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Behind the phenomenon of natural wine

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Behind the phenomenon of natural wine

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Copyright 2022 Peter Njoroge

BEHIND THE PHENOMENON OF NATURAL WINE

by

Peter Njoroge

A Thesis Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE USC ANNENBERG SCHOOL OF COMMUNICATION &
JOURNALISM
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
MASTER OF ARTS
(SPECIALIZED JOURNALISM: THE ARTS)

August 2022

Copyright 2022 Peter Njoroge

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Table of Contents
Abstract .......................................................................................................................................... iii
Chapter 1: Introduction ................................................................................................................... 1
Chapter 2: Domaine LA .................................................................................................................. 6
Chapter 3: Selection Massale .......................................................................................................... 9
Chapter 4: Broc Cellars ................................................................................................................. 12
Chapter 5: Lo-Fi Wines: ................................................................................................................ 15
Bibliography .................................................................................................................................. 19

Copyright 2022 Peter Njoroge

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Abstract
Natural wine has definitively landed in the United States. New bars, retailers and devotees pop
up constantly, but the history behind its rise to popularity – partially due to the youth of the trend
– is relatively unexplored. This project looks to aggregate a few voices that have made an
imprint on the natural wine industry in America. Through my interviews with winemakers,
importers and retailers, supplemented with research pulled from books written by Kermit Lynch
and Alice Feiring, I attempt here to piece together why it feels like everyone is drinking natural
wine right now. Through determined efforts made by people like Kermit Lynch, Guilhaume
Gerard and Jill Bernheimer to recreate experiences that they had in France – coupled with
changes in generational drinking habits and social media – we live in the midst of a wine
revolution.

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Chapter 1: Introduction

In Adventures on the Wine Route, Kermit Lynch – a wine importer and retailer in Berkeley,
California – offers an anecdote from his first experience importing natural wine that helps
illustrate the nature of the products that we’ll be discussing: finicky, sensitive, unpredictable and,
at their best, a reason to reconsider the impact that an agricultural product can have on your life.
After an electric tasting in the early 1970s with deceased winemaker Hubert de Montille in
Volnay, a village and appellation in Burgundy known for making fragrant and elegant wines
from Pinot Noir, Lynch negotiated his first direct purchase.
I left France having made my first wine discovery, my first direct purchase from a French
wine domaine, and I became totally dissatisfied with the other wines I was selling. On the
plane, my thoughts were soaring, I wanted more de Montilles. I wanted a de Montille in
Vosne, Nuits, Aloxe, Savigny, in each village of the Cote d'Or. I wanted the 747 to turn
back so I could begin ferreting out growers. That one tasting was a revolution, and what
had been an interesting business became a passion. My enthusiasm must have been
contagious, because most of de Montille’s wines had been reserved by my clients by the
time the first shipment arrived. I poured his 1972 Volnay “Champans” into a glass and
raised it to my nose.

Where was the fabulous Pinot Noir quality? How had a wine so expressive turned dumb?
The wine was not bad, but it bore no resemblance to what I tasted in Volnay, so I
telephoned France and asked Monsieur de Montille why he had not sent me exactly what
I had sampled. He claimed that he had. He said that this was a natural wine, that perhaps
it was not happy after its month-long voyage from Volnay to Berkeley. Put the wines in a
cool cellar for six months to see if they recover (Lynch 1988,10-11).

For the next year’s shipment of the de Montille wines, Lynch opted for reefers, which are
temperature-controlled containers typically used for meats and cheeses. He noted serious ridicule
from the shipping company but when the wines arrived, Lynch was transported back to France.
I uncorked a bottle right out of the reefer and there in my glass was the true de Montille
in all its splendor. It tasted exactly how it did in his cellar. After that experience, I used
nothing but reefers for all my wine shipments, be they rare, expensive Burgundies or
cheap little country wines (11).

