 Welcome to the Dectogundry Podcast. Ever heard of toxic wine? Well, if you've read any of my books, the answer is absolutely positively yes. I'm talking about wines that are full of one of the deadliest disruptors, glyphosate, the key biocide in Roundup. But my guest today expands the definition of a toxic wine beyond that. In fact, he's actually built an entire business curating the cleanest wines on the planet. He's Todd White, self-professed biohacker and founder of Dry Farm Wines, a subscription-based wine club that sources natural wines from small family farms. If you are a wine lover like me, or just like to stay informed about the latest trending topics, hang tight, because when we come back, Todd is going to reveal what may actually be in your glass of wine, and it's not just fermented grapes. Explain what the heck carb-free wine is, and most importantly, help you find the purest and tastiest wines out there. Welcome to the podcast, Todd. Great to have you on, and congrats on your success. I see many of my health contemporaries praising Dry Farm Wines. Thank you. I'm excited to be here and talk about the dirty dark secrets of the wine business. So let's get to the heart of the issue. What is exactly wrong with most wine out there today? Well, if we look at the food industry, 9 or 10 companies basically control most of the food in the United States. And the same thing has happened in the wine business in the last 30 or 40 years. So you've had massive corporate consolidation fueled by Wall Street money and greed. So here's where the problem begins, is this is all about money. It's not about making wine better or healthier. It's about making it faster and cheaper. And that's kind of the foundation of the problem. So when you look at the wine industry, over 50% of U.S. wines are manufactured by just three giant conglomerates, multi-billion dollar conglomerates. The top 30 wine companies in the United States make over 70% of U.S. wines. And the reason that's important is because you don't know that. And the reason you don't know that they're manufactured in these massive factories, most of them located in California, is because the wine industry hides behind these conglomerates, hide behind thousands of brands and labels to confuse you, to have you believe that you're drinking from a farmhouse or a chateau. That's how they market it. But in fact, most of the wine that you're drinking comes out of massive factories in Central California. So that's sort of where it begins. But here's the secret they don't want you to know about. There's 76 additives approved by the FDA for the use in winemaking. Now, some of these additives are indeed natural. And some of them are indeed quite toxic. The most toxic of these additives is called dimethyldicarbonate. Now, the reason you don't, dimethyldicarbonate is used to treat the single most prevalent bacterial fault found in wine called bretomyces. Tens of millions of gallons of wine are treated with this toxic chemical. And so here's the problem. The transparency issue is that wine is the only major food product without a contents labeling. It also does not contain any nutritional information. So you don't know how much sugar is in it. Now, if you care about your health as I do, or the way I think about health, I care about sugar intake. And so you can't look at a bottle of wine and get any nutritional information or contents. So some wines contain dimethyldicarbonate, or ammonia phosphate, or copper sulfate, or any number of other chemicals that are added to wine, legally. But you don't have any way of knowing your wine contains it or not, because there's no transparency in wine. So we're advocates for putting a contents label on a bottle of wine. We advocate for this all the time, because we, like, if I go into the store and I pick up anything that's processed, and wine is processed, right? I pick up any processed food. The first thing I do is I look at the contents and nutritional information to decide if I want to put that in my body. And with wine, you don't have that option. So that's, from our perspective, that's the primary problem. That's no question. Why doesn't labeling laws apply to wine? Oh, that's a great question. It comes back to money and greed. So the politicians in Washington D.C. at the TTB and the FDA, and also your local jurisdictions, state jurisdictions. So alcohol is one of the few products that are regulated at a state level. There's not a lot of federal intervention in alcohol law, a little bit. The TTB, which used to be the old ATF before Waco, the TTB, which is the Tax and Trade Bureau, oversees the labeling of wine. But that's about, and the FDA approves additives that go into wine. Everything else is in the state jurisdiction. So it's very confusing. But Washington controls the label. So the TTB controls what goes on the label. And politicians fueled by lobby money. The wine industry spent millions of dollars in lobby money to keep contents label off of wine because they don't want you to know what's in it. It's very straightforward. I mean, there's nothing mystical about any of this. Everything I'm telling you, industry size, consolidation, additives in the wine is all available in a simple Google search. Everything that I'm going to share with you is just not well known, but it's readily available through Google. You know, I'll share a couple of years ago, I was at a meeting in Colorado where I was speaking, it was called the weekend. And I was speaking with Robert Mondavi, Jr. And I mean, sorry, Michael Mondavi and Al Gore. And Michael Mondavi said, we were actually addicted to chemicals. And it actually took us personally in our wines 10 years to withdraw from the addiction to chemicals in our wine. And I thought that was a rather impressive comment to make from, you know, a leading winemaker about how prevalent, even in the growing of grapes and the making of wine, chemicals pervade the industry. I'm sure you can elucidate on it. Well, it begins with farming. And this is an important distinction. So it begins with farming. Chemicals are readily used. Roundup, as you mentioned earlier, glyphosate is the number one applied herbicide to U.S. vineyards. You can usually tell, you can look at a vineyard and tell if it's been treated with glyphosate. Because the surface of the soil looks like lava, it looks almost like the moon. It's a very, very hard surface and there's absolutely nothing growing below it. When you go to a natural vineyard, when you go to, we'll talk about what natural wine is and why we call it natural and what defines natural wine. But when you go to a natural vineyard where no chemicals are used. Well, let me take it one step back. You go to an organic, you have organic farming and then you have natural farming. All natural farming is always organic. Not all organic farming is natural. So organic farming has some leeway, right? But natural farming is always organic. When you go to a natural vineyard, in fact, not only will you see things growing below the vines, it looks almost like forestation. The weeds and the plant material can be waist high just below where the grapes are trellised. Because the natural