lowed natural wine to become a cultural
phenomenon in a way that organic or
biodynamic wines never quite have. The
wines can be Creamsicle-colored, or
Greek, or mildly effervescent, or all of
those things at once. The wines can taste
loamy, or tongue-wateringly acidic. The
wines can be made by a twenty-five-year-
old farming two acres on her own. The
wines can be cider!
I
n August, I drove from Sacramento
to the Gadsden flags and back-yard
goats of Yuba County, an hour away. It
was the beginning of harvest season in
Oregon House, and Dani Rozman was
making his seventh California vintage.
During his apprenticeship with Bein-
stock, in 2013, he had made two barrels
on his own, as a learning exercise. Rozman
followed Beinstock’s practice: close at-
tention in the vineyard, a largely hands-off
approach in the winery. He, too, hoped
to make fine wines with enough struc-
ture—a balance of tannins and acidity—
that they could age for many years.
Rozman was living a largely itinerant life
at the time, and the resulting wine felt
almost like a liability. He let it age in
barrels as he returned to South Amer-
ica for the harvest, figuring that he’d
eventually give it away to friends and
family. When he came back to Califor-
nia several months later, the wine had
turned from what Beinstock called “cute”
into something much more interesting.
Beinstock urged him to bottle and sell
it. Rozman, calling his nascent winery
La Onda—Spanish for “the wave,” or
“the vibe”—hand-labelled and numbered
six hundred and forty-seven bottles, and
took samples to the Bay Area’s best-
known natural-wine shops: Ordinaire,
Terroir, Ruby. As the buyers sniffed and
sipped, Rozman watched their faces
closely for their reactions. In one after-
noon, he sold dozens of cases. Since then,
La Onda wines have appeared on the
wine lists of a number of highly regarded
restaurants: Ruffian, in Manhattan; Ro-
berta’s, in Brooklyn; Quince, in San Fran-
cisco; Bavel, in Los Angeles.
For most of the year, La Onda, whose
vines are grown on Apollo land, is a
one-man operation, but harvest season
requires help. During my visit, Rozman
was aided by two cheerful, teasing in-
terns, Francesca DeLuca and Carly
Cody; his partner, Manuela Delnevo,
came up from Berkeley for the week-
end. At dawn, we all piled into a white
Ford van and drove out to Apollo.
The Fellowship of Friends is much
diminished. Most of the grapevines
planted by Beinstock and others in the
seventies have been pulled up or aban-
doned; only about fifty acres remain. In
2015, Renaissance ceased production.
Later that year, two of Beinstock’s other
protégés—Aaron and Cara Mockrish,
the owners of Frenchtown Farms—
signed an agreement with Renaissance
that allowed them to take charge of much
of the remaining vineyard. Rozman, who
tries to avoid dealing directly with the
Fellowship, has an agreement with
Frenchtown that allows him seven acres.
“It’s really hard to find land you can farm
in California,” he told me. “The fact that
I’m willing to spend my time farming
land here—everything else is either not
interesting or bombed with chemicals
or owned by really rich people.”
We went through a security gate,
down a winding road lined with stumpy
palm trees—remnants of a bygone Fel-
lowship experiment—then past a field
of idle, sloe-eyed camels. There were
occasional bronze statues of Greek gods
and tall weeds dotted with yellow flow-
ers. Burton had preached that, after the
apocalypse, Apollo would be the cra-
dle of a new civilization, but now its
splendor was ragged and Ozymandian.
The plot was weedy and wild, the Sé-
millon grapes we’d be harvesting shar-
ing space with prickly blackberry bushes
and tarweed. Rozman’s style of farming
is hands-off compared even with that of
many of his peers. This year, he eschewed
not only chemicals and pesticides but
tilling and Weedwacking, too. Instead,
he used a scythe and a sickle to pare back
the weeds just enough to access the grape
clusters. This made for a slower and more
painstaking harvest, but Rozman believes
that a thriving ecosystem results in bet-
ter, more complex wines; he’s been told
that his Syrah has a subtle lemony note,
maybe from the tarweed.
Rozman gave us each a pair of clip-
pers and instructed us to sample the
grape clusters, trimming only those that
tasted “like sunshine, with acidity be-
hind it,” and leaving the rest to ripen
further. I plucked a grape off the vine
and popped it in my mouth; it tasted
grapy. I began to move down the row,
snipping off clusters that seemed right.
The tarweed clung to my socks, and a
happy little bee hovered by my elbow.
Midway down a row, a bird’s nest was
tucked in the crook of a vine, and, a lit-
tle beyond, there was a spider the size
of my palm, yellow-flecked and mo-
tionless on its web. After a couple of
hours of harvesting, and of spitting seeds