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Some 50 years later in between waves of the COVID-19 pandemic, I scheduled an outdoor
coffee date with one of my oldest friends from high school. During our routine exchanges, I
mentioned that I was working at a natural wine shop while finishing undergrad and tried to make
it clear that it was something that I was building some enthusiasm for. Not a ton of people our
age were drinking a lot of wine but I knew we both were, or that at least he had some meaningful
exposure to it. I try not to launch into niche conversations that are going to be irrelevant to the
person that I’m talking to (I personally hate the feeling) so I often leave the “natural” part out.
But this was someone I thought might be interested in what was really going on in my life, so I
was open to hashing out some nuances. “That’s the stuff that’s really cloudy, right?” he
responded. From there, I probably launched into some speech about rebellion, consumable art or
energy – I can’t exactly remember. My experiences working with the people that produce and
sell low-intervention wines have been the most interesting, complicated, peculiar and
nonsensical. The natural wine world shapes my worldview in a deep and complex way, but it
seems like cloudiness and colorful labels always peek through.

There are a variety of rituals that one is conscripted into as a wine professional. Blind tasting,
visual evaluations, spitting, sniffing, swirling and seemingly endless comparative tastings
experiments known as a side-by-side. A side-by-side tasting can involve anything, but the crux
of the exercise revolves around tasting at least two wines at the same time: perhaps different
vintages of the same wine, wines made by the same winemaker but from different vineyards or,
in this case, two wines made by two legendary estates working similarly in the same sub-region
of France. Both wines were from the 2019 vintage, both from the cru of Morgon in Beaujolais
and both from the Cote du Py – a legendary slope near the town of Villié-Morgon known for

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some of the finest wine in the region. Both wines are emblematic of what we might consider
natural wine: the top wines from Jean Foillard and Domaine Marcel Lapierre – two of the most
prominent names in the natural wine world. I flew back home from Los Angeles to Washington,
D.C. with the idea of having a pretty special side-by-side tasting with some of my friends.

Jean Foillard and Marcel Lapierre represent half of what became known as the Gang of Four, a
group of French winemakers in 1980s Beaujolais who were committed to the teachings of
scientist and winemaker Jules Chauvet. Lynch gave Lapierre and Foillard – along with Guy
Breton and Jean-Paul Thévenet – the name because of their serious commitment to making wines
with ancestral techniques and minimal manipulation. Located in Eastern France, the wine region
of Beaujolais exists as a bit of an appendage sitting directly below Burgundy – the region now
known for the world’s finest and most expensive wines made from Pinot Noir and Chardonnay.
While there are exceptions, wine from Beaujolais is made from Gamay, a fairly virile, ancient
grape varietal that produces vibrant, light-bodied red wines. They are generally affordable and
produced for immediate consumption – wines produced from harvest to bottle in three months
are not atypical.

With the availability of technological advancements, along with the emergence of an opinionated
wine media, winemaking changed dramatically over the course of the 20th century. In France
and across the globe, farmers shifted away from reliance on nature and started adopting
manipulative techniques to produce boisterous wines with higher alcohol – prized by writers like
The Wine Advocate’s Robert Parker – while also relying on herbicides and pesticides to ensure
consistent crop growth. In particular, Beaujolais quickly became a hub for commercialization

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and mass-produced wines that obscured Lynch’s ideas about the region. After reading the
autobiography of the Parisian wine merchant Jean-Baptiste Chaudet, whose writings on
Beaujolais just 30 years earlier conflicted greatly with Lynch’s contemporary notions (boozy,
heavy wines), he decided to track down one of the respected producers mentioned in the book.
In his autobiography, Chaudet dropped the name of a Beaujolais producer he respected
named Chauvet, so I looked him up hoping to understand what had happened to the old-
style Beaujolais and perhaps even to taste one. In Jules Chauvet I found a gracious,
guileless man with a poetic streak that he seemed to want to repress, an eighty-year-old
bachelor who is semi-retired and has no heirs to take over his small négociant farm
(Lynch 1988, 182).

At the bottom of many of the conversations surrounding the history of natural wine is the Gang
of Four and, as you continue to look further, ideas proliferated by Jules Chauvet. In Alice
Feiring’s book on natural wine named for one of Chauvet’s ideas, Naked Wine, her description of
the man is exacting.
A bachelor, a scientist, a winemaker, an obsessive and to some, a natural wine saint. In
the black and white photographs of his era, he looks so “of a time”: horn rimmed glasses,
buttoned-down sweater tucked into his high-waisted pants, and, always, a tie (Feiring
2011, 36).

