About Us & Our Wine

Tabula Rasa Bar opened as a neighborhood bar in September of 2016 in East Hollywood, Los Angeles. The Silverlake Lounge has been operating for over 50 years on Sunset Blvd and we are honored to take over this historic venue.

“Natural Wine” means different things to different people. To us, it’s an intentional term. First and foremost it means a wholistic approach to agricultural practices. Sometimes that involves official certification (biodynamic, organic, etc), however many of our producers are small family farmers who are either too small for it to make sense to go through the burdensome certification process and/or use methods that do not fit into a box, yet are tuned to their specific area.

Natural Wine also indicates “minimal intervention” in the winemaking process, which leads to the possibility of interpretation. Instead of being dogmatic, we listen to our winemakers, importers, and distributors and hear their stories. We trust that they are making the best decisions possible. And if there’s a wine that falls outside of what we consider a Natural Wine, then we won’t bring it in. 99.99% of the time that means nothing added to the wine except for maybe a small amount of sulphur.

We also make a strong effort to do business with female winemakers. That too can be up for interpretation as many folks we work with are wife/husband teams, each with her/his responsibilities in the business. That could mean the husband is the “winemaker” but the wife is the farmer. Or vice versa. Again we listen to the people we work with and feel it’s important to support women in our industry.