San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
California’s next-level natural wine
The number of avant-garde, zero-zero winemakers is growing
Natural wine has long occupied the fringe of California’s mainstream wine industry. Winemakers observing this minimalist-intervention philosophy have positioned themselves as an alternative to the establishment, eschewing certain technologies and additives that are commonplace in modern winemaking. It’s won them a lot of fans — seemingly every new restaurant or bar that opens in the Bay Area these days bills itself as a natural wine specialist.
As this philosophy’s popularity grows, more natural winemakers are emerging here. Now, a fringe within the fringe is gaining speed in California, too. These new winemakers abide by a more extreme version: “zero zero” wine, in which they add nothing to the grapes as they ferment. That means no yeast, no nutrients, no acid, no water, no preservatives. Unlike most natural winemakers, who accept some interventions in small degrees, the zero-zero crowd draws a hard line, often explaining their approach with the catchphrase “nothing added and nothing taken away.”
While a few California winemakers like Tony Coturri have made zero-zero wines for years, even decades, more local vintners have started recently. Since 2017, nearly 20 new zero-zero wine labels have popped up in Northern California, with some of their wines just hitting the shelves for the first time in the past year. They make orange-colored Sauvignon Blanc, fizzy Merlot, inky Carignan. They buy grapes from organic vineyards from Mendocino to Monterey and beyond; some are farming small plots of land themselves. As a rule, they’re low-volume producers, some making just a couple hundred cases a year. After all, making wine in this antiindustrial method is not a scalable enterprise.
Every creative discipline has its avant-garde segment, the makers who endeavor boundary-pushing, intentionally audacious work. In wine, that avant-garde is zero-zero.
To the average wine drinker, the distinctions between zero-zero wine and plain old natural wine and socalled “conventional” (a.k.a. not natural) wine may not matter, or even be apparent. There are no specific aesthetic giveaways. In theory, any wine can end up tasting any way. In practice, sure, many natural wines share certain traits — a hazy appearance due to lack of filtration, for example — but none is universally shared.
Behind the scenes, however, these various winemaking philosophies inspire fervent debate. Some zero-zero winemakers think non-zero-zero wines are not fully “natural,” since the wine’s unadulterated state is being manipulated. Others believe the zerozero approach is misguided, even irresponsible, since it leaves the wine vulnerable to bacterial flaws.
The growing interest in all of these low-intervention methods mirrors the demand for “natural” everything: food, skin care products, even water. It dovetails with the market for organic produce and the demand for ingredient transparency. With their penchant for experimentation and coolkid vibes, natural winemakers have attracted drinkers who might have previously found wine too stuffy.
Natural wine has also challenged conventional wisdom around what wine should taste like. Whereas most California wineries go to great lengths to make sure their wines are free of, for example, the spoilage yeast brettanomyces, which can make a wine smell like horse manure, some natural winemakers welcome it if the yeast ends up finding its way into their barrels. Wines like these have primed a whole new generation’s palates to be more open to funky flavors.
The zero-zero movement puts those dynamics into overdrive. If natural wine felt experimental and cool, its zero-zero subcategory feels even more so. San Francisco now has two wine shops dealing exclusively in zero-zero wine, Ruby in Potrero Hill and the forthcoming Bar Part Time in the Mission.
But zero-zero wines may also invite more intense criticism. Is there a point where a wine — even a wine intended for a natural wine-loving audience — can get so unpleasantly funky that a winemaker ought to intervene?
For most natural winemakers, that intervention would come in the form of sulfur. This element occurs naturally in wine, as a byproduct of fermentation. On top of what a wine already contains, a winemaker can add more sulfur as a preservative and antioxidant, to protect against a wide range of ills, including bacteria. Essentially, sulfur is the final failsafe against any unfriendly microbes, and the vast majority of winemakers — including natural winemakers — rely on it to ensure that their wine doesn’t turn to vinegar.
This is where the zero-zero winemakers get truly radical. They’re not interested in any failsafe. They believe wines made without sulfur, and without anything else, are more soulful, more interesting, more alive. They’re willing to accept any bacterial over growth risks in pursuit of that.
“It’s like a Heath bowl versus a bowl from Ikea,” says Graham Shelton of Slow Dance Wines, a zero-zero devotee in Petaluma. “It’s more delicate. It’s more crafted. And yeah, maybe it’s a little chipped.”
