Somewhere between the rows—pre-dawn, the hour when the world is still half-invented—Jenks drifts through a vineyard in Mendocino, or maybe he’s being drifted, by some force not entirely his own. The vines, cryptic and conspiratorial, whisper in chlorophyll Morse, roots tangled in a network more ancient than any of us, a mycelial internet pulsing beneath the surface. The earth, cold, dark, honest (or as honest as earth ever gets in a world of shifting boundaries and agricultural subsidies), yields its secrets only to the patient, the paranoid, the ones who know to look for glyphs in the pattern of fallen leaves.

Jenks, hands stained with the honest dirt of certified-organic vineyards—no glyphosate, no clandestine molecules, no chemical agents from alphabet agencies—operates on trust, which is to say, he operates on faith, which is to say, he operates on the edge of reason. He does not force the land, does not rush the fruit. He is a slow conspirator in a plot to combine Riesling, Gewurztraminer, and Pinot Gris into a wine that traditional Alsace winemakers have named Edelzwicker. Edel (noble) and Zwicker (blended) are an apt name – the grapes give the craftsman room for innovation and inspiration on the winemaker’s part, tying to the old world tradition while creating a new tradition in the new world.

In the cellar, things get stranger. The wild yeasts, invisible but omnipresent, begin their work—anarchists in the barrel, fermenting with the kind of chaotic precision that would make Maxwell’s Demon blush (some believe thermodynamics to be misguided anyway). Jenks stands back, a watcher at the threshold, resisting the urge to intervene, to add, to subtract, to play God with sulfur and enzymes. He listens, as if the wine is broadcasting on a frequency only the initiated can hear, static and signal blending in the glass.

Natural wine, then, might be approached less as a philosophy than a paranoid system, a refusal to believe in the easy narrative, an embrace of multiplicity and entropy. It is not easy—entropy never is. Nor is it lazy—inaction is its own discipline. Each bottle is a message in a bottle, cast adrift on the tides of sun, rain, soil, and time, encoded with data only the truly obsessed will decode.

Jenks does not make wine for everyone. He makes wine for those who suspect there is a plot behind everything, who taste in the glass not just fruit and earth, but the faint, persistent aftertaste of conspiracy. The wine is clear, cold, a cipher. It tastes of the place, of the year, of the winemaker’s inspiration, but perhaps too, it tastes of something else—something you might want to name, but it’s good to know it’s there. The Florez Edelzwicker is the sort of wine you could imagine Thomas Pynchon making. That is enough.