#104 – Todd White
Chantel Ray: Hey guys, welcome to this week’s episode, and I am so excited to have Todd White with Dry Farm Wines. I’m going to start, Todd, by welcome you and asking you to walk us through a day in the life of Todd. What did you eat yesterday like, breakfast, lunch, and dinner?
Todd White: Oh, awesome. Well, I only eat once a day. I do 22 hour intermittent fasts and last night I had just a smorgasbord of things. I was in a Japanese fusion restaurant last night, and so there was grilled cabbage, and I had okra, and I had a tomato salad, and a grilled duck skewer. Anyway, it’s very tasty, one of my favorite restaurants in Los Angeles. I’m down at the beach on the west side in Santa Monica, and this little restaurant is over on Abbot Kinney in Venice beach. I drink a bottle of wine and I eat dinner, and other than that I don’t eat during the daytime. Just water only, actually.
Chantel Ray: That’s awesome. Tell me, is there any kind of, let’s say in the morning or at lunchtime you were like, “I am starving.” Do you have anythings that you do to kind of curb your hunger? To keep you going?
Todd White: You know, because I’m ketogenic, I never get hungry. I’m not even hungry, really, when I eat at night. I oftentimes do extended fasting as well for three, to five, or seven days. Try to do those every month or two, at least a three day once a month, but I don’t really … I think if you drink a glass of water you’ll find that that’s helpful. Especially if you’re ketogenic, I mean, you’re just not hungry, because it’s hunger suppressing. There are hormones that are hunger suppressing when you’re on a ketogenic diet.
Todd White: Or if you’re on a regular fasting schedule, or regular intermittent fasting, if you do, like me, if you eat only once per day, you’re going to be in ketosis by virtue of starvation by the middle of the afternoon anyway. Eating is largely emotional, it’s largely psychological. There becomes a point when of course we have to be fed, naturally, or we’ll starve, but for the first few days it’s largely psychological. You’ll really learn this, experiment with this if you experiment with fasting. If you’re already low carb or keto, fasting is pretty easy. It’s more difficult if you’re not accustomed to it, but no, I don’t really ever …
Todd White: If I’m ever hungry, it’s really psychological. I’m bored, or the same reason people eat on an airplane. They don’t eat on an airplane because the food’s good, they eat because they want something to do. They’re bored, they’re trying to pass the time. It’s just another distraction away from the process of thinking. When you experiment with fasting, you learn quickly, as I did. I’ll tell you what I learned the most, I used to eat twice a day. I used to eat a late lunch and an early dinner, on the 16 [inaudible 00:03:16] lean gain, what’s known as the lean gain method of fasting, intermittent fasting.
Todd White: When I went to eating once per day, which I did about three years ago, for about a month, I would have psychological desires to eat. Not that I was hungry, it was just psychological. The same thing happened when I gave up caffeine, for
several months after and the only reason I gave caffeine up was I gave it up for a fast and I realized how addicted I was to it, didn’t feel great about it. I just decided to give it up all together. For about a month or two after that, I would still romanticize having a coffee. It wasn’t that I wanted the caffeine, it was just that romance. It’s largely psychological.
Chantel Ray: We were at the Mindshare Summit together, it was so funny when I was listening to you talk, I was like, “Yes, yes amen.” Everything you were saying, it was so funny. Let’s just right into our listener questions. The first one is from Megan in Indianapolis. She says, “I love wine, especially a good cab. I drink a couple of glasses at least three times a week, but I notice that the mornings after I drink it I feel a lot of pressure in my sinuses. It’s almost like I’m so congested. Am I crazy? Is this in my mind, or is there some kind of connection?” Megan in Indianapolis.
Todd White: Yeah. No, it’s real. She’s not crazy, in fact. What she’s suffering from is a reaction to biogenetic amines. Two primary offenders, and this is what most women associate with feeling bad from drinking wine and particularly red wine, is these tyramine and histamine, which are quite high in commercial wines. They’re quite low in natural wines, because the style and the way the wines are made. That’s the reason that most people with histamine sensitivities can drink our wines, but cannot drink traditional wine.