What remains of Chauvet are brash philosophies about wine that live on through his writings and
stories passed down from those who knew him. Feiring writes, “But when I came upon one of
Chauvet’s statements – ‘Wine Must be Naked’ – I stopped; there is something exposed,
vulnerable yet true” (36). He was an outspoken critic of the manipulation and commercialization
of the winemaking in Beaujolais that developed over the course of his lifetime. Specifically, he
spoke out against the addition of sugar to boost alcohol levels in wine. This technique, known as
chaptalization, achieved great prominence amongst winemakers, particularly in Beaujolais. By
adding sugar to fermenting must, winemakers found that they could keep up with the ever-
increasing demand for robust, higher-alcohol wines that seemed to be scoring higher and higher

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in wine publications. Quoted in Naked Wine, Marcel Lapierre spoke about the dramatic changes
in winemaking that he experienced during his career.
“Out of fear,” Marcel said, “A recipe emerged: Pick unripe grapes at eight percent
potential alcohol, so you have high acid and low pH, more stability but not enough sugar
to ferment. So to get the right alcohol, you add as much sugar as you want, then you
heated up the juice to start it as quickly as possible. You heated it so hot, you killed
everything – all the life – so you had to add yeast” (92).

He decided to strike out on his own and began experimenting with low-intervention winemaking,
which eventually led him to Chauvet. The Gang of Four then materialized around Chauvet and
his philosophies.
“Chauvet hadn’t created anything new,” Marcel said. “He just returned to an anti-
technology way of making wine. Because if you don’t love wine, you don’t have any
motivation to work with nature. And Chauvet loved wine” (93).

The wines made by Lapierre, Foillard and the other members of the Gang of Four exist at the
other extreme of the trend towards commercialization in winemaking. Both estates farm certified
organic vineyards, both never adjust levels of sugar or acid, both work with old vines, hand-pick
and sort their grapes meticulously and use minimal additions of sulfur dioxide. The results were
revelatory for a generation of wine professionals in France and in the United States as well.
Today, the wines from Chauvet’s disciples are highly allocated and often sell for over $50 a
bottle, when in previous decades they sold for much less in the United States and less than €10 in
France. The wines are typically consumed by collectors and industry professionals and no longer
exist at the forefront of the conversation surrounding natural wine. But a wide variety of roads in
the natural wine world lead back to Marcel Lapierre and the Gang of Four.

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Chapter 2: Domaine LA

For Jill Bernheimer, owner and operator of Domaine LA, one of the premier destinations for
natural wine in Los Angeles, a bottle of Jean Foillard’s Cote du Py tasted in Paris initiated a
years-long transition out of the film industry and into wine. “I drank it and sort of had this
moment where I was like, ‘Oh, this is a special bottle, there's something different about this,’”
she said. “And over the course of the next year or two, [I] sort of explored what it was that was
special and different about that bottle, and of course, Foillard was one of the fathers of natural
wine.”

In 2009, Bernheimer opened her store on Melrose Avenue featuring an array of natural producers
in a U.S. market still trying to understand the merits of wines produced in this style. For
Bernheimer, there was a definitive educational gap that needed to be addressed.

“When the store opened, there was a high degree of market resistance to the concept of natural
wine, or even organic wine because there was a pretty strong memory of the older population of
pretty bad supermarket iterations of organic wine,” she said. “People were interested in boutique
wines or artisanal wines,” she continued. “Those were words that were thrown around 15 years
ago. And they were interested in farmer's market produce and organic produce. But translating
that from produce and how to shop for food and how to shop for wine just hadn't quite happened
yet.”

If you study the Domaine LA website, the word natural doesn’t appear anywhere. But consumers
can expect that wines stocked on the shelves will be made from organically farmed grapes,

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fermented with ambient yeasts and utilize minimal additions in terms of winemaking – often a
small dose of sulfur dioxide at bottling. When she started, Bernheimer said 85-to-90 percent of
the wines were made according to those specifications. Today it’s 99 percent. “I was a little bit, I
won't say hesitant, but I was calculating in the language I used because the conversation wasn't
as prominent, and the category just didn't exist in the same way,” she said. “It wasn't until maybe
three or four years ago that people started coming – a lot of people – coming in asking for natural
wine.”

