Your coolest friends have been talking about natural wine for a hot minute. You’ve probably nodded along as they poured you a glass of some cloudy, pumpkin-hued liquid, exalting its funky aroma and barnyard taste. Days later, you find you can’t stop thinking about that oddly alluring bottle—and where you might find others like it.
Enter Big Mood Natural Wines (2020 Baltimore Ave., Suite 102, KCMO). This small Crossroads shop—owned and operated by friends Liz Zoeller, Jamie Zoeller and Richard Garcia—is stocked exclusively with natural wines from around the globe.
“We wanted to have a place that focused solely on natural wine and not have the conventional stuff clogging the shelves,” Jamie Zoeller says. “We bring in wines from producers who are practicing sustainable, organic and biodynamic farming, treating their workers fairly and not using chemicals, pesticides, additives or sulfites in their wine.”
These are the attributes that define a natural wine, more or less. There’s no legal definition for what’s considered “natural” and no industry regulations around the growing process. Even with so little to go on, natural wine represents an estimated one percent of all the wine in the world. Think of natural winemakers as bad boys meets hippies: These folks aim to produce a wine that is as close to nature as possible—and they’ll shirk all the well-established tricks of the trade to do it.
Let’s not get hung up on those details: All you need to know about the wines at Big Mood is that they are delicious—and quite unlike anything you’re likely to find in the wine aisle at a big box liquor store.
Did You Know?
Most wine isn’t vegan—common practice uses protein-based fining agents like gelatin and casein—but natural wines generally are.
