I thought we were supposed to wake you up when September ends.
This is why the term is so problematic. The term itself (at least in the U.S. market) screams “Expect this to be flawed!” The vast majority of winemakers who practice the sort of minimal interventionalism many in this thread define as “natural” steer clear of the term. There are also different camps within natural wine with more stringent definitions, bickering over that, hypocrisy with arbitrary allowances and exceptions, deception. Why even try to play the “natural” card if you aren’t specifically targeting the natural wine niche?
Someone brought up “glou glou”. What a horrific, douchey, exclusivist hipster term that implies a highly likelihood of flaws.
Jamie Goode proposed the term “authentic wine” for non-flawed minimal interventionist wines that express their terroir and varietal character clearly. Not sure that’s the best term, either, but it’s the right direction.
The wine industry needs more good, ready to drink on release, food friendly wines. Light reds with good complexity. Fun wines. People don’t even know wines can be like that. Something affordable and revelatory in btg programs, rather than heavy dull chores to drink. Good marketing could mainstream this. I seem some on here lauding natural/glou glou wines as addressing that, but they aren’t beyond some elitist niche of hipster kids. How about something like “normal wine”. Normal wine is for drinking on release, collectible wine is for aging. Simple. (Typical grocery store wine seems like a bad mockery of wines that need age, but they taste terrible on release and don’t age. It’s an expected profile of sub-mediocrity. It’s what the beer industry wants wine to be.)
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So it does mean something. You said it didn’t. Now you’re off on some tangent with a virtual myth - obsolete practice so often hysterically portrayed as commonplace. But yes, that would be a natural flavor.
We (first) learned the basics of food labeling in the 3rd grade. There’s no excuse for a consumer thinking vanilla bean is an ingredient if it isn’t listed as an ingredient.
As usual, Wes, you are full of good sense. 
I’m not sure anyone answered your specific questions.
I know Ridge’s labels say something like “minimum necessary sulfites” or something like that. It seems there are lots of winemakers who are trying to minimize their use of sulfur without ending up with mousiness, or lots of VA or brett. I’d guess there is no hard-and-fast rule. I gather from some of the posts here that how much sulfur you need turns on the pH/acidity and other things in the wine.
For the sake of completeness, I thought I’d cross-reference a few of the earlier thread on these topics:
Wine’s naturalistic fallacy (thread started by William Kelly) (2021)
AliceFiering: Comes to Her Senses (2023)
TN: A natural wine tasting, or: how I ended up walking into a mouse trap (2023)
Should we be evaluating natural wine differently? (2020)
Natty Wine: A Millennial Con? (2020)
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- Whether someone likes a wine is a personal opinion, and yes, everyone has one. I was at a big champagne dinner yesterday, and I preferred the 2004 vintage over the 2005. The people next to me preferred the 2005. I don’t think they were wrong. However, in a subsequent flight, the 1994 was clearly off.
If someone had liked it, I’d have been surprised, but it wouldn’t have been wrong. However, my opinion on the chemical process behind the reason the wine was off wouldn’t have been relevant because I don’t know the chemistry behind it. Similarly, in a discussion about how to define natural wine, not every opinion is relevant. Sales reps are trying to sell you wine, so they will say a lot of things to get there without any kind of internal consistency. That is not the goal and it’s not a meaningful opinion. “This is what the drunk Santa in Times Square yelled at me the other day about wine” is also an opinion, but it’s not relevant either. - Sales reps trying to sell you wine are not the people bringing the wine into the country. That’s the importer.
This is the equivalent of using retailer excuses for premoxed wine as a basis to discuss the concept of premox. I’m pretty sure the importer of a certain white Burgundy producer doesn’t think wine being shipped from Boston to New York causes premox (as one retailer tried to tell me).
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Right, as I said, it’s an aesthetic. I’m all for people making wine the way they want to make it, even if I don’t want to drink it.
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Not my point there at all.
Point being, say, 95% of natural wine isn’t labeled as natural wine, and isn’t flawed. While half of that 5% labeled as natural wine is flawed. The niche market is small. Using the term when trying to sell to a broader market would be a loadstone.
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Paul’s experiment was with sulfite levels in barrel. Microbes basically have two thresholds in the face of toxins, such as ethanol or sulfite. One is inhibition, the other mortality. The conventional UC Davis advised practice at the time was big doses of SO2. Initially, enough in the must to kill everything, then wait 24 hours for it to dissipate or bind, so you could then inoculate. Then you’d add big doses when racking and bottling and possibly otherwise. I believe Ridge always started natural and only added SO2 after ML. His experiment, as judged by tasting, determined smaller, more frequent adds yielded more complex, enjoyable wine. It was enough to prevent bad stuff from happening, but not so much that good microbes couldn’t do their nifty stuff.
When Paul was first hired at Ridge, he did a deep dive into historic California wines. He found pre-Prohibition wines to be more complex and wonderfully evolved than post-Repeal wines. Pasteurization was probably the biggest factor, as many of those wines were strangely unevolved. I’ve had a few super-mature wines that must’ve been pasteurized. Weirdly youthful with very mature notes well in the background and not much complexity.
The amount of SO2 to avoid mousiness is extremely small.
VA - there’s a lot of factors. It’s a risk with damaged fruit, which sorting well can eliminate. It’s a risk with senescent fruit, fermentation regimes, poor barrel regimes, etc. SO2 can be the best measure, but doesn’t have to be some lazy catch-all big recipe dose to all wines. It could be a nutrient deficiency stressing out your fermentation yeasts. So, doing nutrient adds til you get your vineyard soil healthier.
