Supernatural!
Unfiltered, fresh and funky, natural wine is finally making its case in California.
The Starline Social Club in Oakland could barely contain the Sunday afternoon horde. Five hundred people had gathered here for Brumaire, an annual tasting event of natural wines from around the world. Thirsty attendees jostled through the rooms, foisting their shoulders through a sea of supplicants, holding out their glasses for a few precious drops of carbonic Trousseau, or Xarel-lo pet-nat, or ramato Pinot Gris, or whole-cluster Marquette.
This was the third Brumaire, and by far the biggest. Led by Bradford Taylor, who owns the Oakland wine bar Ordinaire, this year’s event featured 51 wineries, about double the number it hosted in its original 2016 installment. Brumaire sold out in mid-February, and by this weekend the wait list for tickets had grown to over 400.
Yes, you read that right. A 400-person wait list for natural wine. Not a typo.
The Brumaire turnout is remarkable because natural wine is — or has been — a fringe movement, a radical blip on the massive radar of conventional winemaking. Broadly, natural wine (a.k.a. “natty” wine, a.k.a. “glou glou,” a.k.a. “zero-zero” wine, with zero output/zero input) refers to wines made without manipulation: no synthetic pesticides in the vineyard, no commercial yeast, no tannin or acid additions, no filtration. Ideally, a natural wine would use no sulfur, a preservative that can prevent microbial spoilage. (However, many wines that characterize themselves as natural do use small amounts of sulfur.)
The case for natural winemaking is largely an argument for transparency and consumer safety. “I just want to know what’s in my wine,” says Jared Brandt, who with his wife, Tracey, owns Berkeley’s Donkey & Goat winery. When it comes to chemicals in the vineyard or cellar, Brandt says, “my standard is always: Would I let my kids drink this?”
The appeal is also spiritual. Natural wine, the theory goes, is a pure, unadulterated conduit for a vineyard’s expression. It’s personal. It’s ancient. It’s raw. “I’m always trying to explain to customers,” says Aran Healy, owner of Ruby Wine shop, “that these wines are actually like art.”
Like other art forms, natural wine can be offputting to the uninitiated palate: often cloudy (since it doesn’t get filtered), and often pretty funky-tasting. To its devotees, those idiosyncrasies are what make it beautiful. But associations with descriptors like “sweat,” “fart” and “barnyard” exclude natty wines from the arena of the squeaky-clean, ultraconsistent mass market. That, and the fact that natural wine is necessarily a low-volume endeavor, anti-industrial by definition. As Healy says, “It’s impossible to scale this industry.”
And yet. Fifty-one wineries and a few hundred enthusiastic consumers might barely scratch the surface of the global wine industry, but the energy of Brumaire — and recent natural-wine events like it — is evidence of the mainstreaming of a category that just a few years ago was confined to the outermost margins. Natty wine may remain a tiny slice of the overall wine market, but it’s an increasingly major part of the wine conversation.
But is natural wine ready for those higher stakes?
Natural wine’s home has long been Europe, where it is much more widely produced and enthusiastically embraced than on this side of the Atlantic. “We have come to recognize that California is just at a very different moment than Europe,” says Taylor. “Brumaire maybe represents 1 percent of the natural wine from Europe, whereas we have pretty much every California producer at the event.”
There are easy explanations for this. The high costs of buying land and doing business in California. The preponderance of Napa Valley’s opulent wine style. A Bay Area culture that privileges technology. As Josh Eubank, owner of the importer Percy Selections and a co-organizer of Brumaire, puts it: Young winemakers here “are under immense pressure to bring a ‘consistent’ product to market, not so much because this is what they want to drink, but rather because their alternative is bankruptcy. That’s certainly not a recipe for experimental winemaking.”
On the other hand, California’s reluctance to embrace natural wine makes little sense at all. Jared and Tracey Brandt recall their bewilderment upon launching Donkey & Goat in 2003: They sold out of wine in New York, but couldn’t sell any in California. Why? After all, Bay Area restaurants have long waved the flag for transparency in ingredients, in organic farming, in farm-to-table. And our tech culture is all about so-called disruption: “You have people who made all their money in Silicon Valley challenging convention,” Brandt says. Yet when it comes to wine, those disrupters veer toward the utterly conventional.
A lot has changed since then. In 2007, Terroir opened in SoMa, an early signal of the natural wine bar wave that was to come. Oakland’s Punchdown came in 2011, and Ordinaire in 2012; Ruby Wine, though open since 2000, went all-natural in 2012.
Then, some acceleration: Lord Stanley opened in 2015, the first San Francisco restaurant with a Michelin star to have an exclusively natural wine list. That same year, Del Popolo and KronnerBurger opened with Ordinaire-designed wine lists. (Essam Kardosh now oversees Del Popolo’s wine list, and it remains dedicated to natural wines.)
At what point did Bay Area wine drinkers get on board? Certainly, the popularity of the wine bars, and their staff ’s fervent advocacy, helped ease consumers into the idea of natural wine. They became places you wanted to hang out at, and their mantra of drinking real wine is easy to want to adopt.
The growing acceptance of natural wine seems to mirror, too, our local food culture’s embrace of the weird. If you’re eating at restaurants serving sprouted mung bean croquettes or sesame-based desserts, it feels only fitting to drink amphora-aged Viognier and carbonic-maceration Counoise.
“All of a sudden, in the last two years, the consumer is really ahead of the curve,” says Healy. “Suddenly wines we always sold,” like Clos du TueBoeuf from France’s Loire Valley, “are impossible to get. We get an allocation, and then we sell out immediately.”
