Marcelo Castro Vera - Making Wine Without Electricity or Sulfites in Mexico

My guest is Marcelo Castro Vera of Octágono, one of a few natural wines in Mexico and the only winery nationwide that ferments in clay vessels buried in the ground. They don't have electricity in the winery, so the whole winemaking process is done by hand. They add zero sulfites to their wine. They also produce artisanal mezcal. The agaves are cooked in earth pits using fallen wood, crushed with a stone tahona using spring water to extract sugars, fermented naturally with no yeast or additional sugars added in wooden vats, distilled in copper stills. They also produce beer, mead, cider, and distilled prickly pear alcohol. 

I love Marcelo's thinking about how doing all the winemaking by hand creates jobs for more people, and that he sees this as the goal of the winery rather than getting rich. I hope you are inspired by him to think about what wine could become by eliminating some of the things we take for granted.

@octagonomx

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