The Wandering Winemaker of the San Juans

Yours truly At a picnic table on Lopez Island sitting across from Nic and two bottles of Piquenique wines

I met Niccolo Coturri in a waterside park on Lopez Island, a sleepier island in the San Juans carpeted with farms and known for its accessible biking culture. Before we start chatting, he extracts two glass bottles from his backpack. One contains a burnt orange liquid with a picture of a blackberry bush on the label, and the other is a buttery yellow and depicts a sunset over the water. If you’ve been to a natural wine shop, you’ve seen similar sediment-laden, autumnal-palette-colored, vividly-labeled, bottle-capped wine. But beyond the natural and biodynamic approach, Nic is a roving winemaker, not attached to a single place or vineyard, which is an industry defined by tradition and rooted in place is pretty radical. Nic used to be the fourth-generation winemaker of a prominent Sonoma, California winery (his father was the first commercial natural winemaker in the US after WWII) that dates back to 1979. About five years ago, he left it all to try to coexist with climate change while still making really good wine. 

One of the first tenets of wine-making is the concept of terroir. Literally translated to soil, it means everything that contributes to a wine's flavor, from climatic conditions, cultivar and rootstock, geography and topography, soil mineral and nutrient contents, and water supply. It is both precise and mystical. Even small variations in location can result in consequential changes in geology, temperature, or soil composition, which will all affect the characteristics of the wine produced–both predictably and unexpectedly. What terroir lacks in exacting definition, it makes up for in imbued meaning. It is the idea that you can taste where a wine came from, that a place is channeled through the vines and into the grape. It means a wine that can only be produced in that particular corner of the world. 

It was, of course, the French that breathed life into the concept of terroir when Benedictine monks in Burgundy noticed that microclimatic changes could create unique-tasting wines. Since then, France has essentially codified terroir through the appellation d’origine controlé (AOC), a system that geographically separates regions where particular types of grapes can be grown, which is meant to guarantee the quality and origin of wines. The dominant French wine-growing regions, such as Bordeaux, Burgundy, Alsace, and Champagne, are each known for their unique terroir and the types of wine they produce. Changing these grape varieties and the types of wine, they produce would not just meet resistance to uprooting tradition but would run up against legal structures. 

The magic of wine is its connection to place. But it is precisely this sensitivity to environmental conditions that is so prized in wine that also makes it so susceptible to the impacts of climate change. The last eight years were the hottest on record. Around the globe, temperatures have climbed so much that harvests now begin an average of 13 days earlier than they did before 1988. Since 1950, average temperatures in Bordeaux have risen 2 degrees Celsius or 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit. In warmer conditions, grapes ripen more quickly, which lowers their acidity and increases their sugar, resulting in more ripe, cooked flavors. Additionally, because winters are milder, vines are coming out of dormancy earlier, which makes them more vulnerable to frost. France, in particular, has been experiencing a pattern of mild winters with sudden cold snaps in early spring, which kills off early growth. When this happened in 2021, the country’s total wine harvest shrunk by 30 percent. Warming trends are helping other regions become more hospitable to wine, but for many traditional wine regions, climate change has left them struggling to adapt. 

Napa Valley, California, the heartland of wine production in America, is experiencing a litany of climate change impacts. A study based on an analysis of local temperature records spanning 1958-2016 found that the growing season starts more than four weeks earlier than it did in 1958. In an effort to mitigate the impact of record-high temperatures, growers have resorted to spraying sunscreen on grapes to prevent roasting. Wineries use about 7 to 16 liters of water per liter of wine in an increasingly water-scarce state, and growers are starting to irrigate with treated wastewater from toilets and sinks to prevent reservoirs from running dry. And then there are the fires. Since 2017, heavy smoke has engulfed Napa vineyards most years. Even if vineyards are not directly burned, smoke can taint grapes from a hundred miles away. The permeable skin of grapes, the very thing that enables the sensitivity and complexity in wines, makes them uniquely vulnerable to smoke. 

The impact of fire and smoke on California wine production is something Nic knows well. In October 2017, a series of 250 wildfires, known as the Northern California firestorm, broke out throughout Napa, Lake, Sonoma, Mendocino, Butte, and Solano counties. Nic watched as fire surrounded his family vineyard within a mile and a half on three sides. His house and the shop he was renting burned down. He spent over a week sneaking past humvee lines to take care of abandoned fermentations. He watched as a profuse amount of precious water was dumped on a scorched landscape. According to Nic, “What doesn’t burn is the most dangerous because it’s only a matter of time.”

That was the breaking point for Nic. At the age of 32 (he had been working for his family since he was 18), he left half a century of winemaking with his family and started over with limited and inexpensive equipment in the San Juan Islands of Washington state. He founded Piqnique Wine (Piqunique means picnic in French) to make natural wine from grapes and other fruits he sources from around the islands. Like seemingly everything Nic does, the decision to stake his fresh start in the San Juans was thoroughly deliberate. There is a family connection. His wife’s grandparents had moved to the islands in 1977, and she grew up visiting them frequently. Nic’s grandmother’s cousin, who was a formally trained painter, moved to the San Juans in 1949. Though she is not around today, he feels a “haunting” familial connection. 