This year, 22 California wineries poured at Brumaire. That included the state’s natural-wine stalwarts like Donkey & Goat, Clos Saron, La Clarine Farm and Coturri. More surprising was the number of brand-spanking-new brands, like Frenchtown Farms, Subject to Change, Absentee and Vin de California, all launched since 2015.
Wine-world thought leaders not previously involved in natural wine have jumped in, too. Rajat Parr, the former Michael Mina wine director and owner of Santa Barbara’s not-natural Domaine de La Cote, was at Brumaire with his new brand, Combe. Wolfgang Weber, a former senior editor of Wine & Spirits, debuted his new En Cavale label.
Many of the wines poured at Brumaire I can describe only as bizarre. There was Ruth Lewandowski’s Feints cuvee, a half white, half red wine from Italian varieties in Mendocino County. There was the sparkling Grenache, from Vin de California, that somehow came out the color and opacity of Goya mango nectar. And the wines made from cold-hardy hybrid grapes like La Crescent and Frontenac Gris, from Deirdre Heekin of La Garagista in Vermont, and the cider-wine amalgamations of Heekin’s protegee Krista Scruggs.
Were these wines good? I found it difficult to evaluate them, as I imagine an art critic might have felt when looking for conventional markers of subject and form in a Jackson Pollack painting. Some I found wonderful and surprising. Some I found undrinkable. But my “undrinkable” — if I found volatile acidity, for example, or excessive brettanomyces — appeared, at Brumaire, to be many people’s “delicious.”
Good or bad, not all wines at Brumaire were bizarre. Nothing about the pure, deeply structured Rhone-style blends from Cote de Cailloux in Sonoma Valley tasted radical, for example. Nor the concentrated, black-fruited Cotillion from Frenchtown Farms, an old-vine red blend from Lodi grapes. Or the bright, floral Calaveras County Syrah from Purity Wine in Richmond.
Is this the “fringe”? For the hundreds of drinkers zealously throwing back their glasses at Brumaire on Sunday, this seemed to be home. No one was complaining that the wines were too “funky,” or asking why the Pinot Gris had come out magentacolored. Like the wines themselves, on Sunday these natural wine lovers were free to be who they are, without apology.
In the Bay Area and beyond, natural wine’s recent ascent has not gone unnoticed. In fact, on a national stage, 2017 felt like natural wine’s year-long debutante ball. I counted the launch of three new publications (Sprudge Wine, Terre, Glou Glou) solely devoted to natural wine. Bon Appetit, whose wine writer Marissa A. Ross covers natural wine exclusively, pronounced it “2017’s Drink of the Year.” Jeff Gordinier pledged his endorsement in Esquire (after pledging it the year before in the New York Times Style Magazine). Punch even had to convene a panel to hash out the full implications of this “mainstreaming.”
And there was the category’s most unlikely celebrity advocate, the rapper Action Bronson, who embraces natural wine in its funkiest forms. In one episode of his “Untitled Action Bronson Show,” he described a white wine from Austrian natural-wine darling Gutt Oggau as “ass-y,” which turned out to be a compliment. “It’s a beautiful wine,” Bronson concluded.
Of course, under this new spotlight, new detractors have emerged. But that discourse, too, has changed. Whereas a few years ago, the natural-wine conversation was a black-and-white, with-us-or-against-us proposition (cf “Why ‘Natural’ Wine Tastes Worse Than Putrid Cider,” an actual Newsweek headline from 2014), today for the most part the tenor has softened. Yes, natural wine’s devotees continue to play the part of the resistance. But today few of us who deal in wine’s so-called mainstream would refuse on principle to drink a wine simply because it is natural. It is an accepted part of our landscape.
That’s not to say I still don’t have some major questions for natural wine. For instance, why does the conversation revolve so heavily around winemaking practices in the cellar, and so little around farming practices in the vineyard? Do some of natural wine’s favored winemaking techniques — carbonic maceration, skin fermentation for whites — conflict with the mandate of expressing the grapes in their purest form, rendering them more a product of process than of ingredients?
And I keep coming back to this question: What about the times when sulfur can preserve a vineyard’s site expression, rather than stifle it? If your wine tastes like brettanomyces or lactobacillus, I’d argue you’re tasting spoilage organisms, not terroir.
The most familiar complaint leveled against natural wines — use as little sulfur as you want, but the wine has to taste good — is perhaps more relevant now than ever. Recent years have seen the rise of one particular wine flaw, commonly referred to as “mouse,” which can develop in the absence of sulfur. (Supposedly it makes a wine’s finish taste like a dead mouse, though this strikes me as difficult to verify.) As more novices enter the natural wine game, “it’s up to experienced wine buyers to be more diligent now,” says Healy.
The great opportunity for natural wine now is to use its megaphone to challenge all wineries to reexamine their long-accepted notions. It may itself not become the mainstream, but maybe some of its principles, like lower intervention and consumer transparency, will.
“Finding ways to be critical of whatever is ‘mainstream’ is pretty integral to natural wine’s identity,” Taylor says. As natural wine steps onto a bigger stage, “it will be important for natural wine to still find ways to be marginal, be progressive, be radical.”
That’s a tall order, and a vague one. Yet there was one marginal, progressive, radical tenet on display at Brumaire that I was not expecting to find. As much as the event was a celebration of low-intervention wines, I found it also to be a celebration of table wines — simple wines, humble wines, unapologetic for their flaws and, by California standards, relatively inexpensive. Yes, I tasted some aged wines — and some young wines that I think will age — but the lion’s share of wines at Brumaire were young and imperfect, and exuberant in their imperfection. I doubt they’ll have Bordeaux-level shelf lives. But I wonder whether, in their fleeting, natty existences, they might shine a little more brightly.