farmer wants insects in his vineyard because nature has a balance. And, you know, nature's been figuring this out for a couple billion years, right? So everything in nature, the natural farmer believes that everything is connected in nature. And so that there's a biodiverse ecosystem there that allows for plant materials to coexist along with insects. We have this farmer in Italy. He describes insects in the soil as little animals. You know, that's how he translates it in English. But see, the natural farmer doesn't plow. Because the natural farmer believes that plowing disrupts the ecosystem that exists just below the mulch in the topsoil, where there are millions of organisms living. And the moment that you plow, what you do is you turn up that soil and you expose it to the sun, and you kill the soil, right? So because the sun, the heat of the sun kills all of the organisms, so you don't see plowing in natural great growing. You actually see flowers and a lot of intentionally planted flowers to attract butterflies and other insects to the vineyard. Because the natural farmer believes that everything is connected and that nature will solve its own problems. But when you see a glyphosate treated, I live in Napa Valley, and when you drive by vineyards, most of them have been sprayed. And you can tell that because there's absolutely nothing alive anywhere near the vineyard, right? There might be a little patch of grass or plant material between the rows, but just underneath the vines, it's just bare. It's black. It's like a lava looking so hard. The surface is terrifically hardened because there's no living soil there to break it up. There's no living organisms. It just becomes very, very hard, particularly with the California sun. It just becomes terrifically hard. So also the other problem, we think that maybe glyphosate is getting in line through irrigation. This is one of the, because we know that glyphosate is present in many wines and even organic wines. And we don't really know why, but we do know that more than 99% of U.S. vineyards are irrigated. The name of my company is Dry Farm Wines. We don't allow irrigation on any of our vines. Now, we also don't sell domestic wine. I don't drink domestic wine. No domestic wines meet all of our criteria. But dry farming is one of those criteria. So when you irrigate, you create a whole other host of problems. Not only is it bad for the planet. We don't have enough water now. So not only is it bad for the planet, but it also makes for a lazy vine. Lazy vines produce lazy fruit of lower quality, which is reason why most of Europe is illegal to irrigate a grapevine. So let me go back to what a natural wine is, because I think this will tie everything together a bit. So natural wine is a very confusing term to consumers, because I tell people I sell natural wine. They're like, well, aren't all wines natural? And so it's very confusing. In fact, they're not. Natural wine is a very specific wine growing and fermentation protocol. It's not complicated. In fact, it's quite simple. It's way more simple than your conventional wines, which are not natural. So there are two types of wine in the world. There's natural and conventional. There's just nothing really in between. Before we get all the way down that path, I want to mention for a second about organic wine. So organic wine is not always natural, but all natural wines are always organic. So just because a wine says it's organic doesn't mean that it's natural. And this whole confusion is what leads to, well, it's one of the reasons for our success is that we're the largest buyer and seller of natural wines in the world. And we really think of ourselves as a health company, not as a wine company. And our audience are people who care about what they put in their body. And so, and of course, we are trusted in this world of health because it's kind of our lifestyles, the way we live, right? And so we're not here for some marketing pitch. In fact, we'll talk about this in a moment, but alcohol is super toxic. And one of the most dangerous neurotoxins on the planet that ruins millions of people's lives every year. And so, and some people shouldn't drink at all. So, right. And so I'm not here to advocate for people to drink. What I do is I educate people if you're going to drink, then this is what you should drink and this is why, whether you get it from me or not, right? So let me go back to the natural wine. We'll get to the toxicity alcohol in a moment. So natural wine is a very simple definition. Natural wine is always organically or biodynamically farmed. Biodynamic farming is a prescriptive advanced form of organic farming. We can spend 15 minutes on biodynamic. We don't need to go there. It's an advanced prescriptive form of organic farming. All natural wines are either organically or biodynamically farmed. Number two, this is the big one. This is very important. Natural wines are always fermented with wild indigenous native yeast. Conventional wines are almost, let's call always, fermented with lab culture GMO yeast. What's all that mean? Well, on the skin of every grape berry at the time of harvest at maturity, all grape berries, no matter where they're grown or whether they irrigate, it doesn't matter. All grape berries have yeast on the skin of the fruit. It's a white, waxy film. You could use your fingernail to scrape it off. It's just waxy and it's on the skin of all grapes. That's a wild indigenous native yeast that's collected in the air in the vineyard. Now, natural winemakers allow that yeast and that yeast alone to ferment to create the wine, to create alcohol. It's called a spontaneous fermentation because everything needed to make wine is already present on the grape. The only thing you need to make wine is yeast and fruit juice that has sugar in it. Fermentation is when the yeast inoculates and starts to eat the sugar. And the byproduct of that is that the alcohol and carbon dioxide, that's how wine is made. However, in the conventional world, the reason that they're using these lab-grown commercial yeast is because the native yeast, this indigenous wild yeast is temperamental. It's difficult to work with. You cannot make wine in very large volumes using it. It's too unstable. And so you'll end up with a broken fermentation, which means that the yeast dies off before it completes its fermentation. So these commercial lab-grown GMO yeast are manufactured to be more stable. They will also withstand a higher alcohol environment. You can make wine in any quantity you want with them because they're very sturdy. And they don't require a lot of coddling. And so it's the yeast of choice for virtually everyone except for the natural winemaker. Now, natural wines, by the way, are quite rare. They're not expensive. We'll get to that, but they are rare. They represent less than one tenth of one percent of wine production worldwide. As an example, South Africa is the eighth largest wine-producing country in the world, but there are only five natural winemakers in the entire country. And so most natural wines are grown in and across Europe. We have a dozen or so growers in South America, five in South