Today’s natural wine world operates less like it did when Bernheimer was drinking Foillard
during the mid 2000s in France. In her mind, there’s a new generation of natural wine consumers
constantly being paired with new winemakers that take charge of the narrative surrounding the
category – often overshadowing legacy producers like Foillard and the Gang of Four, something
she dubs the “Instagramification” of natural wine. “There's a cycle where people are really
interested in a producer and they may know nothing about that producer or where they're from or
what their history is,” she said. But the force behind the interest is powerful and in order to
remain relevant, wine stores and restaurants need to respond to this powerful demand for a
product with, often, an incredibly limited supply.

One of the producers that pops into Bernheimer’s mind to describe the phenomenon is Frank
Cornelissen – a native Belgian who moved to Italy to make natural wine on Mount Etna, an
active volcano in Sicily. Cornelissen owes a chunk of his prominence to the advocacy of a rapper
who happened to stumble upon and fall in love with one of his wines. Today, the wines sell out
almost instantly all over the world and natural wine businesses wear their allocations to them like

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a badge of pride. She likens it to sneakers: “It's almost like a collectability, shoe-drop factor,” she
said. “And then they tire of that and move on to the next.” For someone with a tie to the Gang of
Four, balancing traditional and contemporary examples in the shop is a never-ending challenge.
“Context is really important to me,” she continued. “I don’t want to have a young, avant-garde
producer from the Beaujolais without having Jean Foillard on the shelf.”

“That’s a point of differentiation between me and some of the other shops in town where they
only have the trendy, hip labels. And I’ll have a little bit more classical, benchmark producers
from regions that I think are important.”

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Chapter 3: Selection Massale

Guilhaume Gerard’s wines from the import company Selection Massale can be found at
Domaine LA, along with several other venues selling natural wines across the country. He grew
up in France and his natural wine story bears some resemblance to Bernheimer’s. An evening
back in a Parisian wine bar, after living in the United States for a time, instantly altered the
direction of his life. Gerard wasn’t much of a drinker at the time and describes a dramatic
conversion while drinking with friends at La Muse Vin. “For the first time in my life, I was
drunk, not feeling bad and there was this whole radical thing about the people making the wines
that I was drinking,” he said.

In one evening, he tasted the wines from a shopping list of the great producers of natural wine in
France: Domaine Gramenon, Domaine de Peyra, and, of course, Jean Foillard and Marcel
Lapierre. “All of them were like zero-sulfur,” Gerard said. “And all of them were part of that
pretty radical – this was 2005 – fringe of the winemaking culture that was like we’re going to do
everything organic, we’re not going to use herbicides and pesticides and we’re not going to use
anything in our wines.”

A sense of radicalism has been a constant throughout Gerard’s life and prior to entering the wine
business, he was a graffiti artist who felt an instant connection to the winemakers working on the
fringe of their community. “Coming from the graffiti world, from a place where you steal your
tools to paint, you risk going to jail, you're really putting yourself out there to do what you think
is cool or right, or what makes you feel good,” he said. “I really related to these people that were
in the middle of Cheverny and everything around them was just an ocean of Sauvignon Blanc

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being sprayed with herbicides,” he continued. “These few rebels, few revolutionary people, were
just like, No, no, no, we're going to take it back to the roots of viticulture and we're going to
make this the right way.”

After six months of tasting everything he could get his hands on in France, he returned to San
Francisco to open Terroir, one of the first natural wine bars in the United States.

“I'm tasting these wines and I'm like, shit, this is what I want to do with my life, these are the
people I want to represent,” he said. “My idea of opening the place in San Francisco just
[became] obvious.”

With the help of his business partners Luc Ertoran and Dagan Ministero, Gerard’s vision for a
bar in the United States featuring the growers to whom he dedicated his life became a reality.
Terroir opened in November of 2007 in the SoMa district of San Francisco. Gerard and the group
set out to be militant about the kind of wines that would be sold at the bar: “We were fighting for
organic viticulture. We were fighting for no sulfur added and we were asking our reps these
questions and they had no idea what we were talking about,” he said.

