THENEWYORKER,NOVEMBER25, 2019 37
at one point, Beinstock told me, their
bottles were on the wine lists of a quar-
ter of the San Francisco Chronicle’s top
hundred restaurants.
Beinstock had studied to be a painter,
but when, in his twenties, his paintings
started to sell, he hated how even that
small amount of success activated his
ego. He had a seeker’s temperament and
an appetite for discipline. Like many
New Age dabblers in the nineteen-
seventies, he was drawn to the Fourth
Way—a brand of mysticism established
by George Gurdjieff in the early twen-
tieth century. The Fourth Way drew from,
among other things, Zen Buddhism, Sufi
Islam, and the occult; followers strove
for unceasing self-awareness and self-
mastery. In 1978, Beinstock came across
a bookmark advertising a Fourth Way
study group called the Fellowship of
Friends, founded in the Bay Area a few
years earlier. (The Fellowship recruited
by strategically placing bookmarks in
New Age texts in bookstores.) Beinstock
attended a meeting and joined the group
later that year. “The Fellowship was burst-
ing with poets, writers, artists, musicians,
actors—it was vibrating with an amaz-
ing energy,” he told me. The group’s
founder, Robert Earl Burton, claimed to
be in communication with forty-four an-
gelic beings, including figures such as
Plato, Shakespeare, and Abraham Lin-
coln. The Fellowship believed that hu-
mans spend their lives as if hypnotized,
lulled into a trance by mental, physical,
and emotional habits; in contrast, mem-
bers of the Fellowship sought at all mo-
ments to awaken.
Beinstock began to spend time at the
group’s headquarters, known as Apollo,
in a rural community in the foothills of
the Sierras called Oregon House. It was
in one of California’s poorest counties,
but the Fellowship worked to create an
atmosphere of cultivation, planting rose
gardens and erecting a central building
in the style of a French château. The
group, which had nearly three thousand
members around the world, had its own
orchestra and opera company, which per-
formed in a classical amphitheatre called
the Theatron; the Fellowship amassed a
collection of Ming-dynasty furniture,
which was later sold at Christie’s for
more than eleven million dollars.
Wine fit in with the group’s commit-
ment to spiritual work and high culture.
Beinstock and other Fellowship mem-
bers planted row after row of Cabernet
Sauvignon, Riesling, Sauvignon Blanc,
and other Old World varietals, the so-
called noble grapes. The work was ardu-
ous—removing granite boulders, plant-
ing vines by hand—but the Fellowship
prized the clarity and camaraderie that
came from collective physical labor. Ul-
timately, the members planted three hun-
dred and sixty-five acres of vineyard.
“Then the spiritual leader said, ‘That’s a
beautiful number. We can stop at that,’”
Beinstock recalled. The Fellowship’s Re-
naissance Winery was soon producing
thirty-five thousand cases a year, he said.
“If there is a more remarkable vineyard
in California, I did not see it,” James Hal-
liday wrote, in the “Wine Atlas of Cali-
fornia.” “Renaissance Winery is open to
visits by appointment only. I can only
suggest you move heaven and earth to
make an appointment, for you will see
both when you arrive.” Beinstock moved
to England, where he studied for the
prestigious Master of Wine qualification.
In 1991, he returned to California and
later became the Fellowship’s winemaker.
At the time, Beinstock said, the Fel-
lowship made wine “with a lot of tech-
nology and quote-unquote scientific at-
tention to detail.” After the Second World
War, the wine world had been trans-
formed by the same forces of industrial-
ization that were changing all sorts of
farming. There were now technical solu-
tions for every enological issue. At Re-
naissance, the soil was sprayed with her-
bicides; after the harvest, the crushed
grapes were spun in a centrifuge, until a
precise percentage of solids was attained.
The liquid was fermented in tempera-
ture-controlled tanks, its sugar content
was measured and plotted on a graph
twice a day, and during bottling the wine
underwent sterile filtration. “It was the
age of science in winemaking,” Beinstock
said. “It gave people the illusion they were
in the driver’s seat, that they can control
everything and make perfect wines.”“
W
ine geeks”—men, mostly—
discussed wines in terms of
chemical compounds and quantifiable
metrics: pH, total acidity, months of
barrel aging. They celebrated the mod-
ernization of the notoriously finicky
winemaking process; the developments
allowed for greater consistency andprecision. A year of difficult weather
no longer had to mean a bad vintage.
Wines being shipped across oceans
could have longer shelf lives and more
predictable tastes. The consolidation
of the wine industry accelerated the
trend, since a mass-produced wine
couldn’t afford to have an off year.
Beinstock believed that these meth-
ods suffocated the terroir, the grapes’ nat-
ural expression of the land, and he dis-
approved of the hubris of those who
considered themselves vineyard manag-
ers. Beinstock saw himself as a midwife,
encouraging the birth of something beau-
tiful by staying out of the way as much
as possible. Once he took over at Renais-
sance, he stopped filtering and disman-
tled the centrifuges; he wanted the wine-
making to be less intense, less worried.
A critic for the Times called the 1995
Renaissance Chardonnay “excellent” and
its Sauvignon Blanc “even better.” Esther
Mobley, the San Francisco Chronicle’s
wine critic, declared the years between
1995 and 2001 the winery’s “golden age,”
when Beinstock produced “some of the
greatest wines ever made in California.”
Beinstock loved making wine, but he
was increasingly disillusioned with the
Fellowship. Burton, its leader, had begun
making doomsday predictions. In 1998,
Burton claimed that an earthquake would
destroy most of the West Coast but spare
Apollo. A group of Fellowship mem-
bers was charged with preparing for the
tremors. “As a winemaker, I couldn’t stand
it,” Beinstock said. “I made a lot of en-
emies back then, because I was kicking
them out of the winery, and they would
come back and strap the barrels to the
racks.” When the apocalypse didn’t come,
many members left the group. Burton
was also dogged by lawsuits from for-
mer members who claimed that he had
sexually exploited them. (The president
of the Fellowship said that no lawsuits
about sexual misdeeds have been adju-
dicated in court.)
In the mid-nineties, Beinstock and
Rice, his wife, began tending four hun-
dred vines in a thicket down the road
from Apollo, with the goal of making
wine outside of their work at Renais-
sance. Clos Saron used no pesticides or
herbicides and even less intervention in
the winery. They built a small house, a
pen for their sheep, and a winery sunk
into the ground, to keep the temperature