Following the 2007–08 recession, Los Angeles Times food critic Jonathan Gold declared that 2009 had been a year of changing tastes. High-profile restaurants continued to open on the Westside, but much like what we’ve seen throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, the rest of L.A.’s dining scene was undergoing a major shift. “While nobody was paying attention, food quietly assumed the place in youth culture that used to be occupied by rock ’n’ roll,” Gold wrote, describing this newly formed food scene as “individual, fierce and intensely political, communal yet congenial to aesthetic extremes.” No one had their finger more firmly on the pulse of L.A. food than the late critic, but in the dozen years since, we’ve had yet to discuss how 2009 was also the year of changing tastes in wine.
In the mid-2000s, you went to one of two wine bars in Los Angeles: A.O.C. in Beverly Hills or Lou in Hollywood. Jill Bernheimer was drawn to the latter, which reminded her of the wine bars she’d visited in Paris, where one could get a humble bite of cheese and charcuterie, thoughtful home-cooked meals, and a list of lesser-known wines. The wines Bernheimer drank on her European travels left such an imprint that she abandoned her decade-long career as an independent film producer to pursue a wine merchant’s life. She started a blog and began selling wine to friends, family, and readers. The audience, she says, “grew unintentionally from there,” and in 2009, she opened Domaine LA in Hollywood—one of the city’s first natural wine shops.
Natural wines were a new
