Shopping for wine online is nothing new. There are ample existing subscription services that deliver selected bottles to your doorstep—and plenty that specialize in natural wine, too. But more often than not, when you sign up for a wine club, you receive the same selection of wines as every other customer each month. Enter The Waves: a new online natural wine service that promises a more personalized, highly curated experience. “People are always giving the same packages in other subscriptions because when you’re working with conventional wine, you can scale quantities pretty dramatically,” explains Billy Smith, a former sommelier at Brooklyn’s pioneering natural wine bar The Four Horsemen and now the chief wine officer at The Waves.
For The Waves, he and the celebrated winemaker and sommelier Rajat Parr instead curate a global library of wines made by producers they know and respect, all of whom make wines with organically farmed grapes and no synthetic chemical additives. With a subscription, you can browse bottles on The Waves’ website, read about them, and ultimately, choose which wines you want to drop into your box. (You can also have The Waves make a selection for you if you prefer.)
Beyond its unique approach to curating its offering, The Waves also stands apart from other e-commerce wine platforms by providing a shopping experience that’s simultaneously educational and fun. On their website, wines are organized not by grape varietals or producers, but by lifestyle—empowering subscribers to find wines that are suited to their needs instead of based on what they already know. “The intent is to make wine super easy and serviceable by relating it back to ‘Are you looking for the perfect wine to host a dinner party? Are you looking for the perfect poolside wine? Are you looking for a wine you just want to curl up on the couch with?’” says Andy Comer, The Waves’ co-founder and president.
You can search by filters such as “Show Up in Style” or “Unplug Chill” and each wine’s profile contains “vibe” indicators, like “dance-floor drinker,” “foolproof with food,” and “street cred.” Furthermore, the actual wine descriptions are “a little irreverent and a little cheeky,” says Smith, meant to be an antidote to the boring and oftentimes pretentious traditional wine speak around food pairings and tasting notes. For example, they describe one of their go-to wines for this summer, a rosé made by Milan Nestarec in the Czech Republic, as “Capri Sun for the big kids’ table” and a splurge-y bottle of French Trousseau from winemaker Stephanie Trousseau as “a ballerina, a glowing paper lantern, a field of violets.”
Now that summer is here, Smith and Parr gave us the scoop on the wines they’re excited to drink in the coming months—by the pool, during apéro hour, with dinner al fresco, and for barbecues.
Poolside Wines
“It’s always nice to have bubbles, poolside, on ice,” says Smith. He loves ¡Claro Que Sí!, a sparkling Riesling produced in New York’s Finger Lakes region by a young couple who makes wines under the label Barbichette. It’s low in ABV, at only 10.8%, and “goes down really easy.”
“Something a little more fun and indulgent,” says Smith, would be a split (read: an individually-sized, 375ml bottle) of Champagne from Laherte Freres. “We’ve got a little split of delicious grower’s Champagne tucked into the assortment so that people can toss it in for a little self-care treat.” All of the Champagne that The Waves carries is made at small Champagne houses in France by winemakers who also grow their own grapes—known as “grower Champagne”—which is very rare.
Apéro Hour
“A lot of natural wines, since they re not adding any sulfur, sometimes have a little bit of residual carbon dioxide in the wine, which is what gives it that little spritz,” explains Smith. “During apéro hour anything that’s low-ABV with a little spritz will basically replace your Aperol spritz or Campari spritz.” For this, they recommend a refreshing Riesling made by a young German winemaker named Christine Pieroth, called Piri Naturel.
Richard Stávek’s Divý Ryšák rosé, a co-ferment of five different grapes made in the Czech Republic, is another go-to for apéro hour. “This is salty strawberries, kind of like a strawberry margarita with a little bit of an herbaceous quality to it,” Smith says. Since the idea is to not to get drunk, but “to whet the whistle before you have a little bit of food,” this bottle is also low-ABV, at 11%.
Dinner al Fresco
For something special to drink with dinner on a warm night outside, Parr loves Trousseau Singulier, a red made by Stéphane Tissot in Jura, France, deemed “white tablecloth-worthy” on The Waves’ website. “Trousseau is a varietal that is structurally similar to Pinot Noir, slightly more rock and roll, with slightly more umami in it,” he says. The 2020 vintage they carry is “fairly round and delicious, very low-tannins, soft, with crunchy red fruits on the nose.”
The Trousseau Singulier can be found in the “Rare Bottle Room” section of The Waves website, where “rarer, more highly allocated, super small production wines that are really special, but are also offered at really competitive prices” can be found, according to Comer.
For Barbecues
“When I go to a barbecue, I always like to bring bigger bottles,” says Smith. He recommends a series of one-liter bottles—“mini magnums”—from Milan Nestarec, also out of the Czech Republic, in Růž (rosé), OKR (orange), and Nach (red). The latter is light, fresh, high in acid, and best served cold, while the rosé is super juicy, and the orange has some spicier notes.