He described a quiet start that turned into a spectacular bang over the course of a year, and how
one person helped to put Terroir on the map. “Some guy walked in – Wolfgang – that works for
us now,” he said. “And Wolfgang was an editor of Wine & Spirits and started drinking with us.”
While still working at the magazine, Wolfgang Weber, a wine writer turned salesperson for
Revel Wine and Selection Massale, began to bring his friends and contacts from around the city

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to Terroir. “Within six months or so, everybody that was more or less into wine seriously – And
I'm not talking about like Bordeaux and Burgundy, high priced, '' Gerard continued. “I'm not
talking about the social positioning of wine drinking, but the people truly interested in wine that
would seek a great $20 bottle would end up at Terroir.”

“It started becoming busier and busier and the critics would come. The San Francisco Chronicle
would come, The New York Times would come and, within a year, it was kind of like a done
deal,” he said. “Everybody was like, ‘Okay, this is kind of the most exciting place in the U.S. to
drink at right now.’”

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Chapter 4: Broc Cellars

One of the Bay Area residents that had their conception of wine dramatically altered by Terroir
was Chris Brockway. Brockway moved from Nebraska to the Central Coast of California to
study winemaking at Fresno State and eventually found himself making wine in the North Coast
of California. “You walk in the door [thinking] ‘I know wine,’” he said. When asked about his
journey into winemaking, Brockway gives a bit of a circuitous answer: “I studied philosophy as
an undergrad.” After completing his degree at the University of Nebraska, he found himself
without a clear idea of what he practically could do with his life. Then, a friend made a
suggestion. “They were like, ‘Well, you talk about wine all the time. Why don't you become a
winemaker?’” he said. Brockway, citing youth and isolation, decided he was going to make the
move from Nebraska to California to make wine. “I was always interested in California wine,”
he said. “This is before even thinking about – well before – thinking about low-intervention or
natural wine.”

Brockway jokingly says that he studied the wrong thing during undergrad. He had no science
background and felt unprepared to tackle the technical aspects of winemaking. So, he looked to a
different kind of education to remedy his concerns. At Fresno State University, in the midst of
what Brockway would consider a very conventional winemaking education, he stumbled upon a
book written by Patrick Matthews called Real Wine. The book exposed Brockway to low-
intervention winemaking techniques and producers that were working to make wines in a style
that was very different from what he was learning about in class.

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“I’m reading this book and it's like somebody does this and picks early and doesn't filter and
grows grapes in a certain way,” he said. Some of his friends in the program were interested but
also skeptical. “They're like, ‘Oh, that's cool, but you can't do that,’” he said. “Well, there's this
whole book about people who do that.” With some of the ideas from Real Wine brewing in the
back of his mind, Brockway eventually moved north to the Bay Area to cut his teeth and get
started making textbook wines in the North Coast of California.

After the initial excitement of taking the first step into his dream to make wine in California,
Brockway found himself with a huge problem: his enthusiasm for the wines he was making and
tasting waned dramatically. “And then, all of a sudden, you kind of have this crestfallen
sensation, where you're like, after a couple years, this isn't what I was reading about in the
history of California wine,” he said. “And you start doing all these tastings and you’re like ‘Man,
I just can’t drink this stuff,’” he said.

He offered an anecdote about the bottling of one of his first wines: “I remember I was making
some Grenache and Syrah from a vineyard and getting ready to bottle my own wine, and it
should be exciting,” he said. “And I just, I couldn't get it there. It just didn't taste good to me.”

He found himself stuck, unhappy and confused at work but, at the same time, felt like he had
planted roots and found a community in the Bay Area. “And then all of a sudden a place like
Terroir opens up,” he said. And as Brockway began to frequent the bar, he found that there were
worlds opening up inside the worlds he was discovering: new ideas about winemaking, new wine
regions, new indigenous varietals and, for Brockway, a new conception of what wine could taste

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like. “You walk in and it’s like Pineau d’Aunis Rosé, what are you kidding me?” he said. The
manifestation of the ideas that Brockway had read about had arrived in the Bay Area in the form
of Gerard’s bar. Eventually, Brockway managed to get hired and work a shift at Terroir on
Friday nights in addition to his jobs making wine. “All the while your palate is changing,” he
said. “And then your palate is ahead of what you're doing. You're like, ‘Well, I like drinking this,
why am I still making this?’” he continued.

