That’s definitely part of it, but these winemakers are also working with what they have, too. Either they can’t afford land or a winery and buy grapes and do their work in crush facilities, or they buy land in lesser/unknown regions and do their best to make the most interesting wine they can.
To me, it’s a no-brainer that a millennial on an average millennial income would choose the non traditional wine with a story from an intrepid winemaker who’s accessible and interesting rather than a bottle that costs $200 from a faceless, stuffy winery owned by some patrician-“vigneron“ who inherited his acreage from his 19th-century French robber baron great-great-great-great grandfather.
I actually think that’s backwards; it’s more about the style than the place. Ooka (La Grande Colline) is very much seen as a “natural” winemaker, is imported by Zev Rovine, yet he make a Cornas and a St. Joseph. Whereas Jamet and Cuilleron, both very traditional producers (i.e. not making wine all that differently), have both been leaders in growing grapes and making wines in the Collines Rhodaniens for some time, which is an attempt to revitalize a region that had stopped producing wine (it was only given AOC status in 2009). But no one thinks of Jamet or Cuilleron as natural wine producers, nor would they ever seek that kind of status.
Similarly, I’ve had natural wine made in Burgundy, and it tastes more like “natural wine” than it does Burgundy - it’s much more about winemaking and farming than terroir. I think there is a correlation with less traditional terroir, because people making natural wine tend to be younger, and can’t afford to buy in Clos de la Roche or Margaux. But that’s not causation.
I really like the “in search of a didactic” line! I also think it’s exactly right, and it’s just not possible to pin down. Because it’s not just about methods, it’s also about the story. If tomorrow, Chapoutier started making mousy wine and called themselves a natural winemaker, would anyone actually treat them as one? I can’t imagine so, because they’d be viewed as a giant faceless negociant. How could a producer like that make “natural” wine that’s authentic? And yet, they’ve been at the forefront of biodynamics forever!
Where in my posts are we getting into that? If you’re referring to my “mousy” comment, that was both a somewhat flippant comment and a reference to the likelihood of wines with no sulfur (which is a common “natural” winemaking technique) having a mousy quality.
The point of my posts is that there is no consensus on what natural wine tastes like, because it’s more of an aesthetic than a collective set of defined winemaking techniques.
Currently drinking Valentina Passalacqua’s calcarius Rosa. 11% alcohol, easy to drink and delicious. In my view, there is definitely a time and place for wines like this.
A
haven’t you heard? she has been cancelled, effective immediately. when the tribe votes you off the island, you are not making natural wine anymore…right???
I think a book built around the two perceptions in this paragraph, that 1) “children do not drink the same kinds of wines as their parents” – wine is constantly changing and “progressing”, and 2) what is billed as progress and technical innovation often has a high cost in side effects not appreciated at the time of their introduction, would be a fantastic contribution to the wine literature. If you fleshed it out with real historical detail it would be far richer than most wine books, and would encompass two opposing truths – that “progress” is inevitable in wine, and that what is billed as progress is often not really progress. That would make it far more conceptually complex than most wine books, which generally fall in one of three rather boring categories – a) encyclopedic collections of information with no underlying theme but great illustrations, b) starry-eyed tourist guides to the writer’s favorite winemaker visits, or c) one note manifestos which are basically internet posts blown up to book length and recite one-sided arguments everyone already knows. (Sometimes the tourist guide and one note manifesto are combined into a single book to pad out the length).
I think critics have done a terrible job, almost amounting to malpractice, at helping wine hobbyists understand and be in dialogue with the constant flow of technical and stylistic change in winemaking and how it affects what is in the glass. The days when collectors really needed endless critical tasting notes to tell us “is this wine worth buying or not” are mostly over, except for occasionally breaking obscure producers. I want to understand what I am drinking and why it is the way it is. Over 20 years of collecting I have seen multiple dramatic stylistic changes in each region I follow, changes that are very obvious based on what is in the glass. I am sure these are connected to significant changes in winemaking practices and viticulture. Yet except at the vaguest and most general level (“extraction”, “Parkerization”) I have no real understanding of what exactly is driving those changes. Shouldn’t it be the critics job to help me understand that?
This is a very interesting take. What you seem to be pointing to is an approach to wine where you don’t judge wine by whether you actually like what you taste, but by whether it conforms to a set of “virtuous” practices in the making of wine. You train your palate to enjoy whatever is created according to those “virtuous”/“natural” practices.
It sounds a bit crazy put like that, but it makes a kind of sense – industrial food production is fantastic at creating big obvious flavors that the human palate has evolved to enjoy. So if you want maximal distance from it, you abandon your palate as a standard and instead try to teach yourself to appreciate products made in the most non-industrial ways you can think of.
But the problem, as often repeated in these threads, is that one is so irreducibly a craft product that except at the extremes there is really no clear line dividing virtuous/natural from unnatural/bad practices in winemaking, it is a bit game-like and arbitrary.
Is that Cab really the “same”? If so, that would seem to fly into the face of a lot of the assumptions and ideas thrown out on this board and beyond. Like terroir.