Africa, and the rest are spread across Europe. It's worth noting that there are about 25 natural wine growers in the United States, maybe as many as 40, but they don't make wines according to our specific requirements. So Dry Farm Wines has requirements far and beyond just being natural. We also do lab testing, as you're familiar with. And we have a number of requirements that exceed just the natural format. And I'll cover those in a moment. But so natural wine, organic, biodynamic, native yeast fermentation, and then they're additive-free. That's pretty much the end of the story on natural wine. Spontaneous fermentation, no additives, nothing but honest, true wine. Now, commercial wines, as we already talked about, may contain these additives. They're conventionally farmed. They're irrigated usually. And so we recommend that people drink this natural wine product, again, whether they get it from us or not. So that's sort of what constitutes a natural wine. It's quite straightforward. It's just all very confusing to people who aren't familiar with it. So how did you decide that you were going to get into clean or natural wines? I mean, was there epiphany for yourself? Did you say, I live in Napa Valley and I see what's going on and there's got to be a better way? Or were you walking a vineyard in Europe and going, hey, what's all the weeds doing in here? No, it was actually, I was a biohacker and a health and fitness enthusiast for many years and I drank wine from all over and plenty of wine from domestic vineyards. But I started experimenting with the ketogenic diet about six or seven years ago. And initially, this is now ketogenic. Keto is very popular in the mainstream. Nobody knew what it was at the time. But biohackers had started sort of as a quite famous researcher. His name is Dr. Dominic DiAgostino. He's the best known ketogenic researcher. There are a number of well-known researchers, but he's done the best job of sort of marketing himself, if you will. He's a terrific, terrific guy, but he showed up on the water. I know him well. What's that? I know him well. Yeah, he's a good guy and recommends our wines exclusively and drinks our wines and has published numerous times blood testing and keto testing with our wines and that they have no impact on your ketosis. But anyway, I'd started experimenting with what I'd call a therapeutic ketogenic diet. So pretty hardcore, which I did for a couple of years. I got bored with it. Didn't find it was sustainable. And now I'm on what I would call a modified ketogenic diet and have been for years, which looks more like I can. It's just very low carb. But when I started ketogenic diet, I don't know if, you know, it's hard to say with nutrition, but I don't know if it were a number of cofactors or I was getting older or, you know, for whatever reason, I didn't feel good drinking conventional wines anymore. And so I was actually, I thought it was the alcohol and because alcohol levels have been rising and wine and and I've been drinking wine and alcohol for a long time. And I thought along with aging that it was just that I was becoming more sensitive to alcohol. And so I was talking with a friend and I was going to make this is before I knew anything about natural wines. And when I discovered natural wines, nobody outside of Europe knew what they were. And so I was talking with a friend, the smartest person I know in the wine business in Napa Valley and I was saying, you know, I think I'm going to make some low alcohol wine because I'm having a challenge with drinking. I think I'm having a challenge with alcohol in my life and I don't want to stop drinking. But it's just causing me to feel bad and brain fog and I just don't, I'm not enjoying it, but I don't want to quit. And so he said, have you tried some of the low alcohol wines that are made in Europe? And I was like, never heard of such a thing. And he said, yeah, check it out. So I started trying to locate these low alcohol wines. They weren't natural. I didn't know anything about natural wine at the time. I just started looking for lower alcohol wines and they were extremely difficult to find. And we define low alcohol wine at 12.5% or below. And most of the wines I drink today are between 7 and 11%. That's just my preference, both from a taste point of view and as well as I like to drink wine. I'm not like one glass guy. And so I want to be able to drink numerous glasses and lowering the alcohol. It's a huge impact on both my health and my ability to retain, you know, a reasonable level of sobriety while I'm drinking. With the occasional glorious exception on my dad. So in this process, basically I accidentally stumbled across natural wine without even knowing what it was. But as I was looking for these lower alcohol wines, I discovered that there was this importer in Paris who was an American who was bringing in these delicious and amazing wines that were lower in alcohol and I just fell in love with him. And so I called him up in Paris and I said, or sent him an email and I talked to him on the phone and I was like, Hey, look, I really love these wines. Your palate is great. You know, you're bringing in these lower alcohol wines. They taste delicious. Tell me about these. Well, I sell natural wine. I was like, what is natural wine? Right. And then that that's kind of how the whole thing started. And so then I discovered that there at the time there were probably about 500 natural wine growers in the world. Now there's probably 12 for 1400, but the total is only about 500. And so I started really going down this rabbit hole and because I had made wine in Napa Valley in 2005 and a hobby project, I knew a little bit about analogy. And so I started doing independent lab testing on these wines. Also, one of the things I was looking for was sugar. And the other thing I was looking for was actual alcohol content because it might surprise you to learn might not. Alcohol stated on a wine bottle is not legally required to be accurate. Really? Yeah, it's another collusion between the government and the wine industry. And so I started correlating these lab tests also looking for added sulfur or sulfites. So the US legal limit for sulfur is 350 parts per million. We don't allow over 70 parts per million because wines can all wines contain naturally produced sulfites. Any fermented food has sulfite in it. Many foods have sulfites, but if it's fermented, it contains it contains sulfites. And so sulfites can be naturally occurring up to 70 parts per million, which is our limit. But our average wine test out at 39 parts per million, those are all naturally occurring. So we were looking for a number of attributes in lab testing. So I started setting these kind of protocols and requirements around lab results and a taste aesthetic that we liked, right? Because it's really important that wine tastes great. Right. And for us, I mean, we're really taste makers. We just love the taste of wine, which is one of the reasons I don't want to stop drinking, but I was having this adverse relationship with alcohol. And well, I thought it was alcohol. It turns out it could have been a lot of things. See, there's no real