SHOWNOTES

2:20 - DRY FARM WINES: Low Sugar, Low Alcohol, Toxin-Free, Mold- Free, Pesticide-Free , Hang-over Free Natural Wine! Use The Link DryFarmWines.com/melanieavalon To Get A Bottle For A Penny!

2:40 - LISTEN ON HIMALAYA!: Download the free Himalaya App (www.himalaya.fm) to FINALLY keep all your podcasts in one place, follow your favorites, make playlists, leave comments, and more! Follow The Melanie Avalon Podcast in Himalaya For Early Access 24 Hours In Advance!

03:15 - Paleo OMAD Biohackers: Intermittent Fasting + Real Foods + Life: Join Melanie's Facebook Group To Discuss And Learn About All Things Biohacking! All Conversations Welcome!

3:30 - JOOVV: Red Light And NIR Therapy For Fat Burning, Muscle Recovery, Mood, Sleep, And More! Use The Link Joovv.com/Melanieavalon With The Code MelanieAvalon For A Free Gift From Joovv, And Also Forward Your Proof Of Purchase To Contact@MelanieAvalon.com, To Receive A Signed Copy Of What When Wine: Lose Weight And Feel Great With Paleo-Style Meals, Intermittent Fasting, And Wine! 

8:30 - Todd White's Background - The Search For Low Alcohol Wine

13:30- The Role Of  Alcohol In Conventional Wines 

17:50 - Is The Alcohol Percent Stated On A Bottle Correct?

20:25 - The 76 Potential Additives In Wine

22:00 - What Is Natural Wine?

22:50 - Dry Farm Wines Criteria For Healthy Wines

25:30 - What Is The Difference In Alcohol Wine Content?

26:10 - The Cause Of Wine Sensitivities 

The Intermittent Fasting Podcast Episode 126

28:20 - What Type Of Additives Are In Wine?

29:15 - Top 3 Companies In US Manufacture 52% Of Consumed Wine

34:35 - FOOD SENSE GUIDE: Get Melanie's App To Tackle Your Food Sensitivities! Food SenseIncludes A Searchable Catalogue Of 300+ Foods, Revealing Their Amine, Histamine, Glutamate, Oxalate, Salicylate, Sulfite, And Thiol Status. Food Sense Also Includes Compound Overviews, Reactions To Look For, Lists Of Foods High And Low In Them, The Ability To Create Your Own Personal Lists, And More! ​

35:55 - BEAUTY COUNTER:  Non-Toxic Beauty Products Tested For Heavy Metals, Which Support Skin Health And Look Amazing! Go To Beautycounter.com/MelanieAvalon! To Receive A Free Beauty Counter Gift From Melanie, Exclusive Offers And Discounts, And More On The Science Of Skincare, Get On Melanie's Private Beauty Counter Email List At MelanieAvalon.com/BeautyCounter!

37:50 - Water Soluble Toxins In Wine

39:00 - Red Wine Color - Why Conventional Wines Stain Your Teeth (Mega Purple!)

42:45 -Glyphosate In Wine

Glyphosate Pesticide In Beer And Wine

Traces of Bayer’s weed-killing chemical discovered in popular wines and beers

44:30 - Irrigation Of Wineries (Why Dry Farming Is Important For Health!)

47:00 - Are "Organic" Wines Actually Organic? Are They Additive Free?

49:30 - The Role Of Yeast In Wine Fermentation (How Wine Becomes Sugar Free, Yeast Flavor Profiles)

54:20 - The Ketogenic Diet And Intermittent Fasting 

57:40 - How Does Wine And Alcohol Affect Ketosis?

1:00:30 - Becoming Intuitive With Eating  

1:01:40 - High Vs. Low Fat Keto

1:03:10 - Olive Oil Quality 

1:05:40 - The Power Of Meditation 

1:10:00 - Getting Dry Farm Wines In Other Countries 

1:11:15-  Will Dry Farm Wines Create An Approved Wine List?

1:12:10 - Wines Made Specifically For Dry Farm Wines And Supporting Small Family Wineries

1:17:10 - Experiencing Rare, Ancestral Varietals Through Dry Farm Wines 

1:19:20 - The Dry Farm Wines App!

1:20:00 -Do Other Forms Of Alcohol Have Additives? 

1:20:00 - What Is The Best Form Of Alcohol To Drink, If Not Wine?

1:22:00 - How The Sugar In Beer (Maltose) Is Converted To Fat

1:22:50 - The Sugar In Ciders

 1:26:10- Is Love The Power Of Wine?

1:28:50 -The Emotional Health Benefits Of Wine

1:30:30 - DRY FARM WINES: Low Sugar, Low Alcohol, Toxin-Free, Mold- Free, Pesticide-Free , Hang-over Free Natural Wine! Use The Link DryFarmWines.com/melanieavalon To Get A Bottle For A Penny!

TRANSCRIPT

Melanie Avalon:
Hi, everybody, and welcome. I am so excited about our guest today. We have Todd White on the podcast. For listeners of the Intermittent Fasting Podcast, you are probably very, very familiar with Todd White and his company because I talk about it all the time. That is Dry Farm Wines, and Dry Farm Wines is just a fantastic amazing company. There is a reason for that.

Melanie Avalon:
Today, we're going to go into all the details about wine and alcohol and why wine may or may not be healthy depending on which wine you're drinking and just so much more. I am so excited about our interview today. Todd, thank you so much for being here.

Todd White:
Thank you. Super excited to share some dirty dark secrets about the wine industry.

Melanie Avalon:
I know, right? I guess to start things off, how did you come to form Dry Farm Wine? What's your background? Why are you so passionate about wine, about the wine industry? What led to where you are today?

Todd White:
Well, I've been drinking wine since I was about nine years old. I had a lifelong kind of love affair with wine so much so that I moved to the Napa Valley 20 years ago. It was I've been biohacking for before biohacking was even a term. I guess it began low-carb dieting and experimentation with ketosis as we know it today or keto probably about 20 years ago and experimented with low carb and was on and off beginning with the Atkins Diet. That's sort of how I got introduced to what we would know as biohacking today.

Melanie Avalon:
I feel like that's how we all started or a lot of us with the low carb.

Todd White:
Exactly. It was very effective for me. I was using it for weight loss just to maintain weight. I really didn't understand ketosis or any of the science about it, and neither did anybody else really at the time. I got seriously involved in both more advanced biohacking, but in particular intermittent fasting and the ketogenic diet about five and a half years ago. I think in conjunction with a number of other cofactors, but when I did I found that I couldn't drink conventional wines anymore.

Todd White:
I quit drinking for a while and the period I referred to as suffering through sobriety. I really love wine. We'll talk about what's wrong with wine and what's wrong with alcohols. I don't love alcohol, but I do love wine which is the reason that today I only drink low alcohol wines. We'll talk more about alcohol and its problems, but I found I couldn't drink traditional wines. I thought it was because alcohol levels had gotten so high. I thought I was having a reaction to alcohol because alcohol levels in American wines have become very high.

Todd White:
I started experimenting with what I call micro-dosing. I was drinking lower amounts and reducing the amount of both the wine I was drinking as well as the alcohol. Well, skip forward talking to the smartest person I know in the wine business and I was like, "I want to make a low alcohol wine." How low can I make the alcohol and still have it taste like wine?

Todd White:
We had a discussion about that. During that discussion, he's like, "Well, have you drank any of the low alcohol wines coming out of Europe?" I was like, "No. I've never heard of them." I began investigating these lower alcohol wines. From that, I stumbled quite accidentally at the time on the natural wine revolution that was just really getting under way.

