🟧 “Rescue” natural wine
How Garage Gal makes and markets natty rosé.
Kyle Chayka: During the early days of the pandemic, Jes Gao, a screenwriter in Hollywood, was out of work. In trying to think of something else to do with her plentiful spare time, she hit upon wine, something she enjoyed as a consumer but wanted to know more about. It launched her down a rabbit hole: She took a remote winemaking program at UC Davis, got a job at Scribe Winery in Sonoma, and began working at other vineyards. She moved to Napa. Then, she recently launched her own winemaking venture: Garage Gal, whose first product is a natural rosé made from excess Pinot Noir grapes that she rescued from an established winery.
Garage Gal is an example of the kind of DIY culture that I love. Someone wants to see something exist in the world, then they make it happen. An experiment meant for friends and family can grow into something bigger, a project that anyone can participate in and follow along with. Of course, you also have to find your fans and customers online. Gao kindly sent me a few bottles to try, and I can report that the rosé is light, dry, complex, and delicious, more like what you might casually drink in Provence than the sweet pink stuff usually on American store shelves. I highly recommend it — we had some with dinner last night. (Jess made Clare DeBoer’s brothy spiced meatballs.)
For this Q&A, I talked to Jes Gao about discovering her winemaking process, designing a brand, and the challenges of making yourself heard on social media when you might rather not.
Kyle Chayka: How did you get into making your own wine?
Jes Gao: I started working in wine 3 years ago. I worked for a winery in the cellar, in the winery making wine during harvest for 3 months out of the year. They make premium Pinot Noir and Chardonnay that costs upwards of $100 a bottle. During the process of red wine making, as soon as grapes come in in half-ton bins, they get dumped onto this apparatus where you sort it and move it up a conveyor belt, taking out the stems. Throughout the process there’s a lot of juice that’s free running.
So as the grapes jostle around they give off juice?
Literally, juice that’s running off as it’s moving around. There’s a long plastic tube that’s connected to the bottom of the metal table that’s shaking the grapes down the line. The juice is just being shaken into this tube, which is connected to a metal sump. It goes down the drain because it’s not how they make their rosé. Once the red grapes get into tanks, it’s a similar thing. Usually there’s too much juice.
When I was there the first year, as someone who has slight OCD and needs to eat everything in the fridge every week, I was like, I’ll take it home. They said, grab a keg. I brought it home to my garage, let it finish fermenting there, and hand bottled it for friends and family. That’s as natty as it gets. The second year when I came back, I asked if this could be viable for real. I made it properly in a winery; it’s been checked for all the right chemistry.
You’re taking what would be a waste product from these very high-end grapes and making something new out of it. Hence the “rescue wine” description.
People are so dedicated to the farming of the fruit where I work. It’s organic, regenerative, they spend a ton of money, time, and effort making sure is it’s as good as it gets. But they don’t rely on that waste on their books financially. It’s no additional cost for them.
But the winery you work for doesn’t market itself as natural?
They definitely use organic and regenerative certification as part of their marketing, but it’s by no means a natural wine how the masses understand it right now. Strictly speaking it is a natural wine, but it’s not the cloudy ones that are a little sour and funky.
Yeah, there’s this cliche of natural wine now, that it has to be cloudy and a little sparkling and have a whiff of gasoline.
Now I’m trying to sell to places that champion that kind of wine. Anyone who has some interest in wine knows there’s no real definition of natural wine. Each of them have their own definition: no sulfur, no yeast inoculation, has to be organic. It really varies. How I think about it is, natural wine has always been around but they might not market themselves as natural wine. A lot of the best burgundies, the most expensive wines in the world, are natural wines.
I do enjoy drinking those cloudy wines, but advertising them as better for you or somehow morally more elevated than regular winemaking is a little bit difficult to digest. You can drink a natural wine where nothing has been added and nothing has been done, but it comes from most conventionally farmed grapes. But you won’t take an organic wine that’s been farmed really well, with minimal sprays, but has a little bit sulfur or yeast. There are too many other factors that come into play.
The whole supply chain matters. That’s what bothers me about heavily branded wines like Molly Baz’s Drink This Wine. They’re advertised as “low intervention wines” but the vibey branding can be a distraction from where they actually come from.
That kind of branding is being conflated with stuff that is truly natural, that people were attracted to in the first place. There’s a difference between natural wine and bad winemaking.
How do you market Garage Gal so it stands out in this whole world of natty wine?
I’ve been struggling with it a little bit. As with anybody who creates stuff, you want to make it for yourself and the audience that you feel are knowledgeable about it. But that’s not your consumer if you want to have it as a sustainable business. You have to meet them where they are. It’s about finding a happy medium where I don’t feel like I’m compromising it.
Another challenge is getting it on the internet. You can have a cute label, but wine is not a very visual thing, it’s not a plate of food that’s really obvious and attractive as it is. How do you present it in a way that it has some kind of objective value? Because obviously people can’t try it.
Still, you have some very cool and vibey photography on your website that makes the brand feel indie and gritty. Where did that come from?
I enjoy taking photos. A lot of that stuff is not really by design; it’s just what I had, the photos that I took during harvest season when I was working. It’s very simple in that way
How did you develop the brand overall?
Garage Gal was a nickname randomly given when it was being made in the garage. For the graphics, I worked with a designer in New York City. We decided that it was important to position it differently from other rosés — the summertime, feminine, bachelorette parties, rosé all day type of things. We wanted it to be grungy, dirty. I had just gone to Berlin; I wanted it to look like graffiti.
The biggest fans so far have been 50-60 year-old white men, dads who really love it. I love that because it feels like we’ve converted someone who doesn’t usually drink rosé to give it a shot. I feel like that’s my greatest accomplishment right now.
How do you grow Garage Gal from this personal, DIY passion project into a bigger company?
We made 200 cases of wine. It’s one step at a time. I’m in Los Angeles; we’re self-distributing, physically going to retail stores, hotels, and restaurants. It’s horrible for me personally but there’s no other way to do it. We’re finding the target demographic, identifying influential establishments and hoping to get on their shelves. Hopefully if that works out it’ll sustain itself and I can make more. We’ll just scale a little bit at a time.
I have to sell a certain amount to cover the cost, but it’s a lot less than if I had bought the grapes myself. It’s very expensive to bring grapes yourself to a custom crush and pay the crush fees per ton.
Do you need to sell it online as well as IRL?
You need both. Selling to brick-and-mortar establishments that are tastemakers in this space is important but those are super low margins; you’re almost doing it for free so people can see it. Online is where I hope most of the sales will be, direct to consumer.
It’s very difficult to get further than your immediate friends and family and their word of mouth circle. I’m having such a hard time thinking about how to engage people on the internet and convert them without having to be in a bikini holding the wine. How many times can I do that? It also seems like how far it gets online is out of my hands a little bit.
Some brands partner with influencers, some just make content on their own and try to get followers. It reminds me of this pasta restaurant in London, Onda, that went viral on TikTok because they made giant batches of tiramisu in plastic drawers.
I want to go viral on TikTok! Talking to people in social media, they’re like, Just do something stupid, just smash a bottle in different locations, that’ll go viral.
Best of One Thing:
If you’re a new reader, catch up on our back catalogue! We publish newsletters on authenticity, taste, and culture every Tuesday and Thursday, with some extras sprinkled in.
On the aesthetics of travel: How we pack now
On vintage purchases: Buying art from antique stores
On a good travel memoir: Ignore the ugly book cover
On a great notebook: Time-less Japanese notebooks
Very good to know…