Ordinaire in Oakland a shrine to natural wine

The wine is cloudy in the glass, a kind of pale-golden milk, wafting a cowshed’s worth of organic-matter aromas: wet earth, animal hide, sweet-smelling hay.

A tangy bacterial thing (see also: kombucha; sour beer) makes my mouth pucker, and among its pretty floral flavors there emerges a more pungent biotic note, reminiscent of cannabis.

“I think it says a lot about the establishment that they’re always criticizing natural wine for not having a definition,” says Bradford Taylor, the owner of Ordinaire.

Natural wines have nothing, or almost nothing, added to them: no chemical treatment in the vineyard; no yeast to jump-start a fermentation; no fining or filtration; certainly no sugar or acid adjustments.

There might be added sulfur dioxide, in minimal amounts, to prevent spoilage, but bonus points if you go totally sans soufre.

Some natural wines are cloudy and semi-opaque (that’s the lack of filtration), and they can sometimes (not always) be funky or dirty-tasting — as opposed to the crystal-clean products you might get from a generous sulfur regimen.

A doctoral candidate in English at UC Berkeley, he is writing a dissertation on “the concept of taste in early 20th century literature, as it toggles between an aesthetic sensibility and a more gustatory, more physical sense of eating.”

Adding to this academic pursuit was Taylor’s love of the natural wine bars of Paris — places like La Verre Volé — which serve as meeting places for a like-minded community.

To Taylor, these bars seemed to serve as both salons for wine intellectuals geeking out, and also casual, unadorned saloons, with inexpensive wine and simple food.

Wine bottles, their prices scribbled in chalk above the label, line the walls of Ordinaire like books on a bookshelf.

There are 10 or so wines by the glass — on a recent night, all European — and several more on tap (Matthiasson Chardonnay, Folk Machine Pinot Noir, Donkey & Goat Counoise), available by glass, half-carafe or carafe.

Food options are cheese, charcuterie and Portuguese sardines; on some weeknights, neighbor Boot & Shoe Service will deliver pizza.

If you’d like to try something unusual and new, you’d be wise to say so, and a staff member — often Taylor or his right-hand man, Quinn Kimsey-White — will gleefully guide you.

While I was perusing the shelves recently for a $30-ish bottle of wine, Kimsey-White appeared, offering assessments of the different cuvées of Julien Altaber, a producer from Burgundy’s Saint Aubin whose wines include a skin-fermented Aligoté ($33) and a Pinot Noir from the obscure Maranges appellation ($37).

The sardines, which we spread on bread, tasted meaty, creamy and mild — considerably less assertive than the Pinot.