After learning that wine sales are down and losing out to a younger audience who are turning to beer, Napa’s winemaker, Patrick Rue, had an idea. 

Rue runs Erosion Wine Co.in Napa Valley. He’s putting wine in cans, ignoring vintages, fermenting with genetically modified yeast and adding uncommon ingredients to wine like cherries, hops and cocoa nibs. It’s a plan he took from the 12 years he spent running his Southern California brewery, the Bruery.

Yet the learning curve from beer to wine for Rue has been steep, and as he’s gotten used to the particularities of Napa’s wine landscape, he’s had to adjust some of his radical, beer-inspired experiments. After three years of packaging his wines exclusively in cans, 750ml crowlers and kegs, for example, Rue recently started putting most of his wines in traditional bottles, having learned that customers are still reluctant to spring for an expensive canned wine.

“I figured I could bring my weirdness to wine and see how that works,” says Rue, who started Erosion in downtown St. Helena in 2019. (In May, Rue also became a partner in Santa Rosa’s Moonlight Brewing, buying the 50% stake previously owned by Heineken.)

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