When Brian Smith and his wife started Oyster River Winegrowers in 2007, they never expected to sell their natural wines outside of Maine.

Now, the Warren farm winery distributes from New York City to Wyoming, and just recently sent its first pallet to the Washington, D.C., area.

While global consumption of wine continues to decline, Oyster River is looking at ways to expand its operations to meet the demand from new markets for its low-intervention wines.

Why is this little Midcoast business with modest ambitions bucking a worldwide trend?

It has something to do with the right wine at the right time.

About 15 years ago, Smith started experimenting with a sparkling style that had built-in hipster appeal — cloudy, from yeast sediment left in the bottle before being topped with a crown cap to catch the gas, giving it a rustic, artisanal aesthetic.

He liked drinking the “half wine, half juice” right out of the tank, but he wasn’t sure it would sell, until he noticed bottles of the same style — pétillant naturel in French, and pét-nat for short — being imported from Europe.

From there, Morphos was born — the white first, then a rosé, both made with grapes from New York state — one of the earliest American pét-nats and what’s become Oyster River’s bestseller.

The naturally sparkling style with ancient roots has since surged in popularity, something Peter and Orenda Hale have witnessed at their Portland natural wine shop, Maine & Loire.

When they opened their business on Washington Avenue in 2014, a wine rep told them not to dedicate too much space to sparkling wines, that Maine ranked 50th in the country for its consumption, Peter Hale said. It was a disappointment to them, as sparkling wine drinkers.

Sure enough, they didn’t have many people asking for it in the first half their business’ life, Hale said. But now? It’s in the same conversation as rosé.

As for Morphos, which has been on their shelves since the beginning, between the two varieties, it’s the store’s all-time second or third bestselling wine, Hale said. For customers looking for something local — sometimes for Morphos specifically, having seen it at a restaurant or in a writeup — it’s often their introduction to pét-nats.

At $22 per bottle on Oyster River’s website, Morphos falls within the cost category of wines that have been the most stable, according to a recent report by beverage magazine SevenFifty Daily.

“We really hit the pét-nat style kind of at the right time at the right price,” Smith said.

Unlike Champagne that gets reserved for special occasions, pét-nats are everyday sparkling wines, typically with a lower ABV, that you can pair with a variety of foods, which bodes well for Morphos, even among current trends in the consumption of alcohol and other indulgences.

“When people start to drink less or spend less, they go back to their familiar favorites,” Smith said.

There’s no question Morphos has established a level of familiarity locally, if a second-cheapest sauvignon blanc drinker like me has taken notice.

It was sometime last year that I was at Oxbow Brewing in Portland — one of a few places in the city you can find Morphos on draft — and, not feeling like a beer, I ordered my first glass of the white, wary in light of my limited wine palate but willing to take the risk on something local.

It made a favorable enough impression that I started noticing it on restaurant wine lists and seeing the whimsical label, in green or pink, everywhere. In less than a quarter-mile stretch of Washington Avenue alone, you can find it at oyster bar The Shop, grocer Sissle & Daughters and Vietnamese restaurant Cong Tu Bot, along with Oxbow and Maine & Loire.

In the past month, it’s been restocked at Maine spots as far and wide as Frinklepod Farm in Arundel, the Farmington Food Co-op, The Castine Inn and Bangor health food market Natural Living Center, according to Maine distributor Devenish Wines.

Although its prevalence could hurt its hipster cred, I’m taking it as a sign that it’s joined the ranks of Maine’s high-quality, craft-made beverages known beyond our borders and here to stay.