For this issue of The Fizz, I spoke to winemaker and grape farmer Matt Niess of North American Press. Matt has been working with hybrid grapes for the better part of seven years and has become one of the leading voices on hybrids in California, where he has been a major part of the growth and influence of hybrid wines. At North American Press [Instagram], he’s making wine from grapes like Baco Noir, Traminette, Vidal Blanc, Brianna, La Crosse, Catawba, as well as co-ferments with wild native California grapes and local apples. His dedication to farming these grape varieties has brought a wealth of knowledge to the national hybrid community—a small group of people committed to making wine with indigenous genetics.
Why make wine with hybrids instead of the European vitis vinifera species? Many hybrid enthusiasts laud these grapes’ resilience, tenacity, and environmentally friendly qualities—their hardiness and native genetics make for grapes that don’t require as much support. Farmers can often spray less frequently (or not at all), do fewer passes through the vineyard, and worry less about pests, mildew, and other issues that plague many vinifera vineyard workers. In this issue, Matt and I touch on the day-to-day of growing hybrid grapes, why he believes hybrids are the future of California wine, and the importance of a hybrid-growing community.
Margot: You grew up in California—was wine a part of your life growing up?
Matt: Wine was not a part of my upbringing. I had zero wine culture until I was in college. I never saw my mom drink anything, any alcohol, wine, beer. She’ll have a glass of wine now every once in a while, but not very often. It wasn’t until I started working in restaurants through food and wine pairing and cooking that I got into wine.
I was going to college in San Luis Obispo on the central coast of California and there’s a good wine scene there. I was going wine tasting on the weekends. I loved the communal aspect of wine. Food and wine gets to people’s humanity, gets us to gather around a table and spark conversation and memories.
Margot: Often folks in the wine industry have that moment where things click and they make a choice—am I going to go the service route or am I going to go the manufacturing route? Did you have a moment like that?
Matt: Coming from the restaurant world, I was always a back of the house person, I was always in the kitchen. That’s where my heart is at, more with creating something. I can do the hospitality part if I need to, but it’s not something that brings me a lot of joy to be honest.
Margot: How’d you get into the production side of winemaking?
Matt: I was taking winemaking courses on the central coast at Allan Hancock Community College in Santa Maria. I didn’t get a degree in oenology or anything, but I took some classes more just to see if winemaking was interesting. I loved all the production classes. When it was time to take the next step, I tried to get a harvest gig going. I applied to a bunch of different wineries that at least, looking at it from the outside, aligned with my ethos of wanting to learn about organic growing and biodynamics and more hands-off winemaking. I applied to ten different places and one of the first wineries that responded was Radio-Coteau with Eric Sussman. My first harvest was in 2010. I was the harvest intern there and then after harvest he offered me a full-time position, and I ended up staying.
Margot: How long were you working with Eric?
Matt: Nine years to the day actually.
Margot: It’s interesting you worked with Pinot Noir for nine years. Had you realized over time that hey, vinifera is maybe not sustainable here?
Matt: That was more of a slow burn process for me. I didn’t fall out of love with vinifera, but I have no desire to make Pinot Noir ever again. I still drink European wines or wines from European grapes. If North American Press doesn’t work out, I would much rather segue more into fruit wines and ferments and apples and stuff than I would working with vinifera again.
Over time, I became really interested in native plants. Not just native grapes, but native plants in general. It just bothered me how in our everyday life, all the landscaping and all the plants and all the horticulture is also really Eurocentric. This isn’t just a wine thing. This is just a white people in North America thing not letting go of wanting to recreate what Europe looks like and feels like and tastes like in North America. It always bothered me how we’re in California and everyone’s yard is planted with European flowers and even our food. I’d like to let that go and embrace more of where I currently live.
I don’t live in Europe, and so I don’t really need my house and my whole life to pretend like I do live in Europe. I’m much more interested in honoring where I live. I started getting interested in native Californian plants and pulling out whatever landscaping I had around my house and strictly adhering to the spectrum of native California plants. At first it was just to celebrate the diversity of native plants and being aware that all these beautiful flowers and plants exist here. But then there’s this whole added benefit of their resilience because they’ve evolved to be in California and so they don’t need water, sprays, that sort of thing. After that, it was just applying that same mentality, but to grapes.
Margot: How did you get to grapes? You’re in this moment where you’re waking up to native plants and you realize oh man, I’m working with vinifera, what am I doing?