Todd White: In fact, as you know, the primary histamine blogger just passed away, I’m sure you saw the memorial at Mindshare.
Chantel Ray: Yes, awful.
Todd White: She in fact was a partner and endorsed our wines to the histamine community, so that stuffiness is an amine reaction. The two primarily offenders in wine are tyramine and histamine. That’s what that stuffiness is. I’m not histamine sensitive, but if I drink commercial wines I get a sort of tightening in my frontal cortex. I can feel it, and it’s probably related to some kind of an amine.
Chantel Ray: Great. This is from Doug from Peterson. “I drink a lot of wine, I like both red and white. I’m not picky, but it seems like if I overdo it with red wine, I end up with a much worse headache the next morning then I would after drinking white wine. What’s up with that?”
Todd White: It’s several different things. Again, it primarily goes back to the wine making style, the commercial wines, the style of wines that they make because it’s a style that people are interested in drinking. There’s a whole bunch of different things between the red and the white, but the primarily difference between red and white is that the red wine has contact with the skin, and the seeds. That’s how it gets it’s color. The white wine does not, the white wine actually has no contact with the skin. It’s just free run juice. If you squeeze the juice from a red wine grape and you squeeze the juice from a white wine grape, they’re both
clear. Red wine gets it’s color from contact with the skins, but here’s what’s happening.
Todd White: In order to make the wine more extracted and concentrated for bigger, bolder flavors, the winemakers, commercial winemakers are leaving the wine in contact with the skin for a really long time. That’s not the way natural wines are made. The reason they do this is because it produces a greater body of texture in the wine, it also creates darker color, so Americans believe the darker a red wine is, the higher quality it is. Of course, there’s no truth to that statement, that’s just a myth. Winemakers macerate, or have contact with the skin, for very long periods of time to get this body and boldness and darkness.
Todd White: That extraction process is a wine making style. It’s also unhealthy. We don’t know exactly why, but the longer these extractions take place, the worse you feel for drinking the wine. One thing with wine, it’s just like nutrition, there’s just not a tremendous amount of studies out there that really validate what we know anecdotally, because you can’t do control group studies on people on nutrition. You can’t control what people eat and drink, you can only control their representation of what they did. We don’t have a lot of great nutritional information in terms of scientific studies, nor are there a lot with wine either just because A, nobody to fund it, B, no way to control it.
Todd White: Then when you get into these nutrition, or all these science studies, all these studies can be designed to look or lean any way you want it to lean. Also, it doesn’t take into account all the co factors. With co factors, with me, I’m an intermittent faster, I’m also ketogenic, I have a super active fitness regimen, I’m an athlete. To compare how I’m willing to test out on things against somebody who has the standard American diet, is on some kinds of pharmaceuticals, takes all kinds of, maybe they take some kind of crazy supplements. These things are very difficult. We don’t know, like with intermittent fasting or the ketogenic diet, we don’t know all of why we get the benefits.
Todd White: We don’t know if it’s, is it calorie restriction, because I’m just eating less? Is it eating less often? Therefore, having fewer hormonal responses to food? Is it that I’m not eating highly glycemic foods? We don’t know exactly, because there are so many things happening at the same time, hormonally. We’re not really sure. The same thing is true for all nutrition, everything you eat and drink, it’s just very hard to have quality science around it. What we do know though, for sure, is anecdotally, when we drink these additive free, clean wines, that we feel better. For sure.
Todd White: Look, as you know, I’ve talked to you about this before, there’s 76 additives approved by the FDA for use in wine making. Four of them are quite toxic, some of them are quite natural, but there’s 76 additives. The bigger, important issue here is that the reason that your audience does not know about these 76 additives is because the wine industry spent millions of dollars in lobby money to keep contents labeling off of wine. This is a transparency issue, and right now
the wine industry is intentionally misleading people and not letting them know transparently what’s in the bottle. Of the 76 additives and of the four that are toxic, I can’t tell you which ones are in which bottle of wine.
