From Raw Denim to Natural Wine

The number of celebrities and fashion designers making wine in recent years has surged. So when those in New York’s natural wine world learned that Jean Touitou, the French founder of the minimalist clothing company A.P.C., was bringing 60 bottles of Jean Touitou Banibano to Brooklyn’s Marlow & Sons on Halloween, eyebrows were raised.

But this isn’t Jon Bon Jovi’s Hamptons Water Rosé. Nor is it a label drawn by Donatella Versace’s team and slapped on a bottle. As with Mr. Touitou’s founding of Atélier de Production et de Création in Paris in 1986, this wine comes from a nose-thumbing renegade who has made it his lifelong personal mission to create what he thinks is missing in the world: simple, yet well-made, things.

Mr. Touitou, 72, does not consider himself a celebrity.

“I mean, when I go to a fashion show, no paparazzi knows who I am,” he said in a recent interview, in English, at the Mercer Hotel in Lower Manhattan. “In that area, I succeeded.”

Nor does he consider himself a winemaker. He sees what he’s doing with Jean Touitou Banibano as different.

“There’s a few words of today’s cultural vocabulary I simply do not understand,” he said. “To me, a celebrity should be a very gifted cultural thinker.

“But a celebrity doing nothing but being a celebrity?”

He laughed.

As for bankable names who put their monikers on a supplier’s bottle, he continued, “That’s not a journey. It’s a phone call between two great agents, and the agent knows a friend in the South of France.”