Todd White:
Today natural, wines are quite well known particularly in major markets and particularly among foodies and people who are interested in matters of taste. But at the time, nobody knew what a natural wine was. Now, there are natural wine bars and natural wine restaurants and so on and so forth. Many farm-to-table restaurants now feature natural wines. We'll talk about what makes a wine natural in a moment.

Todd White:
Anyway, I stumbled upon the natural wine movement. From there, since I had lived in Napa and I'd actually made wine before I started doing lab testing on these wines looking for specific quantifications and how those related to the aesthetic of the wine. When I say the aesthetic of the wine, I mean the taste, the texture, the aromatics. That's the aesthetic of the wine. I started correlating these quantifications with lab testing.

Todd White:
The other thing is because I was ketogenic, I wanted sugar-free wine. See, most wines contain sugar. That was another thing I knew I could lab test for. I started comparing the aesthetic along with specific laboratory quantifications. I came up with this kind of algorithm, if you will, for how we would select wines.

Todd White:
I started selecting wines that way and started sharing them with friends. They're like, "Oh, wow. You can drink this wine. You feel great, doesn’t make you feel like regular wines make you feel, and you don't get a hangover from it." Just lowering the alcohol was really fundamentally important as well. All the sudden, people were like, "Where can I get these wines?" I was like, "Well you can't."

Todd White:
I created this business around it. When I started, I had no intention really of creating "business" out of but I was trying to solve a drinking problem that I had and how to drink better healthier wines. We can talk about what that means. That's kind of how it all started. That was like in 2015.

Melanie Avalon:
I feel like that's how the best products come to me when it comes out of solving your own personal problem or want or desire. I love that so much. Okay. You brought up so many topics that we can touch on. Let's touch on the alcohol levels first.

Todd White:
Yeah. I was just going to say alcohol levels statistically. By the way, everything I'm going to share with you on this podcast, any statistic, any industry metrics, FDA additives in the wine, all the things we're going to touch on, they're all easily, easily found in Google just with a simple search. Statistically, alcohol levels in wine have been rising for the last 30 years.

Todd White:
Now, the reason that's happening is there's several reasons for it. First of all, the wine industry loves high alcohol. Here's why. Alcohol is addictive, and alcohol is a domino drug. What I mean by domino drug is that the more you drink, the more likely you are to drink more. Higher the alcohol, more likely you are to drink more. Wine industry likes to sell wine, not surprising.

Todd White:
In addition to that, alcohol also gives wine a density, a richness, and a boldness. Now, that's not appealing to me. That is appealing to most American and global palates. As our palates have become damaged and distorted primarily from processed foods and high amounts of sugar, we'll need bolder, richer, bigger things in order to taste them because our palate when you get away from sugar and processed foods and you start eating a clean real diet, clean real food, your palate will adjust to be more sensitive. You're not interested in big, rich, sweet bold things. That's what alcohol brings to wine.

Todd White:
When you remove the alcohol, you end up with a much lighter, more elegant, more really just fresh just a cleaner taste. For people who eat like I do, that's what they want. They don't want big, bold, rich, bigger, better. They also don't want the negative effects of alcohol. Those include hangovers. Those include primarily dehydration. When you're waking up in the middle of the night, that's generally from dehydration. Then, you can't go back to sleep because the monkey mind starts, and you start thinking about all these things that keep you up at night.

Todd White:
When you remove alcohol, you not only end up with a better wine taste better, but you also end up with much fewer negative remnants from the alcohol itself. We know alcohol in moderation. There are plenty of studies for this, but we know alcohol in moderation is both neurologically beneficial as well as biologically beneficial for particularly for cardiovascular health. That's moderate amount of alcohol of any kind.

Todd White:
Now, there are health benefits imparted from wine particularly red wines which contain over 800 polyphenols, flavonoids, non-flavonoids, and antioxidants. Wine comes with special and increased health benefit, but we know very moderate doses of alcohol have been shown to be healthy.

Todd White:
The problem is most of us don't drink moderately. Most of us don't have a glass of wine. We have several. It's really important to lower the inherent underlying amount of alcohol in the wine in the beginning unless you're one of those people that can drink half a glass or glass of wine. That's not most people. Our wines are anywhere from 6% to as high as 12.5%. Average American wines today are just at 15% on average.

Todd White:
The other thing and we're going to talk about this collusion between the wine industry and the government particularly the politicians, there's a couple of things going on. We'll talk on additives in a moment, but alcohol stated on a wine bottle, we also test for alcohol. That's another one of the tests that we run because the alcohol stated on wine bottle is not required to be legal. It's not required to be accurate, to be legal.

Todd White:
The wine industry normally rounds down the amount of alcohol stated on the bottle for two reasons. One, they want you to think you're drinking less. Number two, more importantly perhaps, they pay tax. They pay federal tax based on the amount of alcohol that's contained in the wine. Higher the alcohol, the higher the tax.

Melanie Avalon:
What is the exact legality around it doesn't have to be accurate? What can they round to?

Todd White:
Well, it can be as much 1.5% different than what's stated on the bottle. Now, there's a reason for that. The reason was that this law like most alcohol laws and many laws, it's just written a really long time ago so these alcohol laws. The only oversight that the federal government has on wine is taxation and also its labeling laws. The TTB which is Trade and Tax Bureau which used to be that before Waco, it used to be the ATF. They govern the labeling of wines. That's the only thing the federal government does.

Todd White:
Everything else is associated with alcohol sales are administered at the state level except for labeling. The reason that the labeling is allowed to be inaccurate is because in the 1940s when these alcohol laws were written at the federal level, alcohol testing protocols were not accurate from lab to lab. In order to accommodate for this variance that might show up from lab to lab, now, that's no longer the case today and has it been for decades. Alcohol testing is very precise from lab to lab. You'll get exactly the same alcohol percentage in any lab that you test because it's very precise science now, but at the time it wasn't.

Todd White:
They were allowed to have this variance, but the problem is that the wine industry doesn't want that updated for the two reasons I've already explained to you. The wine industry spends tens of millions of dollars and lobby money, see, in Washington because that's how you get things done in Washington is you pay for it.

Todd White:
The other problem with wine that relates to this collusion between the wine industry and the government is the additives in wine. There are 75 additives approved for the use in winemaking. The problem there and the reason that you don't know about that unless you've heard me on a podcast or see me speak somewhere, I haven't formed a few million people of this issue, but problem with these additives and reason you don't know about them and some of them are pretty nasty chemicals is because the wine industry spends millions of dollars to keep contents labeling off of wine.

Todd White:
Wine is the only major food product without a contents label on it. The reason they don't want a contents label on it is because they don't really want you to know what's in it. This is the collusion that goes on between... This is the dishonesty that goes on between the wine industry and your elected officials and federal law, so the alcohol as well as the additives and the lack of transparent labeling on the bottle.

Todd White:
The reason they don't want a label on it because if it did, it would look just like the rest of processed foods that have that kind of rectangular to square shape label that show you all these ingredients and things you've never heard of it or even know how to pronounce. If the label were owned a wine bottle, that's what it would look like, have all these additives in it. They want you to think that it's a health product, but in fact, it's not, not unless you're drinking natural wines.

