California’s new generation of sought-after wines

One block of Polk Street separates the two restaurants whose wine lists Gianpaolo Paterlini oversees. The first, Acquerello, serves tasting menus of high-end Italian cuisine — think sweetbreads and risotto with caviar — in a grandiose converted chapel. The second, its 3-year-old sister restaurant 1760, has no tablecloths, and its food is eclectic, global, without genre: fried duck sandwich with pickles; pork ribs with peanuts.

I ask Paterlini what sorts of wines are difficult for him to buy for each list — which rare, allocated bottles he pulls strings to obtain. For Acquerello, he says, it’s the usual cast of Napa cult Cabs: Harlan, Screaming Eagle, Colgin.

For 1760, Paterlini names two small producers from Sonoma: Arnot-Roberts and Ceritas.

The 2012 Screaming Eagle is on Acquerello’s list for an eye-catching $1,950. “You see a wine for $2,000, and you remember that,” Paterlini says. And you’d better believe it sells — in fact, he mentions, someone bought the ’12 last night — partly because Screaming Eagle’s scarcity is famous. By contrast, if you glance at the 1760 list, where Ceritas’ Elliot Vineyard Pinot Noir is $95 and the Arnot-Roberts North Coast Syrah just $75, it would be easy to overlook the wines Paterlini scrambles for.

But scramble he does — as do many sommeliers across the Bay Area. When it comes to Arnot-Roberts and Ceritas, “we’ll take what we can get,” says Sam Bogue, wine director for the Ne Timeas Restaurant Group, which includes Flour + Water, Aatxe and Central Kitchen. He’ll get an email from those wineries’ distributors in advance of a release, alerting him to the allocation they’ve set aside for him. “We take all they allocate to us, and we’ll take anyone else’s allocation who doesn’t want it,” Bogue says. In a good year, he gets “nothing more than a couple cases” of Ceritas; at best, five cases of Arnot-Roberts. “And we were lucky this year to get six bottles of Ultramarine,” Bogue says of the California sparkling wine, now in its second vintage.

“The cult phenomenon became very elitist because of price,” says Jason Alexander, wine director of the Progress and State Bird Provisions. “These new wines are accessible in price, but still not accessible in terms of production.”

At places like Acquerello, business remains brisk for cult Cabernets. But at the younger class of fine-casual restaurant that claims a growing slice of San Francisco’s culinary identity, a wine list with a $2,000 Cabernet feels garish. For those restaurants, the trophies to hang on their lists are not Araujo, Bryant, Colgin, Harlan and Screaming Eagle. Instead, they’re Arnot-Roberts, Ceritas, Dirty & Rowdy, Sandlands and Ultramarine.

Does that make those latter five wines the “new cults?” No. They fail the “cult” definition on too many counts. The classic cults are all based in Napa, and each works entirely from an estate property. Meanwhile, all but one of these five new producers is based in Sonoma; most own no vineyards, and they source fruit from traditionally unglamorous places like Placer and Lake counties. The cults are owned by wealthy outsiders who hire winemakers; these new wines are scrappier, all of them small, winemaker-owned businesses. Whereas the cult wines represent a single style of wine — ripe, lush Cabernet — these new guys are heterogeneous, making everything from skin-fermented Melon de Bourgogne to Touriga Nacional rosé. The cults thrive on a perception of secrecy and exclusivity; you’ll find the younger folks documenting their lives in a quotidian flurry of Instagram posts.

Most importantly, the cults are very expensive, and are traded at auction. The new wineries are not.

To understand what has taken the place of the cult Cabernets in terms of wine-industry frenzy, let’s turn away from California toward France, to a Loire Valley producer of Cabernet Franc and Chenin Blanc called Clos Rougeard.

Never heard of it? Didn’t think so. But in certain sommelier circles, Clos Rougeard is a kind of holy grail — the wine they Instagram every chance they get (#wineporn), that they’ll beg distributors for a single bottle of, that they’ll chase obsessively on the gray market. And the hype emerged seemingly overnight.

