PARIS — At the start of the Covid-19 pandemic, municipalities across the globe made agonizing decisions about which parts of life were truly indispensable. For obvious reasons, hospitals, pharmacies, and grocery stores remained fixtures of life. Perhaps more interesting were those less-obvious spaces, the ones that fell along cultural lines.
In New York, for instance, corner bodegas were permitted to keep their doors open. In parts of Belgium, fried potato stands kept their cooking oils hot. And in Paris, the caves à vin kept selling bottles, a small mercy in a European capital known for wine.
For Léa De Cazo, that latter decision would end up shifting the direction of her career.
The backdrop of De Cazo’s pandemic life had become a near-empty Parisian newsroom. She had spent nearly a decade working as a cultural journalist for French television, but the shutdown had reduced her work to combing through old archives, digitizing the past for consumption in a world standing still.
“I was by myself, completely alone,” she recalled, adding that stepping into an open wine shop after work became a bright spot of her weeks. “That was part of my social life, buying a bottle of wine at the place next door.”
And it was in this atmosphere — beyond extensive wine lists at bustling restaurants or hip wine bars — that De Cazo began a personal journey to understand wine on a deeper level. As she put it, she discovered the language to describe what she liked and didn’t like, and what terroir really meant.
“Weirdly, Covid helped me find my palate,” she said.
Today, she’s playing an outsized role helping other Parisians expand theirs. Her unexpected path into the wine industry led her to found ORJI, a small distribution company devoted mostly to hybrids, and bringing them into the French capital.
But her path to founding ORJI began with an unexpected detour into the wine world itself — one that started during the pandemic, when she joined a grape harvest in the south of France (at Lori Haon’s Domaine du Petit Oratoire). The work was physical, and rhythmic, and when the season ended, she moved back to Paris with the idea of working in wine, even if only part-time. In 2022, while working behind the counter at a city wine bar, De Cazo said a vigneron walked in to conduct a wine tasting for the team. The man behind the bottles was Emmanuel Bienvenue.
They opened more than a door into wine; they started a conversation about how a country defines authenticity.
Down the rabbit hole
Bienvenue’s wines were brought into Paris from a quiet stretch of the northern Loire Valley, where he works three hectares of vines at his Domaine Château Gaillard in Messemé. Trained as both an agronomic and oenological engineer, he spent 15 years in the wine industry before deciding to farm on his own terms. He calls himself a ‘gardener of nature,’ intent on preserving the vitality of his soils and producing wines that are shaped — not controlled — by human hands.
His project is at once traditional and experimental. He has revived long-forgotten French hybrids such as Plantet Noir, Villard Noir, and Oberlin, while also planting newer disease-resistant grapes like Muscaris and Souvignier Gris. Fermentations take place in clay amphorae rather than steel, a nod to ancient winemaking meant to let the wines breathe at their own pace. The result is a collection of quiet, unhurried wines that reflect both the biodiversity of the Loudunais landscape and Bienvenue’s belief that resilience, not pedigree, is what the future of viticulture will depend upon.
For De Cazo, having Bienvenue pour a taste of his Plantet Noir — a bottle named Sang Neuf — was a pivotal experience.
“I was like ‘Okay, this is the future,’” she said. “I was convinced by the taste. Emmanuel Bienvenue is so precise. He’s transforming wine. He’s working with organic and natural. It was the best way to discover hybrids because there were no flaws or mistakes in the wine.”
Shortly after that tasting, De Cazo experienced another pivotal moment in her young career in wine when, in 2023, Jura-based vigneron Valentin Morel published Un Autre Vin (Another Wine) to address the intersection of viticulture and ecological crisis.
In 2014, Morel took over his family’s six-hectare vineyard, converting the land to organic and biodynamic farming methods. In doing so, he began homing his attention on minimal-intervention winemaking, native yeasts, and low to no added sulphur.
As explained to me by Nathaniel Ratapu, the owner of a charming Parisian wine shop and activist bookstore called Rerenga Wines, Morel’s book bears particular significance in France because he was one of the first people to address the history of hybrids from a wine maker perspective rather than a purely technical one.
“He talked a lot about the history, and how in France there was this huge propaganda machine against hybrids,” Ratapu said, “and really he debunks a lot of the myths that still are in a lot of these winemakers heads about hybrids.”
Resurrecting cast-aside vines
Plantet Noir, the first hybrid that De Cazo tasted, is one of those half-European vinifera-half American rootstock grapes that’s largely slipped through history’s cracks. In the late nineteenth century, after phylloxera destroyed much of Europe’s vineyards, French breeders began crossing their traditional varieties with hardier American vines. The result? New hybrid varieties — among them Plantet Noir (also called Plantet 54-55) — that were hardy and resistant to disease.
At its peak, Plantet Noir was so common that it was practically part of the French landscape. Bred by the prolific hybridizer Albert Seibel, the grape type spread rapidly after phylloxera, valued for its vigor and frost resistance. By the late 1960s, more than 26,000 hectares were planted across the country — making it one of the more widely grown red hybrids in France. It thrived in the Loire, the Charente, and the Massif Central, poured as everyday table wine in both farmhouses and cafés.
