Outdoor Retailer Patagonia Is Now Selling Natural Wine

Patagonia, the always-crunchy clothing brand behind your favorite fleece pullover, has just announced that it's expanding into wine, cider, and sake sales. Earlier this week, it released eight wines on its Patagonia Provisions website. In late November, it will expand its offerings to include one sake made from organic rice, and a dry hard cider from the Chilean Andes.

And, because they knew you'd have questions, there's an entire section on the site that attempts to answer the question "Why Wine?" The biggest reason, the Ventura, California company explains, is because drinking wine can provide a connection to the "authentic natural source" of every bottle's place of origin.

"Nothing captures the natural setting of a given location — the soil, weather, flora and fauna — like hand-crafted, thoughtfully produced wine, cider and sake," Patagonia wrote. "The French call it terroir, but we just think of it as the taste, aroma, and beyond that, the spirit of some of the best places on earth."

And, in keeping with Patagonia's environmentally friendly ethos, all eight are natural wines, which means that they're made without additives, chemicals, sulfur, or filtering.

The wines that are currently available include a sparkling wine and a canned piquette from New Zealand winery Alex Craighead; a chablis from French winery Château de Béru; a Pistemutta rosso and Pistemutta rosato from organic Sicilian vintner Frank Cornelisson; a rosé and a thyme-infused pinot blanc from Meinklang, a certified biodynamic Austrian farm; and a marquette from New York state's Wild Arc Farm.

Beer-lovers may already know that this isn't Patagonia's first foray into adult beverages. In 2016, the company collaborated with The Land Institute in Salina, Kansas and with Hopworks Urban Brewery in Portland on its first beer, Long Root Pale Ale. The beer was the first to be brewed with Kernza, a perennial grain that's more climate-friendly than those that have to be re-planted every year.

Patagonia Provisions and Hopworks have since expanded their beer lineup to include Long Root Wit, a Belgian-style brew that's infused with organic coriander and orange peel, and Long Root IPA, which was released in September. (The name "Long Root" is a reference to Kernza's impressively deep root system, which can stretch more than 10 feet into the soil.)

As of this writing, Patagonia's new wine range can be purchased by and shipped to legal-aged customers in 13 states — Alaska, California, Connecticut, Florida, Louisiana, Nebraska, New Hampshire, New Mexico, North Dakota, Oregon, Virginia, West Virginia, Wyoming — and Washington, D.C..