Buvons

Depending on where you find yourself in LA, and what time of day it is, getting to Long Beach can be a breezy 30-ish-minute drive or a brutal, hour-plus slog. Even the worst of Southern California’s notorious traffic is a small price to pay, though, for a visit to Buvons, a wine bar and retail shop tucked away on a quiet stretch of Long Beach’s trendy Zaferia district.

The business is the brainchild of Alicia Kemper, a longtime fixture in LA’s wine scene who made the move south in the midst of the city’s pandemic lockdowns, with the intention of setting up a neighbourhood wine shop in an emerging market. The store opened in 2022, and though the early days were quiet, the business quickly evolved into something far beyond Kemper’s initial vision. Buvons is still identifiably a retail shop, of course, but it’s also become a wine bar, an events space, a classroom and a community hub all rolled into one. On a single weekend, Buvons might play host to a winemaker from Champagne pouring their latest releases, offer an afternoon lobster roll pop-up on their expansive back patio, hold a wine class on hybrid grape varieties and finish strong with a local DJ spinning dub reggae 45s.

Apart from the aforementioned chef pop-ups, food offerings at Buvons are generally pretty slim – the menu is limited to charcuterie and cheese, along with some light accompanying snacks and a small selection of tinned fish. It’s maybe not enough for a full dinner, but more than sufficient to accompany a few bottles of wine, which is the reason you come to Buvons in the first place.

If artisanal, low-intervention European wines are your thing, there really aren’t many better spots to get it in all of California than Buvons. Kemper’s taste in wine is exceptional, and though her efforts and passions are firmly anchored in the natural wine movement (such as it is), her approach is zero BS when it comes to flawed wine or the kind of form-over-flavour dogmatics that lurk in the dark corners of the term ‘natural wine.’ The formula is simple, really: Kemper and her team support folks who farm responsibly and produce wines that reflect both their origin and the values that went into making them.

As the shop’s name would suggest, the lineup at Buvons is predominantly French, though the rest of Europe gets plenty of play as well, as do the US and points further afield. Champagne is a particular strength – Kemper has worked harvest for the last several years chez Jacques Lassaigne, and her selection is full of exciting new(ish) talents she’s discovered while in the region. Options are plentiful from Burgundy and the Loire as well, as one might expect, but in truth, there are great options from practically every region of France, and several beyond its borders.