Right!
I think being a great winemaker is step one. Then worry about the rest.
I actually drink a larger than I ever realized percentage of natural wines at home, but they are all clean, well made wines.
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i’ve come to the realization that “natural wine” is an aesthetic - for makers, buyers, wine bars, journalists, etc. I use the quotes here literally because it has very little - if at all - to do with what’s in the bottle. in fact, the wine itself is tertiary at best behind the “what does this feel like” aspect of the movement; the stories of the winemakers, and all the rest.
so trying to define what makes a wine natural is inherently useless because (a) no one will actually do it and, more important, (b) no one really cares. it’s not at all the point. is this that far off from things like collecting vinyl in a world dominated by streaming?
and i don’t really think this is bad. in fact, the net effect is quite great for the wine market - brings in new fans that didn’t feel like they could belong. it’s all pretty inevitable coming from the dominant paradigm of gatekeeping, male-dominated, points, etc., reality, which is really a drag most of the time. so much of wine culture is ponderous.
of course, as with most movements that stem as a revolt from the status quo, it too has evolved its own in-group culture. ironically, the natural wine movement now exhibits so many of the attributes they mean to reject.
this alice piece seems like a “nature is healing” moment, maybe. it was reasonable to expect the pendulum to swing where it did, but with time, it should settle.
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“There’s not really enough good natural wine around.”
That was the point of the old debates. The people who were challenging the term and the arbitrary, situational, hypocritical and exclusionary aspects of the movement were noting that by any fair standards, there were many many times the number, with the vast majority held on the outside. Discussions flared with aggressive insults from the elitists. One jackass wrote “I don’t think it’s even possible to make natural wines in California” at a time so many French “natural” wines were coming from vineyards bathed in toxins, and the “natural” started in the winery. If you’re literally killing the soil biome, that’s natural? French natural winemakers were arguing the toxins were necessary to get a crop. At some point Alice had a revelation that there were, in fact, two natural winemakers in California (at a time, judging by the low intervention practices of those two (then three) as her metric, there were hundreds.
Here, she cites a natural winemaker who had to add yeast to save a vintage. The only shocking thing there is she heard about it. Plenty who’ve dug themselves into the no intervention camp have had to act to save a wine. The norm is they don’t disclose that fact to their consumers. Intuitively, I’d say that’s maybe one in eight wines, if they know what they’re doing and putting out non-flawed wines. In other words, about the same as a self-proclaimed low intervention winemaker, who will disclose when they had to do something.
This is a good take and I largely agree.
Natural wine is prob a healthy niche. The problem for me is that 97 natural btls of 100 don’t do it for me. The “natural” wines I love (Foillard if it even qualifies; some Ganevat) don’t really fit the paradigm.
“But ask most natural wine fans to define the movement with just one characteristic, and they’ll focus on sulfur.”
This is the source of the problem. The term “natural wine” had been used quite swimmingly for a long time before a few culprits with a beef about sulfur decided to appropriate it. The result was a lot of nasty wine and a lot of nasty threads about natural wine.
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Natural wine is an oxymoron.
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Similarly how white wine isn’t white.
When talking about problems of natural wines, I wish people didn’t always bring this dumb point up because it’s just a poor translation of the original French term and bringing it up for the umpteenth time adds nothing new to the discussion.
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The issue is that the standards aren’t uniformly agreed upon, and there is no one to police any of it. It’s all in good faith, which is giving a lot of credit to a constantly growing crowd of people…
No it isn’t
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France tried in 2020 to make some more official rules about “natural wine” based on different things like amount of sulfites added during the winemaking proces.
There will never be anything uniformly agreed upon though. Even something like the rules for organic products differ vastly between the EU and US.
Personally i drink a lot of wine that many people would frame as being natural wine. But only because a lot of winemakers within this so called category often makes wine in a style where the focus is on lower abv, less oak usage, high acidity and so on.
I really don’t care about added sulfites in my wine, as long as it is good and stable i am happy. I do care about that most of these winemakers don’t use a ton of chemicals in their vineyard and often leaves a bit more space for nature to blossom… but for some reason the discussion always ends back on sulfites and faulty versions from winemakers who are clearly not skilled enough to do what they set out to do.
It is a term i wish people would stop using. But it is probably too late for that. So we can from now on and to the end of time beat a dead horse just a little more 
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oh God not this again
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This right here is the most damning comment to be made about natural wine.
But do you think it is realistic that people will ever agree on some rules for “natural wine” ?
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Honestly, yes. I think those that decent from things that would make a wine “not natural” should also be exposed.
Kind of an ironic example, but Brunello Gate came about because a governing body was paying attention. I think if people are putting stuff into natural wine that they shouldn’t then they should be exposed and fined.
Cheating on making Brunello I’m sure folks can say “Eh, was it really that big of a deal if it made better wine?”. There are those in the market place drinking natural wine because they view it as cleaner and somehow healthier. I’m not sure if someone could get sick, but I’m not a doctor, but maybe they could?
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Unless there was something very underhanded going on it would seem highly unlikely. This also smack a bit of the “clean wine” marketing scam that has been floating around with some branded products.
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It is not because we disagree at all. I would love if some more official rules would be accepted.
I probably just don’t trust people enough to agree on something like that… within a region somewhere, maybe even a country. Sure. But a globally accepted rule for what a natural wine is i don’t believe much in.
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That was my point as well. Running a wine category on “trust” is not how to operate.
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Yet another undefined wine category running on trust, excellent point to add here.
Short of poison being added, the only thing in wine that can make everyone sick is the alcohol. That risk isn’t altered by any natural winemaking techniques unless you count lower ABV.
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I don’t have the energy to retread what I already covered at length 10 years ago, but for those still entertaining the notion that there is anything even remotely “damning” about this… On Language and Dogma | Cellar-Book // by Keith Levenberg
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