40 THENEWYORKER,NOVEMBER25, 2019
into the bushes, I felt something begin-
ning to happen on my tongue. Maybe
the sun was getting to my head, but
it seemed that certain grapes tasted
flat or sharp, while others were more
rounded—soulful, even.
For a little while, I snipped next to
DeLuca, who told me about the harvests
she’d worked at conventional wineries.
At a winery in the Finger Lakes region
of New York, the vines were sprayed with
mildew-killing chemicals. In Oregon,
she had stood at a conveyor belt, trying
to pluck out bad grapes as they whizzed
by. After several hours, she felt sick from
the motion. She said, “People say it’s not
possible to do it like this”— she gestured
to the hillside—“and turn the kind of
profit they want.”
Rozman’s methods were appealing,
but the harvest had a desperate edge to
it. The growing season had been alarm-
ingly humid, and dozens of vines had
been lost to mildew. Some of the fences
had holes, and deer had snacked freely
on the grapes, further damaging the crop.
(Previously, an electric fence had failed,
and the Fellowship’s small herd of water
buffalo had gone on a rampage, tram-
pling eighty vines.) Now the crew some-
times had to salvage individual grapes
from damaged clusters. An average acre
of conventionally farmed Cabernet in
Napa yields four to six tons of grapes;
Rozman gets one to two tons—and that’s
before accounting for animal damage.
Rozman’s laborious approach to grape-
growing seemed sustainable for the crops
but less so for the farmer.
Later, Rozman drove to another plot
and asked the interns to walk the rows
of grapevines and assess the Cabernet.
“What did you guys see?” he asked when
they returned.
“Damage,” Cody and DeLuca said in
unison. “But the fruit that’s there is ripe,”
Cody added.
“If we don’t get enough fruit for the
big press, what do we do?” DeLuca asked.
“Cry?” Rozman said.I
n 2011, Marissa Ross was working as
Mindy Kaling’s personal assistant, in
Los Angeles, when she began making
videos about wine for the Web site Hel-
loGiggles. The videos were more come-
dic than beverage-focussed; Ross drank
and discussed cheap grocery-store stuff.
Beer and whiskey were young people’s
beverages of choice; wine was for lawyer
dads who bragged about their supple Cal-
ifornia Cabernets, or tipsy moms with
enormous afternoon glasses of Chardon-
nay. But Ross found that when she drank
better wines—particularly low-interven-
tion, additive-free ones—she felt better.
She started her own blog, which was
more informative, though she still often
chugged straight from the bottle.
There was a youthful enthusiasm and
closeness among the young sommeliers
and bartenders of L.A. that reminded
Ross of her years in the indie-rock scene.
People were making natural-wine zines,hosting festivals and fairs, selling in-joke
wine T-shirts, and tagging their Insta-
gram posts #nattywine. Natural wine
suited the anxious conspicuous consump-
tion of our times; it was both virtuous
and indulgent. An alt weekly in North
Carolina advised downing a glass as a
way to fight back against “the Wine In-
dustrial Complex”; “Natural Wine Is My
Self-Care,” a headline in the Times read.
In 2015, Ross was hired as the wine
editor of Bon Appétit and declared that
she would review only natural wine. She
did so in a slangy, profane way that en-
deared her to her peers, if not always to
her elders. On her podcast, “Natural Di-
sasters,” Ross and her co-host described
wines as “varietally incorrect” and “heav-
ily acidic on the front palate,” but they
also made jokes about cocaine, and dis-
cussed pairing bottles with Lay’s bar-
becue chips. When Ross posted about
a particular vintage on Instagram, it
quickly sold out.
In place of Parker’s muscular Bor-
deaux, the wines of the moment were
often described as glou glou, French for
“chuggable”: light reds frequently made
via carbonic maceration, a fermentation
technique that results in fresh, fruity
wines. (It’s also quick; the wines are often
ready to sell a few months after the grapes
are harvested.) They sometimes tasted
self-consciously unconventional. Millen-
nials with appetites for difficult bever-
ages—sour beers, bitter spirits, kombu-
cha, apple-cider vinegar—appreciated
wines that were cloudy and effervescent,
with a noticeably fermented funk. Wine
bars celebrated previously obscure styles
and regions: pét-nat, skin-contact, Geor-
gian, Slovenian.
As natural wine became conflated
with a rustic, yeasty taste profile, it faced
plenty of pushback. One wine importer
showed up at industry events wearing
an “I Love Sulfur” T-shirt. Robert Parker
called the trend an “undefined scam” and
its advocates “terroir jihadists.”
“It’s become a style, which I thor-
oughly resent,” Alice Feiring said. “You
don’t have to do carbonic to do natural.
A natural wine doesn’t have to be a cloudy
wine. It’s not all about glou glou. ”
The increasing popularity of natural
wine has also been driven by people who
are convinced that it’s a healthier way
to drink. Dry Farm Wines, the biggest
distributor of natural wine in the U.S.,