First things first: What is natural wine?

“It’s a wine made with grapes grown with organic or biodynamic farming, then transformed in the winery without any additives—no chemical intervention. You can have physical intervention—cool it down, pump it from one place to another—but no chemical intervention. So…it’s fermented grape juice. And that’s it.”

No added sulfur, none?
New oak?
Micropore filtering?
How about irrigation in the vinyards?

Again?

Apparently. I guess it’s like vintage clothes. Time for a revival.

Can the winemaker wear any polyester? Is a cotton/poly blend ok?

Pascaline?

As little sulphur is required. Some choose none, but I’d drink those very young.
Most choose no new oak, want the wines to speak for themselves
Generally, no to filtration
Most would prefer dry farming

Look guys, get over the label “natural.” Pretend it’s called scrambunctious or something else instead. The idea of scrambunctuous wines is to minimize interventions and make a wine that expresses its terroir. Think of it as old-school, but clean wine making, and not always the latter.

Don’t get so worked up over the word “natural.” I think the methodologies and goals are admirable, even is the failure rate is kind of high.

I know that some apologists embrace flaws in their natural wines. I’m not one of them. Crap wine is crap, whatever it’s philosophy. But man I love the freshness and vitality of a good natural, err, scrambunctious wine.

Who got worked up?

You’ve seen these threads before, David.

It was a preemptive strike!

Reminder: Most of the contentiousness in those threads was from people who like that sort of wine and agree with that general winemaking philosophy. It was an objection to ignorant people spewing bullshit, being hypocritical and arbitrary… and fairly snobby and exclusionist.

But, we eventually got beyond that when it became the actual European winemakers were open minded and inclusive, unlike certain obnoxious loudmouth idiots who were waving flags for them.

Now more of the California winemakers who’ve been been following the “natural” traditional approach all along are starting to get recognition for it, instead of being dismissed out of hand because it somehow wasn’t possible that they existed.

History lesson: The natural wine movement started in France as a reaction to a standard practice of douching vineyards with toxins. Good thing. But some places never did that in the first place.

Natural wine is like obscenity: you can’t define it, but you know it when you see it.
And you probably wouldn’t preset it to people you like.

Anyone have a list of chemicals that are allowed to be used in Organic and/or Bio winemaking?

Should be about time for a thread on Corkage or restaurant pricing…

Pretty goddamn bad. Probably all the other Boards will line up against us. That’s alright – this thing’s gotta happen every five weeks or so – ten weeks – helps to get rid of the bad blood. Been ten weeks since the last one. You know you got to stop them at the beginning, like they should have stopped Hitler at Munich, They should never’ve let him get away with that. They were just asking for big trouble. You know, Mike, we was all proud of you – being a hero and all. Your father, too.

How bad is it going to be?

I have always found that scene interesting in that one guy is already dead and the bystanders do not appear remotely horrified, shocked or scared.

It’s an Italian restaurant in Brooklyn. They’re used to it.