research to support what a GMO yeast means. Not a lot of research to support what drinking sulfite, what drinking high levels of sulfur did. I mean, the Romans used sulfur to preserve wine. So, you know, this is not anything new. There's just no research to support what it all means. Here's what we do know. When you drink lower alcohol, natural wines, you just simply feel better. Right. And so, and you don't have these adverse effects, particularly from alcohol. Let's be perfectly clear. I mentioned earlier, alcohol is a dangerous neurotoxin. Some people shouldn't drink at all. Some days I think maybe I shouldn't drink because I like it. And so, so, you know, when we drink alcohol in higher doses, we're going to have negative impact from that. Everybody will. The first negative impact is going to be disrupted sleep and dehydration. Right. And then that's going to lead to a whole lot of other side effects that create a hangover if you drink enough. Right. And so I like to drink. I drink about a bottle of wine a day. But again, I drink much lower alcohol, nine or 10% wine. Doesn't sound like a big difference between 12% and 15%, but I assure you it's gigantic in both its effect on you and how you feel. And so, I know you've drank our wines and so you know exactly what I'm talking about. I can't drink conventional wine anymore. The only way I can drink a conventional wine, which is super, super rare. And if it's heavily oaked, it gives me a headache instantly. Like our wines are not out. So, but it's a very popular taste profile to have these heavy, heavy oaked wines all over the world, not just in the US. But so, so let me stop you there for a second because I know a bunch of our viewers and listeners are going, oh my gosh. This guy's drinking a bottle of wine a day and you're obviously not inebriated talking to me this morning. But I don't do the day time and I don't recommend anybody else does either. Good idea. But I want to mention that in my best seller, the longevity paradox, I profile one of the oldest living human beings, Luigi Carneros. In the 1500s, actually chronicled his aging. He died in 102 in the 1500s. And one of his prescriptions for great health was he drank a bottle of 750 ml of wine every day and thought that that was quite prescriptive to good health. Now, the reason I interrupt you is those wines, and I actually was just in Pompeii two weeks ago, those were natural wines. Because there weren't no applicants. Yeah, and those were actually fairly low alcohol wines in those days. And I was just actually, you know, vineyard on Mount Vesuvius, which is a biodynamic vineyard and you're right. And they've been, I think, a support generation family now. And they've got 100-year-old vines with trunks, I mean, bigger than my arm. And there's, you know, no grafting, no nothing. They've been there for hundreds of years and producing beautifully on my dad. But yeah, you're right. So the idea that someone, I don't want people to be shocked that with low alcohol wine that are quote healthy wines, the idea of having a bottle of wine per day is not as shocking as it may appear. And Luigi Carneros would back you up. How's that? Yeah, I mean, I couldn't drink a bottle of conventional wine. I'd just be a drunk, terrible, feel terrible, negative remnants hangover. I just wouldn't work for me, but, and trust me, I've tried. Let me ask another, maybe it's a misconception. A lot of people, there's a buzz among the psalms out there that the new movement in natural wine is obviously don't intervene. But a lot of psalms on their website say, now, if it's a natural wine, there's going to be, it's going to be fizzy, and it's going to be cloudy, and it's going to taste funny. And that's because nobody's putting any sulfites in it to stop the fermentation. And if it doesn't taste, and I'm reading kind of off a website, if it doesn't taste fizzy, it's probably not a natural wine. I think that's a bunch of bump. Well, I'd rather say you. Yeah, that's not true. That's not true. So, you know, it's true that there are many funky natural wines. And then those are not wines we buy, right? Thank you. Yeah, they're, we, we, those wines are faulted from our point of view. And there are a number of classic faults from, from Brett and my seas to reductive to mousey nose to just this barnyard kind of funky smell that that many of these natural wines emit. So we don't buy those wines. I don't care for the taste of those wines. To me, I want to drink a classic, beautiful, elegant wine without all the conventional problems associated with it. So, you know, we only buy a very, very small percentage of wines that we actually taste because many of them are as you describe. Well, let's talk about fizziness and cloudiness or the lipidity, the clarity of wine, right? So you reach it, you reach this perfect level of lipidity when you filter a wine, right? Natural wines are typically not filtered. And so that's not to say that all natural wines don't have some, that some natural wines get some level of filtration, but most do not. So it's not, it's not a requirement of natural wines that you don't filter. It just happens to be the most natural winemakers just in their personal ethos just don't filter. And so, and I would, but not filtering actually is a beautiful thing. Lipidity is useless to me. I don't care how clear the wine is. I care about the texture of the wine. I care about how the wine feels. I care about the spirit of the wine. I care about its supernal sort of ethereal communication, right? And so when I think of filtered wine, I think of it the same way if you think about coffee. So if you have a drip coffee, right, that runs through a filter, then you're going to have this kind of clear or more coffee that has greater lipidity. If you drink a French press, you're going to have texture in the coffee because there's going to be these microscopic pieces of coffee that are actually in it. To me, I'd rather drink a French press, right, because then a drip coffee because it has more texture. So filtering from our perspective is, is not useful to the wine. Now, that being said, when you talk about fizziness in the natural wine, that's a different issue because there are many natural wines that have post-bottle fermentation. Now, why do they have post-bottle fermentation? Because they weren't sterilized with sulfur dioxide. So when you sterilize a wine, you kill everything in the wine, including gut-friendly bacteria that Dr. David Perlmutter has written about many times about our wines and natural wine. Is that these living bacteria, what we call living wines, because all natural wines are still alive because they haven't been sterilized with sulfur dioxide. And so all conventional wines get heavy doses of sulfur dioxide to sterilize them, to kill the wine, or what we call mummify it and McDonaldize it. Because what they want is a consistent bottle-to-bottle experience, and they want it to be able to sit on the shelf life for a long time, right? So sterilizing the wine achieves these goals, but it also, when you sterilize a wine, you kill off living gut-friendly bacteria as well. So the fizziness occurs when a wine did not