36 THENEWYORKER,NOVEMBER25, 2019
Winemaking methods that once seemed suspect now look like authenticity.
AMERICAN CHRONICLES
On the Nose
How natural wine became a symbol of virtuous consumption.
BY RACHEL MONROE
ILLUSTRATION BY GREG CLARKE
I
n 2010, Dani Rozman had just grad-
uated from the University of Wiscon-
sin. He was so deliberate and thought-
ful that his friends claimed it was
inevitable that he’d end up a history pro-
fessor with a closet full of cardigans. But
Rozman went to Argentina instead, and
wound up in Mendoza, the hub of the
country’s wine scene, working at a startup
that helped wealthy people realize their
wine dreams—you could buy a vineyard
from afar, have someone else farm it, de-
sign the labels, and receive cases of “your”
wine to show off at dinner parties.
One summer, Rozman went to Itata,
at the southern tip of Chile’s wine-pro-
ducing region, to work the grape harvest
at a local winery. He had the impression
that winemakers were like the clean-cut
guys in Napa with family money and
fleece vests. Itata was different. The win-
ery was just a shipping container and a
mesh tent, and the work was non-stop.
Rozman had grown up in a health-con-
scious family that nonetheless “had to be
reminded that food was farmed,” he said;
being in daily contact with plants felt re-
velatory. Some of the vines had been
planted centuries earlier, by conquista-
dores and missionaries. The grapes were
País, a varietal that had fallen out of favor
as winemakers turned to popular ones
like Cabernet Sauvignon. The methods
were traditional, too—the fruit was picked
by hand, destemmed with a bamboo im-
plement called a zaranda, then fermented
in clay pots. The finished product was
startling, in a good way. “At that time in
Argentina, Malbec was king,” Rozman
told me. The country made lots of ho-
mogeneous, high-alcohol wines aged in
oak barrels, catering to international ap-
petites—“the French-consultant thing,”
as Rozman put it. To him, they tasted
heavy and expressionless, while the Itata
wines were stripped down and elemen-
tal. “It was like night and day,” he said.
Artisanal wines had already found a
following in European and Japanese cit-
ies, and were beginning to win converts
in the United States, too. Their novelty
lay precisely in the makers’ veneration
of tradition, their rejection of the high-
tech methods that many conventional
vintners relied on. The wines were typ-
ically made with organic grapes, using
no added yeast, no filtration, no chem-
ical additives, no new oak barrels, no
mechanical manipulations. The wines
were variously described as low-inter-
vention, naked, or raw; the term that
eventually stuck was “natural.”
In the past few years, natural wines
have acquired a hipster cachet, with nat-
ural-wine bars popping up in cities from
Seattle to Kansas City and Helena, Mon-
tana. Kasimir Bujak, a buyer for the Wine
Source, a store in Baltimore, told me,
“It’s a trickle-down effect from Brook-
lyn—and that means people in Colum-
bus are going to be drinking it next.”
Rozman said, “Ten years ago, people
in their twenties weren’t hanging out at
wine bars. Now they’re packed.” In the
Napa boom of the nineteen-nineties,
consumers prized wines that were rich
and flawless. Now they’re seeking out
wines that are more expressive than cor-
rect; wines that are earthy, with visible
sediment; wines that taste alive.
R
ozman arranged to apprentice with
one of the early natural-wine-mak-
ers in the U.S., a wiry, philosophical sixty-
four-year-old French-Israeli man named
Gideon Beinstock. Beinstock and his
wife, Saron Rice, farmed eight acres of
grapes in the western foothills of Cali-
fornia’s Sierra Nevada. Clos Saron, their
two-person operation, had proved that
natural wines could please élite palates;