Todd White:
Natural wine which is a categoric definition, people are very confused when I say natural wines because like, "Well, aren't all wines natural?" Well, no. In fact, they're not for the reasons I've already described to you. Natural wines which are found only in major markets New York, San Francisco, Chicago, Los Angeles, Miami, other than that, natural wines are rarely found. There's a couple of ways you can find them. You can do a Google search for natural wines in your market. You can download an app on your smartphone called Raisin that is the natural wine app that retailers and restaurants and bars will oftentimes more so in Europe than in the US, but there's some people in the US who are listed on it.

Todd White:
Natural wines are much bigger thing in Europe because there's not very many natural wines made in the United States. We don't even sell domestic wine. There's no wines in the United States that meet our standards of health and purity. All of our wines come from primarily across Europe. We have four growers in South Africa and two in Chile.

Todd White:
But a natural wine categorically for us meets the following criteria. It's dry farmed. The name of our company is Dry Farm Wine which means all of our wines are dry farm. Dry farming means that there's no irrigation. There's a lot of reasons for that, and we can come back to irrigation if you like in a moment, but there's a whole lot of reasons why we don't allow irrigation.

Todd White:
Number two, they are organically or biodynamically farmed. Biodynamic farming which began in 1925 is a prescriptive form. It is an advanced prescription of organic farming. All biodynamic farming is organic and organic farming means if there's no use of chemicals in the vineyard of any kind. It's organically or biodynamically farmed. It is dry farmed. Then, there are no additives, nothing in or out of the wine. In our particular case, they are also sugar-free. That's not a criteria of natural wines, but it is a criteria of our wines.

Todd White:
Our wines are low alcohol. That's also not a criteria of natural wines, but is a dry farm wines criteria for health purposes. We're really the healthy wine. It just happens that we're the largest buyer of natural wines in the world as well, but we're not really in the "natural wine business." Although all of our wines are natural, we're really in the healthy wine business in helping people think about not only drinking healthier wines that don't contain all these poisons, but also lower alcohol.

Todd White:
The alcohol, it surprises many people to hear the wine guy say, "Alcohol is a super dangerous neurotoxin. It's also a super destructive drug, and it's a drug that needs to be carefully considered." We want to make sure that we carefully consider we can begin the most important consideration, is just drinking lower alcohol wines. I mean that's the best bet.

Todd White:
Then, we don't have to be as concerned about the amount that we drink when we're drinking. Most wines I drink are between nine and 10.5%. That doesn't sound a lot lower than 15, 16%, but it's a lot lower. It has a huge impact on how you feel.

Melanie Avalon:
Yeah. That was one of my questions because ever since I got really into the health benefits of wine and especially Dry Farm Wines and realizing how important all these factors are, I started paying attention... I pretty much just drank Dry Farm Wine. When I am shopping around for wines, I am paying attention now to alcohol contents and things like that. How different is it a wine that's... I mean yet you rarely see it at stores, but a wine that's 12% versus even 13 or 14. It doesn't seem like that big of a difference number wise.

Todd White:
It's a big deal. It's a big deal in both taste, texture, the weight of the wine and also just how you feel. Also, when natural wines are not extracted... Extraction, it's winemaking style that also substantially increases the biogenetic amines. This is a particular problem for women. The two nasty offenders in these biogenetic amines are tyramine and histamine. These women are very often sensitive to these amines. They get flush. They get stuffy. They get itchy. They have a tightening in the frontal cortex that's really oftentimes a nasal reaction, but can also be a reaction neurologically to them.

Todd White:
I'm affected by commercial wines in this way now. I didn't used to be or I didn't notice it. But a lot of people don't know what it feels like to really drink honest pure wine because they've never drank it before. They think that these commercial products are just what wine makes them feel like. If you drank our wines for a while and then you go and drink a commercial wine, you know what I'm talking about, right?

Melanie Avalon:
Exactly. I'm known as like the wine girl because my book, What When Wine, I have a whole section on wine, and I'm really into this. People come to me all the time. They're like, "I don't tolerate wine. I can't do wine. What else can I drink?" My first answer is always, "Well, have you tried looking at the type of wine and the sourcing of the wine that you're drinking because you might find that having a natural wine low in alcohol without these additives, without these compounds will make a huge difference?" It really does.

Melanie Avalon:
Even on the internment of fasting podcasts when we originally had you on with my co-host, Gin and me, Gin was not a drinker yet of Dry Farm Wines. Now, down the road, she's been drinking your wine, and she's completely sold. That's all she'll drink. I think so many people find that because you just feel different. You realize that you actually can drink wine. It was just these other things that were a problem.

Melanie Avalon:
But touching back on what you were talking about with the labels on wines because that is one of the things that drives me crazy and I think so many people would find shocking if they could actually see a label on conventional wines today, so what type of things are in conventional wines besides fermented grape juice?

Todd White:
Dimethyl bicarbonate is probably the one of the highest degree of interest. It's manufactured under a brand name Vulcuren by a lab company. If you Google it, you'll see the Wikipedia page on it. It's funny it says hazards. In the Wikipedia summary on Google, it says hazards. Then right next to that it says toxic.

Melanie Avalon:
Oh wonderful.

Todd White:
This additive Vulcuren... I'm going to come back to it in one second. I'm going to cover something about the industry and how this is getting in wine. What's happened in the wine supply is exactly the same thing that has happened in our food supply. We've had massive corporate consolidation. The top three wine companies in the United States manufacture 52% of all the wine consumed.

Todd White:
You don't know that because these very, very clever multibillion-dollar marketing organizations are run by a bunch of really smart people. They hide behind tens of thousands of labels and brands. Now, the top 40 companies in the US make over 70% of all the wine. Again, they're hiding behind thousands, tens of thousands of brands and labels. You don't know that this wine is really coming from these massive, massive wine factories that are located in the Central Valley of California.

Todd White:
Even there's some health quote, some healthy fitness-oriented marketed wines out there that are also made in these factories. Again, without truth and transparency in labeling even fitness wines that are marketed to be healthy are also made in these same factories, but it's marketing. Just because a wine is positioned to be healthy doesn't necessarily mean it's true.

Todd White:
But most wine has made these massive factories. The marketing organizations, these multi-billion dollar companies want you to believe that you're drinking from a farmhouse or a chateau. That's how they kind of sell the wine through these stories or as an example, I live in Napa Valley right behind Robert Mondavi Winery. Mondavi wineries family, Robert Mondavi was a pioneer in the Napa Valley. You think, "Oh, it's Mondavi. It's just wonderful Napa Valley wine."

Todd White:
Well, the fact of the matter is that Robert Mondavi wineries has been owned for more than a decade by the second-largest wine company in the world. They just make massive factory wines. This is just a fact, some by Constellation Brands. They paid $1.2 billion for it about a decade ago. There's just been this massive consolidation and how these additives which are commonly used including the one that I just mentioned Vulcuren. Vulcuren is used to treat the most common bacterial fault called Brettanomyces that occurs in wine. Brettanomyces will ruin the wine and make the wine unsellable.

Todd White:
Well, this contractor, these independent contractors, you have to be specially licensed and specially trained by this lab company that sells this toxin. When they apply this chemical, all this is online, when they apply this chemical, they come into the winery in hazmat suits to apply this chemical to the wine. Nobody else can be in the winery at the time of application. If you drank the wine within 24 hours of application, you would die.

Todd White:
Now, the government, the FDA allows up to 200 parts per million to remain in the wine in trace amounts. There are also other things commonly found in wines like glyphosate which is the active ingredient and roundup. Glyphosate is the number one applied herbicide in US vineyards.