complete its fermentation down to its driest bone level. So in the fermentation process, didn't totally get complete, leaving a small degree of sugar behind in the wine, which then, because it's not sterilized, it continues a post-bottling fermentation. Sometimes, this is not intentionally, it's also how sparkling wines are made, it's a post-bottling fermentation. So, but we don't buy these wines typically. Occasionally, we'll find it interesting in a specific type of wine. But generally speaking, we don't buy wines that have this post-bottling fermentation because, again, it doesn't appeal to our taste aesthetic. There's nothing wrong with it. Some people like it. It's just that what we're looking for when we buy a wine, as I mentioned earlier, we're looking for classic, elegant, what we just call classic, elegant taste notes of classic wines that are just well-made, right, and well-grown. And so, don't contain any of these bacterial faults that you speak of. I know, and I've heard you speak, and I've spoken to you at meetings before, you talk about your wines as kind of paleo-friendly as they're sugar-free or carb-free. And I think, tell us how much secret sugar is being put, particularly in American wines, that consumers aren't aware of. And what's, you know, what's the difference? People say, well, wait a minute, alcohol turns to sugar. I hear it all the time. And so, I have two questions. Number one, alcohol doesn't turn to sugar. It does not. And sugar turns to alcohol if you're firm at it. Correct. But so, tell me about sugar-free wine. Well, here's the deal. Wine, adding sugar to wine, also known as capitalization, is illegal in most of the U.S., certainly in California. That's not how sugar gets in wine. So, let's talk about how you make wine, and then I'll tell you how sugar gets in wine and why they wanted it in wine. So, Americans like sugar. In addition to that, I mean, we, from my perspective, I think sugar is the most dangerous, widely addictive drug on the planet. So, Americans, particularly, well, it's a global problem, I don't want to say Americans, but it's, sugar is a problem all over the world. And, but it doesn't, wine doesn't, sugar doesn't get in wine by adding it. When you ferment wine, when you make wine, you press wine from, you press the grape juice, which is teeming with sugar. It's sweet. You press the grape juice into a tank, and if it's natural wine, it will spontaneously ferment because it already contains yeast. If it's a conventional wine, the first thing they do is introduce sulfur dioxide to the wine for the first of three times to kill the native yeast, and then they inoculate it with lab-grown yeast. They kill the native yeast because they don't want the two yeast competing. So, but either way, whether you inoculate it or whether it's spontaneously fermented, the way you make wine is that the yeast eats the sugar, kind of like the Pac-Man just eats the sugar, and then the byproduct of that, that's food for the yeast. The byproduct of that is ethyl alcohol and carbon dioxide. That's how you make wine. Now, if the wine is allowed to fully ferment, meaning what that means is that the yeast eats all of the available sugar, and when they do, the yeast will then die because there's no food source for them. If the wine is allowed to fully ferment, you will have a sugar-free wine because the yeast ate all available sugar, and we lab test for sugar because you can't always taste sugar and wine at our level. We don't allow, we restrict sugar and wine to less than one gram per liter. Now, that's less than one gram per bottle because as you noted earlier, wine bottle is usually 750 milliliters, and of course, a liter is a thousand milliliters. Our typical wine test out at .02, which is legally and statistically sugar-free. The government actually has a statistical measurement which allows you to call a product sugar-free legally. Our wines are sugar-free. Also, fair to note, because I get this kind of BS all the time. It's fair to note that there are some conventional wines, particularly red wines, that are also sugar-free and meet our standard, because they're fully fermented. So just because it's a natural wine doesn't mean it's sugar-free, or just because it's a conventional wine doesn't mean it's not sugar-free. But here's what I will tell you. We did lab testing on the top 20 best-selling wines in the United States year before last. We lab tested the top 20 wines for sugar. Only two of the 20 wines, 10%, met our criteria for sugar. The others exceeded our threshold for sugar. So, wine makers in the United States like sugar because it creates mouthfeel. It also creates a long finish, right? Because when you drink a natural wine that's sugar-free and lower in alcohol, it doesn't have that long syrupy finish, as you know. And that long finish, if you will, while I don't find it appealing, is oftentimes a way that Psalms or other wine experts will describe the value of a wine. It's got a long finish. Well, that long finish is associated with sugar. And so, it also creates mouthfeel, sugar does. But let's go back again to how it gets in the wine. Here's how it gets into the wine. I said sulfur dioxide is used in conventional winemaking three times usually, once to kill the native yeast. And number two, this is how sugar gets in or what's known as RS or residual sugar in the industry, both glucose and fructose. And so, how it gets in there is that they use sulfur dioxide again in the wine to break the fermentation before it completes. And so, on the wine tank, there's a little device that's actually quite simple. Some are more sophisticated as you get into large volume winemaking. But if you're making wine in pretty small quantities, there's a little device that floats in the tank that will measure the amount of sugar that's in the wine during the fermentation process. So, you can see how close you are to completing fermentation because the natural winemaker uses this device too because he wants to know when his fermentation is going to end. It's going to end when this sugar runs out the yeast dies, right? So, but what happens in conventional wines is that they can see the measurement of sugar in the juice at any time. And so, when they reach a desirable level of residual sugar, RS as it's known in the industry, then they dump sulfur dioxide into the wine for the second time. And they kill the yeast. Sulfur dioxide kills the yeast. So, it breaks the fermentation, leaving this residual sugar behind. And they can measure it exactly so they know exactly what they're trying to achieve from a taste and mouthful point of view. They have an objective. The winemaker wants to leave, you know, X number of grams of sugar per liter. That's how wine sugar is measured in wine. So, that's how it gets in. And then, and it's also fair to know, I know this is very confusing. A lot of information is also fair to know that all natural wines are sugar free. That just happens to be a requirement of dry farm wines. Not all natural wines are irrigation free. That just happens to be a criteria of ours, right? Not all natural wines are sulfur free. It just happens to be a requirement of ours, right? And