Where does that sort of flash demand come from? One theory: a small circle of influencers whose authority plays out on social media, including sommeliers Rajat Parr, wine director of the Michael Mina restaurants and owner of Domaine de la Cote winery; Patrick Cappiello of New York’s Pearl & Ash; and Levi Dalton, host of the “I’ll Drink to That” podcast.

“I fully blame Raj for Clos Rougeard,” says Paterlini. “That wine used to be easy to get, but then Raj started talking about it, and now it’s allocated.”

Parr, too, is frustrated that he can’t get Clos Rougeard anymore, and acknowledges that its starring role in his social-media feed may have driven its ghostliness. Now he wields his power carefully: “There are certain wines I will not post,” Parr says. “Because I know the guy makes only 2 hectares, and if everyone in the world knows about his 2 hectares, it’s over.” He pauses. “I know it’s weird to say that.” (I asked Parr if he would name any of these too-hot-for-Instagram producers, even off-record. He would not, but he did say they’d be in his forthcoming book on French wine.)

The Instagram effect is powerful — @rajatparr has over 18,000 followers, which is a lot for wine — but the true network of influence is likely offline, in sommeliers’ conversations with each other. Follow enough of them on social media, and you see everyone posting the same bottles, as if drinking Clos Rougeard — or Overnoy, Guiberteau, Selosse, Allemand, Pierre Gonon — were proof of being one of the cool kids.

It’s not a cult. It’s a clique.

Ultramarine is a testament to this influence: It seemed to come out of nowhere. The inaugural 2010 vintage of the single-vineyard, Champagne-method sparkling wine, made in Petaluma, was released in December 2014. By mid-2015, it was the wine to post. No one is more puzzled by the wine’s instant explosion than its maker, Michael Cruse.

“I think what happened,” Cruse tells me, taking obvious pains to recollect, “is that Levi had tasted the wine, and he recommended me to Patrick.” He doesn’t need to use last names: This world is that small.

Was that all it took? Two people? “I hope that part of it has to do with the wine being good,” Cruse offers. Undoubtedly it does — but it’s unlikely that it could have proliferated to such an extent without the support of this inner circle.

The story is similar for Ceritas, a Pinot Noir and Chardonnay producer launched in 2005. “The first person we sold wine to was Raj,” owner-winemaker John Raytek recalls. On his first sales trip to New York, “we took one appointment, with Robert Bohr at Cru,” he says of the now-closed wine-industry haven. “Bohr liked the wine, called his friends and told them to buy it. They all did. I had no idea it worked that way.”

It’s one thing when that happens with Chardonnay. It’s quite another when it’s a label like Sandlands, which makes esoterica like Contra Costa County Carignane. “A lot of it is timing,” says owner-winemaker Tegan Passalacqua. “People who have been making nonstandard varieties for 30 years, they did the hard yards. Now, Raj can post my wine on Instagram, and everyone’s like, ‘Oh, right, Trousseau Noir!’ and they go to my website.” Over 50 distributors have reached out to him asking for wine, but Passalacqua has none left to sell.

If Screaming Eagle and Harlan owe much of their success to a couple of dudes, then so, perhaps, does this new set of sought-after wines. Instead of critics like Robert Parker and James Laube, it’s sommeliers like Parr and Cappiello.

Which, despite the nature of social media, may feel even less democratic than it did before: What are the implications of this industry’s innermost circle becoming its tastemakers? The work of the critic is at least predicated on impartiality, but sommeliers have something to sell.

This dependence renders the wineries’ business models quite different from the cults’. While the cult Cabernets sell virtually all of their inventory directly, through mailing lists, these newer brands recognize they can’t afford to alienate their restaurant-industry friends.

“The assumption is that you want to cultivate as much direct-to-consumer as possible immediately,” says Duncan Meyers, co-owner of Sonoma’s Arnot-Roberts, which makes wines like Ribolla Gialla. “But unless you get it out in distribution, you’re not going to get plugged on someone’s list.”