Todd White:
I can go on and kind of on about these types of issues that there are 76 additives. Some of them are harmless. Many are not. If you just go to Google and search FDA additives, you'll see the list of them. Most of them you can't even pronounce. You want to know what they are. There are defoaming agents that include five pretty nasty chemicals. Defoaming agents are used when you move wine.

Todd White:
When you move wine from tank to tank which is a part of the process in winemaking, wine gets moved around in tanks, it foams. It foams quite vigorously. If you're a natural wine maker, you just wait for the foam to subside. Then, you move more wine, but in fact, conventional and commercial wines, they spray a defoaming agent on it that makes the wine instantly dissipate the foam. Then, you can add more wine. Things are just the kind of things they're going on that nobody knows about.

Todd White:
Again, everything I'm telling you is easily verifiable and a Google search. It's just that the wine industry has been successful at keeping these secrets. People believe if it comes from this famous appellation or it has this name on it or if it costs more, it's going to be better. I don't care if you pay $150 or $15. You're drinking additives.

Melanie Avalon:
Yeah. We also know I mean especially with things like glyphosate how damaging it is because of how it's water soluble and it just saturates the environment and then our cells and our bodies as well. I mean I haven't personally researched this, but now I'm just thinking aloud. I'd imagine having all these compounds in the format of wine being a drink, being water and then having that alcohol as well. Drinking it in that form must make it very potent and saturated by ourselves, I'd imagine.

Todd White:
Well, there are only two things in wine other than the polyphenols. I mean that is an inherent benefit. They're more polyphenols in the red wine then white because they are increased from their contact with the skin and grapes which is how red wine gets its color when you make wine. We'll talk about sugar in wine in a moment because that the fermentation process kind of to cover that and how wine becomes sugar-free and how sugar gets into wine because that's something is a big concern to us, but when we make wine, the way red wine gets its color and the reason it gets an increase in polyphenols is from the contact with the skins during the fermentation process or the maceration.

Todd White:
When you squeeze the juice of a red wine grape and you squeeze the juice from a white wine grape. They're both clear. How red wine gets its color is that the skins after the juice is pressed is added to the tank with the juice. Then, it macerates for some period of days two weeks. That maceration period is how red wine gets its color. That's one of the ways it gets its color. The other way is from the use of the most popular color agent called Mega Purple. That's manufactured by Gallo. Gallo was the largest wine company in the world and based in the Central Valley of California.

Todd White:
They began in Sonoma County, but their factories are all in the Central Valley.

Todd White:
Mega Purple, I don't know if you've ever experienced drinking red wine or seen other people get purple lips and purple teeth, that's generally coming from color agents. Natural wines will not stain your teeth or your lips.

Melanie Avalon:
I am having an epiphany now because I remember the first time and because I knew now about Mega Purple, but I remember the first time I was with a friend out at a bar like shortly after turning 21, and her teeth turned so purple. I was like, "Wow, it's really crazy that the wine could do that." It must have been those dyes.

Todd White:
Mega Purple is commonly... I can taste it I can smell it, but most people can't. I just happen to know what it tastes. But it adds a density and also much darker color to red wine. Americans believe the darker a red wine is, the better quality it is. There's no truth to that, but that has led to people using color agents to make a darker. The other way it gets darker is extending the extraction of maceration. The longer the wine soaks in the skins, the darker it will get. That's also what leads to an increase in these biogenetic amines.

Todd White:
Women all the time, we're the official wine for 117 health and performance conferences this year. Many of them you would know like Paleo f(x) or bulletproof or JJ Virgin, all of these conferences. We're the official wine for everybody in the health in the health field.

Todd White:
Women all the time all day long come up and say during tastings, they're like, Could I try your white wine? I can't drink red wine." I'm like, "No, no, no." They'll say, "I like red wine, but I can't drink it." I was like, "No, no, no, no. You can drink this red wine." Trust me. You won't have any of the negative effects that you're used to with red wines. I know as thousands of people have experienced this, women in particular, and so try the red wine. Then the next day they come back. They're like, "Oh, wow. I had like three or four glasses of that wine. It was great. I felt great. I had no adverse effects that I normally had from red wines."

Todd White:
Wine, other than the polyphenols, wine only contains ethyl alcohol and water. Whatever the alcohol percentage is, if it's 10% alcohol, it's 90% water. When you mentioned the water solubility of glyphosate, that's really interesting because it's speculated. There are two studies one done by a group called Moms For a Better America. That was about five years ago and another study that came out this year where wines across... I don't remember who did the study this year. It was recently pushed around on social media.

Todd White:
But wines were tested from several Appalachians across California and 100% of the wines tested came back positive for glyphosate both organic and non-organic wines. The reason the organic wines are thought to be testing positive for glyphosate is because it's believed that it's coming in through the irrigation. They don't know this. This hasn't been proven, but it's believed that because more than 99.9% of vineyards in California are irrigated, in the US are irrigated. There's virtually no dry farming in the US which is one of the reasons we don't sell domestic wines for several reasons, but that's one.

Todd White:
Because the way glyphosate is applied in a vineyard, it's close to the ground. It's not like wheat farming. In wheat farming, oftentimes, you're getting glyphosate contamination in neighboring organic farms because it's applied through the air with an airplane, with a dust plane that flies over and sprays the wheat, but that's not how it's applied in vineyards. It's applied very close to the ground.

Todd White:
The concept of really having overspray into a neighboring organic vineyard is very low. It's thought to probably to be coming through the irrigation because whether a farm is organic or non-organic in California, most are not organic, but there are a handful that are. They are still irrigated. Irrigation which I said we touched on for this and irrigation is a pretty... It has a whole bunch of problems associated with it which includes potentially, we don't know this, but potentially this glyphosate issue.

Todd White:
But in addition to that, it dilutes the polyphenols in red wine because it might not surprise you when you fill a great berry with water. It dilutes everything including the character of the fruit. It also increases the sugar level at the time of harvest because irrigated fruit which is filled with water, I'll tell you why you irrigate in a moment might not surprise you, is about money and greed, but irrigated berries which are filled with water have to get riper before harvest in order to develop the proper flavoring because they're diluted with this water.

Todd White:
Now, the reason you irrigate is because fruit is sold by the ton. When you irrigate you, get higher yields and you get bigger berries with more water on them and, guess what, it weighs more. Most grape farming is not done on the estate. It's not like ABC winery grows their own grapes and then they make this special wine. That's not how most wine gets made. Most wine is industrially farmed by farmers who then sell it to the wine companies. The more it weighs, the more it's worth.

Todd White:
In Europe, it's illegal. It a crime in most places across Europe to irrigate a grape vine because Europeans know who've been making wine for over 3000 years know what we know that the moment you intervene into nature's logic with irrigation, you fundamentally change the quality of the fruit. The quality of the fruit fundamentally changes the quality of the wine. Does that all makes sense?

Melanie Avalon:
That does. That's where the dry comes from in Dry Farm Wines. Actually, I'm really glad you brought up. I've seen those findings as well about the pervasive nature of glyphosate and the levels in wines even organic wine throughout California. It sounds like... because I know like if you go to the store, you'll often see wines labeled as organic or made with organic grapes which I know that even that's different, like the made with organic grapes versus the organic. I guess it's not technically automatically "safe" to get just your everyday "organic wine" at the wine store.