so, we have these sort of requirements that not all natural wines are low on alcohol. Natural wines can be 15 or 16% alcohol, just like conventional wines. We don't buy those wines. In fact, you know, when I first started doing this and I realized that drinking lower alcohol wines made me feel so much better. And I could drink so much more. And, you know, and so, in the very beginning, I mean, now we're the largest natural wine buyer in the world by multiple many acts. But in the beginning, when I went to my first natural wine fair, this is how you find natural wine growers, is that they, because they've been ostracized by their neighbors in their communities, because they were thought to be crazy for not, you know, using conventional and chemical farming and so on. Now it's, now it's quite, you know, it's quite hip to drink and sell natural wines. But for until just the last few years, it wasn't at all particularly among their neighbors and peers and who thought they were crazy, right, for not using additives and chemicals in their processes. But these are just like, these, when you meet these people, they're just like hippies. They're like, they're not, you can't make a lot of money making natural wine because you can't make it in large volumes. It's also difficult. Like, I assure you, it's a lot more difficult to grow wine without irrigation than with irrigation. Why do you irrigate a grapevine? Because it's cheaper and it creates a higher yield. And it creates what fruit that weighs more because it might not surprise you when you fill a wine berry with water. It weighs more, right. And so fruit is sold by the ton. And so that's, as a result, the more it weighs, the more it's worth. So this is a reason you irrigate. It's also a lot easier than farming without irrigation, which requires a whole several more layers of work throughout the year. You've got to have a winter cover crop. And there's just a whole lot of steps to locking in the moisture within under the mulch. Right. So, but anyway, these people who grow these wines are not, you know, they are usually, as you noted, they're usually second or third generation growers. And so they don't have any capital costs in the land because it's already been paid for, which is why natural wines are not expensive. So our wines are $25 a bottle. And I'll tell you, you can't buy a wine that's organic or naturally grown for less than $20 a bottle. The math just doesn't pencil out. Right. Our wines are $25 a bottle. The other unique thing about dry farm wines, we sell all of our wines for the same price. So, you know, there's no bottle to bottle cost variation. We just say, hey, this is simple, you know, some costs a little bit more, some costs a little bit less, but we're going to sell them for all the same price to keep it simple. And so nobody's getting rich at $25 a bottle given that they can't produce large volume choosing native yeast. Right. And there's a reason we work with over a thousand small family farms because we need a lot of wine and they can't make a lot in any one particular place. And so it's, but these people, you've been, you know, it's a way of life, right? Their belief system, their belief in the spirit connected nature of the natural. It's a way of life. It's the way they eat. It's the way they live. Like most of the family with the farms and not travel extensively and have been the hundreds of these farms, stayed with them, eaten with them. It's a way of life for them. Like most natural wine farms, most everyone in the family works on the farm and they live on the farm and they generally eat only things that they grow or are harvested from their neighbors or themselves. Right. And so they raised their own livestock. The other thing that you find in natural farming is I mentioned this early is this commitment to biodiversity, insects, bees, orchards, trees, livestock. Chickens. Yeah, ducks and chickens and cows. And, you know, this is so most of these families, it's not exclusively true, but I'm because, you know, you might have a young natural wine grower who's not yet married or doesn't have a family. But I'm just saying most of them. They have this lifestyle of the way they live. Right. And it's a very simple way of living and they live this way because they believe they have a spirit of belief around this way of life and this way of making wine and this way of growing wine. And sounds like you've seen it and you know exactly what I'm talking about. Oh, yeah. Whenever we travel, we, my wife Penny and I actually, every trip to seek out a biodynamic wine maker in the area more than one and, you know, ask to walk the fields with them. They usually, you're right, they invite you to lunch and that's one thing I want to bring up real quick, particularly in Europe. In the United States, we've unfortunately raised a culture of happy hour wine drinkers and that concept really thankfully in the villages does not exist. Wine is a beverage that's had with food. And it's one of the reasons, I think, because of these low alcohol wines that you can have multiple glasses over the course of a two hour meal, which would be a normal meal. And you're not going to be drunk, you're not going to have anything, but it's something you're having with the meal. And one of the things that I preach about, the idea of happy hour drinking where we're having two, maybe three glasses of wine and then go to dinner, that's part of what I call the beer belly syndrome. In that alcohol, and we were talking about this off camera, alcohol is actually a great preferred fuel to burn preferentially over glucose, over free fatty acids. And what happens to a lot of people is they don't realize they've already met all of the energy requirements for their cells with the alcohol they're consuming before they can sit down at dinner. And then they get hit with the carbohydrates, the fats and the proteins from dinner. There's actually no place to put those and they're actually turned into fat virtually instantaneously. And I think that's one of the problems of our culture that we just don't see in Europe very much. Is that been your experience? Yeah, I can vary among wine people, you know, because they love to drink wine. But generally speaking, I don't drink without eating generally for a whole host of reasons, but the most, the one of particular interest to me is that it's just a recipe for me to have a brain experience that I'm really not looking for. And so, because alcohol, well, it's also fair to note, I only eat once a day. And so, yeah, so whenever I start drinking or eating, I'm in a fasted state and have been fasted for 18 or 20 hours. And so, you know, for me, it's not a desirable effect to drink without eating because the alcoholic has such quick absorption and small intestine that it just gives me a brain effect that I'm not really interested in. And it's going to lead to, you know, alcohol is a domino drug. And what I mean by that and why it's so dangerous, just like cocaine is a domino drug. So, alcohol, and what I mean by a domino drug is that the more you drink, the more likely you are to drink more. Right. And if you're drinking without eating, then