Bonjour! Thank you for your interest in our natural wine bar! You may have a few questions about the origin of The Punchdown and some of the terminology we use. Hopefully this explanation satisfies both your quest for knowledge and your thirst for great natural wine.

The Punchdown was conceptualized by Lisa Costa and D.C. Looney. We met while working in a winery for the 2007 harvest, and we really got to know each other through working “punchdowns” together.

“Punchdown” is a wine making term of art. During the fermentation process, yeast converts the sugars into carbon dioxide and alcohol. The carbon dioxide causes the solid matter (a/k/a the “cap”) to float to the top. A “punchdown” is a task used to punch the cap of a fermenting lot of grapes down to extract color, phenols, flavors, textures … and to act as a natural antioxidant in the fermenting wine.

The Punchdown is a "natural wine bar". There is no regulation or certifications for "natural wine". In fact, many of our purveyors are breaking the rules, regulations, and laws of their respective regions by choosing to make wine in this natural way. At the end of the day, we like our producers to make wines that have an interesting story and taste - reflecting a sense of place called “terroir”. We have developed a set of guidelines that we feel to be the most important in our selection of wines:

- Let’s start with the vineyards: We like the vines of our wines to be grown in a sustainable, organic, or biodynamic manner by real farmers. We also like to hear that cover crops are present creating a healthy and balanced ecosystem with good pests to combat the bad pests (versus the conventional method of obliterating all pests with chemicals). Certification is not important to us. We get excited to hear that the soils are tilled by hand, horse, donkey, or oxen and a system of recycling of the by-products is in place. A few features we find to be particularly awesome: working farms! 8,000 year old methods! moon / planetary phases in accordance with the natural rhythms of the earth!

- We look for low yields and hand harvested / sorted fruit.

- Minimal intervention in the wine-making process. We prefer wines that are made with yeast that is naturally occurring on the grapes and in the cellar (a/k/a indigenous or wild ferments) ... slow and long. We get excited to find wines fermented in interesting vessels – especially amphorae (clay), concrete, large neutral oak barrels, or some sort of thinking outside of the “new oak” box.

- Minimal additions, handling, and processing. Adding sulfur dioxide only when necessary in small amounts, and preferably only at bottling – or even better – never! We prefer our wines to not have added sugar, acid, coloring agents, tannin agents, enzymes, flavoring or water (it is legal in the U.S. to add 7% water by volume). The list goes on and gets pretty nasty. We feel that the true flavors that are naturally present and occur during fermentation be reflected in the final product (soil and minerality)– not a fabricated, processed product that follows a formula to make a wine that tastes the same every year and is very expensive to process - resulting in what we like to call overpriced “Frankenwine”!

Thank you for your interest in real wine. It is our dream to prove the true alchemy and art of the vine! Cheers, ~D.C. & Lisa