I met Rachel Signer years ago while we were both freelancers living in Brooklyn. We were at a press dinner for a restaurant called Gristmill, which I just checked on: It’s now sadly closed. We’ve kept up with each other’s careers ever since on social media, and I’m so thrilled to see her memoir—ˆYou Had Me at Pét-Nat, a beautiful and enthralling work that enacts Signer’s restlessness and eventual homecoming—in the world and discuss her life in Australia, where she’s making wine, raising her daughter on a farm, and continuing to show the world the significance of natural wine.

We discuss how she defines natural wine, leaving New York City, how she maintains such vivid memories to write from, and more. Listen above, or read below.

Alicia: Hi, Rachel. Thank you so much for being here.

Rachel: Hey, Alicia. Yeah, thanks. Happy to be here. 

Alicia: Can you tell me about where you grew up and what you ate? 

Rachel: Yeah, I love this question. 

I grew up in Arlington, Virginia. And a typical weekday dinner was a dish called salmon patties. And the salmon came in a can. And I think it was probably lightly floured and seasoned, and shaped and then kind of fried in a pan and served alongside peas or broccoli. And I loved it. I definitely really liked that dinner. And I imagine for my parents it was good, because it probably took like 12 minutes to make. And my mother grew vegetables. And I remember in the summer there being a lot of corn, corn on the cob. I remember there being tomatoes, and all of those summer veggies. 

And also very important—sorry, I have a cold. Very important meals were around Jewish holidays. So we would have a beef brisket, which I'm pretty sure would have been a Passover dish. Because you don't eat flour around that week, so you tend to have a roast meat. My mom would braise it with Heineken. It had to be Heineken. And she would sip half a can as she cooked. And then kugel, which is an egg noodle pudding. That happens around the New Year.  

I also was a vegetarian from ages 12 to 20, which was, honestly, sort of a random decision. I only started reading all of the kind of literature, like Diet for a [Small] Planet, after I'd made the decision. So I don't quite know where it came from. I was not a very model vegetarian. I subsisted on granola bars, bagels with cream, and quesadillas for a long time. That’s what I ate.

Alicia: [Laughs.] Yeah. I love that. 

And then you came to natural wine eventually. And I'm going to jump a lot. And I'm sure we'll work our way backwards. But I wanted to ask, how do you define natural wine? Because I think it's important to have how you think of it first before we talk about your life, your book, because it is such a huge part of everything, and—including the memoir. 

Rachel: Yeah, I'd love to get into it.

There's never enough that can be said about what it is because it’s still not a legally defined term. However, that is slowly changing. France has introduced a category called vin méthode nature, in which they—I think they visit the winery, and they analyze the wines to make sure they meet the definition. And we might see more of that in the future. 

But yeah, it needs to be from an organically farmed vineyard. And I'll put that first and foremost, ’cause nothing else matters if the grapes are coming from poisoned farming. So no, herbicides, fungicides. And those are really the main things. Pesticides as well. So organic farmers will use copper and sulfur and lots of plant-based treatments to manage grape vines. And grape vines do need a lot of spraying and a lot of management.

Then we're talking about wine made with very minimal intervention. And a lot of wine drinkers will be surprised to know that stuff is added to wine, because since it's not considered a food, it's not required to list any of those additives on the label. So if you walk into a winemaking store, there's a whole section of stuff that makes your wine taste a certain way. 

Before that, there's packaged yeast. And there's nothing evil about adding packaged yeast. It's an altered way to make a wine. And once you start with an altered way, you've interrupted the natural process, and you're going to need to keep adding stuff. So no yeast, no flavorints, no added wood chips, no mega purple. No fining and filtration. So, you're just getting the grapes. 

Quite a lot of people we consider natural winemakers do add small amounts of CO2, sulfur dioxide, commonly known as sulfites, or sulfur, a very hotly debated word and topic. And personally I would say when you're getting past 30 parts per million sulfites added, we're not really—I'm not sure it's a winemaker who really cares about being natural. However, I still celebrate biodynamic farming, so if they're adding 60 parts per million sulfites, I'm not so mad.

I'll just add, Alicia, that, especially in the past couple of years, I've really come to think about the idea of being anti-capitalistic as something part of making natural wine, to an extent.

Alicia: Well, can you talk more about that?

Rachel: Yeah. And I think it's definitely in theory, because I don't know when there will ever be something that measures if you're anti-capitalistic. But natural wine is definitely a culture based around personalities and relationships, and kind of passing on what it was like when you visited this winemaker. 

Yeah, I mean, if a wine is made as part of a big corporate thing and LVMH is the owner of that winery, I'm not interested. Even if they farmed organically, I'm just not because where's the spirit? I want something where the winemaker touched the bottles and touched the wine. 

And even very small, natural winemakers do have someone full-time helping in the cellar. So I'm not under the illusion that there's one person doing everything-everything. That's not the case for us, either, where we make wine. But yeah, I want it to be a small operation because that is more caring for individuals. 

And there was a case last year, a winemaker in Puglia that was in the news a lot really showed us what can happen. I mean, that's a massive operation. From the beginning, everyone—a lot of people suspected something was not right, which turned out to be true. 

And I think all of that is very tricky. You really have to ask someone selling you the wine for as much information as possible. How are you going to know all that stuff? It’s hard.

Alicia: Yeah. 

No. And I love that because I think that we have to talk about, in food and beverage, when someone is scaling up and is readily available, it's always a red flag. It's always a red flag for something to be always abundant, always available in every store. We know that the alcohol we see in every single bodega is not going to be necessarily the best made, the most caring for the environment, the most caring for the labor that went into it. 

And that's what I love—I love that about natural wine is that it's so specific, and it's so maker-driven, and it's so place-driven. I got that too from your memoir, which is called You Had Me at Pet-Nat, which follows you from being a waitress and journalist in Brooklyn to a writer and now a winemaker in South Australia. How has delving into this world affected you as a writer and how has being a winemaker affected you as a writer? How has this influenced you and your work?

Rachel: It has helped me so much in understanding the year-long cycle of winemaking. I mean, as a journalist living in a city, you're—generally, you're invited by some kind of regional association. They buy your flight. And you have the privilege of spending seven days in a region seeing a very selected group of winemakers, and you just don't get the full story. 

And I've really benefited from doing it myself and seeing other people throughout the year and what they struggle with and the challenges that they face and the choices they make and their attitudes and what—you see it as this delicious wine and this blend, whatever. And from their point of view, that wine started out as a disaster because kangaroos attacked that patch. The grapes were so hard to pick. And then they decided this. They decided that, and then finally got blended with this because they didn't know what to do. And then suddenly, it was good. 

And that backstory is really important in terms of what questions I ask people and how I choose to write about them. I think I write about winemaking less and less, and I write more and more about lifestyle and the choices people make, which influence, ultimately, their wines. So it's helped me immensely. It's a really good thing to be, to have your—even if you just had one hand involved in a project, I think it would really help writers definitely.

Alicia: Right, for sure.

The memoir is—in its detail about the wines you've drank over the years—is just stunning that there's so much detail. I was like, ‘Have you kept tasting notes and diaries over th