I, (Hector Lannible) am constantly approached by business leaders, Government Ministers and the assorted press – gutter and otherwise- seeking my profound wisdom on the world of alcohol. My evidence-based, iron-disciplined views are justifiably notorious.

So let me settle one controversial wine topic once and for all.

NOB – (Natural, Organic, Biodynamic) – hipster voodoo nonsense, or planet-saving healthiness?

No-one can deny trends in the wine industry. Huge strides have been made in grapegrowing, winemaking and, of course, marketing. We know all about getting the “right varieties in the right places,” old vines, and the cult of auteur winemakers.

Lately we’ve seen growing customer distrust of industrialisation; a desire for intimacy and diminished manipulation. For the story behind the wines. For doing more with less.

And the makers of these nouvelle vague wines often proudly boast they carry no winemaking qualifications, no vineyard or winery. Every wine is more honest, more compelling, and more rewarding than tricked up soulless mass-market wine products.

Critics might describe the NOB market as virtue-signalling, sandal-wearing, vegan tree-huggers with electric SUV’s. But these people are missing the key benefit of natural wine.

We can get it into the market quickly, and at a premium price.

What more could we ask for? Cashflow is king! Why bother with the time involved to make “proper” sparkling wine, with years of maturation when you can whip out “prosecco” in a few months. And why bother with that, when a “pet-nat” can grace the shelves mere weeks after harvest?

And, of course, Stoney Goose Ridge could not ignore the lucrative sales, margins, brand-building and resultant boost to my bonus.

Our wine people are always itching to tinker with new techniques and gadgetry. Thanks to my uncanny exploitation of R&D tax breaks, we have ceramic eggs, amphorae, prepared ambient yeasts, and many other toys. Under my benevolent oversight, winemakers carefully curate small batches, and after my brutal assessments and improvement finesses, these can readily transformed be into commercial wine lake quantities.

Our first lo-fi, hands-off “orange wine” Hipster’s Reward®,  laid waste to somms, and customers across several continents, smashing sales records. Our selected winemaking ambassadors fronted the media – with minders – flaunting their beards, tattoos, and piercings. Non-male winemakers too.

It was a runaway success, where our only key problem was making more!

Organic and biodynamic wines often have annoying and, frankly, unnecessarily laborious certification processes, with competing authorities, and ambiguous rules. This is ideal for Stoney Goose Ridge! We claim to abide by the principles but see no need to be hamstrung by red-tape stifling innovation.

And we are sensitive to feedback, with our massed lawyers always eager to issue writs for defamation, with corrective and humbling apologies and punitive damages sought.

Of course, our mainline is mainstream wines, utilising all the tools that make such a difference in improving quality and decreasing costs; mini-ox, oak chunks, reversal osmosis, flowcross filtering and so on in the winery, and spraying with mega-drones, and mechanical trimming and grape collection.

We even made a wine to appeal to the fervent anti-NOBs, an interstellar opposite, the ultra-hi-tech dark horse Miraculous Maximus Technoplex®.

At Stoney Goose Ridge, we are indifferently agnostic to unquantifiable customer beliefs. We proudly cater for all market matrices  that provide momentum-bursting growth and profitability metrics.