The first vintage Brockway sold was made in 2004. But around the time when they were
released, his winemaking started to change. He mentions that things didn’t happen overnight. “It
was trying to get a comfort level and it took a little while to get comfortable picking early and
making everything with native yeast,” he said. And in 2008, he moved into his own winemaking
space in Berkeley with the intent to make wine with as little manipulation as possible. “If you're
not happy, then you feel like you're failing because you're not making something that you're
necessarily proud of anymore,” he said. “I might as well just go this route. And at least if I fail,
I'll enjoy drinking my wine.”

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Chapter 5: Lo-Fi Wines:

Five hours south of San Francisco, Mike Roth – one of the winemakers at Lo-Fi Wines in Santa
Barbara County – met Chris Brockway at Demetria Estate & Vineyards in Los Olivos and picked
up the bug for less-processed wines tasting obscure bottles that Chris knew from Gerard’s bar. In
2012, Roth and his partner Craig Winchester started Lo-Fi Wines with the intention of making
wines similar to what they were enjoying from the Loire Valley, a major hub for natural wines in
France. The two met in college at East Carolina University and reconnected in California when
Roth invited Winchester to come work a harvest with him. Winchester spoke about his lack of
enthusiasm for wine until encountering some of the unique wines Roth was drinking. “This is not
really exciting,” Winchester said. “I'll just have a beer please. And then somebody being like,
‘Oh, here's this Loire Cab Franc’ … And you're like, wow, I didn’t know wine could be like
that.”

“It started because it was wines that we liked to drink,” Winchester continued. “Let's just make
wines like that.”

Their first wine and flagship pays homage to the Cabernet Franc made in appellations in the
central part of the Loire Valley like Saumur, Chinon and Bourgueil – which are still mostly
unknown to an American audience of wine drinkers. Similar to Broc Cellars, Winchester and
Roth’s wines feature lesser-known varieties, unique winemaking techniques and are often much
lower in alcohol and higher in acid than most of what is coming out of California. The two
already had some distribution connections and a thumbs up from Jon Bonné in his influential
title The New California Wine and were able to get in on the ground floor in terms of producing

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natural wines in the United States. Their fresh, ready-to-drink style – harkening back to the Gang
of Four – has since become incredibly popular with a younger audience of drinkers that is less
interested in the status quo wine culture.

Roth and Winchester believe that younger wine drinkers are in the driver’s seat and their needs
and desires – which line up with the ethos of natural wine – are driving change in wine culture.
“Most of the demographic of people that come in [to the winery], they just drink it now,”
Winchester said. “They're like, ‘Yeah, I live in this small place … I’ve got this teeny closet that I
can keep a couple of cases of wine. And let’s all drink it now.’”

“I think that young people are idealistic, and they vote with their dollars,” Roth said. “It's the
same with food and everything else. They want organic … They just don't want to buy things
that have a bunch of shit in it.”

But as natural wine increases in popularity, Roth and Winchester say that some brands use
certain winemaking techniques and branding to capture the momentum – even if they’re working
at a scale that seems to be in conflict with the handmade, small-production model laid out by the
Gang of Four. They point out a nearby project skeptically delivering thousands of cases of wine
using techniques made popular by the natural wine movement. “It’s a gateway drug,” Roth said.
“They sell it in 50 states and make natural wine.”

“So you made 200 tons of carbonic Sangiovese?” Winchester said. “How? How do you fucking
do that?”

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On the whole, increased demand for natural wines has played out well for winemakers like
Brockway, Winchester and Roth – along with other wineries using the trend solely to sell bottles
as new markets continue to open up outside of big cities. At the same time, many of the wines
that started the movement and hooked the people that established the framework for the industry
have become collectibles that are no longer widely available. The industry landscape looks
dramatically different for importers like Gerard who built his career championing small growers
now dealing with incredible demand. “Scaling natural wine is an interesting question and it's
something that I think about a lot,” Gerard said. “There are not enough winemakers with five
hectares working alone with their horse and absolutely no sulfur to quench the thirst of the whole
world.”