you're getting the double whammy from the alcohol because there's no substance there to slow its absorption. And so, you, so you're drinking more in de facto faster because you don't because your absorption rate is so quick. So, for me, I don't want that. I don't want to have a quick absorption rate, which is then going to leave me to have a poor brain experience from the alcohol. So, I want to slow it down. So, I want to drink lower alcohol wines and I want to slow the absorption down. And so, when I'm eating and drinking, as you know, you're going to get a much slower absorption of alcohol. And then you're going to be able to moderate that much better over time. Well, I say drinking a bottle and sometimes more, but when I say drinking a bottle of wine generally, that's over a three or four hour period. Right. It's not, it's not like I sit down and drink a bottle of wine. But, but so it's over a long period of time and food is involved. Just like Luigi do. All right. I got to let you go pretty shortly. But you got a new line of products that's getting a lot of buzz. Bo Lixer. Yeah, it's a what? What the heck is Bo Lixer and why would you mess with wine? Come on. It's a botanical. Well, I'll tell you why we did. I'll tell you. We wanted to, we actually, we were introduced to it by an Austrian wine maker's wife who had, this is how we got onto it. A few years ago, they had, they were primary sparkling producers, sparkling wine producers. A few years ago, they had men recently married and they were going to, she was going to get pregnant, but they wanted to make a very, very low alcohol wine that she could enjoy, you know, in moderation during her pregnancy. That was their goal. And so they made this botanical elixir by taking wine and essence blending it with, in their case, an elderflower tea. So they would sundry these elderflowers, these organic elderflowers and then they'd make a tea from it and then they would ferment the, they would, they would combine these teas in the fermentation process. Anyway, it resulted in a 5% alcohol wine. You can't make wine at 5% and how it doesn't taste like wine. And so they enhanced the taste by using these botanical additions. We tasted it, it was great. And the reason we kind of pursued it further and started having these botanical elixirs made for us is because we wanted to release an ultra low alcohol wine like experience. So, because I believe alcohol is toxic. And I wanted to give, I wanted to drink lower alcohol wines personally or have that option. Now they don't taste like wine so it's a, it's a, it's a different experience. So basically we wanted to produce a natural product that had the benefits of botanicals with a lower alcohol wine like taste. And so that's kind of how we got there. It's, they've been popular. But at the end of the day, I'll tell you most people still want to drink wine. They just love the taste of wine and they'll drink these botanical elixirs, what we call a boluxer. They'll drink these lower alcohol things at different, for different occasions, maybe around the pool in the late afternoon because they're very, very low alcohol. Or, you know, just people want that option. Some people do, but I'll tell you at the end of the day, the people who buy the product still buy a lot of natural wine, right? They still want to drink wine. So we mentioned in the beginning, so you're a subscription service at Drive Farm Wines. How does that subscription work? I mean, my wife and I, I drink almost predominantly red wines. My wife attends towards champagne for the polyphenol effect of both red and champagne. How do you do it? Can you customize a box? Or, you know, here's what we're sending in this month and good luck. Yeah, I'll, so you can, most of our subscribers get wines delivered. We're really a wine company for regular wine drinkers, right? So people who drink wine on a regular basis, that's who I am and that's people who need the most amount of help are the people who are drinking the most, right? Drinking occasionally probably don't need our help as much, but most of our customers drink fairly regularly. Maybe not as much as me, but fairly regular. So our two primary, our two most popular subscriptions are monthly and bimonthly. Now, that being said, you can buy any frequency you want, quarterly, twice a year. You can get wine from us on any frequency that you want. Not daily. Well, we do have people who get multiple boxes per week. Okay. All right. Some people have several subscriptions. But that being said, you can cancel it anytime. We don't make it difficult. There's an account portal that you can log into your account, change your frequency, change the type of wine, cancel your subscription. We don't make it challenging. You know, I had to call us or do anything. You know, if you want to put your subscription on hold, you know, you're going to leave the country for two months or you decided I want to drink for a while. You can simply put it on hold and restart it when you want. We don't make any of that confusing or difficult. We're not trying to trick people into having a subscription or make it difficult to stop it. You know, if you don't want it, you don't want it, right? So I find it offensive when businesses, and there are many subscription type businesses that make it difficult to get out or trick you getting in or, you know, it's just like, yeah, that's not who we are, what we're about. But so that you can also choose any mix of wine you want, or you can choose a custom order anytime you want just by contacting us if you want to check or go into your account portal and changing the type of so you can get mixed. You can get all red. You can get all sparkling. You can get orange rose orange wine is white wine that has skin contact. Almost all white wines get have no contact with the skin. Red wines always have skin contact. That's how they get their color and the increase in polyphenols is from contact with the skin and seeds and their tannin rupture from contact with the steeds and Sims and and skins. So but anyway, so you you so we sell orange wine rose sparkling wine white and red and then some sparkling reds as well. And then the Bolluxar, which is, you know, this botanical mix. All right, last question. How do I find a healthy wine at the grocery store trader Joe's the wine shop. Do they exist or is there anything to look for or do I have to come to you? And that well, here's the deal. It's very difficult. Right, because there's no contents labeling the it's and in my case, because I drink only lower alcohol wines and I recommend that people drink lower alcohol wines. You they're very hard to find even it's just crazy like I go into a restaurant and normally I just take wine in with me, but some states don't allow it. Right. So it depends on what state you're in. Like in California, you just carry a bottle of wine in a restaurant with you. I'm in New York right now. You just carry a bottle of wine in a restaurant with you, but many states don't allow it. I was just in Denver last week. They don't allow it. So if you go in and you ask, you know, a psalm or wine director is like, Hey, do you have any natural wine? Usually