724 Vine Street
Hollywood, CA 90038
ph: (323) 962-6369
What's Lou?
Lou is a cozy, convivial wine bar located in Hollywood.
Our obsessions: natural winegrowing, indigenous grape varieties, and the characterful wines produced by old vines.
We enjoy offering our customers unique wines that are expressive of their place of origin and the people that grow them.
News
June 19th: Alice Feiring, author of The Battle for Wine and Love: or How I Saved the World from Parkerization, will be at Lou for a chat and a book signing (6 PM).
June 11th: On June 11th Lou will host a special supper with Michael Goëss-Enzenberg, a great biodynamic winegrower from Italy's Alto Adige. Last spring, during our biodynamic wine fest, we poured Mr. Goëss-Enzenberg's Manincor wines and fell in love with them. Come to Lou on June 11th to meet this wonderful winegrower, taste across the range of Manincor wines, and enjoy a three course farmers market wine-pairing supper.
Supper is served from 6 o'clock until 11 PM, and reservations are recommended: call us Monday-Saturday after 5.
Michael Goëss-Enzenberg
April 30th: Come meet biodynamic producer Olivier Pithon at an extra-special winemaker dinner.
Mr. Pithon + horse + Roussillon terroir = good!
April 21st: Real chicken!
March
A celebration of red wine from Roussillon, home of schistous soils and ultra-old geezer carignan vines. This is one of the most dynamic winegrowing areas in France today.
February
On Monday, February 11th, we hosted an extra-special multi-course dinner with Tony and Julie Hook, artisan cheese makers who produce super-aged cheddars (10 and 12 year) with extraordinary complexity and depth of flavor.
During the month of February, we also offered a mini-festival of vigneron-driven Beaujolais, from simple, juicy village-level wines to full-bodied crus from practitioners working at the very highest level of the appellation.
Sometime this spring/early summer
Our 2nd annual biodynamic wine festival.
Natural wine?
A customer once asked, "natural wine, doesn't it taste like poop?" After a glass of Gauby's biodynamically grown Côtes du Roussillon Vielles Vignes '03, he was a convert.
Many of the wines we offer our customers are natural wines. We don't make a big ideological deal about it: we pour natural wines because we like them and hope that you do, too.
Vineyard and cellar
In a conventional vinyeard the farmer has become an agricultural technologist, and does not hesitate to deploy the complete armament of modern agriculture, including synthetic fertilizers and herbicides. The vineyard itself has been transformed into an inert container for a cash crop, a transformation that is reflected in our use of the term "winemaker" — we conceive of wine as something that is made rather than something that is grown. Natural winegrowers reject synthetics, and are resolute in their belief that wine is made in the vineyard and not in the cellar.
In the cellar, natural winegrowers practice low-intervention winemaking, opting for naturally occurring yeasts rather than commercial strains, low or no doses of sulfur, and modest amounts of new oak—or no oak at all. The idea is to let the vines speak for themselves.
Old vine garnacha as thick and gnarled as a tree
Will drinking natural wine make you a better person?
Abolutely! Drinking natural wine makes you a better person, a much better person. OK, to be honest, if the results in the bottle weren't very good, the story of natural wine would be a lot less compelling than it is. But from a completely hedonic perspective, natural wines taste good, sometimes very, very good. We don't entirely know why natural wines taste so good, but they do.
724 Vine Street
Hollywood, CA 90038
ph: (323) 962-6369
