America May Be Falling Apart, But Its Wines Are Better Than Ever
For instance, I'm loving the current wave of alt California wines we're finally seeing in the east.
This past weekend, I celebrated ‘No Kings’ day in the People’s Republic of Vermont—specifically Burlington, home of Bernie Sanders and one of America’s most reliably progressive cities. The assembled crowd at Burlington’s City Hall Park did not disappoint. Many seemed like the same folks who—back when I was in college here—were protesting the U.S. support of right-wing contras in Nicaragua, or who chanted on the UVM campus when a group of my fellow students forcefully took over and occupied the president’s office to protest the university’s embarrassing lack of racial diversity.
Which is to say that it warmed my heart to see they’re still fighting the good fight here in this small northern corner of our degraded country—even while so many of us feel powerless as a gestapo enters our cities and oligarchs advance their plans to install an AI-driven technocratic feudalism. (Note to my European readers: There is a resistance, I swear).
Ahem. Yes, right. This is a wine newsletter, so let’s move on to the wine. It was also a wine-soaked weekend, to be clear.
For a small city, Burlington actually has a really good wine scene. I’m always finding great bottles on the wine lists here—often with an Alpine or Central/Eastern European slant. At Honey Road, I had a great Croatian Škrlet by the glass. At Rogue Rabbit, I had a cool Slovenian skin-contact sivi pinot (aka pinot gris). At Frankie’s I drank a wonderful cornalin from mountainous Vallee d’Aosta
But on this weekend of American introspection, the wines that struck me most were American wines—specifically from California. At Bar Renée, in fact, I tasted three amazing California wines on their by-the-glass list, from Broc Cellars, Les Lunes, and Stirm. Honestly, these days, it’s a rarity at a wine bar on the east coast to have this many California wines on the list (as we saw in our recent Everyday Drinking Wine Bar Index).
These bottles were not the usual cabernet sauvignon, pinot noir, zinfandel, or chardonnay that we’ve come to expect from the legacy regions like Napa or Sonoma. Broc Cellars ‘Got Grapes’ was 100 percent orange muscat from Lodi. Les Lunes ‘Astral Blend’ was a blend of zinfandel, syrah, pinot noir, and chardonnay from the North Coast. And the Stirm ‘Neptunute’ Rosé was a blend of riesling, chenin blanc, cabernet pfeffer from San Benito County.
Last week, in Brooklyn—before I headed up to Vermont—I also had a chance to taste through the lineup of Ruth Lewandowski wines, made by iconoclastic winemaker Evan Lewandowski.
I wouldn’t necessarily call these California wines “new wave”—Broc Cellars, for instance, has been around for a while. There’s definitely been an evolution in style happening slowly in California over the past decade, with smaller wineries working with different grapes and in more contemporary, natural-leaning styles. When I visit family occasionally in the Bay Area and in Sacramento, I get to taste these wines, so they’re not “new” by any stretch. Maybe, for now, it’s better to call them “alt California.”
Of course, this isn’t news in California. But out here, in New York, Philadelphia, Washington, D.C. and other points east—where European wines remain most popular—we’re starting to see more and more of these alt California wines. I don’t know why it’s taken so long, but we are definitely beginning to see a critical mass. Perhaps this is an effect of the Trump tariffs? I don’t know.
Whatever is happening, it’s making me reopen my eyes to California wines—which were my first love way back when I was first getting into wine. I know that I’ve been mostly Euro-focused here at Everyday Drinking. I also know that I have been disparaging of cheap California wine in the recent past. These are not those.
But I can tell you that we’ll be having some deeper dives into what’s happening in California in the coming months. For now, here’s ten wines that opened my eyes.
10 ‘Alt California’ Wines
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