don't even know what it is or they don't have it or it's like, OK, well, do you have anything that's lower in alcohol? And they have they're clueless. They're like, I don't have any. I don't know because nobody ever asked that. Right. So but here's how you would. Here's how you would find natural wine. If you live in a major market like New York or San Francisco or Chicago or Los Angeles, you there are natural wine retailers. You can find them by either doing a Google search or downloading a free smartphone app called Raisin and and and this this app or Google search. If you live in a major market, you're going to find you're going to find one or two or three in New York, you would find a dozen. Right. But in San Francisco, there are three in LA. There are probably half a dozen retailers that sell exclusively natural wine. Now, that doesn't mean it's sugar free. It doesn't mean that it's lower in alcohol. It doesn't mean that it's been lab tested. It just means that it's natural wine and you could go in and those natural wine retailers, they don't sell conventional wine. I mean, they're like rabidly against it. Right. They're they're they're just against their religion. It's against their religion. They always sell natural wine. And so so you you that's that's one pathway. If you're going out to eat, this is really difficult. If you know if you're going out to eat, then I recommend a couple of ways to approach that. If you look at wines that come from colder regions, then you'll find lower alcohol typically. There's a tremendous amount of natural wines in Beaujolais where Gamma is the red wine. Great. It looks like you have a bottle of Italian wine. If I do indeed, I have been to that. I have been to that vineyard actually 11% 11% I love that wine. It's delicious. And the wine growers are great guy. But so, you know, the problem is, it's just not easy. Unless you live in, you know, if you live in Wichita, you're not going to find any natural wine. I was just in Dallas, which is, you know, a pretty big city. And and, you know, there's one natural wine retailer there that had a super limited selection. You know, so, so it's, it's, it's just hard. But, you know, I just recommend it, you know, if people drink lower alcohol wines, they're going to typically, for whatever reason, even if they're not natural. If they're lower in alcohol, the style of the winemaking just tends to be better. Right. Better for you. And just drinking less alcohol is better for you. I know people expect me to come on, think I'm selling wine, but I actually talk pretty negatively about alcohol. Right. And so it's not easy. It's the reason I think there's so many people depend on us that and the fact that our standards are above natural. Right. We're, we're, we're bringing a criteria that's, that's way far advanced, more than natural. Gosh, you're taking about like an hour of your time, which is. You know, I got, I got to let you go. And I want to, you know, I want to just say that again for anyone who listened. First of all, if you don't drink, don't start rule number one. We can talk about health benefits of wine or the dangers of wine, but for goodness sakes, if you don't drink, don't start. Please take that away from, from what we've said. But for those that enjoy glass of wine from time to time, can you tell us about a special offer that you have for our listeners today? Yep. So we, we, for your audience, we are offering, and I'm sure this will be in your show notes. Yep. We are going to send them a extra bottle of wine for one penny. We can't give it away under the law, but we have a penny bottle offer that we send along with. And there'll be a link to, to end the show notes for you to find that offer. That'd be great. That's been great talking to you. It's good to see you again. Congratulations on getting this, I think, much needed product out to wine drinkers everywhere. And one more time. Don't drink. Please don't start. But thanks a lot and continued success to you. Great. Thank you for having me. All right. Take care. Okay. It's time for our audience question from, oh, Keras Nightwing on Instagram. I hope I got that right. I have two sons, one 14 months old and two and a half years old. Are they too young to start time controlled eating? You know, this is a great question. I get it all the time and thanks for asking. First of all, we have to remember that the idea of breakfast being the most important meal of the day is based on millions and millions and millions and millions of dollars of advertising from primarily breakfast food companies like cereal manufacturers who have convinced us that breakfast is what you're supposed to start with. And that's an early morning, basically, of sugar. The idea that people eat breakfast is actually a very modern finding. Breakfast really started in the late 1800s in the Industrial Revolution. And I've talked about this before. If you follow hunter-gatherers, the last ones that are still in existence, most hunter-gatherer societies don't eat breakfast. They may have their first meal 10, 11 o'clock in the morning, maybe noon or when they find something. And the kids follow that the same way. Most hunter-gatherer societies, mothers are breastfeeding their children up to about four years of age. And as you know, mothers out there, when your child wants to eat, your child wants to eat. So the idea that a child isn't eating nearly constantly during the day, a small child, probably doesn't go along with experience. But even in these hunter-gatherers, once their kids are mean, they're eating like everybody else. They're eating when they find a berry or they're eating later in the day. Just remember so much of what we've been taught is actually from marketing and not from truth. Having said that, where time-restricted eating really starts to pay off is later in life. We also have to be cognizant because of social media. There's still a body image problem that is taking over young girls, young women, teenage girls. And manipulating eating patterns can, not necessarily, can feed into negative behaviors. So you've got to have a lot of judgment in this area. Just remember breakfast is a very, very modern invention. Great question. Time for the review of the week. Nikos S watched my interview with Robert Slovak on water filtration and said, I am so happy to find your channel excellent work with love from Greece. Well, thanks very much, Nikos. This interview got a lot of positive comments. I think it's really important to learn about where our water comes from, what's in our water, exciting to learn about deuterium depleted water. And glad we're coming to you from Greece. And some of the longest living people in the world are in Greece. So keep up the good work and don't return, don't go to modern habits. So that's it for today. And keep writing on wherever you get our podcasts, write on iTunes, give us a review. Because I'm Dr. Gundry and I'm always looking out for you. We'll see you next week. Before you go, I just wanted to remind you that you can find the show on iTunes, Google Play, Stitcher, or wherever you get your podcasts. Because I'm Dr. Gundry and I'm always looking out for you.