And then there are the philosophical aspects. Nic specifically wanted to move to a place that was not part of the wine industry, which would grant him the creative space and ability to work with a more diverse agricultural community. The San Juans enjoy mild, rainy winters and mild, sunny summers. It was crucial for Nic to make wine in a more temperate climate to not only reduce the impact of heat on the fruit but also on the fermentation process. The wine is natural, meaning without additives and preservatives such as yeast and sulfates, so there is a fairly fine bandwidth for the right fermentation conditions. It’s important to Nic that the wine is grown and fermented in the same place, something that is a rarity in Washington today, where only one percent of wine grapes are actually grown on the west side. He tells me the San Juans used to be the fruit basket of the Puget Sound until trains and irrigation reached the east side of Washington, destroying the fruit industry here in less than a decade. He also suspects many trees were cut down during prohibition to prevent moonshining. According to Nic, there are more apple trees in the San Juans now than there were in 1957, but only a fraction of what existed in 1927. 

And then there is the fact that he can get to work by boat. For Nic, moving fruit around on boats is a personal satisfaction. During one conversation, he told me that he was about to go to work at the vineyard on Lopez even though the ferry was down. “And so if I didn’t have a boat, then I wouldn’t be able to go to work. So that’s pretty weird,” he says. 

To discover what the future of wine may look like, Niccolo is pushing and prodding almost every traditional notion of winemaking. For starters, he uses a variety of fruits, not just grapes, to create different blends. The composition of the wines is determined by what is available around the islands, making for a very creative and adaptable winemaking process. He works with heritage trees and orchards, some of which have been around since the 1800s. A lot of the fruit he uses is leftover or disregarded produce that can’t be sold. For example, during a recent heat wave, a grove of peaches all ripened at once instead of over the course of weeks, leaving the owner with a copious amount of fruit and no buyer lined up. Nic was able to take it all. He also delights in discovering unusual fruit varieties. One of the wines on the picnic table was comprised of apples, blackberries, crab apples, and seedling pears. Nic explained that while seedling pears are usually used for their bitterness and acidity, these pears, which have been growing in a hedgerow at one homestead for 70 years or so, are actually delicious. 

For Nic, moving outside of just grapes is economically more sustainable, but it's also creative and interesting. That being said, there are also grapes in Piqnique wines. Nic is taking care of a 40-year-old vineyard on Lopez Island and is planting table grapes in partnership with two farms in Everton. While table grapes might be shunned in Burgundy, Nic says they have low water dependency and spraying needs and are high-yielding for their use of space. He also appreciates that table grapes are edible and that they make a lower-alcohol wine, which is growing in popularity and harder to make in places with increasingly hot weather (higher sugar levels in grapes mean higher alcohol levels in wine). 

Spontaneity and mobility are core to Nic’s operation, but he does have plans to plant about 100 fruit trees a year that won’t require irrigation in partnership with a number of farms to provide shade for animals and restore a landscape that used to be made up of big beautiful trees. Nic thinks obsessively about how to adapt his processes to the landscape and ecosystems that already exist on the island. He tells me that all the apples are pressed through island-grown hay and then fed back to the animals since there are a number of livestock operations on the islands but a scarcity of hay. 

It is clear Nic took the time to meticulously understand the needs of the farmers and fruit tree owners in the San Juans. This may be part of the reason why, for someone who has lived in Washington for less than five years, he knows a frightening amount about the history of this place, wine-related and otherwise. Besides his knowledge of agriculture in the San Juans and across Washington, Nic can tell you about historical migration, temperature, and trade patterns. He tells me that Guemes Island, right off Anacortes, Washington, used to be known as Dog Island. Native Americans in Washington, up to Alaska and Russia and down to Japan, used to raise long-haired dogs, known as Salish Woolly Dogs, in lieu of fleece-producing goats or sheep. They would shear the dogs and turn the fur into yarn and then into famed “Salish” blankets. These dogs were so important to coastal Indigenous people that the dogs were often buried wrapped in a blanket to honor them. But despite the wool dogs’ abundance in the 18th century, they were extinct by 1900 due to the increased presence of European settlers who brought machine-spun sheep wool as well as European dogs that bred with Salish Woolly dogs, a history, which Nic says is so “recently pathetic.” When I ask why history has become an obsession for him, he explains, “Understanding the history makes it possible to try to take care of a place and contributes to why the wine tastes good or how you fit into a community and help it.”

But for all his love of history, Nic is certainly not stuck in the past. In an industry steeped in tradition, Nic is not afraid to call out absurdities. For example, Western Washington, in many ways, has an ideal climate for agriculture, but it is covered in a patchwork of suburbs. Instead of growing food where it makes sense from a resources perspective, we tend to grow food where it’s hot and dry and not as amenable for people to live. And while Nic is appreciative of all the knowledge he has acquired from generations of family wine-making, he doesn’t have much patience for sentimentality. According to Nic, “Preciousness is not sustainable. It’s cool when you go into a vineyard, and there are stone walls and olive trees, but it may not make sense to grow grapes there anymore.”

Historic wine regions may not be open to reimagining winemaking, but even the oldest wine regions are starting to adapt. Vineyards are employing precision irrigation techniques and trellis systems that can help vines withstand hotter temperatures. In Bordeaux, seven additional grapes have been selected for experiments to determine whether they can be used to mitigate the effects of climate change. Change in the world of wine is slow, but it is happening. 

But in an industry obsessed with terroir, there is an argument to be made that Nic’s approach is the most honest expression of this philosophy. Instead of planting a vineyard with any sort of preconceived notion about the wine he wants to make, he is painstakingly determining how his operation can fit into a landscape, its ecology, available resources, culture, and patterns of commerce. As the climate, the landscape, and the economic, cultural, and agricultural makeup of the San Juans shift, so will Nic’s wine. It will always represent this region as it is today, not as it was or as we might hope it will be. When change is the most common denominator of our time, shouldn’t the foods we grow and celebrate reflect that?  And what better way to express this moment of change than through wine, which has always spoken to land and culture and encouraged imbibers to take a moment, to come together, to consider, and to savor.