But then came the regulatory purges. Hybrids were condemned by the government as rustic and un-French. By midcentury, most hybrid vines were ordered uprooted, and Plantet Noir survived only in scattered family plots and a few stubborn corners of the Loire. By the 1980s, it had nearly vanished from the record. What had once been France’s everyman grape — so ubiquitous that few bothered to name it — was suddenly unspeakable.
Yet its memory lingered. At a wine fair in May, while working a booth devoted entirely to hybrids, De Cazo met a young visitor who told her a story that stayed with her. He had poured his grandfather a glass of Plantet Noir, and the older man, after a single sip, recognized something he hadn’t tasted in decades.
“He was like, ‘Ah! This tastes like some of the wine I drank when I was younger,’” she recalled.
The reaction was quietly profound, a moment of nostalgia and proof that the flavor of a forgotten grape could reach across generations.
That same sense of rediscovery surfaced again, months later, during a tasting organized by Raisin App. De Cazo had brought along a bottle of Couderc Noir — a dense, dark hybrid red from winemaker Paul Barlet in the Ardèche.
“To me it was the most rustic and weird wine of the selection, not trendy at all,” she said, describing it as almost black in color and clocking in at 14% alcohol. “This red wine conquered the heart of everybody. They were saying, ‘My dad or granddad is going to love it!’ And I’ve sold all of them.”
Back in Paris, De Cazo began meeting growers who, like her, were rethinking the story. One of them, Geoffrey Estienne, told her bluntly: “We need people in Paris to sell hybrids and to represent our wine communities who make hybrids.”
So she’s made just that her mission.
It was in 2023 that De Cazo founded ORJI. And then she quickly upped the ante, hosting the city’s first all-hybrid wine fair in June 2024 at L’Orillon Bar in the Belleville area.
“It was a total success,” she said. “We had winemakers, wine shop workers, and journalists there. I think the public is completely ready.”
Hybrids across the continent
Europe’s warming climate and rising disease pressures are forcing growers to rethink the centuries-old covenant between grape and place.
To outsiders, it might seem like a niche revival. But the turn toward hybrids is quietly reshaping Europe’s wine map. In Austria, the estate Gut Oggau has begun planting new fungus-resistant varieties and bottling a hybrid cuvée called Eugenie, describing the move as “viticulture fit for the future.” In Germany, PIWI grapes — short for pilzwiderstandsfähig, or fungus-resistant — are entering mainstream production. In Italy, some have abandoned traditional vitis vinifera vines altogether, arguing that the future lies in genetic diversity, not purity.
“We will not grow European varieties again,” the Austrian winegrowers at Ploder Rosenberg told me.
France, with so much of its wine history entwined with the story of vitis vinifera-based fine wines, has been slower to adapt. Hybrid varieties still occupy an ambiguous place in regulations and the average wine drinker’s psyche. For De Cazo, the leap into hybrid wines is an extension of the hip natural wine movement that’s swept through wine culture during the last decade.
“If natural wine is low-intervention in the cellar, hybrids are low-intervention in the vineyard,” she said.
Hybrids varieties require far fewer chemical sprays in the vineyard than their vinifera counterparts, sparing both soil and laborers from the burden of repeated treatments. That alone carries a lot of weight in a place like France, De Cazo explained.
“We talk about ecology in France,” she said, “but we rarely connect it to how we actually live.”
But that conversation is bubbling up more and more. Not long after Valentin Morel published his book, he also became one of the initial members of a new wine association in France, Vitis Bastardus Liberata. It was started in 2024, and represents more than 150 winegrowers growing more than 50 different cultivated varieties of grapes. The group’s stated goal is to defend and promote the use in viticulture of resistant grape varieties. Many of the members have participated in a young new wine salon — also started in 2024 — that focuses solely on hybrid wines.
“I didn’t go this year, but I went last year for the first edition,” Ratapu said. “They got Deidre Heekin from La Garagista to come, and Alice Feiring was there. I think they anticipated 50 people, but instead they had over 500.”
For Ratapu, one of the interesting takeaways was the number of people in attendance who were lowkey growing hybrids already.
“I think that until recently a lot of them haven’t wanted to necessarily signal it so much because of the stigmas that are still there,” he said. “You got a lot of people who were sort of under the radar, even within natural wine circles, but who had just been working with hybrids for the last 20-30 years.”
A bold vision
A mix of pragmatism and poetry has made De Cazo something of a translator between worlds: between natural wine and hybrid growers, between old appellation law and new ecological reality. She recently left hospitality to focus on ORJI full time, sourcing bottles from small producers.
In some ways, her work introduces Paris as a fascinating backdrop, against which an entrenched wine culture can reexamine itself — an opportunity to question old hierarchies of taste, to reconsider what integrity demands in a changing climate, and to imagine whether the future of French wine might grow from the very vines it once rejected.
The natural wine movement once redefined authenticity by asking what should happen in the cellar; hybrids extend that question back to the soil itself.
A century ago, hybrids saved Europe’s vineyards from a pest that nearly destroyed them. Today, they may be saving them from a rapidly-changing climate. And in a city that once defined wine by exclusion, De Cazo is helping to pave a future on the opposite impulse: inclusion, resilience, and renewal. Her work suggests that what France once rejected as foreign might turn out to be, once again, its most native thing of all.