Back in November we had the pleasure of meeting with Laura Brennan Bissell, the winemaker behind Inconnu Wines, when she came by the shop with a few of her wines for us to taste. Our meeting was brief but impressionable. Laura’s story was concise and honest, simple enough for my beginner wine brain to digest. I’d had the pleasure of tasting a few Inconnu wines before meeting Laura, and felt how special they were through their energy and nuances.
After meeting Laura, it was like two puzzle pieces coming together. It was one of my first experiences feeling like I had truly met the heart and soul behind a wine labeI. I had two major takeaways from our time spent with Laura.
The first is that the most beautiful things in life are those that you allow to exist as they are. The secret recipe to anything is authenticity, and that looks different for everyone. When you grant things the support they need to develop into something of their own essence, the results can leave you lost for words.
The second is that simplicity and honesty will get you a lot farther than smoke and mirrors. It can be rather easy to get swept away from the heart of a project when figuring out how you’re actually going to sell the thing. There is a certain amount of courting that must be done by a creator to entice the market, which in this industry is often done through seasoned discourse.
As someone who is still quite new to this industry, it can be challenging to keep up with the world of wine around me. At times I find myself stumbling over the intricacies of all the logistics, technical info, and well-read banter that exists in trading wine. Laura is a refreshing intersection of sophistication and accessibility. She is a great reminder that wine exceeds the need to fill a glass and is something that can be captivating and emotional, even for the novice wine drinker. Her wines feel ethereal and energetic, yet grounded in their own unique expressions.
Even at her caliber, Laura keeps things simple and raw. She is purely transparent about her intentions as a winemaker and her wines are such a distinct manifestation of the principles she embodies. The way she prioritizes absolute and unadulterated beauty is impelling.
Inconnu is about supervision and integrity, allowing the fruit to mature and evolve into the expressive characteristics they’ve always harbord. The way Laura thinks about wine is very reminiscent of how we should be thinking about people - they are rugged and unique, and when given the opportunity and care to develop into something of their own, you are left with an undeniable one of a kind beauty. Perhaps collaboration would be more fluid and abundant if we all existed in such a way, through the embrace of our differences rather than competition over similarities, so that we may fit together like complementary pieces of a broken glass.