Todd White: I can tell you there are none of them in are wine, but in any wine, when you walk into a grocery store, and you see all those bottles, I couldn’t tell you which ones contain additives, which additives, and which one don’t, because there’s no transparency. That’s the real problem when you go to choose wine, you just don’t know. Only way you know for sure if you’re drinking a natural lab tested wine is buy it from us. We’re fanatics, we walk the walk that we talk. It’s like, I’m drinking the same wine that I sell. We care deeply about what we put in our body, and most of your audience probably cares about what they put in their body.
Todd White: If you weren’t buying your wine from us, then your next second best is to try to find a retailer that sells natural wines, that’s a specific category of wines which means that it’s additive free and it’s fermented with wild native yeast and it’s organically vined and organically farmed. Anyway, that’s a lot of the story here.
Chantel Ray: This next one’s from Alyssa in Omaha. “When I drink one glass of regular wine, I get a massive wine headache. Why is it that I can have three or four vodka tonics and not get a headache?”
Todd White: Well, again, this is the impurities. She’s not drinking natural wine, she wouldn’t get a headache from natural wine. These are the impurities that are in the wine. They could be additives, they could be toxins from farming, it could be glyphic ate, it could be sugar. The combination of sugar and alcohol is a pretty nasty combination. If you drink a shot of tequila, that’s a very different feeling than you’ll have from drinking a margarita. When you combine alcohol and sugar together, it becomes particularly nasty, particular in your hangover. There are a lot of impurities in wine, unless you’re drinking a natural wine.
Todd White: You’ve had the experience, you’ve drank our wines. It’s not the same. We’re all so, we’re doing independent lab testing. Of all the wines that we taste from around the world, we don’t sell any wines from the United States, by the way, because there are no wines made in the US that meet our standards of health and purity. They’re just not any here. All our wines are grown in Europe, very small family farms. I have four growers in South Africa. I saw growers because wine is grown, not made. If you’re not doing anything in the cellar but using wild native yeast and some of the skin of the grape to ferment the wine, with no other additives or additions, you’re not really making wine, you’re growing it.
Todd White: Everything you need to make wine is already on the grape. The only thing you need to make wine is yeast and sugar in the juice. The yeast eats the sugar, and the byproduct of that is ethyl alcohol and carbon dioxide. As long as you have yeast present, and what’s happening with commercial wines, like when you walk in the grocery store, you see all these wines, you see hundreds of different
wines on the shelves. Those wines are not made with wild native yeast. They’re made with genetically modified, commercially lab grown yeast.
Todd White: That yeast is easier to work with, wild native yeast, which is on the skin of all wine grapes, in the world, every skin, every wine grape in the world has yeast on the skin, it collects through the air naturally. If you just pick a cluster of ripe grapes and you throw it into a bucket and the skins break open, it will begin to ferment because there’s yeast on the skin. That is the yeast that natural wine makers use to make wine. All they need is to put the grape, to press the grape, the have the temperature rise to a point where the yeast will activate. It won’t activate if it’s too cold.
Todd White: Then you make wine with nothing but just what you grew. It’s the reason we say our wines are grown, not made.
Chantel Ray: I like that. I like that. Jessica from Arlington says, “I’m obsessed with wine but I’ve heard sulfates aren’t good, can you tell me any wine that’s completely sulfate free?”
Todd White: That’s impossible, here’s why. Sulfites are naturally occurring in fermentation. Any food that’s fermented, whether it’s kombucha or sauerkraut, or any food that is fermented contains sulfites. They’re naturally occurring as a part of the fermentation process. The question here is, is the winemaker adding additional sulfur dioxide to sterilize and preserve the wine? That’s one of the tests that we run, and we do not allow more than 50 parts per million of sulfites, which can be naturally occurring. Most of the wines that we sell are somewhere between five and 10 parts per million. The US limit is allowed to be 350 parts per million, under the law.
