Unauthorized

Wandering through most grocery stores, it‘s easy to find organic products. As science revealed the negative consequences that harsh chemicals used in agriculture can have on the body and environment, consumer demand shifted toward organic, sustainably farmed products, including wine. Though still relatively niche, natural wine is steadily gaining popularity. In Sacramento, where I live, several wine bars and urban wineries that sell and produce natural wine have opened. Personally, I have had a difficult time fully embracing natural wine. We are taught that a varietal wine should have clear, defining characteristics, but inherent to natural wine is an unpredictable variance in flavor and quality from one producer to the next. As Darek Trowbridge of Old World Winery in Sonoma says in Lori Miller’s new film, Living Wine, this is what natural winemakers are aiming for: what one sees as consistency, he considers “homogenization”—desirable in your milk … but not your wine.

Living Wine highlights the challenges and victories of four winemakers and farmers in California who are eschewing conventional farming and winemaking techniques in favor of something more natural. Along with Trowbridge, an innovator in restorative farming, there is Gideon Beinstock, owner of Clos Saron and a pioneer of natural wine in California. Beinstock mentors up-and-coming winemakers like Dani Rozman of La Onda, who splits his time between Chile and the Sierra Foothills, where he grows the Mission (a.k.a. País) grape. Margins Wine owner Megan Bell works several part-time jobs to keep her in the vineyard, while creating her own winery at the same time.

Though natural wine may seem like a new fad, it’s been around for centuries—that’s how wine was made. Afterall, it’s not like the Romans were selecting cultured yeast from a catalog. But it wasn’t until the end of WWII, the film explains, when munitions factories switched to manufacturing fertilizer, pesticides and herbicides, that using these products became a widespread practice in agriculture. Turned off from this, a small number of producers in Europe started making wine the way their ancestors did. However, only in relatively recent years has it gained traction in other parts of the world. Home to UC Davis and nearly 150 AVAs, California is arguably the hub of American winemaking and viticulture, yet less than 1% of wine made in California is natural, the film asserts.