Such plugging used to come in the form of critical scores. In their early vintages, Arnot-Roberts submitted their wines to the Wine Advocate’s Robert Parker, and earned some great, mid-90s marks. “But it became apparent that those scores weren’t enough to grow our business,” Meyers says.

“We rely on those people — at State Bird, at Bay Grape, at One Market — to tell our story,” says Hardy Wallace, owner-winemaker of the single-vineyard Mourvedre specialist Dirty & Rowdy. “They can sell our wines better than I can, because they are not the producer.” (That’s what people used to say about wine critics.)

It’s worth remembering that we’re talking about a small, albeit visible, segment of the market. “When you make 10 different Mourvedres, you live in a bubble,” Wallace laughs. Not only are plenty of people still drinking cult Cabs, but many others are drinking a new generation of ultra-premium Napa Cabernets like Scarecrow, Hundred Acre, Futo and Realm. Though they still cost hundreds of dollars, these wines “hit a different demographic than the first generation of cult wines,” explains Kerrin Laz, who operates a Yountville wine club and tasting room, K. Laz Collection. “It’s people in their 40s, not their 60s, which is definitely younger for wines in that stratosphere.” These wines stand a much better chance of gaining secondary-market value — Scarecrow already has — than Ceritas or Arnot-Roberts.

But what draws wine geeks even younger than 40 into these esoteric wines is a different sort of energy. In fact, it’s their divergence from the cult Cabs — in price, in style, in transparency — that’s given them a cultish aura. “I’m not sure that Patrick would have put Ultramarine on a list if it were $150 wholesale,” Cruse says. Ultramarine only appeals to influencers in the first place, thereby attaining allure, because, at $50, it’s priced so differently from a wine like Harlan. It’s 1760, not Acquerello.

Compare notoriously clandestine Bryant and Screaming Eagle with Wallace’s Instagram account (@dirtysouthwine). “It’s ‘Here’s my wife and I at a Phil Lesh concert’ or ‘Here’s some fried chicken,’” he describes. Someone like Wallace represents what’s fun about the wine industry — indeed, what’s fun about living in California. The openness resonates.

But this “transparency” holds its own paradox: It reinforces the symbiotic relationship of producers with the sommeliers who celebrate them. Scroll through, and it seems they’re all best friends, crushing cans of Modelo after extravagant evenings of grand cru Burgundy. The sheer visibility makes this world seem all the more exclusive. Screaming Eagle never let you see inside, but Patrick Cappiello just makes you wish you’d been invited to the party.

If the 1990s cults are lambasted for pushing ripeness to its upper limits, the new generation of influencers can be guilty of fetishizing austerity. Some wines are welcome expressions of California’s lean side, like the Sandlands Grenache, whose ethereally delicate texture belies its 14.2% alcohol level and intense flavors; it recalls a fruit rollup in the best sense. And Ultramarine, though acid-driven, is not a “lean” wine by any measure. On the other hand, the Arnot-Roberts’ 2014 Syrah from the Que Syrah Vineyard tastes underripe: searingly acidic, tasting like capers, pink peppercorns and cornichons, lacking even a trace of fruit. Ditto Ceritas’ 2014 Hellenthall Vineyard Pinot Noir: It whispers red cherry and violets, but the wine privileges texture at the expense of flavor.

Some of these wines prompt the question: Has the pendulum swung too far? And, in fact, asking that sort of question is half the fun of drinking them. It’s as if the very wines are in conversation, the new wines rejecting their predecessors’ business models and stylistic goals. The frenzied social-media posting and allocation battling testify to the excitement they represent. Do you hate these wines, love them, resent them for becoming famous? Either way, there’s more to talk about than ever before.

The intense stylistic debate, the mad hunt for scarce bottles, the fried-chicken Instagrams — where else but California? “When you can get these wines, it‘s fun, and you smile,” says Bogue. “When you can’t get them, it's just part of the game.”