Todd White: You’ll see these higher sulfite wines and commercial wines, because what they’re using the sulfur dioxide for is to sterilize and McDonald-ize the wine, making it sort of a shelf consistent taste from bottle to bottle, year to year. They’re selling this shelf stable product that’s not alive. They’ve sterilized it. When they sterilize it with the sulfur dioxide, they also kill all of the friendly microbiome, all the friendly bacteria that is helpful to the microbiome. That is killed in the sterilization process, too. Doctor David Perlmutter just recently did a post, a blog post on our wines and the living bacteria that has been tested and found in them.
Todd White: When you don’t sterilize a wine, it remains alive and natural, all the bacteria in the wine is also alive and natural. It’s very friendly to the gut biome.
Chantel Ray: I have a great idea for your next commercial, I just thought about it because of what you said. I don’t know if you remember this commercial, it was probably 15 years ago and it was a Hebrew National hot dog commercial. It had this Uncle Sam on there, he goes, “The government says we can add this filler in our hot dog, and this, and this chemical in our hot dogs, but we don’t.” Then he’s like,
“The government says we can add this, and this, and this, but we’re Hebrew National. We are a higher standard.”
Chantel Ray: My mom used to quote that for something all the time in my family, and I’m thinking, that’s what you should do. That should be your next commercial, because it says the government says we can add 350 milligrams of sulfites, but we don’t. We have a higher standard. There’s the marketing tip for the week, because that’s true. This is Clarissa from San Diego. We just went there. It says, “I really like Melee wine, M-E-L-E-E wine, it’s one of my favorite gifts to give to people, but I’m assuming it’s not organic. Can you recommend a nice organic wine that doesn’t taste like organic wine?”
Todd White: That’s another really important thing to understand, I’m not familiar with the specific wine that she mentioned, so I don’t know, but here’s the thing. Just because a wine is organic, does not mean it’s natural. Organic is only the farming practices. Now, I tell you it’d be better for the planet and better for your body if you drank organic wine, but that doesn’t mean it’s natural, it doesn’t mean that it’s additive free, it doesn’t mean it doesn’t contain sulfur dioxide or any of the other 76 additives. It simply means it was grown organically. Just to clarify that, all natural wines are either organic or biodynamic. Biodynamic farming is a prescriptive form of advanced organic farming.
Todd White: All natural wines are always organic or biodynamic. However, not all organic or biodynamic wines are natural. A natural wine must be farmed organically or biodynamically, however, an organic wine is not necessarily natural. It may contain additives, it very likely does. If you go into Whole Foods, you have to think of it this way. If you go into Whole Foods and you see an organic wine, or even a biodynamic wine, in order for that winery to produce enough volume to satisfy the buying needs of someone like Whole Foods, you can’t make natural wines in that volume. I can tell you that those wines are not natural, because natural wine is always fermented with wild native yeast.
Todd White: You cannot ferment wild native yeast and make wine in very high volumes. It’s just not possible. The yeast is too unstable, also it’s impossible to make wine in high volumes without the use of these other additives and chemicals. The reason being is that you just, the environment is too unstable. The bacterial environment, and you end up, the wine can spoil without the use of these additives.
Chantel Ray: Got you. Michelle in Tampa, “I’ve been doing intermittent fasting for a few months now, been doing two meals a day and I’m slowly trying to go to one meal a day. Do you have any tips?”
Todd White: I think the greatest obstacle, it’s definitely psychologically first, but I’ll talk about that in a minute. The greatest obstacle to most people is who they’re surrounded with. If you’re single, if you’re single or in a relationship with
someone who also wants to experiment in these things with you, then that’s awesome. If you’re living with someone, or other people who don’t subscribe to what you’re trying to do and there’s this constant stuff around you all the time, then that makes it more difficult. Let’s just say that you’re single, then what’s the next hurdle to get over?