Matt: I was exploring different native California fruits and I was like, what can I grow? Even just in my garden, what can I eat and grow that is indigenous to California? I didn’t even know that there were native grapes. Then I stumbled across California native grapes that indigenous peoples would eat and use the vines. I was like, whoa, what? There’s native grapes to California! What the fuck? What are we doing? There’s a billion acres of vineyards everywhere and there’s grapes that are native to here. Just that whole concept that there’s not a single vineyard in California, land of vineyards, that is even exploring what these grapes are like and how they taste and fermenting them and making wine?
As soon as I learned there were native grapes to California, that’s when the whole rabbit hole got opened. I would stay up all night thinking about this. It was unbelievable literally. I started learning about native grapes throughout all of North America.
Margot: How did your experience change at the winery? Did you want to start your own project right away?
Matt: Not really. There was a vineyard that is the Baco Noir vineyard that I still work with. That was the first vineyard that produced grapes for the first wine I ever made under North American Press. It’s an old vineyard. The vines were planted in the 1960s in Sebastopol in Western Sonoma County. The guy who was farming this Baco Noir vineyard was also growing organic Pinot Noir and Syrah exclusively for Radio-Coteau. He would talk about this every once in a while, he would mention this Baco Noir vineyard that he was farming and no one ever gave him the light of day.
It’s like this oddity, this side project that this guy has. He said had tried to pass off this vineyard to other people for years and nobody wanted it. So when I became interested in native grapes, and then hybrids, it just dawned on me—I’m in California, these grapes do not exist here. How am I going to even get any sort of experience? I don’t have any land. I can’t plant stuff.
So I reached out to him. His name is John Dierke, and I reached out to John and he was like yeah, please take it. He’s been battling cancer for a number of years and he’s getting older and slowing down and he needed to reprioritize his life and his energy. He was thrilled that somebody in California was interested in working with Baco Noir, and so I started farming this vineyard in 2019, in the spring. It had been pruned and that was it.
Then he passed the baton to me, and that’s when, if there was an aha moment, that was it. All this other stuff had taken years and years to creep into my brain and snowball over time. But there was a holy shit moment when I started farming this vineyard and realizing the implications of not having to use any sprays in the vineyard. Not just because I didn’t want to or because I was being dogmatic about not using chemicals. It had nothing to do with the site or me or anything. These vines—they just don’t need it. I felt like holy crap! Everyone’s spending a gajillion dollars talking about how are we gonna farm more sustainably? I’m like, you guys hello? There are literally these grapes that you don’t even need to talk about spraying!
There’s all these forums and books and businesses and conferences about regenerative agriculture. You guys are all looking in the wrong direction. Come over here. There’s these vines that exist and you don’t even have to spray anything! The only thing you have to do is get over this stigma you have about these grapes and that’s it. You would rather dig your heels in that hard and double down on what’s it going to take to grow European grapes here in California? That’s so much more energy and time consuming and costly than just mentally shifting your perspective on the varieties of the grapes. To me that seems so much easier than all this, than trying to manufacture, chemicals or organic sprays to this adherence to growing the same varieties.
Margot: We hear a lot as folks in the industry who are aware of hybrids, we hear about how farming hybrid grapes is easier. I’m curious from your experience—where are they more difficult to work with than vinifera? Where does labor or complication actually come in?
Matt: Yeah, they’re not a silver bullet. I understand the desire to want to group hybrids together because people are need to generalize in order to better understand them. But it’s really impossible because hybrids are not even one species, it’s twenty plus different species of grapes we’re talking about. “Hybrids” as a term is too broad of a term, even though for most people it’s actually a very narrow term because their understanding of hybrids is limited, where their understanding of European wine is so vast. For most people, hybrids are like this teeny little tiny thing, but it’s actually this really enormous, broad thing because some complex hybrids could have genetics from ten plus different species of grapes potentially.
There are usually not that many, but even so within each species comes different challenges for the growing or the winemaking. Some of them are more vigorous. During the growing season, you’re spending more time doing shoot thinning, which is what I spend most of my time doing during the growing season with the Baco Noir, for example, trying to reign that freaking thing in. I’m doing more canopy management and more shoot thinning than I would otherwise. But that’s a trade off I would gladly take against spraying throughout the whole growing season. It’s still a no-brainer as to how I would rather be spending my time.
