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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At times I’d rather question your understanding in some matters.) Believe me the feeling is reciprocal.
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Pretty skeptical about this. In its origins, natural wine is a winemaking philosophy, not an agronomic approach, and the idea of “healthy, balanced vineyards” is neither here nor there (even if it may be very important to some natural winemakers). I am not going to name-and-shame on an Internet forum, but there are several famous natural winemakers who purchase fruit from vineyards farmed with herbicides to include in their cuvées. What do you know about Chauvet’s farming? By contrast, to take the example of Champagne, producers such as Selosse and Egly abandoned a long time ago or indeed never adopted herbicides. Larmandier Bernier has been farming organically since 1990, long before anyone talked about “natural wine” in Champagne.
As for minimal intervention… it would be better to describe natural winemaking as “non intervention”. Most of the world’s greatest wineries could be called minimal intervention, the “minimal” being the word that does the heavy lifting. Of course, as a wine defined by the presence of an artificially induced secondary fermentation and disgorgement to remove the resulting lees, it is quite funny to hear any Champagne described as minimal intervention, as the interventions here are transformative and unavoidable. True minimal intervention wines are only fizzy by accident.
Organoleptic defects from feral winemaking are not, to me, analogous to the results of extended lees aging. Not all “yeasty smells” are created equal, and the active ingredients are quite different.
You have to go back a long way indeed to describe amphorae as a “traditional” vessel in Champagne. Oak barrels, by contrast, have been in continuous usage since the Celts.
You don’t need to cite Nicolas Joly to convince me of the merits of malo in Champagne, you could just look at the Côte de Beaune (exactly where the folks who started doing malo in their vins clairs looked, by the way). If you have ripe grapes it’s a bit of a moot point, anyway.
As for lieux-dits, I think the inspiration once again is clearly Burgundy, rather than the natural wine movement.
Personally, I have over the years gone pretty deep down the natural wine rabbit hole out of intellectual curiosity and because sometimes the bottles could be very compelling. I have visited many, mainly in the Beaujolais and Jura. And I have even produced a wine for my own amusement with 20 ppm total sulfites and zero free that is closing in on a year in bottle without any flaws.
But I can’t honestly say, thinking about it now, that I have learned anything of interest from a self-styled natural winemaker. One is more likely to be shocked by their complete insouciance with regards to sanitation: sticky wineries, filled with fruit flies, with equipment scattered over the floor, empty barrels sitting outside in the sun, unwashed wine glasses and plates stacked in the sink… What’s more, in the extreme vintages we increasingly have in France, you can get away with less and less. The “pruine” of ambient yeasts on the grape skin only establishes itself from véraison onwards, and is hugely defined by the climate of that period; heat waves distort the microbiome, encouraging all sorts of nasty stuff. Far from the resulting flaws being proof of authenticity, in my view they occlude the expression of terroir.
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Having come into wine from the natural side and learned about “classical” wine from there as I grew into it, I do feel like I originally thought of natural wine as “put grapes in a barrel/vessel and let the hanger-on yeasts ferment it and then pour it into bottles.”
I learned that natural yeasts is a feature of many classical wines too, so while I think there’s a camp of “we don’t use lab yeast strains or Purple or chaptalize” — which when describing to a non wine person all sound like cheating (and if I think about it too hard, I agree)— I wonder also where things like punch downs and pump overs and battonage fit. They certainly don’t seem like minimal interventions, but I rarely know.
One of the reasons I struggle with the natural wine movement is that “taking what nature gives me” isn’t how they make wine. Having spoken to many winemakers (including a good number that the natural wine movement claims as its own), even those who use limited intervention make a lot of decisions in a vintage: how to till, when to spray with copper, how much cover crop to plant (if at all), how much to prune, green harvesting, canopy management, trellising, when to harvest, whether to sort in the vineyard or in the winery, whether to use stems (or how much), and that’s before they actually do anything one would technically consider “winemaking”. Then, as you said, there are decisions about pumpovers, punch downs, battonage, racking, controlling temperature during fermentation (listen to some of Christophe Roumier’s interviews on the subject), the choice of oak toasting, how long to age in oak, etc. etc.
None of this is “what nature gives you”, it’s working in concert with nature, but moving the end product in a certain direction.
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It’s somewhat ironic that this clearly ChatGPT-written post is in a thread about natural wine.
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Dear William,
So much passion in a text, something one is not used to from you. I think there are two issues which need to be addressed: the semantic one and the agronomic one.
Natural wine and minimal intervention are ambiguous terms, and seeing the confusion or multiple interpretations only adds to the Tower of Babel syndrome associated with this form of winemaking. The ambiguity might actually contribute to the richness and diversity of interpretations, fostering innovation and debate in the field. I am not an advocate of natural winemaking in its extreme form, but I maintain that it is the avant-garde of winemaking, and its influences are manifesting in many regions in many forms. Here, avant-garde refers to practices that push the boundaries of traditional winemaking, encouraging experimentation and fostering new methods.
To get into a debate about what minimal intervention is, is pointless as, like natural wine, it is not codified or certified.