Todd White: The next hurdle is really psychological. You’ll fine that going to eating once a day is pretty easy once you get past that psychological addiction, that pleasure. Or, also just the distraction. I think because I have a serious meditation practice, I think also helps with my fasting. One of the reasons that we eat is it draws us away from the trauma of thought. The trauma of thinking is also what leads us to entertainment, going to movies, watching television, porn, sex, eating. All these things are distracting us and really giving us a way to get away from this trauma of thinking.
Todd White: If you have a regular meditation practice, then that over time, not in the beginning but over time, teaches you to silence your mind and to be in the present moment. I think that’s very helpful for fasting. Drinking a lot of water, staying hydrated. Water is filling, water’s quite filling. I’ve found I think that caffeine helped me, caffeine is also a hunger suppressant. I think caffeine, I don’t drink it anymore but I imagine it was probably useful to me when I first started fasting. Having a support system around you, being surrounded by people who want to be supportive of what you’re trying to do, it’s impossible for most people who work in a traditional office setting.
Todd White: At my company, there is no … there’s the kitchen, but there’s not anything in it that’s not helpful. For most people, their break room and their kitchens at their office is just filled with vendors bringing in donuts and birthday cakes, it’s always somebody’s birthday, and cakes come out. I don’t care how disciplined you are, it’s hard when you’re in that setting and you’re walking in and out to get a water or something, or a cup of coffee and you got to walk past this stuff all day long. It’s hard not to have a little pinch.
Todd White: Being in the right setting and having a support system around you I think is really important. Just breaking through and not snacking. Don’t give in. Once you get past it, you can conquer it. Every time you snack, you’re going to have a hormonal response to glucose, of insulin. Unless you’re eating pure fat, anything else you digest in the way of food, unless it’s pure fat, is going to create an insulin response. Then you’re going to be right back on that peaks and valley of trying to feed that glucose.
Chantel Ray: We had a psychologist come on this show and one of the things I loved that she said, she said, you need to set with unease to prevent disease. Let me say it again, you need to sit with disease to prevent disease. What she’s saying is, as soon as we’re uneasy about something, we’re running to something to distract us. Either the food, wine, something. Sometimes you just have to go, you know
what? I am going to be able to sit here with a little bit unease and I don’t have to self medicate with all these different things.
Todd White: Yeah, the other thing I think is helpful too is to lean in psychologically to the challenge. I know this is going to be difficult, I know this is going to be challenging. I’m going to derive power from that challenge. I’m going to derive pride and power from my standing up to this desire. It will pass. I wouldn’t dream of eating lunch now. People ask me all the time, don’t you want to … No, I don’t want anything to eat. It’s just going to make me feel bad. I’m going to lose an edge of energy. I have zero desire to eat, and in fact, turn down the opportunity quite often. At times, I will go to a lunch and sit with people while they eat.
Todd White: They’re like, “Aren’t you uncomfortable? Aren’t you hungry?” No, I’m not.
Chantel Ray: That’s right, and you can enjoy the people and have more conversation instead of them just the whole time shoving food in their mouth. That’s great. Here is from Ashley in Portland. “I’m only eating one meal a day now, but what’s happening is I’m getting super ravenous by that time, so my portion size ends up being absolutely huge. How can I keep my portion size down without feeling like I’m starving myself?”
Todd White: Super, super simple answer to that, is just increase your fat. Fat is caloric dense, it has high calorie density, but fat is also extremely satiating. Start off with fattier foods first, eat an avocado. Anything fatty, avocado is a great choice. Olive oil on your vegetables, just increase your fat. Fat is very satiating. I don’t have her experience, I’m not ravaged. Men and women are different, of course, everybody has a different response to fasting. For me, it just happens to work very well. Some people it doesn’t work as well. Most people don’t give it a fair chance because they don’t really get there, they don’t really get fat adaptive.
