Dry Farm Wines - Todd White - Pt. 1

05/20/20 • 5 min

1 Listener

Welcome to The Best 5 Minute Wine Podcast. I’m your host Forrest Kelly from the seed to the glass. Wine has a past. Our aim at The Best 5 Minute Wine Podcast is to look for adventure at wineries around the globe. After all grape minds think alike. Let’s start the adventure. We go on a different journey. We don’t drop into a specific winery.

We are speaking with Todd White, founder, and CEO of Dry Farm Wines.

Yes. Dryfarmwines.com. The only health-focused natural wine club in the world. We’ll get into the intricacies a little bit later. But first, let’s get where the inspiration came from.

Well, Dry Farm Wines was not intended to be a business in the beginning. So I do remember a specific inspiration that was a specific wine like a Pinot Noir from Mosel, Germany, that I was drinking at Zuni Cafe in San Francisco. That led me to the exceptionally inspired by natural wines. So I wasn’t thinking of Dry Farm Wines as a business at that time. I was just had discovered quite by accident the remarkable taste and texture of natural wines. And as a result, that kind of started me down the path of investigating natural wines and at a deeper level, which eventually led to the business.

Okay. Before your mind gets too far down the road of traditional wine thinking.

The first thought from Todd is we think of ourselves as a health food company, not as a wine club. This is a health food company first. So the second point is less than one-tenth of one percent of wines in the world are naturally grown and produced.

Why do you let your mind marinate around those two thoughts? Todd continues to educate us on the philosophy of the company.

Well, I mean, nobody. We created the category of healthy wines and sort of branded, as we think of ourselves as a health food company, not as a wine club. So we just happened to sell wine, have healthy food. So no one had really captured lab testing and quantifying wine around health quantifications. So we were the first to do it. Really were the only one to do it even today. As a result, when we started educating people on what’s really in commercial wines, not just organic wines. So organic is a farming method. You can have organic wines, but they’re not natural. Natural wine is a very specific protocol and category. And it’s very rare. Less than one-tenth of one percent of wines in the world are naturally grown and produced. So natural wine is a very specific category that has a very clear and specific understanding around the world for people who are in the natural wine business. We just happen to be in the right place at the right time in trying to solve a problem from ourselves. I wanted to drink healthier, lower alcohol wines that were sugar-free and met other criteria that were of interest to me. It turns out that the same concept was of interest to a lot of other wine drinkers. And so it’s always been my feeling that regular wine drinkers, meaning that people who drink daily as I do, people who drink wine every evening, most of them think they probably drink too much. Right. And so offering them a lower alcohol alternative that’s also natural and sugar-free, which is of interest to our customers. There just wasn’t any offer out there in the marketplace that did so, combining that with a long public speaking television appearances. You know, Podcasts that have aired to millions of people and our business just grew very rapidly. And also, as people tasted the wines, you know, they taste better. And so that’s sort of what led to us becoming one of the fastest-growing private companies in the United States. That concludes Episode 1 of our conversation with CEO and founder Todd White of Dry Farm Wines in our next episode.

There are 76 additives approved by the FDA for the use and winemaking, and not all of them are good for you. We’ll get into that next time. But first, it’s time. Boys and girls for our listener voicemail. Hi, this is Amber from Chicago. My question is, what’s the difference between organ...

We are speaking with Todd White, founder, and CEO of Dry Farm Wines.

Yes. Dryfarmwines.com. The only health-focused natural wine club in the world. We’ll get into the intricacies a little bit later. But first, let’s get where the inspiration came from.

Okay. Before your mind gets too far down the road of traditional wine thinking.

Why do you let your mind marinate around those two thoughts? Todd continues to educate us on the philosophy of the company.

Previous Episode

Post Winery – Altus, AR Pt. 3

Welcome to The Best 5 Minute Wine Podcast. I’m your host Forrest Kelly from the seed to the glass. Wine has a past. Our aim at The Best 5 Minute Wine Podcast is to look for adventure at wineries around the globe. After all grape minds think alike. Let’s start the adventure.

We continue our conversation with Tina Post of Post Winery and Altus, Arkansas, as she explains the depths they go to ensure quality control.

We take care of our vineyards and we harvest. We haul that. We bring it to the winery, which it’s just six miles away, which is really nice for the assurance of fruit quality. And then we process it. We package it. We develop the package. And we distribute to at four different levels. We know we work with brokers. We work in different states. We what we are our distributor. We also do retail. So we’re a business. And I think this is just wonderful. It makes it really interesting always to that take something from the ground to the table. And usually, that’s not the case. You’re one part of that, you know, in the process. But we literally do it from the ground to the table. You know, we built a distribution center that’s temperature controlled. We use the same refrigeration that we use for our cold fermentation tanks and our distribution centers. So everything is controlled. And, you know, with wine, that’s a big thing. You need sterile filtering. You need you know, we do liquid nitrogen drip on the line to everything to try and ensure the quality and the end being shelf-stable. You know, back in the 60s, it was very different. We had a bunch of wooden tanks and I hope over the years now we use wooden stays or wood chips for some of the things that, you know, everything’s stainless steel cold fermentation. Do you either evolve or you won’t get shelf space anymore? There’s too much competition to not make a good shelf, stable wine.

