When she first started entering the wine world a number of years earlier, 27-year-old Estefanía Bermúdez recalls feeling suppressed.
As Bermúdez– who’s now the drink director at Logan Square’s dynamic Mi Tocaya Antojería– would open a bottle of wine, the tasting keeps in mind regularly talked to her from her earliest memories, tastes like tamarind, watermelon or passionfruit. But this was often met suspicion, or perhaps derision, from her mainly white equivalents.
“I was continuously stating or pronouncing things incorrect, since English is my second language,” Bermúdez said. “I constantly believed that things tasted some way to me, however they weren’t best to a white male.”
So when Bermúdez began building out Mi Tocaya’s first-ever wine list, she knew she wished to do things differently. Empowered by the restaurant’s mostly-Latino personnel (consisting of chef-owner Diana Dávila Boldin), she set out to craft a wine program that sets the restaurant’s diverse range of Mexican cuisine with an equally innovative and far-flung red wine list– and one that doesn’t rely on classical tasting notes and extensive methodology.
“It was like, ‘How do I make this feel safe for myself and safe for the people that I work with?” she stated. Bermúdez recalls feeling right away welcomed by Chicago’s Mexican community when her household immigrated from Medellín, Colombia, more than twenty years earlier, and wanted to reproduce that sensation of embrace for the customers and personnel at Mi Tocaya.
“If you taste something, and it advises you of something, it’s nostalgic. It’s definitely bringing you back to your childhood,” she stated.
Photo: Marisa Klug-MoratayaEstefanía Bermúdez
Bermúdez represents a new guard in Chicago’s red wine industry, one that declines the high-mindedness of great dining and collection for a technique that favors community and story-telling. You’ll find traces of this ethos at higher-end organizations throughout the city– locations like the Michelin-starred dining establishment Esmé (headed by beverage director Tia Barrett, previously of the Aviary and Entente) or Bronzeville Winery in Grand Boulevard, both of which feature wine lists that highlight Black, brown and women-owned vineyards.
The approach has also penetrated Chicago’s natural red wine scene, an area currently specified by its rejection of wine making (and drinking) standards.
Natural red wine– which, broadly speaking, includes white wine that are made in traditional or streamlined approaches, and may leave out making use of specific ingredients– brings a track record for catering to a hipster subset, however an increasing number of wine drinkers in Chicago see it as a tool to present red wine to a younger, more diverse audience.
Los Naturales is among a number of wine clubs at the center of this objective. Started by friends Oscar Salinas, Adam Jiménez and August Marron, Los Naturales has a shop established inside Pilsen pillar Caminos de Michoacan, owned by Jiménez’s household.
I ‘d like to believe that it’s adding to something more than simply wine. It’s contributing to the neighborhood as a whole.
Salinas and Jiménez– both Pilsen natives– started checking out natural red wine as a hobby when, in February 2020, they understood to develop a ticketed occasion in order to share the white wines they ‘d pertain to delight in with their good friends. The initial event, hosted at Caminos, sold out within a couple of hours, and concentrated on “quickly approachable” white wines shared between family and friends, Salinas says.
Now, signed up with by Marron, Los Naturales is open as a shop on Saturdays and Sundays (the trio have day jobs Monday through Friday) with regular monthly “Club Naturales” occasions. The wine selections, Salinas states, are reflective of the group’s own journey down the natural wine “bunny hole.”
“You get a whole various viewpoint of how red wines are actually made with stability and with respect to the land and to the family that’s growing it,” he said. “Instead of someone who’s sort of getting on natural white wine because it’s fashionable. I think the key to what we do is credibility and keeping it real to our tastes and our concepts that we began this on.”
Photo: @colorlamination
The club’s location in Caminos as well as the group’s connection to the predominantly Latino location led to an initial crowd that, in big part, reflected Pilsen’s Mexican and Mexican-American population.
” [At first] it was a great deal of individuals from the community,” Salinas stated. “That was cool since it was generating a crowd that’s not usually considered a wine-drinking crowd, let alone a natural wine drinking crowd.”
The red wine club has grown considerably since then, now consisting of numerous red wine drinkers from outside the South Side. Salinas says it prevails for a number of their new red wine drinkers to be going to Pilsen for the very first time, stopping at Los Naturales along the way to other restaurants and cultural websites in the area.
“It’s bringing individuals to the South Side,” he said. “I wish to think that it’s contributing to something more than simply white wine. It’s contributing to the community as a whole.”
And in the middle of waves of gentrification in the neighorhood, Salinas feels that Los Naturales has been able to invite longtime locals of the location alongside those from somewhere else in the city.
“How we saw it was an opportunity to sort of serve our own neighborhood, because now that we’ve been doing it, we’ve recognized that there is a want for this sort of product and services [natural wine] within our own community,” he said.
Another Pilsen-based wine club, Downer White wines, has accepted a similar technique of sharing wines that they take pleasure in with good friends and neighbors in a setting that focuses collecting around white wine in a comfy and engaging method.
Started during the summer of 2020 by good friends David Rodriguez and Victor Sanchez, Downer Red wines is essentially an online wine club. Members receive two bottles of natural red wine chosen by the duo each month, and Pilsen homeowners get free shipment. Their selections also cover the globe with an unique concentrate on little, BIPOC producers and Latin American white wines.
Both homeowners of Pilsen, Rodriguez and Sanchez state they were motivated to start Downer Red wines mainly by an interest in natural white wines and a desire to expand access to them to the area.
At first, the duo kept Disappointment Wine totally digital and built a neighborhood-centric membership base, with over half of their members being Pilsen locals. They have actually considering that branched out into hosting a handful of successful IRL events and now hope to open a brick-and-mortar wine shop somewhere in the neighborhood, Rodriguez states. By meeting online very first and getting a sense for their member base, he adds, they have actually had the ability to get some insight regarding how this service might impact the community.
“We definitely try to connect with local neighborhood companies to see how we can either work together with other companies or in methods we can engage with them,” he stated. “It’s about how we can help and not eliminate from the neighborhood.”
Progressing, Rodriguez and Sanchez stated, the objective is not to produce an enterprising brand-new space to purchase hard-to-find-bottles. Rather, to continue building a neighborhood that can share concepts, tastes and stories.
“It’s produced an area where you can think seriously about white wine,” Sanchez states, “and not worry about thinking the incorrect ideas.”