I Hope to Make You Fall in Love with Natural Wine

I am happy to host Ieva Elvyra on the blog. Ieva was born in Kaunas and moved to Vilnius after university. After six years at Revolut she became a wine storyteller: through GliuGliu she hosts themed wine tastings built around wine without snobbery, and she is also one of the hosts of a daily news show on LNK.

When I wrote to her about featuring GliuGliu, she told me about the natural wine scene in Lithuania, and about the challenge of talking about wine in a country with strict rules on how alcohol can be promoted. So I asked her to tell her own story, in her words.

I’m sure I raised some eyebrows back in 2023, when I announced leaving my comfy corporate job as Revolut’s Head of Global Internal Communications to become a wine storyteller. What even is that? In fairness, I wasn’t too sure myself, as I hadn’t really met any. But I was at a point of dire need of change in life, and it all came down to answering two questions:

1. What’s something I’m actually good at? The answer was simple: communications. I can talk and I can write, and lucky for me, every industry in the world needs that. Which brought me to the second question:
2. What world am I interested in now and could talk about for hours? This one had come into focus fairly recently, following my sommelier studies, and the answer was wine.

The scariest (but also the most exciting) part was going solo. As someone who’s never had a strong entrepreneurial spirit, more of a creative type here, I had zero plans and projections. The idea was to simply allow myself to do everything I’m excited about, and see what happens. That’s when GliuGliu was born.

This is a good time to point out how tricky my new career choice was. All alcohol advertising in Lithuania is banned by law. That even includes any social media posts where a bottle label is clearly visible. Wanting to create content in an industry where content creation is virtually prohibited? Now that’s a creative challenge!

While my sommelier studies unlocked my curiosity about the world of wine, what really made me fall in love with it was natural wine. This was the first time I learned that much of the world’s wine is made by manipulating grape juice with various additives (often synthetic), allowing wineries to pull their product whichever way they want, regardless of the quality of the actual grape harvest.

Then there is this niche (and often mocked) part of the wine world where winemakers are able to create beautiful wines from one ingredient only, the grapes, with minimal intervention in the process (which also lends the “low intervention” name to these wines). These wines range from something that tastes quite understandable to something quite surprising. You won’t necessarily like everything within that range (even I don’t), but it certainly expands our understanding of what wine can be, while the authenticity of the process and the result are what’s so charming to me.

Natural wines reached the Lithuanian market around 2020 thanks to our first natural-wine-only importer. Since then, we’ve had several notable and exciting low-intervention importers pop up: people who genuinely loved the philosophy, the winemakers and their creations; who’ve spent time working in the vineyards themselves and trying every single wine they brought back home. I was lucky to become friends with all of them and found myself becoming part of an open, exciting and welcoming community, where curiosity always beats snobbery.

Discovering the world of low-intervention wine was pivotal in my own work. Choosing to talk about these wines in my tastings and content felt like the most natural fit: I genuinely like these wines better than conventional or industrial ones; I stand by their philosophy and the respect the winemakers show to nature; and I really felt at home with these people.

My wine tastings took me all over Lithuania, and seeing people discover their curiosity for wine and the low-intervention philosophy was just the best feeling. I traveled to various wine fairs, visited winemakers, and worked harvests myself. Eventually wine also took me where I least expected it to: I got a call from our main commercial TV channel LNK, saying that the producers noticed my wine reels, liked my delivery, and offered me the opportunity to become one of the hosts of the live daily afternoon news show. I honestly never would’ve thought that I’d be able to combine my two great loves, TV and wine, into one life. Let’s see if our paths cross some day over a glass (and then some)!