You read that right! There’s a new wine store on Main Street specializing in wines that are low-intervention, organic or biodynamic, sustainably farmed and vegan.
On Saturday, June 27, Dirty Bacchus officially opened the doors on Main Street right next to The Beacon Pantry. Yes, an artisan cheese & charcuterie shop now conveniently placed next to a sustainable wine store- talk about a one stop shop! Whether you enjoy a fancy red, a cool white or a refreshing rosé, Dirty Bacchus has it all. The shop will soon carry Sake, Cider and Mead as well. I (Teslie) had the chance to interact with owner Steve Ventura, and immediately noticed his passion for fine wines and knowledge of his products.
He was gracious enough to share his story on “The How and Why of Dirty Bacchus” below:
So… I’ve been into wine for over four decades. In the late ‘90s and ‘00s I detoured into bourbon and then scotch and finally, very specifically, into independently bottled single malt scotch, about which, for years, I maintained a blog called The Maltfreak. Soon after moving from Southeastern Massachusetts to Beacon, I was contacted by someone opening a boutique wine and liquor store who wanted me to help choose his inventory of brown liquors. Once there, I was hired to clerk in the store and to consult on buying both liquor and wine. It was then, dealing with the reps from the different importers and wine vendors, that I started getting more deeply into natural wines - they were only a casual interest before that. Soon after, another buyer was hired at the store and she had an even stronger predilection for natural wines. I learned a great deal from her and, before long, I was drinking natural wines at home almost exclusively.
Then utterly exclusively!
As a co-owner of Quinn’s, I was never able to indulge my taste for natural wines because, well, it just never made sense to stock them in a beer-and-saki-centered rock and jazz club with a very small stock room and a Japanese menu.
One day in July last year, I was talking to a friend and Beacon business owner who was in the beginning stages of opening a small wine store at 380 Main Street - the address of Dirty Bacchus. She had run into some snags and, well, life itself, and could no longer deal with all the work and money and time involved in opening a new business. Her plate was more than full. Did I want to take over the lease and open the wine store myself, she asked? Right next to an amazing cheese shop? The landlords are friends of mine, so that was good. I told her I’d let her know in 24 hours. I talked to my wife Sue about it that night and we decided that such a project was worth the risk and might even be fun. By August 22, my application had been submitted to the State Liquor Authority and, a mere ten months later (!!!), with a global plague and an economic implosion intervening, my license was approved. It took about six or eight weeks to taste with dozens of wine reps, to decide on inventory - much of which I already knew I wanted to stock - and to open the store. My first day open to the public was June 27, 2020.
Walk-ins are limited to two customers at at time and they must wear masks and use the provided hand sanitizer before touching the bottles. Beacon being Beacon, nobody, so far, has had a problem with those restrictions.
There are three main reasons I decided to focus the store exclusively on natural, organic or biodynamic, vegan, low-intervention, sustainably farmed, non-commercial wines and wine makers. The first, of course, is the wine. The variety of textures, of gustatory surprises and pleasures, of fascinating and compelling aromas and tastes, seems endless in the category of natural wines. And to me, it just tastes better, more alive, fresher, more quenching, a beverage it is easy to imagine people drinking with their meals throughout the centuries - after all, the synthetic chemical agriculture so prevalent today is only 70 to 90 years old. Before that, all wine was organic and even, to some extent, biodynamic due to the ecological diversity of most farms before monocultural farming became commonplace.
But the second reason for the store’s narrow focus is the future. The future of the planet. My moment of utter conversion to natural wines came at the intersection of a bottle of biodynamic, zero sulfur Gamay wine made in Burgundy, France by vigneron François Ecot, and the book I was reading when I uncorked it - Cultural Insurrection: A Manifesto for the Arts, Agriculture and Natural Wine by Jonathan Nossiter. Combined, those two influences stripped wine of the exclusivity, arrogance and class pretensions that so often accompany it and revealed it for what is really is, an agricultural product, a very human product intended for common conviviality, one that must, like so much else, be made in the most sustainable manner possible if humanity is going to survive much longer on this planet. Natural wine making is a compelling, in-motion, working example of the changes in habit, materials and scale that must, as soon as possible, be applied universally.
As I state on our website (www.dirtybacchus.com): “We see Dirty Bacchus as a farm stand, as a place where farmers who devote themselves to the arduous hands-on cultivation of flourishing vineyards, and where winemakers who devote themselves to the transformation of those vineyards’ robust grapes into wine, get to display and sell the products of their toil and care.”
Which brings us to the third and final reason for the store’s focus: The types of people who are making natural wine. Nearly all of them are some combination of rock star, sage, poet, scholar and the coolest parents you knew of growing up. There are so many women, so many young people, so many husbands and wives and joyous eccentrics working together in the realms of organic and biodynamic agriculture and of natural winemaking - it is just so inspiring that it fills me with hope for the future. And hope for the future is something truly precious right now.
To end, I would like to thank all the people who have helped and inspired me, but especially these three: My wife Sue, who heard every wild idea I had for the store and patiently guided me to the ideas we could actually afford and put into place, and two of the best friends any man could have - Rob Penner (www.beaconfineartprinting.com), art photographer and printer extraordinaire, and David Smolen, artist and finest of fine woodworkers. Without their skills, their tireless work, their patience and their generosity, I could never have realized the dream come true that is now Dirty Bacchus.
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