I can’t imagine that it’s an easy task. Running a winery, the size of yours, and the diversity that you have. So as a business, I’m sure you’re always looking to pivot to something new or changing, I think is the business.

Any business you always have to be reinventing yourself because the markets changed. You know, a couple of years ago for us in Arkansas, we had small farm winery laws and now we it’s opened up to national brands. That competition got fierce. It’s you know before it was a little easier because only small farm wineries could sell in your convenience stores chain accounts. And now it’s opened that. And so the competition is really fierce.

We’ll take a short break. And when we come back, Tina will tell us what Post Winery is working on for the future need to satisfy a hungry mind.

Every week, Your Brain on Facts brings you science. Why does Mint feel cold? History. King Charles. The 2nd of Spain was so inbred his family didn’t bother educating him music. Many hit songs and even entire albums were written for revenge technology. The first videogame was made on an oscilloscope in 1958 and every other topic under the sun. Look for your brain on facts, on your favorite podcast app or at Yourbrainonfacts.com

What have you got planned for the future? One of the things we’re doing is coming out with a line. It’s kind of a new series we’re putting together and we’re going to be doing. It’s going to be unique to us. Wines with a little higher price. We’re going to have smaller batches. It might be regional flavor, but it might be fruit from other areas. Like this year. We brought in fresh cabernet fruit from the Yakima Valley in Washington State.

It’s going to be one in the series, but it’ll you know, we won’t do thousands of cases. It’ll be a smaller lot. Well, it’s kind of fun if you’re the winemakers to get to do that.

And when you’re working the tasting bar to say what the latest is in our winemaker’s series or whatever, we’re going to name it, which is we’re working on that as we speak.

Will, somebody answer that phone? Well, boys and girls its time for our listener voicemail. This is Joseph Johnson from

Next Episode

Dry Farm Wines - Todd White - Pt. 2

We are speaking with Todd White, founder, and CEO of Dry Farm Wines.

There are 76 additives approved by the FDA for use in winemaking. Four of them are quite toxic. The most toxic is Dimethyl dicarbonate marketed under the brand name Velcorin. And it’s used to treat Brettanomyces, which is the most common bacterial fault and why it’s highly toxic. If you go to Dimethyl dicarbonate on Wikipedia, you’ll see how toxic it is. Okay, I did look it up on Wikipedia Dimethyl dicarbonate. It is classified as toxic. The first warning is harmful if swallowed. It’s also toxic by inhalation. It causes burns. Well, that’s not really something that you want to be ingesting, especially if you’re going to be drinking it over a lifetime. Now, the public doesn’t know about these additives some and in fairness some are natural. Many are not. The wine industry spends millions of dollars a year and lobby money to keep content labeling and nutritional information off of wine labels. So you don’t have any idea how much sugar is in the wine you’re drinking. To people who care about their health sugar is a very important thing they want to know about. So our job is education. The wine sells itself. Now, that brings up the question. Dryfarmwines.com because of these strict guidelines. Why don’t you carry any domestic wines? The reason being is that there are not really any U.S. wines that meet our criteria. And so you talk about U.S. wines. There are a number of difficult criteria for them to meet. And they’re in the order of dry farming. So almost all domestic vineyards are irrigated. Number two, alcohol. We don’t accept any alcohol over twelve and a half percent. And that’s lab tested by us. Alcohol stated on a wine bottle is not required by law to be accurate. So we did lab testing for alcohol. So there are virtually no U.S. wines made that are twelve and a half percent or lower in alcohol. Virtually none. And then the third most prevalent reason that a U.S. wine wouldn’t qualify for our program is cost. So all of our wines sell for exactly the same amount. They’re $22.00 a bottle. There are no U.S. wines that meet our criteria of organic or biodynamic dry farming and alcohol that cost anywhere close to $22.00. The primary driver on a domestic wine price is going to be the cost of the land. All of U. S. vineyard costs are just so much higher than the capital cost of land in Europe and places like Beaujolais, where anywhere across Europe where most of these small family farms that produce natural wines that we buy wine from, most of them are multigenerational landowners, that they don’t have any capital costs.

We’re constantly being told to hydrate, drink more water. That philosophy does not transfer to grapevines. There are a lot of reasons not to irrigate a grapevine. And in most of Europe, it’s against the law to irrigate grapevines. Europeans have been making wine for over 3000 years. Now what we know, the moment you irrigate a great vine, you fundamentally change the physiology of how the fruit ripens. It also makes for a lazy vine and the fruit is actually less healthy. So the polyphenols, flavonoids, native flavonoids, and other healthy compounds that are found primarily in red wines are actually reduced with irrigation. They’re also reduced with non-organic farming. But the real issue on irrigation is that, yes, stress does create a higher quality fruit. Even people who irrigate know that because that’s the reason that you space vines close together is also the reason that you see wine companies, even the ones that are irrigated, will tout h...