Brettanomyces take a crazy amount of SO2 to kill. They feed on nutrients. If you have residual sugar or something else they like in a wine, SO2 can help a bit with that time bomb. Meaning brett could take off at some point down the road under proper storage temperature, or quickly if warmer. That’s where minimal interventionists who normally avoid filtering will often wisely choose to sterile filter.
It’s interesting that some producers are known for a predictably desirable level of brett. I’m guessing that’s from a small, consistent nutrient level. A bit comparable to properly bottle fermenting beer, so you’re measuring and adding a controlled amount of fermentable sugar, so your bottles don’t start exploding.
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Hmm. I can’t remember seeing a wine labelled as a natural wine. I know shops/restaurants that will try and sell a lot of wine as natural wine, but I don’t remember seeing one labelled like it from the producer?
The current term is what it currently is, and has a set of adherents and comprises a sort of related movement. What you want is broad change on a massive level (which would also require an accepted and entirely different definition of natural wine, which does not exist) which is an entirely different question than “what is natural wine”.
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How small? Why go through the effort to go zero if its extremely small? Just marketing, or is there even allergy to tiny amounts?
Sorry for rewording when I quoted myself and a response, but you can see the original wording for context.
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Geez, no.
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Someone posted it in a previous thread. It was within the range some yeast strains produce. The advice was to add that tiny amount to the must pre-fermentation. Then again, I worked at a winery for a decade where we didn’t add SO2 until wines had completed ML (unless the fruit was in really bad shape). That’s a crazy number of ferments with no mice.
It would be dogmatism. Plenty of wineries that use SO2 market themselves as natural.
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What are the natural wine principles that you see these producers integrating, Donald?
From a wine-selling perspective, consumers are often less concerned with natural wine than with producers who support biodiversity and avoid chemical usage. Many consumers seem willing to tolerate imperfections in the wine if these conditions are met. Notably, Rebecca Gibb MW of Vinous gives high scores to what I consider bland Loire producers, while underestimating those inclined toward natural production. Similarly, Essi Avellan MW lacks a nuanced understanding of grower champagnes leaning toward the natural spectrum when she does review them.
Well-known disputes between Jason Wilson and Galloni exemplify differing opinions. I don’t advocate for natural wine, but I find the discourse around it compelling. It’s easy to dismiss it by citing extreme examples, yet many conventionally-produced wines are equally uninspiring. Franck Pascal, a producer who served in the first Iraq War, blames the chemicals in pesticides for his brother’s death due to cancer, stating they share compounds with the ammunition used in war.
Rather than focusing on the flaws in natural wines, perhaps the conversation should shift to the prevalence of cancer in the wine industry. For instance, Bordeaux has recorded high leukemia rates at a local school, attributed to vineyard chemicals. In summary, I’d prefer wines with slight flaws but ethical production over the “perfect” wines that Master of Wines champion, given the health risks involved.
I recall you mentioning some concerns about the variability in Ruppert-Leroy’s champagnes in one of your posts. It seems that you have a particular focus on specific producers in the Champagne region while overlooking others, which might suggest that natural wine doesn’t align with your interests. However, I will answer your question, please excuse the length…
Biodynamic and Organic Practices: At the core of natural wine philosophy is the idea of healthy, balanced vineyards. Both of these practices shun synthetic chemicals in favor of a more holistic approach to viticulture. If you harvest healthy grapes it is much easier to make good wines. The maisons learned this at great cost in 2017.
Minimal Intervention: The ethos of natural winemaking revolves around letting the grape and the terroir speak for themselves, which aligns with the concept of using native yeasts and minimizing additives like sulfur. Terroir is a double edged sword,but the less intervention you have in the cellar the more authentic the wine or champgne
Low to No Dosage: The absence or elimination of added sugar can be definitely be seen as a move towards a more “natural” product, one less manipulated by the winemaker. Again a double edged sword, there have been many tonicky wines but now with the rise of residual sugar in champagnes this is no longer as abig a problem as it was,
Extended Lees Aging: Natural wines often showcase ‘imperfections’ or “flaws” as unique characteristics, similar to the complex flavors that come from extended lees contact.
Use of Amphorae or Concrete Eggs: Traditional and inert fermentation vessels are consistent with the idea of minimizing external influences on the wine’s character. Lahaye speaks of theferemnting wine always being in movement
Natural Malolactic Fermentation: Nicolas Joly speaks of fermentation being like a fever, we should not interfere. Allowing natural bacteria to perform the malolactic fermentation is another form of minimal intervention.
Single Vineyard or Parcel Focus involves producing wine from a specific plot of land, allowing for a concentrated expression of ‘terroir’—the unique combination of soil, climate, and geography. This approach aligns with natural winemaking, which emphasizes minimal intervention and authentic representation of place. By avoiding blending from multiple sites, the wine remains closer to its original state. Such focus usually results in transparent labeling, letting consumers trace the wine’s origins to a specific vineyard. The approach may result in variable quality between vintages, a characteristic embraced in natural winemaking. Additionally, winemakers who concentrate on single vineyards typically adopt sustainable practices, further aligning with the principles of natural winemaking. Overall, Single Vineyard or Parcel Focus is a technique that resonates with the core tenets of the natural wine philosophy.
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Lacks understanding? Knowing her, believe me, she does not lack any understanding. She just doesn’t like the style, and it shows.
(At times I’d rather question your understanding in some matters.) 
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