THENEWYORKER,NOVEMBER25, 2019 41
markets the bottles it sells through
mail-order subscriptions as sugar-free,
mycotoxin-free, lab-tested, and paleo-,
keto-, and low-carb-friendly. Since the
company was founded, in 2015, it has
amassed more than a hundred thousand
customers through appearances at health
fairs and partnerships with health-in-
dustry figures such as the blogger Well-
ness Mama and the celebrity fitness
trainer J. J. Virgin. “I had five glasses last
night and I woke up this morning, went
to the gym at 5 A.M., and felt amazing,”
Ben Greenfield, a triathlete and fitness
influencer, enthused on his podcast. “Just
like I can’t go to a steak house and order
a filet mignon unless I know it’s grass-
fed and grass-finished, I can’t order a
Cab without thinking about seventy-two
different toxins.”
Dry Farm Wines, which is based in
Napa Valley, now has thirty-five employ-
ees. They begin every workday with a
group meditation in a room that has
nubby carpeting, cushions on the floor,
and a couple of salt lamps. Fifteen min-
utes of quiet sitting is followed by a group
visualization and a collective gratitude
practice. When I visited, employees were
grateful for YouTube and Netflix, for a
new kitten, for a great workout, and for
the practice of gratitude. Then everyone
stood and hugged.
Todd White, the company’s founder,
apologized for his rasp; he was getting
over a case of bronchitis. “I’m usually a
raging horse of health,” he told me.
White follows a ketogenic diet—a lot
of fat, drastically reduced carbs, regular
fasting—and describes himself as a
biohacker. He told me that Dry Farm
Wines’ success was largely driven by
meditation and the keto movement, and
then corrected himself: “the keto revo-
lution.” The company’s customers are
health-conscious people who “are try-
ing to optimize life, trying to optimize
health, trying to optimize their aging
experience.” Dry Farm advertises its
wines as producing “no hangovers.”
White concedes that alcohol is “a
dangerous neurotoxin” but has argued
that “microdosing” wine has benefits:
“When the dose remains low enough,
you have an increase of creative expres-
sion, you have an opening of that win-
dow of vulnerability—we all just want
to love, and love more. Wine helps that.”
Natural wine’s move into the main-
stream posed problems, too. Marissa
Ross told me, “The spotlight is really
wonderful but also detrimental.” The
community had positioned itself against
the behemoth of conventional wine;
now that it was accruing more capital,
celebrity, and attention, it was increas-
ingly prone to lengthy dissections of
who was legit and who was just cash-
ing in on a trend, and which makers
were claiming to be more organic than
they really were. New guys kept show-
ing up on the scene, and so many of
them were extremely dogmatic about
sulfur. Part of Ross couldn’t wait for the
trend-hungry hordes to move on. “Sake
is going to be the new thing in a year,”
she predicted, sounding hopeful.
This wasn’t the only thing troubling
her. In the weeks after our conversation,
Ross began collecting stories of women
who claimed to have been sexually as-
saulted or harassed by the rising som-
melier Anthony Cailan and others in the
industry. After several of the accounts
were reported in the Times, Cailan re-
signed from his job at a restaurant, al-
though he denies the allegations. “Nat-
ural wine is all about celebrating pleasure
and freedom and experimentation, which
is great, until those things are used to
excuse bad behavior,” Ross told me.
Bigger commercial interests were try-
ing to capture a piece of the market.
Aldi, the German grocery chain, com-
missioned an orange wine from Roma-
nia that sells for less than ten dollars.“It’s so polished, visually, but it’s very
dead-tasting,” Feiring told me. “It wasn’t
as disgusting as conventional wine, but
it doesn’t go anywhere.” (The wine had
been put through a centrifuge, a no-no
according to Feiring’s principles.) A bio-
science manufacturer now sells a yeast
that promises to give conventionally
made products the complex flavors of
wines made with natural yeast. “I think
it is going to go away,” Feiring said of
the descriptor “natural.” “As conven-tional people start marketing their wines
as natural, the people really making
natural wines will stop using the word.
It’ll be just wine. Like going back to
pre-nineteen-eighties, when you’d just
expect a wine to be natural.”I
felt unexpectedly low after I left Or-
egon House, dogged by the memory
of how happy I had been during my
time in the vineyard, waking up at dawn,
communing with the earwigs that lived
among the grapes. I went to a natu-
ral-wine bar on the Lower East Side of
Manhattan and sat between two couples
on what looked to be successful dates. I
knew that farming was exhausting work
and that I’d be terrible at it. Still, I liked
imagining myself inhabiting a different
kind of life, one that was more vital, less
confined within various screens. I asked
the server for the bar’s liveliest wine. “It’s
going to have a farty smell at first, but
pretty soon it should be jangling,” he told
me when he brought me a glass. It cost
sixteen dollars and tasted fizzy and dirty.
If I was honest with myself, I didn’t much
enjoy it, and that made me feel left out.
I thought about a conversation I’d
had with Beinstock. We had been sit-
ting under a large oak tree in a clearing
near Clos Saron’s first plot of grapevines,
and he was talking about how natural
wine was a cult—but so was football, so
was science. “Most people are cult mem-
bers in some way,” he said. Midsentence,
he cocked his head and looked up. “I
wonder,” he mused. I became aware of a
muted hum coming from the tree. “There
must be a hive inside there,” he said. “It’s
always full of bees.” The sun was setting,
and he was growing more philosophical.
“In the terminology of the Fellowship,
you can lose your identity into anything.
In Zen, they say that the last and the
hardest step is to give up the struggle to
awaken. Only when you let go of it can
you make it—although you don’t want
to anymore. It’s a paradox. That’s the
way I feel—that by now wine is me in a
deep way. And at the same time I’ve pretty
much let it go.”
Yes, the natural-wine world could be
both silly and dogmatic. And yet Bein-
stock still believed that there was some-
thing special happening, something worth
paying attention to. “It’s a beautiful flower
still opening,” he said. “Will it turn into
a fruit? Will it reseed? Will it fade?”