Are you familiar with the phenomenon of déjà vin? It is the profound and inexplicable certainty that you keep seeing the same bottles of wine everywhere you go, in every little Instagrammy bar and bistro in America.
Didn’t we drink this bottle at The Glou Factory, no wait, was it Glou Glou, or Glou Bar, or Natural Inclinations, or I think with your friends at Stuck Like Glou (from the people behind Huffing Glou), which is next to Maisøn de Tinned Fish—I get them all confused. Was it the sparkling piquette or the sparkling pét-nat or the one with the cartoon animal on the label—a bear, I think, or some other large hulking beast, no doubt? It featured pastel pinks and smokey oranges, to match the utterly natural wine within, made from a grape you’ve never heard of, in a bar with throbbing music on vintage speakers and a lot of Throwing Fits–looking dudes standing around, holding their stemware from the base and checking their phones.
Is it starting to feel like the same conversation is being had about wine right now, over and over again? Natural wine culture in America is ascendent, remaking the way a generation drinks and sells wine in a meaningful way. But…haven’t I scrolled past this meme before? One cannot duck into an old favorite bar in Los Angeles these days, the sort of pubby-clubby place where one might order a beer and a shot, without being confronted by a new menu subsection designated in bold font, with extra exclamation points: NATURAL WINE!!! You might ask the bartender to tell you more, as I did—when did these wines join the menu? Was there one to recommend?
“Natural wines are, like, better for the environment,” they say, glancing up from their iPhone, beneath the clanging din of the Bluetooth stereo. “It means the wine is good for you,” they add, before recommending an orange wine from Meinklang.
Is that really why these wines are on the menu? For my health?
“Well—natural wine is really popular right now, you know. I guess we felt like we had to.”
It’s déjà vin all over again. Welcome to the meme-ification of natural wine.
Wine is an industry in flux. The statistics tell a conflicting story: Millennials are spending less on wine, and if the industry fails to attract younger drinkers, sales could plummet by 20% in the next decade. And yet market sales are up by nearly 17% in the last year, and revenue from “fine wine” sales have grown by as much as 40%. This whiplash speaks volumes about the inefficiency of reporting on the wine business as a monolith: Sales of Two Buck Chuck mean nothing to the roaring vintage wine auction industry, which is presently setting all-time highs.
These sales trends mean less than zero to the realm of natural wine—an amorphous, rather intentionally undefinable category that has been woefully underserved by business reporting and sales trends, despite its growing cultural primacy. Natural wine’s roots are in the work of doggedly independent, small production winemakers working largely without the inclusion of additives; commercialization and financial dividend have traditionally barely entered the picture. Even a few short years ago, natural wine was something like a niche beverage subculture, and a signifier of quirk and idiosyncrasy for the establishments that catered to it.
But today it looks more and more like an aesthetic drinking trend driven by the pictures on the labels, with Instagram likes in place of traditional point scores. There’s an increasingly ubiquitous representation of the same 20 or so bottles from a handful of producers on every wine list and bottle shop shelf. You’re likely to find an Austrian producer called Meinklang, whose labels feature a cartoon cow, or perhaps Field Recordings, a California producer whose labels resemble a subway advertising poster. It’s understood as something like a cultural drinking “movement.” I poked fun at the monikers of that “movement” above, but I’m certainly not the only one. There are meme accounts galore, which speaks to the moment we’re presently in for natural wine: It feels like this stuff is everywhere right now, in Los Angeles and New York City, sure, but also Kansas City, Tacoma, Milwaukee, Waco, small-town Vermont, and small-town Hudson Valley.
There is no International Natural Wine Council, or global quorum of agreed-upon norms that a winemaker must follow to be considered “natural.” The movement’s growth is challenging to track precisely because its definition is unclear. But in conversations with some of the industry’s leading importers, it’s clear that the growing cultural cachet of natural wine is more than just Instagram posts and magazine mentions. Sales at influential natural wine importer Jenny & François Selections have tripled since 2017, according to cofounder Jenny Lefcourt. Zev Rovine, founder of the influential and eponymous natural wine importer Zev Rovine Selections, says the company boasts sales figures of $10 million annually—roughly 60 times what the company sold when he launched it in 2008.