Todd White:
Because a wine is labeled organic does not mean it's additive free. It means that it was farmed in a certified organic farm, but it was probably irrigated. It doesn't mean it doesn't contain glyphosate according to these studies which, again, these are independent studies we have nothing to do with. Now, there are a handful, and I mean like less than five, farms in California. I'm only aware of three, that are both dry farmed and organic.

Todd White:
But they're quite rare. They also don't make wines that meet our criteria, but there are a handful of farms that are both organic and dry farmed in the US. But, again, again less than 1% of US vineyards are non-irrigated or dry farmed. Again, none of the domestic producers including the natural wine producers and there are probably about 25 in the US. There are only about 1500 worldwide natural winemakers. There's 155,000 wineries in the world. Less than 1500 of them are natural farmers, natural winemakers, natural wine growers. Natural wines are not made. They're grown.

Todd White:
Nothing happens to the wine other than natural wild native yeast fermentation in the cellar. That's all that happens there. I mention that because this is another interesting fact that we don't really know the health consequences of it, but conventional wines are fermented. I'll cover the sugar issue here. Conventional wines are fermented with commercially-grown, genetically-modified lab yeast.

Todd White:
Now, that's really important because natural wines are fermented with wild native yeast that are present on the skin of every wine grape in the world. When you harvest a wine grape on the surface of the skin, it's collected through the air. It's part of nature. There is wild indigenous yeast that's on the skin of every wine grape in the world.

Todd White:
If you picked a ripe cluster of wine grapes and you just threw it into a bucket. The skins would break open and the juice from this from the grapes would emerge, and there's sugar in that grape juice, and the yeast will come in contact with the sugar. If the temperature is high enough because yeast needs to reach a certain temperature to activate just like when your grandmother put bread in the oven or above the refrigerator because it needs to be in a warm environment in order to prosper.

Todd White:
But if it's warm enough, the yeast will activate. It'll start fermenting in the bucket. You're making wine without doing absolutely anything. I don't promise you the quality of the wine, but you have fermentation that will naturally occur. That's how natural wines are made. The natural winemaker presses the juice from the skin. Then, the juice comes in contact with the yeast and begins to ferment.

Todd White:
Because fermentation occurs, how you make wine is you inoculate the wine with yeast. You activate the yeast. The yeast eats the sugar in the wine. The byproduct to that is carbon dioxide and ethyl alcohol. This is how wine becomes sugar free if the yeast is allowed to fully ferment and eat all of the available sugar, then the yeast will die from a lack of food source, and the wine will be fully fermented and sugar-free.

Todd White:
But what's happening in conventional wines is that the winemaker is introducing sulfur dioxide. First of all, they inoculate the yeast. The very first thing to do is squeeze the juice. They introduce sulfur dioxide to kill the native yeast because they don't want to use the native yeast. It's too difficult to work with. It's too temperamental and it will not withstand a high alcohol environment. It will die.

Todd White:
Then, you have a broken fermentation and a whole set of different problems. The commercial winemaker introduces sulfur dioxide to the juice to kill the native yeast. Then, they inoculate it with this genetically modified lab-grown yeast. Again, we don't know what this means to our health, but it's just another aspect that's unnatural.

Todd White:
They introduce this genetically modified yeast for three reasons. Do they use this lab-grown yeast as opposed to the native yeast? First of all, native yeast is temperamental, difficult to work with. You can't make wine in very large quantities with it.

Todd White:
Number two is that the native yeast will not withstand a very high alcohol environment. In fact, part of the advertising of these genetically modified lab cultured yeast, part of their advertising is that they'll withstand a high alcohol environment. That's just like one of the features of the yeast. The third reason which is kind of interesting is that these modified yeast can be created to have certain flavor profiles.

Todd White:
What I mean by that is let's just say that you grow a rather uninteresting, poor quality grape in Central California somewhere on the big industrial farm. You want that wine to taste like it's Italian. They have a yeast for that. The yeast has certain flavor profiles. This is just kind of what's going on in the wine industry again just nobody knows anything about it.

Melanie Avalon:
That's really funny. I mean I was pretty familiar with the nature of yeast in winemaking, but I didn't know that they would actually add the yeast to create those flavor profiles to mimic other wines. That's fascinating.

Todd White:
Yeah. They have it for all kinds of like you want a Mediterranean profile. There have all kinds of profiles of yeast to replicate flavor profiles from different places for different reasons.

Melanie Avalon:
Switching gears just a little bit, so you still practice a ketogenic diet, correct, and intermittent fasting?

Todd White:
I do. I've been probably for three years now, almost three years, I have only been eating once per day. I do a 22-hour daily fast. I'm not as... Gosh. I don't think I'm as keto compliant as I once was. The primary reasons because I happen to enjoy potatoes, potatoes are the only thing I eat off program, but I do eat potatoes from a couple times a week.

Todd White:
The thing is because I only eat once per day though, I end up backing ketosis no matter what I eat. Well, I don't eat anything crazy, but let's just say I have some French fries or something which I just happened to like. I used to not eat potatoes at all when I was strictly keto and really, really just like fanatical about it, but because I only eat once a day and I don't eat too far off program in the first place, even if I do eat off program, let's say, that I eat good better potatoes, I can eat a little bit of potatoes and it won't take me out of ketosis.

Todd White:
But if I eat enough of them, it will. Let's just say that I do, I'll be back in nutritional ketosis which I considered to be 0.1 millimolar by two o'clock the next afternoon, three o'clock in the afternoon. Now, that's not nutritional ketosis. It's from starvation. But the effect is the same. Largely, I'm in ketosis. I'm not quite as fanatical about it as I once was. I experiment with different things, but off program, potatoes are the only thing I really eat other than occasionally I travel in Europe a lot. I'm in Italy a couple of times a year.

Todd White:
Occasionally, there I'm eating with people in their homes, oftentimes eat with family farmers in their homes and where pasta is commonly served. I do eat pasta a few times a year which is my only real intake of flour. I do eat pasta a few times a year. It's simply because the Italians sometimes, oftentimes, a language barrier. They just wouldn't understand that I don't eat pasta or flour. That just seemed very bizarre to them. They certainly wouldn't understand what a ketogenic diet is. To make a sensible accommodation when I'm traveling, sometimes, a little bit of bread or pasta for that reason, but other than that, yeah, I'm pretty keto.

Melanie Avalon:
Yeah. I feel like a lot of people have that experience where they go through periods of more intense ketogenic diet adherence than they oftentimes gravitate toward either with intermittent fasting, creating a sort of metabolic flexibility where they're having carbs, but still getting into the fast estate during the day or doing more of a cyclical ketosis or having carbs a few times a week.

Melanie Avalon:
I think it's all just about finding what works for you. What have you found though in general with your experience with ketosis and ketogenic diets in wine and alcohol, how wine and alcohol affects ketosis and would it matter if it's normal... Why normal, I say normal, but conventional wine versus like Dry Farm Wines, for example?

Todd White:
Well, here's the thing. This is in part because I only eat once per day, I think I seem to be more sensitive to alcohol. Also seem to be more sensitive to alcohol as I'm aging. Just because I'm keto or largely keto, this whole keto thing, there's a tremendous amount of noise going on right now inside the forward-leaning health movement around carb reloading and metabolic flexibility and fasting and ketosis.

Todd White:
There's just a tremendous amount of noise and debate inside the movement. I don't know. I can just tell you my personal experience. My personal experience is that I feel better and I have better cognitive response. I just feel I look better. I think I have a little less inflammation. If I'm strictly keto, it seems to work slightly better for me meaning that I'm compliant to a ketogenic diet, a little higher fat, very low carb, moderate protein.