Todd White: Being ketogenic makes fasting super, super easier. I would recommend that it sounds like maybe she needs to cut her carbs back, so if you cut your carbs back to say 30 grams or less per day and increase the fat, I think that will go away. Again, that’s the ketogenic, that’s the therapeutic ketogenic diet. May not work for her. Some women don’t do well on keto, you just have to experiment. The thing I think really to remember is we have to give ourselves ample time to really have a successful experiment. There’s going to be a period of adjustment where you’re going to be uncomfortable.
Todd White: When you go from eating carbs to no carbs, there’s definitely going to be a period of adjustment. You’re going to have low energy while your brain is trying to figure out with your liver how to get ketones up there, because it’s been lazy burning glucose. It’s going to take a period of time, and it will be, for most people, quite uncomfortable. I would say lower the carbs and increase the fat, and eat fat first. Get some fat in your system, like an avocado, which is super filling.
Chantel Ray: Even 15 minutes before, having the avocado or the nuts or something 20 minutes, and then go for eating your meal.
Todd White: Right.
Chantel Ray: This next one is from Sam in Pittsburgh. “I love Veuve champagne, it’s my absolute favorite. How do I know if it’s bad for me? I don’t feel terrible after drinking it, but I don’t feel great.”
Todd White: Well, I tell you how you know, because it’s industrially farmed and it’s additive filled, and it has sugar in it. No question about it. Veuve is this huge producer, huge, the one thing they do a great job is packaging, I love the orange labels. It feels sexy and you want to drink it, they’ve done a great job but the fact of the matter is it contains additives, it has been industrial farmed, it is not organic, for sure, and for sure it contains sugar. Most of the Champagne region is industrial farmed, almost all of it, there are two natural wine producers in the whole region, the rest of it’s industrially farmed and filled with additives.
Todd White: You can’t make wine in that volume. They sell millions and millions and millions of bottles a year, you can’t make wine in that volume without the use of additives. What he could do is drink a natural sparkling wine and I think he would have a very different … It only can be called champagne if it’s grown in the Champagne region. All other wines that are not grown in champagne that are sparkling are known as sparkling wines. As I said, there’s only two natural wine producers in the Champagne region. We do business with both of them, but they don’t make very high volume. They couldn’t make anything like an industrial product like Veuve.
Todd White: When you think of these things, they want to make it sound sexy and they want to sell a story and they’ve got beautiful packaging, but these are industrial products that are made in factories. Huge factories. This is not some riddler turning some champagne bottles in some cave. These are huge massive factories that are the size of multiple football fields. They’re huge. What people don’t know, because the wine industry has done a great job of keeping this secret, is 52% of all the wines manufactured in the United States are made by just three giant conglomerates.
Todd White: The top 30 companies make over 70% of US wines. Now, why people don’t know that is because these wine conglomerates, these multi billion dollar marketing conglomerates hide behind tens of thousands of labels and brands. They have you believe that you’re drinking from a farmhouse or a chateau, when in fact you’re drinking from massive manufacturing facilities in central California. They’re all located in the Central Valley, and they’re the size of multiple football fields put together. They’re massive, that’s where they make all this wine.
Todd White: Three companies are making over half of all US wine. They want to fool you, they want to sell you wine through a magazine ad that’s got some pretty girl at a vineyard who looks healthy and happy, and they’ve got a picture of the winery behind it, the tasting room. That’s not where wines are made. Wines are made in factories. Anyway, that’s why we sell and drink 100% natural, organic, additive free, lab tested, natural wines from small family farms.
Chantel Ray: I think the part that you said, the fact that you can’t even get your wine from the United States because it’s not getting you the quality of wine that you’re looking for, is pretty sad.
