California has been up to things.

Always America's agricultural hub, California has been producing wine for centuries now with many turns in the course of its climate, style, economics, and politics. As expensive as land has become in California, its wines have followed suit to the detriment of young producers attempting to get a foot in the door and drinkers excited to taste the beauty of our domestic artists.

At one point in recent history, it would have been easy to write off so much of the state's production as overly stylized or overly ripe or overpriced plonk (sometimes all at once), but over the last two decades, California has birthed a generation of producers turning the tides toward something subtler, more in tune with the land, closer to the wines of an older time, yet fresh in their outlook—Matthiasson, Arnot Roberts, Turley, Broc Cellars and so many more at the forefront of the new California wine.

Today these producers are stalwarts of the state and nearly classic in their influence. Taking up their spirit of paring back and channeling the true terroir of the wild West are a new crop of winemakers. Working in such an era of economic and climate stress, these producers must be lean and efficient in their methods of acquiring fruit, discovering plots, and leasing production facilities. This month, we chose a group of winemakers whose ingenuity and resourcefulness proves that California is still a place of exploration, experimentation, and excitement. (Spoiler alert, we snuck in a nimble Oregon nomad originally from new Orleans for her brilliant origin story born of the wildfires.) —Leslie Pariseau

Ashanta Wine “Amanacer” Rose, Mendocino, California 2023

When I started my journey into wine study, it was purely out of necessity rather than romanticism. After two decades behind a bar, I had firm grip on the world of spirits, but when starting a side gig at a venerable local wine shop, I quickly realized how out of my depth I was. In an effort to be able to field an inquiry about Pouilly-Fuissé with something more tangible than a slack jaw and blank stare, I read everything I could get my hands on and tasted nonstop for years.  

When studying grapes and vinification on a testable level typicity is key—meaning a wine from a specific place and/or a wine made from a specific grape has a certain set of characteristics that are consistent and reliable. Everything in its proper place. Nice tidy little glossary with guardrails and guidelines. Napa chardonnay = brown butter popcorn. Russian River pinot = sarsaparilla and flat cherry coke. Reliably standard. Highly discernible. 

What Chenoa Ashton-Lewis and Will Bassanta are doing at Ashanta in Sonoma, California defies any and all tropes of California’s wine-making playbook. In 2019, the pair unexpectedly gained access to some unsold grapes from Chenoa’s family farm on Sonoma Mountain and have been blazing their own path and producing vibrant, distinctive wines from abandoned and forgotten vineyards from the Russian River Valley on over to Mendocino.  Their inherent anti-classification is the key to their charm and I am thrilled at being flummoxed when opening a new cuvée (hello white pinot noir). Wine is, after all, a living thing, most exciting when it’s unpredictable and energetic.  

The “Amanacer” rosé is made from tempranillo grapes harvested from the Round Valley vineyard at 1400 feet of elevation nestled along the westside of the Mendocino National Forest. A grape usually found in Spain often stylized in dense, ageable reds, tempranillo is a rare thing to discover in California. The altitude and microclimate in this high mountain valley produces drastic diurnal shift in temperature—cool nights, hot days—which allows the Tempranillo to retain its typical strawberry-rhubarb tones while maintaining a mouth quenching, back-end acidity. Atypical beauty defined. —Drew Clowney

California Stars “Fool Bloom” Sierra Foothills, California 2024

California Stars is a very new friend on the California scene, born of a collaboration between Shaunt Oungoulian and Diego Roig of Les Lunes and Populis labels in California + natural importer Selection Massale as a way to create a fresh, custom California wine yet unexplored by either party. These kinds of collaborations are an interesting way to consider a shared philosophical ethos—in this case, classic, clean, natural wine that employs Les Lunes’ brand new winemaking facility, which allows for expanded production. As with Massale’s La Boutanche liter collaborations (each label features a different winemaker throughout Europe at accessible prices), California Stars brings Les Lunes’ wines to new states and markets where their domestic distribution may not yet reach.

Meant for summer drinking, Fool’s Bloom is fresh, fun chillable blend of Grenache, Cinsault and Counoise, sprinkled with a bit of rose of Zinfandel and Syrah. It’s all ripe, seed-speckled strawberries with a zing of strong bitter herbs and lively acidity. A backyard banger that plays with semi-carbonic maceration (i.e. whole clusters of grapes sealed in a tank and left to ferment, trapping a bit of CO2 that adds to a wine a layer of zip and levity). It sits apart from Les Lunes classic California sensibilities and parallels Populis’s low-key coolness, but with a fresh new guise that will please any California-curious buyer. 