Todd White:
Sometimes, I get bored with it. Although it's a luxurious diet, sometimes, I get a little bit bored with it. I do eat less fat today than I used to. I don't drink a fatted coffee that I don't... I find when my fat intake particularly of saturated fat not so much olive oil. Personally, this is anecdotal. This is just how I feel. I find that when my saturated fat levels get too high, I just don't feel as good. It has to do with my lower GI.

Todd White:
I just don't feel the same. I don't feel as good. I've cut back a little bit on high intakes of fat other than olive oil. I do eat a lot of olive oil, but I have cut back a little bit. I'm thinking cut back from where I was when I was fanatically ketogenic like the first few years, when I thought it was just like the best thing since they paved the streets, I was just super into it and super experimenting around it. I thought it would just become a little bit more moderate. I don't eat as much fat.

Todd White:
Personally, I feel better, but everybody's different. The thing is that when I think about biohacking and diet, when I think about that, I like to reference the proverb to feel is to understand. For me, I have a very clean diet. I have a very disciplined regiment only eating once per day. I'm very in touch with my body. I'm very in touch with what food does to my body, very in touch with what alcohol does to my body.

Todd White:
I'm very in touch with any kind of exogenous compound that enters my body. I'm very in touch with it. For me, I can feel these things. If I'm doing something that starts to not feel good, then I change that protocol. I think when you get in touch, when you get clinging, then... Everybody's different. Some women don't do well on ketogenic diets. Some women don't do well with intermittent fasting. It's hormonal issue for them. Everybody's just different. I think you have to like experiment to find out what optimizes your experience.

Melanie Avalon:
Yeah. I'm actually similar to you and that when I first did keto, I did it hardcore. I did it really high fat. I was like all the fat all the time. Now, I go more leaner actually. I prefer doing like you the intermittent fasting, getting my ketosis that way through the fast and then being a little bit more lenient in my eating window in eating. What I feel like speaks to me which does tend to be lower fat at least compared to what I used to do.

Todd White:
Yeah. That's what I used to do which is crazy. I was like fat, fat, fat, fat, fat. There was a butter on everything, coconut oil, fatted coffee, with coconut oil and MCT and butter. I quit drinking fatted coffee a couple of years ago. It was not making me feel good. Then, I started cutting back on fat, but I used to like poor fat on everything. You know what I'm talking about. Yeah. I've come off of that. Sounds like you have to.

Melanie Avalon:
Yeah. Me too. When I first started, it was just stereotypical low carb back Atkins. It was like very dairy fat which now does not too well for me at all, but then, it was coconut oil. Now, I rarely add fat to my meals. I just get it naturally.

Todd White:
Olive oil is the only... I love olive oil. I love the taste of it. I love the Mediterranean kind of profile with the taste of food. I put olive oil and lots of stuff. I love it, but olive oil is another one that... High quality olive oil is both perishable and also expensive. Oils are just like wine. I mean it's just like every single oil is a completely different profile and imparts different health benefits. The one thing that's interesting about oils when considered doing this, there are quantified lab tests for olive oil.

Todd White:
You can test for the antioxidants the amount of them in olive oil. You can quantify the health benefit of an oil. It's also speculated on olive oils in the US that 75% of oils that are labeled olive oil are not even olive oil at all. I mean there was a 60 Minutes that's easy to do a search for. There was 60 Minutes special on olive oil in the United States and the fraud that goes on in it and the lack of any kind of compliance.

Todd White:
Again, it's the same thing in wine. It's actually a little bit worse because there's no real regulating agencies on olive oil. There is because of alcohol some regulation around wine, but not in the disclosure and transparency as we've talked about, but olive oil according to this expert on 60 Minutes said speculated that 75% of marked olive oil in the United States are not even olive oil at all. They've been modified to taste something like olive oil. If you eat a lot of fat, you eat a lot of olive oil or you can eat at all. It's also perishable. You don't want to eat olive oil more than about 18 months post-harvest.

Todd White:
All quality olive oils have the harvest date printed on the label. If you're an olive oil aficionado or you're interested in eating olive oil for the imparted health benefits or you like the taste of it, you should be sure that you're buying olive oil with a harvest date on it because that is one of the signs of a high quality oil.

Melanie Avalon:
So many sneaky things going on.

Todd White:
It's out there, girl. They're trying to get you.

Melanie Avalon:
I know. It's shocking.

Todd White:
It's about money.

Melanie Avalon:
I know.

Todd White:
It's all about the money. That's just what the world has come to and so many, many things which we're living in this... I don't know if we talked about in the last podcast, but I'm a super huge promoter of meditation. In fact, at my company, we spend the first hour of every day together meditating. It's a central part of our culture. We are leaders in trying to raise the consciousness level of humans through meditation because what's happening is this money thing is that we're in so much pain from the trauma of thinking that we have turned to money as one of the ways. We turn to many other things, television, porn, alcohol, drugs.

Todd White:
But we've turned to money as a way to soften that pain as a way to use it to create other experiences that dilute the pain from the trauma of thinking when we could just meditate. This whole culture of just money, money, money, everything's money, money, money. It's all around social. It's just like this perceived lifestyle that people have around money.

Todd White:
It's just so poisonous. But it really pervasively affects everything in our society and particularly what we're eating and drinking and making it unhealthy. Also, in our health care, it's just everywhere. It's just about money, money, money. If you're not meditating, I'm really suggesting you get some quiet time.

Melanie Avalon:
I'm so glad you brought that up. That's becoming more and more my increasing focus is meditation, the mindset. Actually, when I asked you the last question before we go, you'll see how much it's been influencing me, but that's wonderful to hear. I love that you have that going in your business. Man, if every business did a practice like that, I could change the world. It really could.

Todd White:
Yeah. I absolutely would. The problem is people... We don't meet until 10 o'clock. From 10 to 11 o'clock every day, my staff of 27 people meditate for an hour and some other gratitude practices, but it's an hour, hour and 15 minute practice. We don't actually start creating. We don't start adding value to the world until about 11:15 or 11:30 in the morning and most businesses would never do that. They would say, "Oh, it's way too expensive. We need these people working."

Todd White:
Well, what I tell you is that we've been closed between 5:00 and 6:00 in the afternoon. We're really only open about six or six and a half hours a day to create. We don't like to think of what we do as work. We think of it as creating value. We start creating around 11:15 or 11:30 in the morning. The reason as you know, I was a few minutes late to start recording this podcast.

Todd White:
The reason being is my staff had not sent me the contact information for me to dial into you. They were in meditation until about 10 after 11:00 when I dialed in because I'm down at the beach. I'm in Santa Monica. They're all up in Napa. I didn't have any way to contact anybody. Companies would say, "Oh, we got to have all that time for productivity. You get people working." This is like, "You know what?"

Todd White:
When they start the day at Dry Farm Wines, they're starting in a moment of peace. They're starting in a very high tone of a higher vibration of creation. They're going to actually get more done in the same six hours that you were running people eight or nine though they'll get the same amount done or more. It's just it would just be with a peaceful mind and open heart filled with love. That's going to translate in every way possible in the vibration level which we create. Does that make sense?

Melanie Avalon:
Yup. That makes sense completely. I am so on board. I'm going to circle back around to it for the last question.

Todd White:
Nice.

Melanie Avalon:
Before that, I wanted to ask you a few really quick questions because I've been reaching out to listeners and readers just in my general audience because I said I was having you on. I had a few quick questions for you about Dry Farm Wine specifically. A lot of listeners and readers wanted to know about your availability beyond the US. Do you ship to other countries?

