Film looks into what is in your wineglass
DocLands selection spotlights natural winemakers trying to build movement
Wine was one of the building blocks of civilization, and winemaking is a tradition so rich and enduring that it’s startling to realize that most wine sold today is full of unnatural additives designed to manipulate flavor and as processing aids in manufacturing — and of course, the grapes are often not organic.
So where’s the natural wine movement? In most grocery stores, there is a clearly marked section for organic foods, but rarely is there a clearly marked section for organic wines.
Darek Trowbridge and other Northern California winemakers are hoping to change that. The owner of Old World Winery in Fulton is one of the region’s leading natural wine producers and one of the winemakers featured in Lori Miller’s “Living Wine,” which makes its world premiere 3 p.m. Sunday, May 8, at DocLands, the documentary festival by the California Film Institute, which also produces the Mill Valley Film Festival.
“The natural wine movement is very similar to the organic food movement, but we’re 25 years at least behind organic food because of the perception of the public that it’s liquid,” Trowbridge said in a video conversation with The Chronicle. “It started with grapes. So it’s just natural, you know? But they don’t realize that everything that you ingest in a wine that was added, your liver has to detoxify.”
DocLands runs Thursday, May 5, through Sunday, May 8, at the Christopher B. Smith Rafael Film Center in San Rafael and online through Wednesday, May 11, on the California Film Institute’s streaming platform. Other highlights include the world premiere of the surfing documentary “Savage Waters,” the opening night selection; the North American premiere of “Everything Will Change,” a German/ Dutch environmental film that is an intriguing mix of science fiction and science fact; and the U.S. premiere of “Scrap,” about the people who collect, restore and recycle the world’s scrap metal.
There are also several films set in the Bay Area or made by Bay Area filmmakers, including Oakland director Marc Shaffer’s “Exposing Muybridge,” about pioneering Bay Area photographer Eadweard Muybridge and featuring noted Muybridge fan Gary Oldman; and “Fire of Love,” Berkeley director Sara Dosa’s portrait of French volcanologists Katia and Maurice Krafft, which premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in January and played at the recent San Francisco International Film Festival.
Miller, who lives in the Los Angeles area, became inspired to make “Living Wine” when she met Trowbridge through her brother, Ben, who lives in Santa Rosa and had lost his home in the 2017 Tubbs Fire. He found a property that had a small home vineyard on it, but the company that had helped the previous owner farm the land was spraying the herbicide Roundup on his vines every few weeks, and it was getting into his drinking water.
He reached out to Trowbridge through a mutual friend for advice.
“At the beginning of COVID, he actually sent me a case of Darek’s wine and I was like, ‘What is this?’ It tasted very different and unusual to me, and I started asking a lot of questions,” said Miller, who joined Trowbridge on the video chat. “I didn’t realize wine had become so corporatized and genericized. I thought wine was a natural beverage, and I didn’t realize that most of the wine I was drinking was conventional wine where the flavors had been created for me, rather than an expression of the place where they were produced.”
Miller followed several natural winemakers for the film, including Trowbridge. Others include Gideon Beinstock and Saron Rice of Clos Saron in Yuba County and Megan Bell of Margins Wine in Watsonville.
The winemakers focus on sustainable and regenerative farming techniques, but they are, of course, impacted by larger issues affecting all Northern California winemakers because of climate change: drought conditions, shorter growing seasons and the increasing danger of wildfires.
“It is dispiriting,” Trowbridge said. “We’re at 420 parts per million of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, when it was stable for 10,000 years at 280 . ... Life is way more fragile than any of us really understand. Farmers are intimate with this fact because it’s so easy to lose a shoot on a vine, which is the beginning of the whole winemaking process. We could lose the vineyard through fire in two ways. One is fire burns vines and that kills the whole thing. Or we get smoke taint on the crop, and that became a real issue in 2019.”
Trowbridge estimates that natural wine makes up about 1% of wine sales in California; he believes its profile is much higher in the Los Angeles area because the Bay Area’s proximity to the corporate wine industry makes the region resistant to natural wines, a movement that is quite popular in Europe. He noted that the traveling international wine-tasting festival Raw Wine stops in Los Angeles, not San Francisco.
“It’s ridiculous how you can’t open a hot new restaurant in L.A. without a completely natural wine list,” Trowbridge said. “There’s quite a number of natural-wine-only shops and then other shops that all have natural wine sections. So L.A., New York and Chi
cago as well have an extensive amount of this. But San Francisco, not so much.”
He recommended San Francisco’s Gemini Bottle Co. and Ruby Wine in the Mission District as places to get quality natural wine. There is also Bottle Bacchanal in the Castro District. There are several restaurants and wine bars in the Bay Area as well.
Miller said she hopes her film can help spur Northern California further along; she loves Northern California wines and is thrilled to premiere “Living Wine” near the heart of Wine Country.
“I’m hoping that people will see the film and start to see that there’s this other choice in terms of their wine purchases,” Miller said. “I think that if as a filmmaker you can influence consumer demand, it’s the best contribution that I could make toward fighting climate change. I consider the winemakers I filmed to be visionaries in their field and in their philosophy and spirituality in general.”