Not everyone has a tolerance for “chipped” wine, but then again, tolerances change over time. When Noel Diaz of Purity Wines in Richmond decided to go zero zero in 2017, after three years of making wines with small sulfur additions, he was initially nervous that his wines might succumb to problems like volatile acidity, which can make a wine smell like a magic marker.
But he found himself more accepting of his wines’ imperfections than he’d expected. One ended up tasting so sour and kombucha-like that he decided to embrace it, calling the cuvee “Pickleback,” a reference to the name for a shot of Jameson with pickle brine.
If a wine were to go seriously downhill, some zero-zero winemakers would sooner get rid of it than fix it with sulfur. “I’d rather not use sulfur and learn from that mistake and do better in the future than keep leaning on the crutch,” says Brent Mayeaux of Stagiaire Wines in Santa Cruz. Diaz has distilled some of his failed wines and made amaro.
Others counter that it’s financially untenable to pour wines down the drain, and that it’s unfair to customers to sell wines that reek of premature oxidation, brettanomyces or — maybe worst of all — “mouse,” a defect that produces a taste in the back of the throat said to be reminiscent of a dead mouse, and which tends to appear only in unsulfured wines.
“If your choice is between making a wine that’s zero zero but doesn’t taste good or adding (a small amount of sulfur) to make a balanced wine, I would always choose to make the wine that is clean and tastes good,” says Rosalind Reynolds, who aims to make all wines under her Emme label zero zero but is willing to intervene when necessary. She’s drunk zerozero wines that are transcendent, she says, and she’s drunk some that “taste like trash.”
“The best wines I’ve ever tasted are zero zero. There is a certain liveliness and purity and vibrancy to the wine that you get without any sulfur,” Reynolds says. “But by no means do I think it’s appropriate to practice zero zero as a hard and fast rule.”
These are aesthetic questions. There is also a question of safety: Is sulfur responsible for post-wine headaches, for example? The scientific consensus is that consuming sulfur in wine in small amounts is not harmful to most people’s health. If a person can consume sulfur-heavy foods like dried fruit or deli meats without an allergic reaction, they’re probably not allergic to wines with added sulfur.
Nonetheless, some swear they feel much better after drinking zero-zero wine. “I don’t tell people to drink my wine because it’s healthy,” says Diaz. “But if you ask me whether I feel better after drinking natural wine, the answer is yes. Even though the science says I shouldn’t feel that way.”
The conversation gets thorny quickly. Many zero-zero winemakers would say their aim is to let a wine freely express terroir, unobstructed by a winemaker’s hand. So is a zero-zero wine that gets overtaken by a bacterial problem just an example of nature taking its course, something that ought to be embraced? Or is it simply another way of obstructing terroir, if the wine ends up expressing merely the taste of the bacteria?
It’s easy to get caught up in these worst-case scenarios. The truth is, there are plenty of examples of locally
produced zero-zero wine for which these concerns aren’t even relevant. Many don’t taste funky or faulty at all. They just taste good.
Sure, you can find zero-zero specimens that taste like kombucha and horse manure. You can also find ones that are mildly, agreeably funky, like the Slow Dance Sauvignon Blanc, which has vegetal aromas and a pleasantly sour flavor that reminds me of banana Runts candy.
And then there’s a plethora of zero-zero wines being made in California right now that look crystalclear and taste pristine. Carlos Caruncho, a Nevada City language teacher moonlighting as a winemaker under the Arquils label, makes a classic-tasting Cabernet Sauvignon blend called Maestro. In Sonoma County, Caleb Leisure crafts beautifully clean wines such as his Caesura, a lightly sparkling Viognier that tastes like peaches and apricots.
Everyone seems to be a little bit tired of talking so much about sulfur, which has somehow become a lightning-rod topic and yet is not the most important part of the winemaking process, by a longshot. The debate around it tends to frame sulfur additions as an issue with moral implications — are you robbing a wine of its soul?! — but it has little to do with actual ethical issues facing the wine industry like climate change and fair labor practices.
Ultimately, the average wine drinker, even the average natural wine drinker, is likely not paying attention to the finer points of sulfur additions. “For most consumers, it’s too confusing and it doesn’t matter,” Mayeaux acknowledges. It’s hard enough for people to wrap their heads around natural wine in the first place.
That’s why Reynolds thinks it’s silly to ascribe a sense of righteousness to any winemaking method, zero zero or natural or otherwise. “The thing that’s important is not whether you added sulfur,” she says. “The thing is being honest about what you did and then letting people decide what to drink for themselves.”