Todd White:
We will begin shipping to Canada sometime later this year, some in the next few months, but we do not presently. We're considering open opening Europe because the wines are already there. We're about to open an office in Amsterdam. We're considering opening. We run an import company because we bring these wines. Normally, a natural wine retailer which is what we would technically be considered although we're an online wine club, but under the category, we're really a natural wine retailer.

Todd White:
Most retailers get their wines from importers. We import our own wine because the volume that we buy. We have operations in Europe now. We don't have retail operations meaning we don't sell wine online in Europe yet, but we are opening an office in Amsterdam. It's very like that sometime later this year or next year, we'll probably start shipping wine in Europe.

Melanie Avalon:
Okay. There's potential for the future with that. That's fantastic. Another reader/listener wanted to know for those who did not have access due to their location, if you would ever consider creating a list of approved wines or a list of the wines that you do export. Her quote was, "I would pay for a curated monthly list." Do you create anything like that?

Todd White:
We don't. The thing is because we're an importer, and these wines are made in very small quantities. First of all, we're the largest natural wine buyer in the world. We buy most of the US inventory, but oftentimes, these wines are made specifically to our specifications for us now. Because of our size, there are quite a few farms around the world now that make wines targeted specifically for us.

Melanie Avalon:
I've noticed sometimes in the wine shipments now like the actual label has Dry Farm Wines on the label. Are those ones that are

Todd White:
Those are the ones I'm talking about. Those wines are made specifically for us by that wine grower. Why they've made specifically for us is because as I mentioned earlier, we have much more stringent and specific purity and health standards than even just natural wines. We're way beyond natural. They're mid-natural winemakers who make natural wines, but they don't fit our criteria. They contain some sugar or they're too high in alcohol or they could be irrigated. Not all natural wines are irrigation free. Ours are.

Todd White:
We have these standards of purity and health. Most commonly, it's the alcohol or sugar. That's the most common two offenders because wine growers don't understand these hippie, activist wine growers. They don't understand. It took us a while to help them understand why we don't buy alcohol over 12.5%. Even the natural winemaking is quite common to have higher alcohol. But because of the volume that we buy and also we pay farmers more than importers do and we pay them faster.

Todd White:
Because we've removed these middle people between the grower and the drinker, it only is us. Normally, it could be from one to three other people taking a cut of the proceeds between the grower and the drinker. It could be as high as four. It's usually two or three. We've removed those people from the financial equation. We are the only conduit between the grower and the drinker.

Todd White:
The reason that's important is because we can pay the grower more for the wine because there's fewer people in the transaction. We can pay them more for it and still sell it at a competitive price to the drinker. That allows us, and one of the things we're most proud about the work that we do is it allows us to pay fair trade pricing to the growers, to these small the farms who literally struggle. We can pay them more. We can pay them faster.

Todd White:
Because an importer, and I'm going to go back to why this is relevant to why we can't publish your list is, so an importer buys a wine. Then, the importer sells it in two to five case drops at restaurants and retail. Well, then the employers got to collect from the restaurant and restaurants are slow to pay. Then, the importer can't pay their bills to the grower. Everything just gets slowed up and the family farm is on the losing end of that stick where we pay for wine when we pick it up in Europe. There's no terms.

Todd White:
They get paid faster, and you paid more, but when we do that, very often, very often, the wine grower produces a specific label that can only be distributed to us. That label is not available to retail. Even if that grower did sell other wines in the US, it would be under a different label. Does that make sense?

Melanie Avalon:
Yeah. That makes sense completely.

Todd White:
Yeah. It's not always the case, but very often and certainly when you see our logo on the back of it, that's a custom label for us. That wine was made specifically for us to our criteria for the reasons that I just described to you why they want to do that because we pay them more and faster. We're also super loving and friendly and easy to deal with. We compete. We compete. Our primary competitors... We have to compete for the purchase of these wines. We're not really competing against importers in the US.

Todd White:
Our primary competitors are actually in Tokyo. The Japanese drink a lot of natural wine. It's very buzzy in Tokyo for natural wines just like it is in New York and San Francisco and Los Angeles, very, very buzzy. All the hipsters are into it. It's like super chic to drink natural wines.

Todd White:
We have to compete in a global marketplace primarily with these two importers in Tokyo. We have to compete to get these wines.

Melanie Avalon:
One of my favorite things about Dry Farm Wines, I love how the shipment you do get just random assortment of wines that it's wonderful because I get to try all these new varietals that I wouldn't necessarily try. I mean it breaks you out of what you may be accustomed to. I love the variety and trying the new wines. It's just absolutely fantastic.

Todd White:
It is a lot of fun because these are... You're drinking grapes like Schiava or Pinot [inaudible 01:06:54] or Ploussard or trousseau or all these native ancestral grapes that are quite rare that you would never see in the US. They're grown in very obscure places across Europe. They're these ancestral vines that are average aged 65 years, but some over 100 years old, these vines. What happens in the United States is that grape vines are replanted about every 14 years on average because once a grape vine gets to be 15 or 16, 17 years old, the yield decreases substantially.

Todd White:
But what Europeans know and what we believe is that older vines produce a better character of fruit that has more soul and interest. Natural vines are usually on average age is about 65 years. These are oftentimes usually also multi-generational landowners who've been farming for multi-generations. But grape vines in the US are replanted about every 14 years on average because of the significant decrease in yield as the vine ages. They're just more difficult to maintain.

Todd White:
They're not as sturdy, not as hardy in that way. But we don't produce a list. One thing we are coming up with and this you'll appreciate this drinking our wines, we are soon to release an app that will allow you to take a photograph at the label from us. Then, it will tell you all about the wine pairing suggestions, what it tastes like, recipe ideas, profile of the farm, profile of the vintage, notes from the farmer, so on and so forth. You'll know a lot more about the wine before you open it up.

Melanie Avalon:
I love that. That's exciting, yeah, because when I get my shipment, I get really excited especially if like I said there's a variety I don't recognize, and I go and I pull up all the notes. I do my little tasting. That'll be great to have that app. I love that. One more quick question and it's like a sort of completely different topic. We don't have to go into too much detail, but besides wine, does other alcohol and liquors have things added potentially that are not on the label?

Todd White:
Yeah, for sure. Well, I'm not an expert in spirits, but some brown liquors do... Obviously, there are many spirits that have been sweetened. They contain sugar. There's many, many varieties of spirits with high levels of sugar in it. There are many types of wine with high levels of sugar in it, but I'm not a spirits expert. I think the prevailing kind of thought in the forward-looking health movement from the people that I respect and follow, most of them recommend if you're going to drink spirits to drink tequila.

Todd White:
There are certainly many fine tequilas out there. I don't drink spirits. I don't recommend that other people drink them because of my aversion to alcohol. Alcohol is dangerous. It's a pretty destructive neurotoxin. Low alcohol wines are just my beverage of choice for alcohol. The difference is that while I'm drinking at 10% wine spirits or 45% alcohol and again because I believe alcohol is destructive and dangerous, I don't want to drink alcohol in higher doses. I don't drink spirits. That's my argument against spirits is it's not the additives alone. It's also just high in alcohol.