There are some challenges that are unique to some of the species of hybrids. For the riparia based hybrids, Baco Noir is one of them, or Frontenac Noir, Marquette, those varieties have really elevated acids. The complexity in those comes more during harvest. When do you pick because the acids are so high? Dierdre [of La Garagista], she talks about Frontenac Noir, waiting until the grapes raisinate to let the acids fall out and making a different style of wine. But being in California, we have the advantage of being able to restrict water, which is great. For these overly vigorous varieties, if you restrict their water, you know that automatically brings the vine back into balance.Here on the west coast, I don’t see vigorous varieties as a problem because if you want to do dry farming, then that’s what you want—you actually need a really vigorous variety to handle not being irrigated.
The labrusca varieties have more of a trailing growth habit. Vinifera and other species want to naturally just grow upright, I’m assuming from their days in the wild wanting to grow up tree, where labrusca has more of a trailing growth habit—it would naturally grow along the forest floor. That makes its own challenges with trellising. So for those varieties, I spend more time in the growing season, because I’m on VSP just because I’m in California and I’m at the mercy of what is offered to me, I spend time with those varieties trying to keep them tucked in the wires. They’re real floppy. They’re all different, really.
Margot: It’s really cool to hear you talk about this because my husband and I have farmed some hybrids here in Maine—Marquette, Cayuga, L’Acadie Blanc, some Frontenac. I’ve worked vinifera harvests before, but when I started farming these hybrids, I thought dang I must be a horrible farmer. I’m the worst. I cannot control these damn plants. They’re crazy vigorous. I’m out here all the time. It’s trailing, it’s foresty, I’m trying to get these things in shape. It’s great to hear you talk about these differences because it’s very validating. We don’t get as much community around farming hybrids to validate the experiences that you’re seeing in the vineyard. So you end up thinking oh my God, I don’t know what the hell I’m doing. Then you realize oh, I’m treating these vines in a way that is meant for vinifera. That’s not what they want. They want something completely different, and you have to open your eyes and your ears to hear what the vine is trying to tell you.
Matt: Absolutely, that’s a really great thought. When I first started growing the Baco Noir, I basically had to throw a lot of what I had been learning for the past nine years out the window and relearn viticulture. You don’t realize how much of an assumption it is that you’re working with vinifera until you’re not working with it anymore. Every book that has ever been written on wine, every class—the trellising, the farming, the spacing—every little detail of the wine industry is based on the assumption that you’re working with vinifera. If you change that assumption or you swap it out for not vinifera, it has this trickle down effect where everything is different. What used to work no longer necessarily works anymore. It does take a mindful presence in the vineyard.
Especially for me here in California, there’s nobody I could call. This has never really been done before. It really just took me years of walking through the vineyard and observing the vines and realizing okay, I’m the only guy here in California that is growing Baco Noir, so I just have to figure this out for myself. I ended up converting the whole trellising system in this vineyard to this modified four arm kniffin style. I just created this thing in this vineyard. Then I talked to Todd at Wild Arc several years ago, and he said oh yeah we figured out that this four arm kniffin style works pretty well. Dierdre happened to say yeah we now do everything on this four arm kniffin. I was like, oh my gosh, that’s amazing! There isn’t much of this hybrid community, so when you meet people trying to do the same thing as you are, it’s really wonderful to come together and finally share village in this small hybrid world.
Margot: I love that. We’re starting to figure it out as a community. How many vineyards are you working with now?
Matt: I’m getting fruit from six-ish different vineyards, but I’m only farming two of them myself. So the Baco Noir, then there’s another vineyard in Healdsburg that is an experiment. I needed to figure out which varieties to grow in California and I had no way of doing that. A good friend of mine has a vineyard up in Dry Creek Valley in Healdsburg, and it’s a pretty large vineyard, but there was this one acre block that was un-contracted. He just said, here, this is your canvas, you can have this block and just do whatever you want with it. They were just going to let it go fallow.
I chopped most of the vines off and then grafted forty or so different hybrid varieties. Five vines of each variety into this block. It was more to learn and observe the vines, to try and figure out, okay, here’s forty that I think might do well in a warmer region in California. From there, hopefully I’ll be able to figure out which ones like it and then which ones we should be focusing on here. That was five years ago and so now there’s all these grapes there that I farm myself. I actually pick all the fruit and ferment it all altogether.
Margot: What are you learning from that experience?
