POSTPONED: UNFILTERED with Darek Trowbridge
Drinking For Life
Darek Trowbridge Is Redefining Our Relationship to Food—And That Means Wine
Darek Trowbridge has been at the forefront of the natural wine movement, founding one the first natural wineries in California in 1998 and pushing the creative boundaries of artisanal wine for nearly 30 years. But creative boundaries weren’t the only limits Darek was testing, and when years of fast living finally caught up with him, he was forced to radically transform not only his lifestyle, but his entire worldview. With a cloudy mind and leaky gut, his journey to rebuild his health was guided by a desire to have a more direct and sacred relationship with everything around him—his food, his friends, his environment—and his wine. Diving deep into the regenerative powers of nutrition, he began farming and eating a variety of native heirloom crops and completely transformed his diet. Darek literally ate his way back to health.
But what role does wine, a known toxin with a broad range of negative side effects, play in the world of an advocate for food as a form for medicine? If wine was a cause of his health issues, how could it possibly play a positive role in his recovery?
Darek still drinks wine, but he approaches it with a deep respect for the delicate line between its ability to enhance or degrade our experience. This transformation was also reflected in his approach to making wine, as he moved away from tannin-forward wines and toward more nuanced expressions of his grapes.
At this Unfiltered, Darek has agreed to share much more than his amazing wines and his storied history in winemaking: he will share the deeply personal journey of how he changed his relationship to the world, and with that, the wine he makes and drinks. He will explain how he managed leaky gut and cleared his mind through diet as he pairs his wines with tastes of the recuperative foods he grows and eats on his farm—his famous ‘boiled greens salad (collards and Kales)’, fermented greens and Native American corn.
While we like to talk about ‘wine as food,’ we don’t always like to talk about what that means. Darek took this to its natural conclusion—and we all have something to learn from him.