Following all the debates about natural wines’ ability to age, I organised a tasting with friends (of which 3 MWs) the purpose of which was to show that great natural wines age beautifully.
I brought 9 bottles from my cellar to the Portland restaurant in London:
Ganevat Vignes de Mon Pere 2002, biodynamic, no sulfites
Richard Leroy Noels de Montbenault 2012, biodynamic, no sulfites
Richard Leroy Noels de Montbenault 2013, biodynamic, no sulfites
Anglore Tavel Vintage, 2012, bio, less than 1g/hl sulfites
Claire Naudin, Hautes Cotes de Nuits Viola Odorata 2012, bio, 1g sulfites/hl at bottling
Frederic Cossard, Nuits Saint Georges 1er Cru Les Argillieres 1999, bio, no sulfites
Lapierre, Morgon 2005 (Cuvee Sans Souffre), bio, no sulfites
Lapierre, MMV (that’s the special Cuvee of 2005), bio, 3g sulfites/hl at bottling
Chateau le Puy, Cotes de Francs, Cuvee Barthelemy 1998 (biodynamic, no sulfites)
All were very fresh and clean. Only faulty wine was the 2002 Ganevat (corked). Tasting notes should appear soon on Jancis’ website.
The wine of the evening, for me, was the 2005 Morgon Sans Souffre. Ruby red, pinot like, very long and persistent yet so subtle. Very pure. It’s not made to impress but capture the essence of what I look for in a wine. Magical juice. The l’Anglore was straight up delicious as was the Cossard and Naudin (whole bunches made it very fragrant).
Many of the wines actually took a while to open up: the Lapierre MMV needed a good 40 minutes to show its stuff, the Leroy 2013 was initially very reductive (to avoid oxidation) and took 30mins to open up.
Marcel Lapierre is arguably the most influential winemaker of the last 30 years and yet his wines can no longer be bought anywhere (try on wine-searcher… he died in 2010 so that vintage and beyond are made by his 2 children).
I get as annoyed as anyone at being told that a faulty wine is “what natural wine is meant to taste like” by snotty Brooklyn sommeliers: for them, the medium is the message. But the producers we tasted last night don’t particularly care about being called natural, they want to make great wines that speak to them in a way that makes sense to them. The results are absolutely thrilling and built to last…
ITB (full disclosure - I sell a bit of Claire Naudin’s wines)
I think we need to ease off the kids in Brooklyn. I also disagree that none of these producers care about being called natural. Eric Pfifferling of l’Anglore in particular is a vanguard natural wine producer.
That being said, I totally agree with you that apex producers make great wines, natural or not. One of the interesting things for me over the last few years has been re-discovering natural wines. Wines that I had written off a decade or more ago because of too many flaws were now gorgeous. “Natural” winemaking is hard and not everyone is up to the task. Your list is an excellent one if someone wants to see what natural wines are all about but has only seen the old men yelling at clouds here or the “think” pieces in the media. One note is that you need to be really careful who you buy these wines from and how you buy them. If you go to wine-searcher, find the lowest price and ship them all over the US you are much less likely to have a good experience.
Natural wine jumped the shark when it became all about sulfur. It didn’t used to be that way!
Some wines age fine without sulfur, some don’t, and I’m not aware of any way of telling which is which on release just by tasting. I am getting a bit tired of pouring once-great wines down the sink, so I’m basically done gambling in that category. It’s also true that there are some beautiful things that can be done sans sulfur that seemingly can’t be done with it, which is great so long as it’s something you can enjoy without taking chances on cellar time. The Claire Naudin wines are a good example. I adore the flower labels on release even more than her higher-end stuff, but for my palate the year or two after release is as good as they get, no point waiting.
Pretty much all of them! It just wasn’t the thing people were fixated on. I think the main issue is that the people who first developed and championed these wines were trying to distinguish themselves from overly processed/treated wines - they weren’t trying to out-natural each other. So the focus was on eliminating things like pesticides from the vineyard and designer yeasts, enzymes, and (later) concentrating machines and other high-tech thingamajigs from the winery. Now that all of that stuff is taken as a given, it sort of prompted the question, “How much further can we go?”
There is a half-way decent article on NattyWine in the last or next to last issue of New Yorker.
It starts off with Gideon Beinstock, amusingly mentions Tony Coturri a couple of times, and then bounces around from there, so I am being critical when I say it is only half-way decent.
To my mind, only the top four wines on the list are Natties, but as already mentioned, everyone has a different definition or idea as to what a natural wine even is.
To mine, just because a wine gets elevage without sulfur does not a natty make. To mine, just because it meets biodynamic standards (who’s? of course) does not make it a natural wine.
To my admittedly muddled brain, “natural” wine is defined as much by style as by the manner in which it is produced.
I’m not sure how any legitimate classification of natural wine producers could exclude Lapierre. It seems similar to arguing that Black Sabbath doesn’t belong on a list of heavy metal bands.
This is a fantastic discussion - thanks for the tasting notes. And yep, it’s too bad that these wines get put into the same discussion as wines that do not live up to the ‘hype’ at all.
Just as with any ‘category’ of wine, buyers need to be wary. You can’t paint a wide swath over any category - even (egads) Burgundy - and hit the bullseye each and every time.
Now there is a concept to ponder. Ironic too. That is the nature of the discussion: that there is no legitimate classification and never will be. Nor is one possible.
I bent over backwards to emphasize that what I said was my own opinion and nothing more.
If you will take my magic carpet ride for just a moment, as a style, Lapierre is structured much like a conventional Morgon. If no one told you, you would not likely suddenly say, “ya know, I bet this is one of them done dair natural wines everyone in tarnation is jabbering on about”.