Wine as It's Meant to Be

The Coturri story begins in the village of Farneta, Italy, where Enrico Coturri immigrated to America in 1901 with $10 in his pocket. [^5^] He settled in San Francisco, worked as a barrel cooper, and helped rebuild the city after the 1906 earthquake. [^1^] Enrico taught his son Harry "Red" Coturri the Italian winemaking methods he had brought from the old country — techniques rooted in patience, intuition, and respect for the grape. [^5^] Red began making wine during Prohibition and the Great Depression, a tradition of necessity that became a philosophy of life.

In 1961, the Coturri family acquired land on Sonoma Mountain above Glen Ellen — a wild, rugged hillside in what would become the Valley of the Moon. [^9^] They planted their first two acres of Zinfandel in 1967, adding another five acres in 1975. [^2^] In 1979, Red founded Coturri Winery with his sons Tony and Phil, making them among the very first pioneers of what we now call the natural wine movement in California. [^2^] [^5^] The timing was radical: post-war industrial agriculture had made pesticides, fungicides, and synthetic fertilisers the norm, but the Coturris recognised that these chemicals were damaging the land and the people who worked it. [^2^]

Tony Coturri has been making wine since 1964, and from the very first vintage, the family refused to use RoundUp, pesticides, or sulfites. [^9^] "It's been 39 years of doing it," Tony told Sprudge in 2018, though that number has since doubled. [^9^] The early years were isolating. Tony was a young man on an island — more likely to find like-minded farmers in the nut and fruit industries than among fellow winemakers. [^9^] When he tried to talk about natural yeast and zero sulfites, wine shops were afraid the bottles would explode and "spew biological contamination." [^9^] Robert Parker, improbably, became one of his earliest champions, but the broader wine world took decades to catch up.

Today, Tony is the custodian of the Coturri legacy, teaching his son Nic the craft while remaining true to the methods of his grandfather Enrico and father Red. [^1^] The winery sits above Glen Ellen on Sonoma Mountain, surrounded by head-pruned, dry-farmed Zinfandel vines that have grown alongside Tony for more than 50 years. [^2^] It is a place where time moves slowly, where the wines are allowed to age for decades, and where the only ingredient that matters is the grape itself.

Tony Coturri is often described as a "reclusive star" of the natural wine world — a man who has been making the wines that today's natty bars pour before most of their drinkers were born. [^9^] His story is frequently skimmed over in the standard narratives of natural wine history: either the ancient Georgian origin story or the 1970s French vigneron revival. But the Coturri family was there from the beginning, planting and fermenting and refusing chemicals while the rest of California was embracing industrial agriculture. [^9^]

The early decades were a test of conviction. In the 1980s and 1990s, there was no natural wine scene — no Punchdown, no Ordinaire, no global community of like-minded drinkers. [^9^] Tony learned quickly that you couldn't walk into a shop and start talking about natural yeast and zero sulfites. "You had to just kind of talk about what everybody else talked about. 'Oh, the vineyard, and the clay…' and then when you finally made the sale, you said, 'Oh, by the way — an added benefit of this wine is there's no sulfites added and it's made with natural yeast.' People go, 'What?' It was like I was considered just out of my mind, radical." [^9^]

The Coturri wines are distinctive for their longevity. Because they are made without sulfites and with minimal intervention, they evolve in the bottle for decades — a master class in what can happen if you age a sans soufre wine with care. [^9^] They have the liveliness of natural wine with the ripeness of classic California, a combination that allows them to bridge worlds: appealing to both the committed natural wine drinker and the conventional wine lover who simply wants something honest and delicious. [^9^]

Today, Coturri is a bonafide star of the global natural wine community — listed on Raisin, the natural wine discovery app, and distributed through natural wine retailers from New York to Tokyo. [^5^] But the winery remains by appointment only, intimate and uncommercial, a place where Tony still makes wine the way his grandfather Enrico taught his father Red, the way Red taught Tony, and the way Tony is now teaching his son Nic. [^8^] The future of Coturri is rooted in the same principles that have defined it since 1963: just grapes, nothing more and nothing less.