Todd White: Not healthy wine. I’m sure there are some quote, quality wines in the US, but they’re not healthy, that’s the difference. I need to know what’s in that bottle. I need to know the farming practices of that family. I need to know from lab testing what’s in that bottle. That’s the only way I can know, particularly even sugar free. The only way you know if a wine is sugar free is to lab test it. With the acid in wine, even taste professionals like us can’t taste the sugar, unless it’s high. If it’s super high, of course you’d taste it. If it’s, let’s say it’s five or 10 grams a liter, we can’t taste that.
Todd White: We’ll find it in a lab test. We think sugar is the most widely abused, dangerous and addictive drug on the planet. We’re just rabidly anti sugar, I don’t want to drink it. I don’t eat it, I go to great lengths to avoid it because it’s so disruptive to our hormonal system, it’s so disruptive to our health.
Chantel Ray: That goes straight to our last question, and this is from Jamie in Springfield. “I just started keto and I need a more keto friendly, lower sugar wine or champagne option. What is the name of the lowest sugar or sparkling wine, and how much sugar would be in a lowest amount of sugar, wine? I need to find out what is the highest amount that I would find in a bottle.”
Todd White: Categorically, sugar in wine can range from zero grams per liter, this is how sugar is measured in wine, it’s in the grams per liter, and so it can be from zero to as high as nearly 300 grams per liter. The reason, there’s about 130 grams per liter in Coca Cola, when we talk about this 100 plus grams, we’re talking about dessert wines, late harvest wines, ice wines, rot wines, these are very, very intentionally sweet and very dense wines. That’s not where the problem comes in, and I’ll address the sparking thing in a moment.
Todd White: The problem comes in in the commercial wines, when wine is ranging from say 10 to 40 grams per liter. That’s where the danger zone is, and a lot of commercial wines contain sugar, intentionally. Sparkling wines are the most difficult wines to find sugar free because of the way they’re made. Most sparkling wines contain sugar. The only way to know if a wine contains sugar or not is to lab test it. The lowest a sparkling wine will be, or any wine will be, is zero grams per liter. The highest could be anywhere in the range I just gave you, probably between 10 and 50 grams per liter. Again, I can’t name, finding
sparkling wines, it’s very difficult for us to find sugar free, natural sparkling wines.
Chantel Ray: Explain why. Explain why on that, because you said it’s because of the way it’s made.
Todd White: The way sparkling wines are made, there’s a secondary fermentation that happens in the bottle after the wine is made. Wine is made, then it’s refermented again so sugar is added, or some component of sugar, whether that’s coming from grape juice or no matter how the sugar gets back in, sugar is getting back in the wine again after it’s made, and then there’s a secondary fermentation that happens in the bottle. With natural wines, you don’t generally have sugar left over because there’s no sulfur dioxide to preserve the wine.
Todd White: You can’t have it, you don’t want to have an ongoing, secondary fermentation. In champagne, in sparkling wines, whether it’s grown in champagne or not, they are all through [inaudible 00:37:06], they get sugar added to them and then they ferment in the bottle again. The carbon dioxide from the fermentation is caught in the bottle, that’s what causes it to be sparkling. It’s not, most of the sugar does not get fermented out, where a natural wine maker, if it’s his desire to fully ferment the wine and have it be sugar free, those are the sparkling wines we sell.
Todd White: Most, all sparkling wines in the market, like prosecco, prosecco is almost 100% industrially farmed, anyway. All sparkling wines contain sugar, which is the reason we do lab testing. If you get a sparkling wine from us, you know it’s sugar free.
Chantel Ray: Awesome. I was going to say, I have the answer to that, go to chantelrayway.com/dryfarm, you’re going to get the best, you can pick from there of which wine you want to get.
Todd White: I think we give you a penny bottle with that, right?
Chantel Ray: Yes, so talk to everybody about this, what they can do to try your wines out. We want to send them to chantelrayway.com/dryfarm, and what do they get when they go there?
Todd White: They have the option to buy a six bottle or a twelve bottle collection, we give you a free bottle for one penny extra with your first order just to say thank you and congratulations for trying this. If, we also have a 100% happiness guarantee. Any bottle you don’t like, we’ll either replace it or refund it, no questions asked. No need to send it back, don’t have to send us a picture of it, don’t have to do anything except tell us, “I don’t like that wine.” We’ll give your money back or send you a replacement bottle.