John McCarroll, the London School of Economics and Political Science–educated wine seller, podcaster, and journalist, argues that the natural wine industry’s influence is even bigger if including “spoofs,” lingo for wines that have been made using less-than-natural means yet are packaged to appear as part of the natural wine trend. Natural wine, with its unregulated ethos, is particularly vulnerable to such malarkey—see, for example, the pastel floral art motifs of the Gia Coppola line of wines from The Family Coppola, whose bottles very much look like something you’d find in a natural wine shop. Counting these spoof wines as part of the grand sales total, “I could see the total industry amount being more like $500 million annually,” McCarroll says.
A half billion dollars both is and is not a lot of money. The soda pop industry in America is worth $318.5 billion annually. In that context, natural wine’s figures are a rounding error. But still, the growth exhibited by importers like Zev Rovine Selections and Jenny & François speaks to the wider scaling of a trend. Natural wine is approaching a sort of mass adoption tipping point that reminds me of grunge rock in the 1990s. And with it, there is a growing sense of sameness, a creeping sense that we’ve left the fringe and entered into something quickly approaching the mainstream. As a certain sort of totem of conspicuous millennial-and-under consumption, natural wine is getting up there with the outdoor shopping mall, the bright white Tesla dealership ball cap, and the frozen Roberta’s wood-fired pizza.
“If you’re opening a restaurant in New York City without a natural wine list right now,” wonders Rovine, the importer, “It’s like, what are we even talking about?”
I am keenly aware that there’s something cruel in thinking about wine like this, as though if one weren’t working part time at Uva in Brooklyn in 2008—or rolling thin little French cigarettes with a glass of Grolleau in the 11th arrondissement in 2005, or being handed a bottle of Serragghia with a cheeky wink from the secret fridge at London’s P. Franco in 2012 (this actually happened to me)—you couldn’t possibly truly grok what natural wine is all about. Gatekeepers keep gates.
But at the same time, there’s a reason why this stuff is now being mocked by the likes of the meme account Nolita Dirtbag, to say nothing of the dedicated dozens of natural wine meme accounts. There’s Shitty Wine Memes, Wine Memes 4 Teenz, and AndersFrederikSmeem, whose name is a parody of influential natural winemaker and former Noma sommelier Anders Frederik Steen. All poke fun at the generational mores of natural wine culture, which is a broad way of saying they are medium-upwardly mobile millennial memes first and foremost, with natural wine as a sort of shibboleth for Stuff Middle Class Millennials Love. (“Hey, hey grape heads! Your friends Brady and Becca here! You’re invited to our old-school hip-hop, yoga, and wine night, yo!”)
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I’m not sure there’s a patient zero for how natural wine came to be performed on social media—and we’ve not yet reached the true cheugy tipping point of paid influencer marketing—but there’s little doubt that Instagram has accelerated the growth of natural wine culture. Social media has infused natural wine with a gleam of marketability as a lifestyle totem. When you’re pouring a bottle of Meinklang atop a surf board while being towed behind a power boat, something has changed. The pandemic only served to supercharge this ongoing narrative, as photographs of what we drank became arguably more important than the drink itself. These trends have IRL consequences, and it’s something wine professionals are watching play out day over day from across bars and bottle shop counters.
“Wine that comes from The Hot Place in a Big City gets pushed on the narrative of what should be considered natural wine…which is its own version of gate-kept shenanigans,” says Miguel de Leon, a James Beard Award–winning wine journalist and wine director at Pinch Chinese, a lower Manhattan Chinese restaurant with a decorated wine list. De Leon terms this phenomenon as “‘natty fratty,” which he defines as “basically a watered-down finance-bro version of what’s cool in wine.” This approach leads to “sanitation and censorship,” per de Leon, “which then minimizes the very thing we were looking for in the first place, which is the individuality of these wines.”
Jenny Eagleton, a journalist and sommelier based in Oakland, has her own term for the same phenomenon: Meinklang-ification. Wines from the Austrian producer are lovely, she says; they’re also on nearly every restaurant or bar wine list that feels the need to have a natural option, priced to sell and increasingly omnipresent. As natural wine consumption and accessibility become commonplace, more people are getting in on the selling aspect “without having developed their own tastes and perspectives,” Eagleton says. The result: Businesses jumping on the trend feature the same seven bottles, many with a Meinklang orange.
“It almost feels like a little wink, at this point, that every new natural wine business has Meinklang on their menu,” she says.
