I fell in love with wine in the early ‘90s living in the Bay Area.

Spending countless hours in the kitchens, barns, and cellars of those early artisanal winemakers in Napa and Sonoma. Hanging around drinking wine and relishing in the human touch of these people who brimmed over with their love of vines and the lore of making wine.

Getting to know them as friends, learning to love each one’s wine as a reflection of their unique piece of land, way before there was a concept of ‘natural wine.’

They were true iconoclasts and dreamers, entrepreneurial viticulturists working against the market grain of industrialized agriculture on the fringes of the established wine world.

It tapped into something in the me of my early 20’s. The kid who knew nothing  about wine at all. The me that was living off the grid in North Central British Columbia. Running bees in the N. Okanagan Valley, subsistent farming, and working as a craftsperson myself, building dulcimers and mandolins.

I’d been a literature major, a hippie, a lover of the Black Mountain poets, evolving into a tech entrepreneur in the emerging gaming world, finding friendship with poets and artists, with these business people from all walks of life whose inner flames had turned them to artisans and farmers. The backbone of sorts of the then-nascent maker revolution.

We talked about organic viticulture and natural fermentation, with bits of Kerouac and Ferlinghetti thrown in. Musing on and inspired by a new world, where individual acts in aggregate cross a community of like-minded people can turn a tide.

When I started blogging about wine in 2009, I was already deeply entrenched in the wine community, learning about the natural wine category from my friends David Little and Jamie Woolf of Chambers Street Wine in downtown New York who were very much reimagining retail for natural and artisanal wine.

I became intrigued by the idea that the social web and personal publishing were making the unscalable nature of artisanal wine fiscally possible. Enabling tiny producers and neighborhood wine shops to collectively build global markets for a large number of individual brands.

So where are we today?

Natural wine, from the beginning, has always had an outsized influence on how people think about wine even though it’s been proportionately but a tiny part of the market. Today the term is everywhere, acting like a mass market category, though like many bottom’s up movements, breaking and splintering as it gets broader.

Weakening in the center as it expands into confusion and even co-opted deceit at the market edges.

There are many new conversations we need to have:

-Does natural as a category matter any longer or does it swallow its tail and spit out Raw, Craft, and Artisanal, restarting yet again?

-Who are the North Stars of this new market that tie it together as examples to producers, and the agricultural poets for consumers in this new fragmented community?

-Does the wine world start to interact in meaningful ways with other conservation and activist’s movements that are sweeping the globe?

I intend to surface these discussions, but this new decade, with a new market reality requires a different approach, less haphazard and more focused.

The goal is to segment my various networks and audiences, letting them join in the middle rather than sort themselves out at the top.

@downtownwineguy is my new moniker and handle for my work in wine. With some thoughts to rebirthing pieces of my theLocalSip community as well.

Digging into my history in the artisanal and natural segments, bringing in points of view I’ve developed in the environmental and tech worlds but specifically for the wine consumer.

Speaking to those who search for answers and engagement within this context.

And honestly, @downtownwineguy feels just like me.

Holding court at the end of the bar on Tuesday nights at Racines and haunting the aisles of Chambers Street Wines when in town. It’s who I am.

I have a bunch of new communications ideas that I’ll be rolling in but wanted to get this out to start the new year. Decade!

So here’s to health and reinvention and rebirth in 2020!

Here’s to this really wonderful, anachronistic, still so dreamy and iconoclastic community of people I’ve had the good fortune to call my friends.

Happy New Year to all!