I don’t think this is correct. I have a number of friends who’re very into natural wine (which causes endless amusing arguments over a years long running text thread) and authenticity is very much an issue. Yesterday, I met up for a drink with one of these friends and another younger couple who also really like natural wine. Thinking of this thread, I asked one of them why she liked natural wine. Her response was “it’s all about the soil, the agriculture - it’s about the winemaker using low intervention methods, allowing the grapes to express their terroir, not adding anything into the wine that detracts from the authentic* nature of the wine, allowing the grapes to grow in harmony with the soil and the environment, using natural yeasts, spontaneous fermentation, low sulfur - the entire package.” The implication here is that most wine is not made this way. (Otherwise there would be no need for such a designation.)
I responded that by the above standard, the vast majority of the wines I drink are also “natural wines” too, with the easiest example being Fourrier. However, that argument never works (which I knew and expected) because the responses is that I drink “boring expensive Burgundy”, which just isn’t natural wine. Which to me, makes no sense from a logical perspective, but makes complete sense from an aesthetic perspective - if you want to feel like you’re drinking wine made from producers who’re rebelling against traditional stuffy old school manufactured wine which you’re certain is created in traditional industrial ways, then natural wine makes sense, and by its definition that wine is closer to the soil, less adulterated, and, yes, more AUTHENTIC. And therefore expensive wines become industrial by default, because a lot of people assume they must be done in a nameless corporate way, but it’s also a self-reinforcing loop, because younger people don’t have the money to drink them, so they don’t learn about them (and I can’t blame them). Why bother learning what Roumier did with farming practices in Burgundy in the 80s, when you can’t buy his wines anyway? (This was a bog standard natural wine discussion too - it proceeded along the lines it usually does.)
To put it another way, both Neal Rosenthal and Zev Rovine import wines across similar regions. Given their stylistic preferences, I expect quite a few of the producers they import farm and make wine very similarly. However, whereas Zev leans into the natural wine designation very hard, I strongly suspect Neal would run away from it as hard as possible. (I’m not making a judgment of the overall quality of the portfolios, mind.) If Fourrier were imported by Zev and Jean-Marie called himself a natural winemaker, Fourrier would be called a natural wine. Yet the wine wouldn’t change.
All that said, one of the wines we had yesterday was Ganevat. Is Ganevat natural wine? Who cares? It was good.
^ just tell your friend that Alice Feiring is a big Fourrier fan (despite the occasional chapitalization I suppose - not aware of any other practice that Fourrier follows that would upset people who prefer natural wine), and if it’s natural enough for Alice it should be natural enough for anyone else.
But that’s my point - it doesn’t fall under the umbrella of “natural wine” for most people solely because it doesn’t have the right signifiers. I know both Alice and Pascaline like Fourrier, but they’re not what the conversation is about.
Don’t worry, I have that project in mind (with regard to Burgundy). Exchanging about it here is a great way to flesh out concepts and encounter counterarguments.
Your summation of the state of wine literature is quite good, I must say. Thankfully there are some exceptions, but…
But that’s my point - for lots of people it falls under the umbrella of natural wine even though it doesn’t have every one of the right signifiers. I know that you have a friend that doesn’t consider Fourrier to be natural wine, but she’s not what the conversation is about.
This has certainly been my experience. And the fact is that the number of producers making really characterful, artisanal wine is actually really pretty small (imagine, for example, what would happen to the wine style if an insurance company, investment bank, or luxury goods conglomerate bought the Domaine de la Romanée-Conti, or Coche-Dury, and installed a highly qualified oenology school graduate—who might have previously made wine in one of their estates in the Rhône or Tuscany—as winemaker?). So that’s why I increasingly feel that this approach requires some sort of defense or at least advocacy.
The phenomena you describe is very much in the vein of how art, music, and theater are viewed by the cognoscenti.
Perhaps the closest analogue I could draw is serialism and atonality, in contrast to ‘standard’ Western tonal art music. Yes, atonal music is likely in some way pure, crafted from the strictest set of rules and intellectually rigorous, honest. I’m sure it appeals to those with expertise and training in composition, musicology, etc. It is certainly the antithesis of heavily produced pop music filled with autotune, following a IV-V-I chord progression in C major.
But there is no such black and white dichotomy otherwise. Well crafted original music that is also commercially viable is not the opposite of either of the extremes. It’s something else altogether.
And so that is how it goes in the authentic/natural wine vs industrial wine false dichotomy. There is an orthogonal characteristic separate from natural vs unnatural (industrial), which I’d describe as established craftsmanship and expertise, that separates the quality from the crap.
While there are oceans of manufactured wine that is ‘autotuned’ for mass appeal (RS, bizarre oak treatments, mega-purple), quite separate from that is qualitatively good to excellent wine that is hand crafted, yet pragmatic where necessary. Wine made based on dogma is generally going to be flawed, whether that dogma is one of maximal marketability/unit margins or minimal intervention.
)
![[cheers.gif]](/uploads/db3686/original/2X/0/0ff9bfcdb0964982cd3240b6159868fbdf215b1a.gif "cheers"){kind=small}