He provides an anecdote from Pierre Overnoy – a winemaker from a region in France known as
the Jura – who’s bottles today are just about impossible to come by. “When you meet this guy,
he tells you I was capable of taking all my vineyards organic and making wines without sulfur
because I was a single man that owned all these vineyards,” he said.

“Meaning to achieve greatness the only thing that matters has to be greatness. As soon as you
start to bring an economical component and a livelihood and putting food on the table for your
kids and what not, you start thinking differently,” he continued.

“I think you can make natural wine on a large scale but it's probably a lot more difficult … It
might not give you the same emotions.”

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Gerard is an avid music lover and record collector and often draws parallels between the world
of wine and music. Gerard sees an overlap between Overnoy and the DJ’s producing disco in
1970s New York City at famous venues like the Paradise Garage. “These people were suffering
immensely and everything that mattered in their life was to make great music to showcase their
pains,” he said. “They didn't have a family to feed, they didn't think about anything else … They
only thought about doing something great.”

Back in Washington D.C., I arrived with my bottles at my friend’s apartment a few hours early to
help prepare dinner. On the menu is a Mediterranean riff on tacos featuring a roasted lamb
shoulder, sumac pickled onions, a cilantro salad and a spicy Lebanese Muhammara made with
walnuts, bell peppers, tahini and chili flakes. The wines looked remarkably similar in their
understated nature: dark green bottles with white labels containing minimal extraneous
information. Instead of cartoons or expletives on the labels, there was regional information listed
in black along with little else. Immediately upon opening, the wines were pure, weightless and
fragrant, an exercise in balance and gracefulness – almost to a point of polarization. If not paying
attention, you might miss the ways that they challenge your conception of what quality wine is.
The similarities far outweighed the differences, and while I usually have a definite opinion when
it comes to these things, I consciously decided not to make one.

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Bibliography

Feiring, Alice. Naked Wine. Massachusetts: Da Capo Press, 2011.

Interview with Bernheimer, Jill on September 1, 2021.

Interview with Brockway, Chris on February 9, 2022

Interview with Gerard, Guilhaume on January 7, 2022.

Interview with Roth, Mike and Winchester, Craig on November 23, 2021.

Lynch, Kermit. Adventures on the Wine Route: A wine buyer’s tour of France. New
York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux 1988.

Abstract (if available)

Abstract Natural wine has definitively landed in the United States. New bars, retailers and devotees pop up constantly, but the history behind its rise to popularity – partially due to the youth of the trend – is relatively unexplored. This project looks to aggregate a few voices that have made an imprint on the natural wine industry in America. Through my interviews with winemakers, importers and retailers, supplemented with research pulled from books written by Kermit Lynch and Alice Feiring, I attempt here to piece together why it feels like everyone is drinking natural wine right now. Through determined efforts made by people like Kermit Lynch, Guilhaume Gerard and Jill Bernheimer to recreate experiences that they had in France – coupled with changes in generational drinking habits and social media – we live in the midst of a wine revolution.

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University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses

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Asset Metadata

Creator Njoroge, Peter (author)

Core Title Behind the phenomenon of natural wine

School Annenberg School for Communication

Degree Master of Arts

Degree Program Specialized Journalism (The Arts)

Degree Conferral Date 2022-08

Publication Date 07/28/2022

Defense Date 07/28/2022

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag France,natural wine,OAI-PMH Harvest,San Francisco,Wine,winemaking

Format application/pdf (imt)

Language English

Contributor Electronically uploaded by the author (provenance)

Advisor Seidenberg, Willa (committee chair), Bustamante, Peggy (committee member), Nguyen, Tien (committee member)

Creator Email njoroge@usc.edu,peternjoroge123@gmail.com

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-oUC111375573

Unique identifier UC111375573

Legacy Identifier etd-NjorogePet-11032

Document Type Thesis

Format application/pdf (imt)

Rights Njoroge, Peter

Type texts

Source 20220729-usctheses-batch-963 (batch), University of Southern California (contributing entity), University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses (collection)

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Repository Name University of Southern California Digital Library

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Repository Email cisadmin@lib.usc.edu