Getting at the roots of natural wine

At 28, I pivoted from fiction to wine writing and went to work in retail. As I sank deeper into the world of natural wines, I became fixated on the idea of moving to Paris and using it as my base for discovering the producers of this quirky and unpredictable style of wine, made without any additives. Finally, I packed two suitcases, and left New York.

What is “natural wine”—and isn’t wine natural, anyway? In my memoir, You Had Me At Pét-Nat, I tackle these questions first-hand, bringing readers along to wine tastings held in a limestone cave in France’s Loire Valley; a harvest internship in that same region; and the wine bars of Paris.

Early on in the book, while discovering the ancient winemaking culture of the Republic of Georgia; I meet someone who will change my life: a winemaker from Australia who goes by the name, “Wildman.” He’s recently divorced and I’m fresh on the heels of several romantic disappointments, and convinced that moving to Paris and opening a wine bar with my best friend from New York will heal my wounds.

As I debate whether to seriously consider a romance with Wildman, I research the natural wine movement’s origins in the region of Beaujolais; travel to the unique vineyards of Sardinia where one organic grower struggles with the effects of climate change; and eventually, try my hand at making my own natural wine, in Australia.

Below is an excerpt from my book, which chronicles how one glass of pét-nat became my way out of a toxic, frustrating time in my late twenties. My personal transformation, from consumer to producer, is depicted through vivid scenes and immersive journalism, such as the experience of working harvest in France’s Loire Valley, shared in the excerpt, that reveal natural wine as a movement to bring joy onto our tables, in a sustainable way.

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I stood in the cold on the driveway between the Mosse family home and their winery, the steam from my double espresso rising into the morning fog. I’d slept in a small bedroom adjacent to the kitchen in the family house, sharing the room with a young French woman named Nina, a family friend. The other pickers began to arrive, most of them in pairs, on foot, having parked their cars or bicycles on the road outside the winery. They had on beanies or hoods pulled over their heads, and some were smoking. We all mumbled bonjour to each other in a tone that said: it’s too early.

Jo and Sylvestre were in their standard uniform of baggy jeans and hoodies, but they also wore sturdy boots and the expressions on their faces were serious; after all, this harvest was their family’s livelihood  and legacy. They busied themselves hosing down the large, modern pneumatic press, which was stationed outside, just in front of the winery. A moment later, I climbed into an industrial gray van. At the wheel was Jo and Sylvestre’s mother, Agnès Mosse. She drove, deep in thought. Gray had taken a firm hold in the long braid hanging down her back. I had never met Agnès, and she struck me as a great beauty.

Half an hour later, I was holding a pair of secateurs—clippers specially designed for cutting grapes off a vine—and a bucket, gazing out at a sea of vines.

“Allons-y!” yelled Agnès—let’s go! She shepherded us into pairs, so that each picker was facing another as we moved along the rows, and handed us each a bucket. My picking partner, a young man with dark hair and sullen, tired eyes, grunted a “good morning” to me and coughed before crouching down and getting right to work.

And we went, grape cluster by grape cluster, vine by vine, cutting the ripe, yellow-skinned Chenin Blanc from the branches they’d been growing on since June. Within ten minutes, my lower back had a dull ache. Within twenty, my knees were crackling. My hands quickly became cold and wet from the dewy grapes. I was starting to notice a lot of murky gray stuff on the grape clusters—it was rot, and I suspected that it was not the so-called noble kind that makes Riesling taste interesting. This seemed like the unwelcome kind of rot that would lend a putrid taste to the entire vintage.

I held up one of the more offensive clusters and showed it to Agnès. Her face held mostly constant, but I detected in her eyes a look of dread.

“Il faut sentir,” she said—meaning, smell it, and see if there’s any vinegar. She rigorously sniffed the cluster, then dropped it into my bucket. “It’s fine.” But if there was a smell of vinegar, she said, then the cluster had to be dropped.

Agnès hollered out the new instructions to the entire team of pickers. As I went on, I dropped probably one or two cluster from each vine. The smelling and dropping of fruit were taking up time. Around me, everybody was doing the same. It was tedious, tiresome work.

An hour later, Agnès yelled out that it was time for la pause—this was a break for a quick smoke and maybe peeing somewhere nearby. Then we worked for another hour and a half, until finally we could break for case croûte—the morning snack. Jo and Sylvestre drove up into the vineyard in a truck and pulled out a thermos of coffee, a homemade sponge cake, and some stinky goat’s cheese.

While we ate, the brothers inspected the grapes we’d picked. I could see them conferring with their mother about the extent of the rot. Clearly, this had happened quickly, to their surprise. The brothers had been diligently visiting the vineyards, each day leading up to harvest, walking the rows and tasting grapes, to discern just the right picking time. But the family rented and managed fourteen parcels, spread out around the area. Like many newer wineries, Domaine Mosse wasn’t one large estate, with the vineyards romantically set on a hill just beyond the house and ancient cellar. Rather, they had accumulated the contracts for these parcels over the past seventeen years, and each site was unique. Even with Jo and Sylvestre routinely checking the alcohol levels, it seemed that the family had missed the ideal picking window for this one vineyard, and rot had crept in. There was nothing to do now except sort out the unsightly clusters and hope that other vineyards would be in better shape when we got to them.

By the end of the first week, my hands were blackened from grape skins—an attempt to wear gloves had been futile, as they’d been soaked by grape juice within minutes—I’d come to see the pain in my back as a new friend that was with me for the long haul, and I’d developed a deep appreciation for the work that families do to make natural wine.

While we at Domaine Mosse—and other small-scale and natural wineries around the world—snipped each cluster of grapes and inspected them for quality, large-scale, often corporate wineries circumvent such efforts by employing machines instead of humans to pick the grapes. Those vineyards are generally farmed using pesticides and herbicides for guaranteed and maximum yield. Once the grapes are hauled in, winery workers douse the fruit lavishly with sulfur to eradicate any bacteria. The grapes continue to receive sulfur additions as well as flavor adulterants throughout the vinification process, resulting in a beverage that is highly profitable and commercially viable but that resembles Coca-Cola more than wine, and that carries nothing in the way of the soul of a place or of a people, as this wine most certainly would.

Excerpted from You Had Me at Pét-Nat: A Natural Wine-Soaked Memoir by Rachel Signer. Copyright © 2021. Available from Hachette Books, an imprint of Hachette Book Group, Inc.