By Joe Lindsley
I was returning to Lviv on the overnight train when Instagram caught my attention: A Swedish wine expert mentioned a new place called «My Wine Natural Wine Shop,» and to my surprise it was in Lviv. Those words – «natural wine» – held out great promise. I had to visit forthwith.
In two years of world-traveling before the pandemic I had encountered the close-knit but welcoming world of natural wine. It’s a movement of people who make wine in the old ways, without industrial processes and chemicals, in smaller batches at family vineyards, often hand-crushing the grapes, often without any filtration. Natural wine is as old as recorded history, but the current natural wine movement was regenerated by Italian and French winemakers in the 1970s. The movement includes not only producers but also purveyors and appreciators who seek stronger connections to nature, place, and people.
The natural wine ethos includes the idea of genuine hospitality. And so some of my favorite drinking places in the world are natural wine shops: Giaconda Wine Library on a busy corner in Tel Aviv, especially during the celebratory hours before Shabbat; Rosforth & Rosforth, a small storeroom under a Copenhagen bridge where you can dive in the river, dry off, and then have a drink; and Garage Wines in Batumi, Georgia, a shop-bar-think-tank recalling a tradition of winemaking nearly lost during the Soviet occupation.
And now there is such a place, at the highest level, in Lviv: My Wine, a stylish room in a modern building on Zelena Street and Petrushevycha Square. I had hardly introduced myself on my first visit when a glass appeared my hand.
«Each wine is a story,» co-owner Nicholas Shandra said to me, in English, while pouring a sample. «Each wine is a trip somewhere. This is not a booze shop where you go in by a bottle of vodka and leave. I want people to come into the shop and learn. Maybe you don’t buy this particular wine you try today but you learn something and remember it.»
A few Sundays ago, I sat around the shop’s solitary giant oak table with several friends. We split some bottles for an easy day of talking, joking, and watching the street outside. Surrounded by wines from around the world, you can pick your destination, and what’s especially great about natural and biodyanmic wines: They preserve the wild uniqueness – the DNA – of the people whose hands crafted them, of the wood, air, and soil that nutured them.
Travel inspired the shop’s ethos. «I prefer to go to a place, spend time there, let it transform my soul,» says Shandra, a native of Mukachevo in the mountains near Hungary. «But when I come home, I dont want to copy-paste. I want to give people what is in my soul – which includes my epxeriences here and in other places.»
A few years ago, some Lviv friends encouraged Shandra and his wife, Inna, to start eating and cooking organic, local, natural food. This led them to the world of natural wine.
Totally natural wines – the wild wines that are the heart of the natural movement–occupy a special wall in the shop. Whil mass-produced wines are designed to be identical from yield to yield, bottle to bottle, natural ones are more alive, subject to great change, even hour to hour. Oxygen is not their enemy: You can keep them open a couple days and appreciate the changes in flavor. Shandra, laughing, calls some of them «cabbage wines,» because that’s how a few of them smell--in the loveliest possible way. I call them psychedelic wines, or wines of meditation; they are restorative to me like a walk in the Carpathians.
Shandra abhors the industrial, mass-produced wines, and so in addition to natural wine, the shop offers mainly biodynamic, organic, or small-vineyard productions. Pinot Noirs have been their best-selling grape these past months; perhaps in part because they are the favorite of Shandra’s colleague, Max Planuch, a sommelier who formerly worked at Kyiv’s Vino e Cucina. The shelves hold fine wines from the Judean Hills outside Jerusalem, from Sardinia, lovely Italian Cabernets, great value Spanish riojas and tempranillos, some powerful Hungarian and Austrian Blaufränkisch, and some varieties from Ukrainian vineyards.
I’m also learning to appreciate white wines. My Wine is an educational experience, and not just about wine. Shandra has introduced my American friend Lindsey and me to Ukrainian folk songs, history, and cuisine. Around the oak table, with a bottle of Ah! Ramon, a wild «cabbage» wine from France, we enjoyed a feast of succulent white mushrooms and boar seasoned with paprika, which a friend of Shandra’s brought from Slavs’ke. We once took a «field trip» to a cafe called «Кафе» in the Frankivski district, where he insisted we try a lesser-known Galician delicacy рубці, tripe soup, made from cow intestines–then we returned to the shop to finish the day with a sturdy wine to wash it away.
Shandra has defined a concept called, in English, «lonely wine,» the sort that you open alone. If you are a painter, a musician, a writer, an entrepreneur, you might take a lonely wine and see what sort of dreams it draws out.
«Sharing your dream with someone too easily is like sharing a bottle of lonely wine with people who might not appreciate it,» Shandra says. After many people told him his concept for the shop was a bad idea, he kept his dream quiet for a year, until a family friend, an American, agreed to invest in his dream. The doors opened in August, despite the pandemic.
While lonely wine might be self-focused, the shop is other-focused, centered around that giant oak table and often full of conversation and laughter. «You never know who is coming in, what’s on their mind, what their day has been like,» Shandra says, «so you have to read people, and first it is about the people.»
I have heard Shandra say many times now the Ukrainian saying, «поживемо і побачимо» – «let’s live and let’s see», which is a good motto for the natural wine movement. Wait and see who comes in next, wait and see how the wine changes, and how life unfolds.
Nicholas and Inna have also begun to sell some hard-to-find items that they personally enjoy: a special Japanese green tea, British muesli and granola, chocolates. And they are also selling whiskies and cognacs. My Wine is open Monday through Saturday from 10am to 9pm, and on Sundays from 10am to 6pm.