I am a bit disappointed that you chose to list the extremes of natural winemaking. Imagine if we went the other way and listed the additives and pesticides that are not declared on the bottles, etc., used by conventional winemakers, the damage they do to the environment, the destruction of biodiversity, and the homogeneous mess they produce.
I will stick to Champagne and especially the example of Ruppert-Leroy. They lived in the Jura and were mentored by Overnoy. Now, what you list above cannot be said of Overnoy, and I am sure you must agree that Overnoy is a paragon in the natural wine-making scene. It’s important to acknowledge that Overnoy’s exemplary methods are not universally adopted, but his influence remains significant, potentially serving as a gold standard.
Ruppert-Leroy, under the guidance of Overnoy, implemented practices in near-fanatical adherence. The Champagnes are decisive; you do not review them like you do not review many of the great Champagne producers of the region.By ‘decisive,’ I mean that the Champagnes have a distinct, unequivocal character that stands apart from mass-produced options
I agree, it is true that hot vintages can affect the microbiome. If the producer takes a holistic approach, then they are better equipped to offset the consequences of the hotter vintages we are seeing. Yet natural yeasts are better equipped to local conditions than commercial yeasts; this is uncontradictable. Then the idea of a flaw being a flaw; perhaps a flaw is a true reflection of terroir and the vintage. It is my belief that consumers who are more open-minded and care about biodiversity accept what some would call flaws as an absolute expression of terroir.
I think one thing that should also be highlighted is that producers going down the natural wine route produce more complex and flavorful wines and Champagnes; this is an ineluctable truth
That would require a definition of “natural wine route”, and it is not an “ineluctable truth” in any case.
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Is that true if the weather conditions are outside the range of historical norms?
Yes, some of these “ineluctable” and “uncontradictable” propositions seem very much in dispute here.
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It’s clearly a ChatGPT written post, so I don’t know to what extent Donald actually believes it, but, well, that’s what one gets with ChatGPT.
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Dear Greg,
Conversing with you can be tiring and often fraught with negativity. To conserve time and mitigate frustration, I’ve employed ChatGPT to frame this response.
Your comment about the irony of a ChatGPT-assisted post in a discussion about natural wine is not lost on me. The dichotomy is indeed intriguing: a dialogue on organic, artisanal processes intersecting with an automated, data-driven tool.
I make no secret of my use of ChatGPT. Utilized judiciously, it becomes a powerful instrument for nuanced conversations and for synthesizing data. Furthermore, it assists in tempering what some have described as my aggressive writing style, allowing me to convey my message without sacrificing its essence.
If I were to write such texts manually, the time spent crafting prompts would likely exceed the time it takes to compose the actual responses. Thus, your assumption about the triviality of this technology is misplaced; its potential to add intellectual rigor to our discussions should not be underestimated.
The emergence of this technology can indeed be unsettling for some, especially for those in your profession, but its capabilities should not be trivialized.
I deferred from chatgpts advice when I did a sensitivity anaylse, I forgot to add emojis but i knew my dear freind Greg would take the bait.
Something feels different about these posts, lol.
sorry, for yout benefit: I deviated from ChatGPT’s advice when I conducted a sensitivity analysis; I forgot to add emojis, but I was confident that my dear friend Greg would take the bait.
I did this this during two vintages. One has been fine, the second started showing Brett. at 1 to 1.5yrs in bottle. Lots of factors at play on the second one that may have been the cause (I had newly acquired used barrels from a colleague; and the cellar was cold and the ferments took a long time to kick off— could this have given Brett. a start?). On this topic I know you get this, but for others, it’s important to remember that SO2 additions depend on pH for its effectiveness in controlling spoilage organisms. For example, a Pinot Noir requires less SO2 than a Cab/Merlot wine in general (there are exceptions of course) simply due to the lower pH in Pinot compared a Bordeaux or Napa Cab or blend. But here’s something new. We have new research showing that under a low SO2 regime, Brett. can evolve within one vintage in the cellar to a strain that is resistant to SO2– and at that point, it would be very difficult to recover from this decision. Here’s the link to the research.
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I did call myself a natural winemaker the first 2 years, but no longer do so. Too much bad winemaking in that category and I don’t want to be associated with that. I want to make wines that can last. I still will say low intervention at times, but even moving away from that recently. I still follow the same principles, natural yeast etc, but will filter and protect with sulphur.
But perhaps a more important business realisation is startin to manifest: customers who buy natural wines and are dogmatic about that, are also a) not loyal and b) not volume customers. So if you’re planning on catering to these customers as a winery, just know that they’re fickle and will move on in a heartbeat when the next flavor-of-the-month cool Azerbaijan amphora winemaker comes along.
Natural wine is just bad business, bottom line.
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When the phrase natural wine first started becoming used more often locally, it generally meant low intervention and was viewed as a positive. I know some winemakers who called their wines “natural” who were anything but low intervention. The place I used to work avoided the name, even for wines he made without any added SO2, because he thought it was becoming too trendy. Which it did as more of the “movement” natural wines proliferated and now it’s more of a negative.
I like some of the natural wines particularly from producers who have been doing it long enough to know what they are doing and where to draw the line to avoid the worst of the flaws. But, there is a lot of crap these days.
-Al
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