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.
Christian Binner
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.
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.
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, crushable glou-glou. But in just a matter of years, Andalucía has become the source of some of the most 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) in collaboration with proprietor Carmen Gómez Cabello, is a revelation. It’s saline and savory, texturally rich and still bracing, raw, fresh—a drinkable link between the past and the future.
Andalucía, Spain
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, crushable glou-glou. But in just a matter of years, Andalucía has become the source of some of the most 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) in collaboration with proprietor Carmen Gómez Cabello, is a revelation. It’s saline and savory, texturally rich and still bracing, raw, fresh—a drinkable link between the past and the future.
Andalucía, Spain
Gómez Nevado/
Buelan Compañía de Sacas
The wine world has slowly begun to ditch more formal stemware in favor of casual, playful, all-purpose glasses. The bulbous Burgundy glass, slender riesling glass, narrow Champagne flute——all now appear like symbols of a bygone time. At today’s wine bars, you’re far more likely to encounter a chunky tumbler, a diminutive copita or a short-stemmed tavern glass than an $80 Zalto. The wine glasses of the moment are anything but wine glasses.
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The modern wine bar has gone through so many iterations that it can be difficult to remember the days, not so long ago, when the genre was typified by cold cheese plates and flights of syrah (but head to any airport if you’d like to reminisce). With the boom of the natural wine movement, so came the first-gen natural wine bar——a vaguely DIY, laid-back channeling of Paris. But even that era feels like a relic. The wine bar of 2023 has now found itself in a double helix with nightlife. A rotating cast of DJs is practically a given at today’s progressive wine bars, whether it’s San Francisco’s Bar Part Time, L.A.’s El Prado or Brooklyn’s Nightmoves. Sometimes, as in the case of the roving party Bêvèrãgęš, where “wine jockeys” dole out pét-nat to club kids, it is not a bar at all. As Punch contributor Jordan Michelman writes in his story on the topic, “Today’s modern wine bar dispels past notions of stuffy, fuddy-duddy wine appreciation ... in favor of something that feels more urgent, fun sometimes chaotic.”