Matt: A lot. That block used to be Cabernet Sauvignon, and half of the block still is. Initially, I was just avoiding the Cab because my only interest was the hybrids. I wouldn’t even pick the Cab and I would just pick the hybrids, which is funny to think about, but then it dawned on me like, I’m selling hybrids to Californians and this is almost too new to them. This is a bridge too far. I decided, okay, let’s actually pick the Cab and co-ferment all the hybrids with the Cab. So at least there’s some familiarity there for people in California. Depending on who I’m tasting the wine with, I can just say, oh, this is a Cab field blend. I’m not trying to be elusive or dishonest, but to remove that stigma so they can at least taste the wine without having this preconceived notion that they’re not going to like it. When they say oh, this is good, now I can talk to them about hybrids. But just to initially start that conversation with hybrids, a lot of times they won’t even try the wine.
That field blend has also shown me the breadth of the growing habits and the chemistries and the flavors and the winemaking of all these different hybrid varieties. These are many different species we’re talking about, and so there’s forty different grape varieties, all hybrids in this block, but every single one grows completely differently and tastes completely differently. The chemistry is completely different. I actually feel like now I know what I’m talking about. I can speak to different species of North American grapes because of this one block that I have, where there’s this smattering of a bunch of different stuff.
Margot: Are you finding any particular varieties are performing better than others in the conditions that you have them?
Matt: For sure. In hindsight, this site was almost too difficult of a location, which is part of the reason why they were just going to let it go fallow. This one hill that this block is on is pure shale. It’s exceedingly well draining with low available nutrients, macro and macronutrients. The vines really struggle. The good thing about that is if there are any varieties that do well there, then they’ll do anywhere in California, because this is an extreme situation. I limit the irrigation. I don’t do any sprays. There are some varieties that are doing really well. That weeded out about 90% of them. Even though those vines are still there and I still harvest the fruit, a lot of them actually don’t like it there because of the lack of water. Their genetics are probably coming from places where the soil maybe has more clay or a different pH or just higher water holding capacity. Some of them, again, are so vigorous that they’re actually fine.
The Aromella does pretty well. There’s a white grape called Albania. It’s a native grape bred by TV Munson from Texas that’s doing pretty well. Lomanto is doing well. The Villard Blanc is doing well. Those are some of the varieties that I am looking to expand upon.
Margot: Are you looking for other growers to work with, or are you feeling comfortable where you are?
Matt: Both. I’m looking for more growers because I want to make more wines and I really want to focus on more whites. I think they’re a no-brainer for hybrids.
Margot: Why do you think so?
Matt: It falls more in line with this aromatic white flavor profile that people already appreciate from vinifera grapes. It’s an easier segue to hybrids through white grapes, from a consumer point of view. If you just say hey, this is an aromatic white, the flavors are so fun and beautiful and aromatically intense and there’s still this good acidity—I just feel like it’s an easier sell to the consumer. I personally love the wines and am currently making only one white wine, so I’m looking for growers to expand my white wine program.
The reality is of the market, of the wine industry right now, though, is pretty terrible. So nobody is expanding right now. Every single winery is contracting. That’s where the hesitancy comes in, is not necessarily because I don’t want to or because it’s not the right thing to do. The realities of the market make you think—is making more wine really a good idea? Like probably not?
Margot: Do you say that just because people aren’t purchasing as much?
Matt: Yes. It’s really hard to sell wine right now. I can speak for myself, but also, at least from everyone that I’m talking with, nobody I know of is doing well financially with their wine business. The idea of making more wine sounds counterintuitive, but at the same time, I do feel very strongly that this is temporary in the marketplace. If you make something good, people will drink. For me, that means more hybrid whites. So I am looking for people to do that with.
Margot: Do you think hybrids offer a financial incentive? I think about the vinifera grape prices in California, which are absurd, and the cost that goes into farming those grapes. The cost of labor, the cost of sprays, the cost of whatever, obviously counting cost of glassware, permitting, that sort of thing. If you’re saying that farming hybrids is more cost effective because you don’t have to do as many runs, you don’t have to do augmentation, sprays, fewer labor costs. The cost of hybrid grapes themselves I imagine would be lower, in which case the cost of wine production could come down and the cost of the bottle to the consumer could come down. Is that something that folks are considering? Would hybrids be better financially from a business perspective?
Matt: It’s something I think is true for sure. But it’s not something that I hear really talked about. The only thing I hear from other growers is that they’re in such a tough spot right now, that they’re willing to try anything and if they hear something about hybrids being on the cutting edge of the wine industry, they’re more open to trying it. They’re willing to take a risk and try something new because there are no other options. But to your point, I think what you’re saying is absolutely true, and from my own experience, I can’t afford to not work with hybrids, right? I literally wouldn’t be able to make this business work if I had to spend my time and money farming the grapes more intensively. So yes, I think it makes wine more accessible because you’re able to keep the cost down and make your product more accessible to more people.