Roig and Oungoulian met at UC Davis before moving to France to soak up natural winemaking and growing methods. When they arrived home, they devised a system of leasing vineyards, tending to them with their own agricultural methods and paying the owners a percentage of the crops’ worth. In a time and place where producers either buy grapes and trust the growers’ methods or own/lease their own land (wildly expensive), Roig and Oungoulian are modeling  another entry point to an increasingly crowded California cocktail party. —Cassandra Vachon

Lagniappe Wines Fizzy Lizzy “Swampwater” Pét-Nat, Willamette Valley, Oregon 2024

Originally from New Orleans, winemaker Lisette Hrapmann named her wines for the local vernacular of her childhood—a little something extra. Swampwater in particular is an ode to Louisiana’s marshy bayous, a refreshing thing to drink in the most humid of climes. 

After working at Antoine’s, Hrapmann traveled the world studying wine, eventually landing in Oregon in 2020. There she started at Belle Pente, a Willamette Valley producer, before moving to Day Wines in Dundee. Her own label Fizzy Lizzy was conceived of in a most spontaneous moment when Hrapmann stumbled across fruit left on the vine in the midst of the 2020 wildfires. According to a podcast she gave for NW Wine Guide, she picked half a ton of Chardonnay and vilified it in a friend’s garage, making a pét-nat in order to avoid elevage (or aging in wine-speak), and take the project with her wherever she wanted to land.

This ingenious and opportunistic maneuver is the kind of thing required of an upstart winemaker on the West Coast these days. With expensive real estate and so many winemakers trying to get a foot in the door, Hrapmann’s daring is a thing to admire and to follow. 

This vintage of Swampwater has a lovely bubble with soft grapefruit and ginger notes, perfect for a humid day on the porch. A blend of 75% Chardonnay from Star Mooring Farm in Chehalem and 25% Chenin Blanc from Threemile Vineyard in Columbia River Gorge, it’s easy enough to glug on a hot day with enough nuance to hold its own on shelf of pét-nats that span from Slovenia to France. —Allison Whittinghill

Florèz Wines “Kind Of Orange” Cienega Valley, California 2023

A Santa Cruz native, James Jelks founded Florèz Wines 2017 in his home town with the aim of producing wines as close to the area as possible. Here in a winery shared with Megan Bell of Margins Wine, he embraces single variety expressions of traditional California grapes from sites where grapes can grow wild with little intervention. What does this mean? Dry-farming (i.e. no irrigation) and organic practices from tiny sites that include the forests of the Santa Cruz Mountains and a teensy parcel of 100+ year-old vines in Santa Clara. The ultimate goal was to make clean wines naturally—native yeasts, sur lie, a little sulfur as needed, tiny production. Like so many young vignerons, this is a labor of love, not necessarily a labor of profit.

“Kind of Orange,” is a skin-contact Viognier, and an ode to his time studying wine in France. It is a delicate balance of aromatic elegance, quietly layered, unfolding over the course of a bottle in the same way a jazz album might unspool, at moments languid and soft, at others high-toned and wild (the name is tribute to Miles Davis’s “Kind of Blue”). Viognier is a grape that can present as overly floral as a white wine, but is well-tamed with skin-contact technique, its fragrant terpenes tuned into a lower, subtle key. 

It’s amazing to consider what James Jelks has been able to accomplish in less than a decade. He’s an impactful voice in a room quite crowded with young, cool producers. When he can’t farm his own plots, he sources grapes from vineyards to whose methods he subscribes that speak to the intimacy of the Santa Cruz locality. When seeking what it means to drink new-new California specifically from the gorgeous oddity of Santa Cruz, Florèz is unparalleled. —Beth Altenbernd

Los Angeles River Project “Lopez Palomino” Lopez Range, California 2022

Have you ever had a wine made in Los Angeles? How about palomino made in California? I would venture to say that you have not. Always the mad scientist in a psychedelic lab coat, nomadic winemaker Abe Schoener dared to track down a mythical plot of palomino grapes from the Lopez Vineyard in the Cucamonga Valley, a very old plot of land planted in 1918 and known primarily for its Zinfandel (which Schoener also vinifies).

At the shop, we were introduced to this wine when Schoener dropped by last year, regaling us with the tale of meeting a man who had been working in the vineyards for decades. In this gentleman's recalling, he knew this little own-rooted pracel of grapes as “golden chasselas,” rather than palomino, the golden grapes typical to Spain’s sherry-making region of Jerez. Schoener, who makes wine under the Scholium Project label as well, mades this wine in an industrial section along the Los Angeles River, once the center of California wine production during the turn of the 19th and 20th century. 

I love palomino. I love it as sherry. I love it as still wine. Its ability to convey the most austere of terroir with salinity, acid, texture and tension is simply stunning. Palomino from California is no less beguiling. This wine has changed over time. I’ve had a bottle that feels Burgundian in its structure and reduction and another bottle quite quiet and brooding. This is part of the adventure with a project so new and experimental (as most of Schooner’s wines are at any given time depending upon his whims), grounded by historic origins. —Leslie Pariseau