Todd White: We are a wine club, and so it is a subscription, but we don’t make it difficult to cancel. You can cancel, as 16% of buyers do, they buy a box and cancel the same day before they ever taste the wine, because they don’t want a subscription at that time. Maybe the taste the wine and come back resubscribe later. We don’t make it easy, we don’t make it difficult to cancel. It’s super simple. We’re not trying to loop people into a membership, it’s just we sell wine to pretty regular wine drinkers who like to get wine on a regular basis and they know they can’t get our wine anywhere except directly from us.
Todd White: We don’t sell to retailers, we don’t sell to restaurants. The only way to get our lab tested, high quality, additive free, natural wines is directly from us. For most people, it just makes it easy for them to have a membership. You can come, go, stay, if you sign up for our email list we do twice a month offers that require no commitment, but the only way to see those is to be on our email list. They can go to our website at dryfarmwines.com and sign up for our email list, not have to buy anything. Then they’ll see these twice a month and holiday promotions that we do that are one time orders. Basically, we’re a wine club, so people like the convenience of getting regular shipments.
Chantel Ray: That’s awesome. I feel like we did a great job with these questions, they had such great questions. What else that people didn’t ask that you feel like, let’s add this in, what did we miss that people need to know about your wines and drinking clean wines?
Todd White: That’s a really important question, I’m glad you asked because it was about to slip past me. Low alcohol. Alcohol is a dangerous neurotoxin and a destructive drug. We don’t sell any wines over 12.5% alcohol. Standard wines now are almost 15% on average. We sell wines as low as 6%, so we sell wines between 6 and 12.5%. Drinking low alcohol wine is a huge advantage to your health, and your wellness, and how you’re going to feel, and your hydration levels, not waking up in the middle of the night dehydrated. Really backing off of alcohol, alcohol is a really toxic and dangerous drug, one that we should treat with care.
Todd White: I love wine, I don’t love alcohol. Drinking lower alcohol wines leads to a more elevated buzz, a greater sense of creativity and connection, it’s just a better outcome. Yeah, I think really being careful about the alcohol levels in your wine, and here’s the other problem with the wine industry. They’re in collusion with the government. Again, the wine’s stated, the alcohol is stated on a bottle of wine. By law, it’s not required to be accurate. The only way to know how much alcohol is in wine is to lab test it, which we do.
Todd White: Listen, we taste hundreds of wines a month from around the world. We only accept 30% of the natural wines that we taste, because either they don’t meet our lab requirements or they don’t meet our taste aesthetic, one or the other. We’re very particular about what we buy.
Chantel Ray: Your wines are amazing.
Todd White: Thank you, I appreciate you saying that. The other thing I would mention, when you asked me about the wine club, our wine is super affordable for a handcrafted, fine premium wine. It’s only $25 per bottle, which for handcrafted fine wine is a great value. It’s not the $10 wine you’re going to see in your grocery store filled with poison, but wines where I live in the Napa Valley are commonly $100, $150, $250 dollars a bottle. For fine, handcrafted wines, $25 is actually a very good value.
Chantel Ray: That’s awesome. We want to give you this amazing deal, so if you go to chantelrayway.com/dryfarm, you can try it out and it is amazing, and it’s good for you. Thank you so much for being on the show, Todd.
Todd White: Oh my god, I love you, I love seeing you in San Diego. You were so enthusiastic, you’re super, super cool and it was so much fun to have you in the audience and get to meet you.
Chantel Ray: Thank you.
Todd White: Share wine with you and share some love.
Chantel Ray: That’s awesome.
Todd White: Thanks for having me on today.
Chantel Ray: Thank you. If you have a question that you want answered, go to questions@chantelrayway.com. We’ll see you next time. Bye bye.