Meinklang’s everywhere for good reason: It’s one of the largest biodynamic farms in Austria. With some 2000 hectares in total, of which around 70 hectares are planted to vines, it is perhaps the largest “natural” wine vineyard in the world. “It’s an incredible winery in my opinion,” says Rovine, whose company imports the wine, “and it’s the price that makes it ubiquitous.” The bottles wholesale starting at around $11, per Rovine, which makes them an easy sell for businesses interested in offering natural wine for the first time. “I love it; a lot of people have never had a natural wine before, and this wine is great and wonderful,” Rovine says. “Meinklang gets flack for being everywhere, but you know what I say to that? Go fuck yourself.”
Fair enough. And it’s not just Meinklang whose labels have become popular and prevalent in the natural wine world. Gut Oggau, an Austrian winemaker whose wines are imported by Jenny & François, has enjoyed an ongoing vogue driven in no small part by its eye-catching labels that features sketches of hauntingly gaunt Austrian people with names like “Theodora” and “Timotheus” set alongside dramatic typographic font. (They’re designed by Jung von Matt, one of the largest advertising firms in Europe.) Las Jaras Wines, a collaboration between winemaker Joel Burt and comedian and author Eric Wareheim, features psychedelically evocative labels illustrated by prominent artists like Jen Stark, Chloe Wise, and John Zabawa. These wines can be found on natural wine shop shelves and #natty tinned fish restaurant lists across the country—despite controversy around just how “natural” the wines really are. (For what it’s worth, Wareheim himself is skeptical of “the natty scene.”)
“There is a tremendous flattening happening right now in natural wine,” says the podcaster McCarroll. He sees this moment of same-ification as driven by economic forces and an increasingly cynical approach to how wine is bought, sold, and consumed in the United States. “We have largely trusted natural wine discourse around what looks good, and so if you cynically want to offer a very basic natural wine program, you simply have to look at bottles with pink stuff inside of frosted glasses and trendy labels you recognize from social media,” he says.
Natural wine now involves a lot of performance and lack of knowledge—some say not just from drinkers but from people who should be experts. “There is an underlying lack of depth of knowledge and understanding at many wine bars and restaurants,” says Alex Bernardo, owner of Vineyard Gate, which opened in 1998 in a San Francisco suburb and is arguably North America’s first natural wine shop. He blames the rise of Instagram wine education, where popular feeds from importers and online sellers prize visual education and “style drinking” over something deeper. He also thinks it’s a result of American restaurant culture, which tends to have less education about wine for its staff. “There’s a tendency for wine bars and bottle shops to get the low-hanging fruit, you know?” Bernardo says. “Because they have to churn it. They need the sales.”
Still, despite any Meinklang-ification of natural wine, nearly every natural wine professional I spoke with was quick to say that the more people drinking organic, mindfully produced wines, the better. And there is no real valor in having been there first; it doesn’t matter if you saw the band before they were cool. “I’m so fucking tired of people feeling like they’re better than anyone else because they visited Frank Cornelissen in 2008,” Eagleton says, referring to the seminal Sicilian winemaker whose rosé blend, Susucaru, was perhaps the first “hype wine” in the natural movement, thanks to a loud endorsement by the rapper and former Viceland television host Action Bronson. (At least one wine seller now offers a “Nat Pack” of wines inspired by Bronson.)
Our cultural imperative to pull up the ladder behind us, to move on from the subculture once it becomes mainstream, speaks volumes to the fickle nature of trend-hopping and style drinking. It also fails to address the real questions at the core of all of this, such as what even is natural wine, anyway? Handmade, small production, heart-on-sleeve winemaking has long been one of the hallmarks of natural wine—far more important than any sulfur level or vineyard claim, to say nothing of hoary, useless tasting terms like funky or weird.
And yet, there’s that nasty business of seeing the same bottles everywhere, from big cities to small towns, performed on Instagram and stocked neatly on bottle shelves framed in salvaged wood. To go back to the music analogy, when an “alternative” album sells a million copies, how can it possibly still be considered alt? When a vineyard is 200 acres and the wine is in every #natty bottle shop in America, how natural can the product really be? I’m not sure these are even really the questions to ask anymore, or if this use of the word natural still means something. The phrase itself is a neat passcode to allow young people to enjoy wine drinking away from the stuffy, boring cultural norms associated with their parents. I think that when we say “natural wine” now, we really mean something more like “millennial wine”—something perfect to sip alongside that frozen Roberta’s pizza, and not the cultural vanguard or structural disruption it might have once appeared to be.
