“I wish I had about two more wine sections,” Peter Rizzo says, pausing in front of white oak shelves displaying orange wines (or, skin-contact whites) from Abruzzo, Italy, and Alsace, France. When Peter merged his eight-year-old shop, Natural Wines Naples, with Nat Nat, the new wine bar he opened in September with the sustainability-focused, plant-forward Café Nutrients’ chef-owner, Ming Yee, he condensed his collection by about 20 percent. “Here, our cellar is on the shelf,” Peter says of the nearly 300 labels lining the print-adorned, creamy walls. New bottles arrive daily, and some—like Alice Bouvot’s Domaine de l’Octavin’s ripe, tropical fruit-flush Muscat from France’s under-the-radar Jura region—sell quickly.
Peter and Ming call their establishment a neo-bistro—a model popularized in Paris over the last two decades. The relaxed, pared-back dining experience departs from the traditional French bistro, with a heightened focus on innovative and more international flavors, designed to let simple but bright, seasonal ingredients shine. But, you could just as easily call Nat Nat a cave à vin, an equally charming term developed by the French to describe a wine-centric hideaway, where no one’s focused on turning tables quickly, and you can sit and sip what you’ve selected off the shelf over small bites and linger with friends. In Los Angeles and New York, you don’t have to go far to find such inviting locales, but the ideas were foreign to Naples until Nat Nat arrived.
Peter was spreading the natural wine gospel in the region for eight years before partnering with Ming. “I’m a truth-seeker, and [natural wines] are the purest, most authentic expressions of wine on the planet,” Peter says. There is no formal certification agency to stand behind the validity of natural wine brands, and there are plenty of fakes out there, so it’s up to the consumer to know the right questions to ask—or the industry veteran, like Peter, who has 33 years under his belt, to guide your way. The unfettered category is loosely defined as wines that have nothing added or taken away (organically farmed, no additives or cellar interventions)—the bottles represent a return to winemaking at its purest, with the vines doing the work instead of mass-production technologies.
Now, with Ming, Peter has a partner-in-wine. “We’re an idealist establishment. We’re standing for something,” Peter says, his passion for natural wine pouring out in poetic waves. “As transparent expressions of the natural world, they are much more revelatory and satisfying to me than man-made constructs of wine.” In the natural wine world, nothing feels rehearsed or too curated—similar to Nat Nat’s style.
Ming and Peter began their working relationship as customers at each other’s spots. Ming was drawn to natural wine’s inherent sustainability, which dovetails with his eco-conscious ethos. After running Café Nutrients for six years (and becoming a father along the way), Ming was ready for a shift. Merging their two businesses last fall was “divine alignment,” Ming says. “There are few ways to support and promote awareness of conscious consumption. What Peter and I are doing is one of them.”
The space is inviting, casual—like the neighborhood wine bar you see in TV series and long to live next door to. Peter brought his custom-made white oak shelves from Natural Wines Naples, and Ming enlisted friend Carlos Castro, owner of Bonita Springs’ Black Mangrove Woodworks, to craft color-matched bamboo tables, benches and a bar for the open kitchen. The weekly dinner menu of a half-dozen shareable small plates is dictated by the local farm-fresh ingredients Ming can source, like lion’s mane mushrooms from Naples’ Care2Grow (Ming shreds and slow-cooks the ’shrooms in grass-fed butter) or Earth Giving Medicinals’ tomatoes (the juicy gems are good for sauce bases and studding salads with pops of freshness). Ming’s flavors evolved from his Café Nutrients plant-based restaurant, which he launched as a stall at the Third Street South Farmer’s Market in 2016 before branching out into a locally loved brick-and-mortar the following year. At Nat Nat, the multigenerational chef mirrors the natural wine movement in the kitchen through healthy, clean cuisine influenced by the Mediterranean with hints of northern Italy. “We’re ingredient-focused—we want to put quality on the table,” he says. Along the bottom, the small menu of tapas-style dishes—which always includes a salad, a charcuterie board and an entrée like Burgundy beef stew—spotlights the farms where he sourced produce.
On the charcuterie board, alongside staples like Parmigiano Reggiano and prosciutto di Parma from Food and Thought, Ming slices radishes in half and bathes them in white vinegar, olive oil and butcher salt. “It’s simple but showcases the radishes in a new way,” Ming says. The dish riffs on the tuber’s typical tartness with a pop of simple salinity. Housemade focaccia, made with Ming’s sourdough starter, is one of Nat Nat’s specialties for the casual lunch menu. The bread is often baked with sage, oregano or basil Ming snips from the row of potted plants in terracotta vessels outside the restaurant. Nightly by-the-glass wines range from an Austrian grüner veltliner to a rosado of indigenous varietal Listán Negro from the Canary Islands. “We want people to experience a spectrum of natural wine, so it’s often grapes people have never heard of,” Peter says. His selection is heavy on French and Italian wines and dips into Portugal, Spain and Austria.
While many of the wines fit into what Peter defines as a “classic zone” for being recognizable examples from famous wine regions, he likes to front others that are wilder and “beautifully expressive without going off the hinge”—nothing too volatile or acidic. A proud proponent of Burgundy (“Burgundy is the most fragmented, complex and viscerally stimulating vineyard in the world,” Peter says.), Nat Nat offers a reserve list of bottles from prestigious appellations like Gevrey-Chambertin and Vosne-Romanée. “The best Burgundies are natural. Most of the finest producers farm and make their wines with full respect for natural principles and practices,” Peter adds.
Look up from your seat in the intimately sized establishment, and you’ll see Peter’s photography from his many trips to Burgundy lining the walls. “In Florida, we may as well have been Alaska when we started [selling natural wine] eight years ago, in terms of availability,” Peter says. “We don’t have all the wines you may find in London, Paris or Montreal, but we have enough of a critical mass to replicate the spirit.” In Naples, that spirit takes the form of a place you’ll want to linger.
Peter Rizzo and Ming Yee
