Alsace, France
In Alsace’s Gang of Five——the vanguard producers who, like Beaujolais’ Gang of Four, have reinvigorated excitement about the region with polished natural winemaking——Christian Binner acts as a peacemaker. While the entire cohort is legendary, he strikes a diplomatic balance between “varietal correctness” and experimental wines. Importantly, he also makes enough of it to go around——for now.
Binner produces everything that is great about the region: classic, age-worthy staples like the powerful Schlossberg Riesling, “pink macerations” of red and white grapes, and the Si Rose, which is a benchmark example of macerated wine made from pink-skinned grapes. With its Pirouettes labels, the domaine collaborates with the next generation of Alsatian winemakers to bring lots of great value bottlings. And it’s not just wine: Domaine Binner’s stunning eau de vie is the best of the region, and it displays actual differences in flavor from vintage to vintage. ——J.V.
Christian Binner
Of course, by its very nature wine changes every year, but its culture has historically moved more slowly; gatekeeping will have that effect. Today, however, its vibe has vintages too——guided by social media, a natural wine movement that has become pop culture and a new generation of drinkers unconcerned with the sort of "decorum” that has sought to keep wine enjoyment reserved for the elite. Wine right now is fluid, changeable, full of energy. Even the very definition of what wine is, or can be, is content with being under construction. That’s why we’ve decided to take a yearly snapshot of the producers, trends, ideas and even objects that are shaping wine
right now——to help us better understand this moment and, over time, tell the story of modern wine culture.
Bío Bío, Chile
Roberto Henríquez
It’s easy to make Roberto Henríquez seem like someone you should drink. He’s a natural winemaker in a systemically disenfranchised part of the world, making wines that reference and iterate off of centuries-old styles. He’s part of the growing local resistance to decades of industrial wine, “flying winemakers” (international winemaking consultants) and an economic race to the bottom that goes a long way toward explaining why you see so many suspiciously cheap liters of Chilean pinot noir at your local grocery store.
Luckily for all of us, the wines Henríquez makes are far more than just do-gooder juice——he is one of the world’s deftest hands at coaxing incredibly lively and of-the-moment wines from vines of unimaginable age and dignity in southern Chile. His País Franco, a wine from vineyards that are more than 200 years old, is a lesson in precision, herbal and lithe with tension, while his Rosado Super Estrella, made from 100-year-old vines of a pink-skinned moscatel, tastes like a fruit that science hasn’t discovered yet. They are wines of place, but, even more, wines that are alive and vibrant, thrumming with a singular character. ——J.M.
Asheville, North Carolina
Plēb Urban Winery
In some ways, Plēb recalls the microbreweries that started popping up in every midsize American city a couple of decades ago: a taproom in a downtown industrial building, fermenting tanks in view, street art–style murals decorating the walls. But Plēb is much more deeply rooted in the countryside than its urban-winery model might suggest. Chris Denesha, who co-founded the winery in 2017 with Lauren Turpin, farms between 30 and 80 percent of the production. The grapevines he tends——without synthetic chemicals, on their own roots——contend with everything from frost to hurricanes, which means abandoning more familiar vinifera varieties for newer hybrid cultivars, as well as natives, like catawba and muscadine. The winemaking draws on both classic marginal-climate strategies and an intuitive use of local materials. Even wines that sound wild on paper (infusions of shagbark hickory bark, flor-aged co-ferments, amphora-aging in Appalachian clay) have a beautifully composed sense of balance.
Plēb shows what domestic wine could look like if it grew out of what was available locally and in abundance rather than what was imported and scarce, and if the barrier to entry for tasting it were no higher than sticking your head in the door to see what was on tap. ——J.S.
Pine Bush, New York
Wild Arc Farm
Since moving to the Hudson Valley in 2016 to launch Wild Arc Farm, Crystal Cornish and Todd Cavallo have been asking what it means to make not just wine there, but an entire life. Finding inspiration from self-supporting homesteaders, they grow as many things as they can——fruits, vegetables, herbs and spices——and their winemaking is one part of a larger system, not the focus. What they add to this mentality is an endless willingness to experiment.
Wild Arc has been credited with launching commercially made domestic piquette, which is made from leftover pressed grapes that otherwise would have been turned into compost. They’ve also influenced a lot of drinkers to explore hybrid grapes, cider and distilled drinks like their take on arak, a Levantine anise-infused grape brandy that’s inspired by the cooking of Cavallo’s Palestinian grandmother. Wild Arc is a proof of concept that you don’t need to be in a historically “great” winemaking region to make special, delicious and site-specific drinks. ——J.E.
Andalucía, Spain
Gómez Nevado/Buelan Compañía de Sacas
The Sherry Triangle and its nearby like-minded regions——Sierra Morena, Montilla-Moriles——are perhaps unlikely places for winemaking that might be considered progressive. The fortified wines produced there don’t exactly slot neatly into the vogue for whimsical glou-glou. But in just a matter of years, Andalucía has become the source of exciting, and original, natural wines. Much of this excitement centers on wines that draw on the hallmarks of sherry production——notably aging under flor——but eschew fortification.
Gómez Nevado, the last producer left in the Sierra Morena range making wines in the sherry tradition, has always been working this way. All of the wines are sourced from organic vineyards, fermented with native yeasts, aged in a combination of tinajas (or amphorae) and solera and, crucially, bottled both unfiltered (en rama) and unfortified. This includes Gómez Nevado’s pálidos, the local name for “pale” fino-like wines. The Nevado, a younger pálido selected by Nick Africano of Buelan Compañía de Sacas (one of the indie bottlers reshaping the region) is a revelation. It’s saline and savory, texturally rich and still bracing, raw, fresh——a drinkable link between past and future. ——T.B.
Abruzzo, Italy
Cirelli
For most of its modern history Abruzzo has been synonymous with cheap, generic wines designed to service family-style red-sauce joints across the United States. Sure, the world-class, age-worthy wines of Edoardo Valentini and Emidio Pepe, the area’s venerated masters, always served as notable exceptions. But for the most part, drinkers in search of the great, characterful everyday wines that Italy is typically known for have had no choice but to explore other, more exciting parts of the peninsula.
Enter natural winemaker Francesco Cirelli. His organically farmed versions of Abruzzo’s native grapes (trebbiano, pecorino and montepulciano) excavate the area’s everyday side, launching it on the same trajectory that transformed places like Sicily and Campania just a few years before. He makes a delicious range of tank-fermented, screw-capped wines under his popular La Collina Biologica label, and the Pecorino bottling is a standout——savory, refreshing and textured, it’s the perfect intro to Abruzzo. ——Z.S.
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Cirelli
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