Margot: Are you doing any fruit co-ferments right now?
Matt: When I started North American Press, the Baco Noir was the first wine that I made, but I felt like I should do more than just have one wine. I love working with our local Gravenstein apples because they have this rich history in the region. They’re this cool heirloom apple that is mostly only grown in West [Sonoma] County. Eric Sussman, he has another side project called Eye Cider that also works with local steins, so I had some comfort working with apples at Radio-Coteau.
Going back to the accessibility issue, apples are so much cheaper than grapes, okay? They’re everywhere around here. You can lower your farming costs, your fruit costs, your production costs and make this really amazing good tasting high value product at a lower price. I make a co-ferment called Wild Card that I’ve been making since I started North American Press with local organic apples grown on a butterfly preserve.
Margot: That’s awesome.
Matt: Hah, yeah I know it checks a lot of boxes. It’s the oldest wildlife preserve in Sonoma County called the Hallberg Butterfly Gardens. They have native California plants everywhere so it’s this pollinator’s paradise and the pipevine swallowtail—the iconic butterfly of the Hallberg Butterfly Gardens—that’s on the label. Apples aren’t indigenous to California, so to make it more in line with the ethos of North American Press and trying to preserve the native flavors of North America, it’s co-fermented with wild native California grapes. It’s 90% apples, 10% grapes. I’m using our own native Grapes of California here.
Margot: Are you foraging wild California grapes?
Matt: Initially yes, it was just going around and foraging for grapes. The first vintage I didn’t make very much, I made a couple of barrels and found out pretty quickly that I didn’t need very many grapes. They’re not big clusters, but if you get one that has a good fruit set on it, there’s a good amount of grapes on them. They’re really small. They’re really intense. High color, high acid, high tannin, high flavor. That’s where the 90/10 thing comes in. I only need 10% grapes.
If I saw grapes on the side of the road, I would pull over and harvest. I had kept lugs and pruners in the bed of my truck at all times. Then I would harvest a couple of lugs and drop them off at the winery and throw them in. That’s incredibly time consuming and not sustainable at all. In order to scale Wild Card, I needed to come up with another solution, but it’s still really important that I work with this specific type of grape that’s everywhere around here. So that winter I started collecting budwood from some of the vines that I had harvested the fruit from. There were some vines that stuck out to me because they were more fruitful and more productive. I took cuttings from those wild vines and grafted them into that vineyard in Healdsburg. There are two rows in that block that are native California grapes. There are probably four or five different ones in there. Now I just go down and harvest those grapes. It’s still the same genetics of the native grapes, but now they’re grown in the vineyard.
Margot: That’s amazing. I’d love to come up and see that vineyard sometime. What keeps you waking up every morning and choosing to do this work? Making wine in general is not easy work. Making wine from hybrids in California is particularly niche work.
Matt: I guess I can’t not do it. If North American Press doesn’t work out, my motivation for making more Pinot Noir and Chardonnay is almost non-existent. The passion’s not there to keep me doing all that work. It’s not the process of making wine. Even though I do enjoy that, that is not strong enough to keep me here. It’s not really about the wine making.
It’s wanting to stay on the forefront of this movement that I feel like I’m being a part of, along with all of the other amazing hybrid winegrowers across North America. It’s the work of banging this drum and telling people about this, because it’s so obvious that if I don’t do this in California, I don’t know who else is going to at the moment. I believe that this is without a doubt where the wine industry needs to go, for so many reasons. The environmental implications of not using any chemicals in the vineyard means there’s less chemicals in the watershed and less exposure to vineyard workers. Most vineyard workers come from underserved communities, specifically here in California, the Latinx community. This is a social justice issue also, not subjecting vineyard workers to chemicals. I also believe in preserving the genetic diversity of our indigenous grapes of North America, and growing to appreciate these flavors.
I want to make the best wine possible from these varieties and change people’s minds about them, changing that stigma. It’s the right thing to do.
Margot: Thank you for your time and your commitment to these grapes. More hybrid wines in North America!
You can support Matt Niess and his work by buying his wines at North American Press. Find his wines at Dos’ Bar in Sonoma and follow him on Instagram to stay connected to his work.