“Natural wine won’t save the world,” says John McCarroll. “There is a weird morality to natural wine, and it’s so stupid.” This phrase won’t show you the way to good wine—there’s only really one way to do that, and it’s not cool and it’s not sexy, and it requires effort. “You have to be open to an encounter with the sublime.”
In other words, natural wine is going the way that wine culture has always gone: It has a cultural cachet from its aesthetics and its language, but people who truly want to find the good stuff will need to put in the work. “Everyone starts drinking boring, entry-level, trite things, but if you choose to actually care and learn, from there you will find the interesting shit,” McCarroll says.
Eagleton compares wine to other cultural entities, like music or movies. “You don’t need a Discogs account to love music, you don’t need a Letterboxd account to love movies, and wine is like that too,” she says. “There’s wine drinkers who just want to drink some fun wine, and there are wine drinkers working toward a deeper interest. Both are valid and fine.”
What I think she’s saying is that we’ve been hopelessly reductionist—both mimetic and memetic—and above all else, annoyingly and predictably capitalist about what natural wine is supposed to be and how it’s sold. The simple phraseology of “natural” or “not natural” is actually an incredibly boring and binary way to think about wine, reducing the entire culture to jingoism and hashtags. There is so, so much more to talk about, like how labor intertwines with wine production, and how wines can make us feel, and who has traditionally been kept from enjoying wine (and what it means to breach those barricades), and how we imbue these bottles with meaning over time that takes on a sort of magical thermal mass of emotional resonance and connection.
Wine memes are funny but wine is not some disposable thing, despite the popular ways we’re depicting and consuming it now in our all-disposable-world. Wine can mean something more, if you want.
Back in Los Angeles, baking in the next morning’s violent sunshine, I went for a long walk down Sunset Boulevard. There are a ton of places to drink natural wine along the stretch that runs between Echo Park and Silver Lake, and just off Sunset Junction there is one particularly gleaming new natural wine hub: the Erewhon Market wine shop. Yes, the Los Angeles grocery brand synonymous with conspicuous health food consumption, where I once saw a famous pop star who cannot be named for legal reasons purchase a $100 filet of salmon, now runs a dedicated natural wine shop, “where each bottle is treated like a treasure.” They sell some pretty nice stuff here, to be honest, with several of the major importers represented and a chic, chill-ready clientele browsing among the clouded bottles overseen by a watchful security guard. I think it’s cool that Erewhon Market has a natural wine shop now. I also think it’s a sign of the times, and utterly of the moment—of course, LA’s go-to place for folks to shine their health halos now has a hashtag natural wine shop.
A couple of blocks further into Virgil Village sits another wine shop, called Psychic Wines. It opened in the summer of 2018, which is an eon ago on the American natural wine scale. Psychic Wines represents much more than just a bottle shop: They instead evoke the role of the caviste, a term that’s largely unused in America, but in France describes a bottle shop-slash-wine bar owner (they’re almost always twinned there) whose curation speaks to a career of travel, discovery, and passion for the bottles they sell. There’s a handful of bottles here you might see other places, but lots more you are probably unfamiliar with (I know I was).
The shop feels both humbling and accessible, a neat trick that’s hard to easily surmise—but you just feel it inside as a shopper there. You will leave a bottle shop like this with fun stuff to drink, but also some perspective, some questions answered, and maybe even a deeper understanding. If you are drawn to wine, your curiosity will be rewarded. The number of bottle shops like this around the country, with their own in-house wine clubs and editorial programs, is growing. Seek them out. Learn from them. Try stuff you haven’t seen before on Instagram. In the wise words of the elders—in this case, Vineyard Gate’s Alex Bernardo—“Be willing to stand back and think deeper about what you’re drinking.”
Natural wine is rapidly becoming part of the zeitgeist—the déjà vin is real—and yet there are still new experiences for wine drinkers that feel analog and meaningful, and aren’t we lucky for it? Oftentimes it’s simply a matter of going here instead of there, picking the place with the knowledge and engaging with their expertise. It means searching just a couple more blocks.