is connected and serving each other with the insects and the bees and the birds and the ducks who eat the snails, right, that, that ducks. You'll see on this, you'll see if you watch this documentary, the Biggest Little Farm, you'll see that they, at one point they had, after some winter rains, in the spring they had a tremendous snail problem. And they didn't know how to get rid of it without chemicals. Like snails had taken over the farm. And so they, they researched it and, and they brought ducks in and the ducks ate all the snails. And so from that point forward they just always had ducks that kept the snail population in check. Right. And so this is just sort of how nature is designed to benefit itself.

You know, it reminds Me, Todd. When I was living in San Diego, we were living up in Rancho Santa Fe on two acres, and we had, we had an orchard. I'd never, like, had any of this stuff, so I had no clue what to do. All I knew was that the birds were pooping on my patio furniture. I was like, well, this is not like, I don't want to have the birds pooping on my patio furniture. So I put up these spinny things, these spinny colored wheels that were supposed to scare the birds away. Well, so we scared the birds away. Now we got mice because we had no birds. Now we had all the mice coming out. So then we had to get mouse, mouse traps for the mice. Because now we have the, like, you start to look at and go, all these things are here for a reason. You can't scare the birds away because the birds handle the mice. And, you know, then we try and put up the fences because the coyotes. Because. But then we had rotten fruit that was causing rats. And it was like, right, okay.

It's all meant to work together. Yes. And when we try and stop nature, that's where problems start. That's where one, you know, so the same thing in wine growing, I mean, it's just, it's just that, you know, these, you know, the same thing happened and you know, with, with, with soils in the, you know, in the Midwest and the west, when we got rid of all the buffalo, you know, we thought that, you know, then everything turned into this dry dust. Turns out that these hooves were needed to regenerate grasses. And so it's just, you know, it's all connected. Like it's been going on for a couple billion years, right. Since the earth was birthed.

Well, to tie a bow on all of this, because one of the biggest questions I get asked is like, you know, I'm doing these programs, can I drink wine? Right.

It depends on which wine you drink.

Exactly. I so wanted to write, you know, the, like, I'd love to write the dry farm wine diet because you went searching out this type of wine. When you went on a keto style diet, you went to find the difference. And so what I can tell you is if you're looking at, can I add wine into my diet? Again, it depends what type. The difference between drinking dry farm wine and anything else is sort of like, you know, we all are eating so healthy. You wouldn't sit down and go eat a bunch of white flour, add some sugar. Like, you wouldn't do that. And you're doing the same thing. If you're drinking these other wines. So it's so easy to do because you have your subscriptions to do. Dry farm wine. It's the greatest thing to come to the door for sure. Right. In the pandemic, I'm sure that I think your business exploded even more.

It turns out people were drinking more while they were at home.

Yeah. God, go figure. Well, they weren't going to the restaurants.

Well, and also that, you know, people started to think a lot more. They were drinking more earlier in the day and just drinking more in general, dealing with stress and, you know, it's one of the things that people sometimes do. But then they also started thinking about what they were drinking more. Right. And since they were drinking more, what am I drinking, you know, and how do I feel better from drinking something better.

Yeah. Well, I will say we've had. We've had our nights, Todd, where we drank more wine than typical. And I woke up feeling great. And that would not have happened we with regular wine. So I tested it. That was my science experiment. Thank you, everybody. You're welcome. So we'll make sure we. We have this on my website too. If you go to jjvirgin.com dryfarmwines you'll be able to learn all about dry farm wines and how you can become a subscriber. This is the membership that you will always want to have, and it's also a great gift to give too. So, Todd, you're always amazing.

My gosh, thanks so much for having me today. It's always great to see you.

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Hello, listeners, this is Anne Bogle, author, blogger, and creator of the podcast what Should I Read next? Since 2016, I've been helping readers bring more joy and delight into their reading lives. Every week, I take all things books and reading with a guest and guide them in discovering their next read. They share three books they love, one book they don't, and what they've been reading lately. And I recommend three titles they may enjoy reading next. Guests have said our conversations are like therapy, troubleshooting issues that have plagued their reading lives for years and possibly the rest of their lives as well. And of course, recommending books that meet the moment, whether they are looking for deep introspection to spur or encourage a life change, or a frothy page turner to help them escape the stresses of work, school, everything. You'll learn something about yourself as a reader, and you'll definitely walk away confident to choose your next read, with a whole list of new books and authors to try. So join us each Tuesday for what Should I Read Next? Subscribe now wherever you're listening to this podcast and Visit our website, whatshouldireadnextpodcast.com to find out more.