Book Review: You Had Me at Pet Nat: A Natural Wine-soaked Memoir by Rachel Signer

Around chapter 6 of You Had Me at Pet Nat, I began to dream of France. Funny, mashed-up memories of work and personal treks to Paris, the Loire Valley, Chablis, but with other bits and pieces that didn’t fit with my own past, which I began to realize were the rich details of the many territories, both physical and emotional, traversed in Rachel Signer’s honest and lovely memoir. It soaks in like that, indelibly into the crevasses of your mind like red wine skins staining the swirly patterns of your fingertips, becoming something at once yours and familiar, and yet different from what you know to be you.

Which is, in a way, the gist of her tale: Allowing herself to crush, bleed, and ferment into an adult life that the author certainly didn’t expect or envision, and in fact rails against accepting in lieu of her younger self’s dream to live and write in Paris. It’s a personal, bare tale of figuring out how to be your true self in the world. Of how to live an authentic, satisfying life doing good, meaningful work, and making the hard choices of where and with whom to do it all, which can oftentimes be a painful and difficult place to get to, if you’re lucky enough to get there. She does, and the jet-lagged, wine-drenched ride she takes you on is at once fun and funny; awkward and painful; introspective and thoroughly inspiring.

Rachel Signer pouring wine photo credit Lewis Potter

Signer is at her best when she allows herself to be at once lost and minutely focused on what she’s so passionate about: wine and the places from which it hails. Her descriptions, thorough, historical, and yet full of wonder, bring you there to feel the crunch of dried dirt under your shoes among the gnarly bush trained vines of Sardinia or the cool, breezy climes of the Adelaide Hills, or even the roar of the city rushing around her as she bikes to and from her job at the wine shop Uva in Williamsburg. In these sections, she pulls you into her world for a generous pour of armchair travel, but also for gentle but accurate lessons in wine. She’s good at explaining things; of not assuming her reader knows all that she does, and the pains she takes to do that strikes just the right balance of informing without being overbearing; of giving names without name-dropping.

Yes, it’s also in part about natural wine. Lots and lots and lots of natural wine. The term is mentioned 147 times in 263 pages. Which is, just to get this out of the way, the one thing that can come off a little forced on these pages (ironic in the unforced, unmussed-with world of natural wine, a juice-making methodology that eschews additives, preservatives, and general winemaking tricks used to smooth, soften, zestify, or booze-up a bottling). There are moments of self-consciousness that give an earthy whiff of propaganda, or, more likely, places where Signer, a new winemaker herself, feels compelled to beat the drum of the natural wine ethos. The constancy of this can come off a bit cultish, or maybe like SEO tracking points. Like the trek with an old friend who drives Signer back home to D.C. to stow some personal belongings at her mom’s house: “I’d lost touch with many of my New York friends… But Megan and I had shared many bottles of natural wine together over the course of our friendship.” Is her friend’s willingness to drive 200-plus miles only the result of sharing many bottles of natural wine? Is the meaning in her relationship credited to unadulterated fermented grapes? Probably not. Signer is much more interesting than the wines she chooses to consume.

Rachel Signer with Pipette Magazine photo credit Zachary Crowther

But it is indeed the thing that set her on a path—to an ethos in wine and responsibility as a human being on the planet, to a clear focus and growing confidence in her writing and winemaking, and to the man who would become her partner in life, the winemaker Anton Von Klopper of Lucy Margaux, one of Australia’s home-grown heroes of the natural-wine movement there. When we meet Signer—editor and publisher of the wine magazine, Pipette, and founder and winemaker of the micro-production label, Persephone Wines—she is a scrappy, slightly lost woman in her 20s, living in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. Armed with a post-graduate degree in Anthropology from the New School for Social Research, she waits tables at a trendy restaurant (where making the callow request of ketchup for a burger earns a collective scornful staff eye roll), and looking for love in all the wrong places. But while she fumbles and stumbles with her own self-doubt, manifesting in awkward hook-ups with douche-y, undeserving dolts (“… an affinity for natural wine could be an unreliable indicator of whether a lover had potential as a partner…”), a life-altering spark grows in her mind and on her palate after tasting a glass of Pieges a Filles, a pretty, pink gamay-based pet nat (one of the flag-bearer styles of wine in the unadulterated movement) from Les Capriades in the Loire Valley. Which, back in 2012 when the story begins, was still pretty cutting-edge stuff to be drawn to, but Signer was trusting her good instincts. Today, natural wines aren’t seen so much as left-field outliers, or certainly not to the extent they were back then and before that, and have far more representation and celebration in the wine community at large, even in a world where the lion’s share of winemaking and consumption of it still lies in the conventional realm.

“Real wine was about status and wealth,” writes Signer of the hit-parade bottles that dominate the pages of many wine publications and lists, “that’s what the old guard, who controlled the media, stood for.” So instead, Signer sets out to write about the stuff she loves, pitching stories and carving out a nascent niche for herself as a freelance wine writer, often using her training in anthropology to find deeper insight to her chosen topic. Early success gives her the courage to ditch her life in New York and make a bold move to Paris and earns her a seat on what would be a fateful press trip to the country of Georgia, considered the ancestral home of natural wine. It’s here she meets Klopper (aka, Wildman), a man from the other side of the world toward whom she feels intensely drawn, but who her rational brain keeps reminding her is not a viable love or partner option.

But if You Had Me at Pet Nat demonstrates anything, it’s that following your instincts and drowning out the negative demon voices in your head can sometimes be the best GPS on the planet, and that being present in your life is always the best vintage. Signer zigs and zags and pushes and pulls; she teeters and falls and gets back up. She questions and questions and questions her decisions. And even in moments when her indecisiveness threatens to become an unruly tangle from which she will not be freed (and you find yourself feeling affectionately annoyed with her, the way you would a sibling or a good friend who can’t see the beautiful forest for the trees), the juicy heartbeat of this book pounds louder with every page. It’s not really about the wine, it’s not really about the guy; it’s about a woman finding her unique path and trusting her own gravitational pull upon it. It’s a story that makes you thirsty—for the wines, she lovingly describes, for happy endings, and maybe even to find your own version of that, too.