Todd White:
Basically, we have among commercially available choices for alcohol, we have three... Well, there are four primary choices. There's beer. I don't drink beer for a whole host of reasons, but the primary reason is because it contains a very specific type of sugar called maltose sugar which goes directly to the liver and converts to fat. There's a very specific metabolic process with this type of sugar, so not all sugars are equal. They're processed differently by the body, but this particular sugar goes directly to the liver and converts to fat.

Todd White:
That's the reason you see people have a beer gut. It's related to this specific type of sugar. I don't drink beer for that reason. It also contains gluten, but there are gluten-free bears, but they're still high in the sugar. I don't drink beer at all for that reason.

Todd White:
The second beverage that's available are ciders. Ciders are also high in sugar. There are some ciders that are sugar-free. We have tested them and tasted them, but when a cider is sugar-free, the austerity of taste is off-putting in our opinion which is the only reason we don't sell them. It's because we don't think they taste good. We do like the taste of cider with sugar in it. It's pretty tasty, but it's also low alcohol, But ciders that tastes good in our opinion contain sugar. Then, there's low-alcohol wine. Then, there are spirits. Of all those choices, I prefer for all the reasons I've already discussed to drink a low-alcohol natural wine.

Melanie Avalon:
Well, you and me both. I just love everything that you're doing with Dry Farm Wines and everything. I will circle back now to that last question which I said was sort of relevant. The question that I'm ending every episode of this podcast with is because I realized how important mindset and meditation and gratitude and everything is, what is something that you are grateful for?

Todd White:
Oh, girl. I spend most of my day in active gratitude. I meditated on the beach this morning. That's the ocean which is my favorite place to meditate. I just think every day how grateful I am to live this extraordinarily privileged life. My philanthropic interest is the homeless. I'm involved in a bunch of programs. We are involved into starting a foundation to support healthier living for people who are homeless.

Todd White:
I'm really super grateful to live this amazingly privileged life that allows me to be under the roof of my beach home. You know what I mean? It's like an extraordinary privileged life of being safe and secure and having friends like you and being surrounded with people who love me and being healthy and being intentional, grateful to live and intentional life to live with intention and purpose and just grateful to have a quiet healthy mind.

Todd White:
If I find my mind drifting into anything that's unhealthy like anxiety or stress of any kind, I just find an object of beauty usually something outside and just focus on how grateful I am to experience that moment of just a beautiful thing. It's usually something that's living. I spend my day thinking about being grounded in gratitude and never forgetting how incredible it is to live this beautiful fragile life that I have every day that keeps me safe and surrounded with love and prosperity and peace. Peace is the most important thing. I think when we find a peaceful life, that's really truly something to be grateful for.

Melanie Avalon:
That is so wonderful to hear. I could not agree more. I've just realized more and more recently. I've been doing research on like the science of it, but how literally the mindset of gratitude and peace and love can reverse the fear and the stress and the anxiety. What that does to our bodies, we can actually reverse that with peace and love and gratitude. It's impossible for us to be both afraid and grateful at the exact same moment.

Todd White:
Impossible. Light cures darkness. You can't be grateful and fearful at the same time. They cannot coexist. Look. Here's the thing. We are wired. We have this fundamental need to love and be loved. Everything is in some way in support of that need to love or be loved. Everything we do is related to that. All of our motivations and emotions are related to these two intrinsic needs.

Todd White:
If we can find a way, and wine is one of those ways, that brings more love into your life, if we can find a way to increase love in our life, this is something that we focus on or should focus on is to be grateful and to increase our exposure to receiving and giving love. This is particularly difficult for men because they're wearing this silly mask of masculinity that they need to rip off that was given to them as a child that told them they needed to be tough. They needed to be strong. They needed to be show power.

Todd White:
That's the mask of masculinity that adversely affects most men. They are all little boys caught up behind this mask and you know exactly what I'm talking about. Now, every listener knows what I'm talking about too. Those little boys that are behind those masks, they need to rip that off and be real and be seen. We all want to be seen. We all want to be loved. We all just want to be seen. This is the people I try to surround myself and this is the lessons that we teach our people at Dry Farm Wines.

Todd White:
I talk about these topics. I've done podcast dedicated to these topics before. It's like we just want to be seen. We want to be loved. We figured that out and the rest of it take care of itself.

Melanie Avalon:
Yeah. I love hearing you say that so much. I've even actually wondered if what percent of the health benefits of wine might even be in part just because of the mindset and the environment that is often created and especially in these societies that drink wine is a part of their culture with their meals just creating that sense of gratitude and everything. It's so nourishing to the body and healing.

Todd White:
Well, wine does. I mean this is the magic of wine and particularly natural wine which is still living hasn't been sterilized with sulfur dioxide and had its soul and healthy bacteria killed off. We didn't talk about that. We're not going to go back down that wormhole, but wine really opens the heart. Wine makes us more emotionally available. When we're more emotionally available, we can be seen. That's why we bond with people over dinner and wine. There are all these cofactors that you just mentioned that may be imparting as much of the health benefit just by being emotionally available and open and loving and our heart opens up. We can be seen. That's when we really feel healthy.

Todd White:
That could be as much to do with it is it's the polyphenols. We don't really know. I think it's a great point.

Melanie Avalon:
I would not doubt it. Well, speaking of, thank you so much for being here today. Thank you for everything you're doing with your company. I am so grateful for Dry Farm wines every time I open a bottle or get a shipment, I'm just like, "Thank you that I have access to this clean healthy wine that I find delicious, nourishing, supportive." I love everything that you're doing with your business practices, with your company. I cannot thank you enough.

Todd White:
Well, let me offer your listeners a penny bottle of wine. If they go to this URL, they're going to find this offer. They can get a penny bottle. We can't legally give it away for free, but they can get a penny bottle with their order. They're going to find a page there for a penny bottle of wine.

Melanie Avalon:
For our listeners, that link will be dryfarmwines.com/melanieavalon. Then, you will get that bottle for a penny. That is that fantastic. Thank you so much for that and listeners cannot encourage you enough to check that out. You will most likely become a Dry Farm Wines convert like I am. It's so funny. People reached out to me. Other wine companies reached out to me quite often and want to send me samples. They'll want to engage with me. I'm really open to it. I love like the opportunity and everything, but I'm like, "I love my Dry Farm Wines." I love everything you're doing. I'm just so confident in the practices and the criteria and the quality that... Yeah. I'm a Dry Farm Wines girl for life.

Todd White:
Nice.

Melanie Avalon:
I cannot encourage listeners enough to check it out. For listeners, I'll put all the links to everything in the show notes. Those will be at melanieavalon.com/dryfarmwines. That'll be the show notes for today's podcast. All the links, everything will be there. Todd, are there any other link you'd like to mention or any other ways for listeners to either follow you, follow Dry Farm Wines any other social media.

Todd White:
Well, Dry Farm Wines on all social media. The most important thing for them to do is meditate. Find some quiet silence and a lot of more every day be grateful and just try to laugh more. Try to remember that everybody you meet, almost everybody you meet is suffering from some trauma you know nothing about. If we just spread more love and less judgment and just try to raise our consciousness level, I think this is our greatest contribution to a better planet and better experience with your own life and the life of everybody around you.

Melanie Avalon:
Well, thank you. If I had a glass of wine right now, I would raise it to you, but tonight, I hope I will raise a glass to that.

Todd White:
Exactly. Yeah. That'd be awesome. I don't drink during the daytime.

Melanie Avalon:
Thank you, Todd. This is wonderful. Have a wonderful day.

Todd White:
Awesome. Thanks for having me on today. I look forward to catching up again.

Melanie Avalon:
Bye.