Natural Wine: What’s In A Name?

Contributed by UK based natural wine importer Doug Wregg, founder of Les Caves de Pyrene.

Definitions of “natural” in Webster’s Dictionary:

*existing in nature and not made or caused by people: coming from nature

*not having any extra substances or chemicals added: not containing anything artificial

*closely resembling an original: true to nature

*marked by easy simplicity and freedom from artificiality, affectation or constraint

When the phenomenon known as natural wine burst onto the scene in the early noughties it soon turned into a divisive issue associated with manifestos and political posturing. The two words “natural” and “wine”, when juxtaposed, became freighted with unintended meaning and intent, and like a line from one of the testaments, could be (and were) interpreted in so many different ways by different people with different agendas. Various wine journalists and commentators in the UK, US and France assumed a nakedly hostile stance, presenting the company that I work for (and us as individuals) as no-sulphur evangelists wanting to flood the country with our nasty zero-additive natural wines, as if we were entirely careless about quality, and valued pure style over substance. Others viewed the word “natural” as a semantic threat in itself, stating that wine could never be a natural product (precisely because it was a manmade product) and, in any case, such wines were faulty and rubbish. Which is having your semantic cake and eating it. More on this anon.

For several years, the wine trade scene roiled with grandstanding contrariness – straw man fallacies, false dichotomies and more than a fair few ad hominem attacks. Ayatollah, fundamentalist, extremist and Cathar Prefect were some of the terms used to describe me back in the day. The Old Testament day, I guess. I used to joke that certain sensitive souls had google alerts set to respond to the juxtaposition of the words natural and wine. Mighty carillons would chime. Thus, did natural wine cause uncontrolled “wild fermentation” ‘mongst certain overly sensitive-souled bloggers. Meanwhile, a notable wine merchant most notably wrote an introduction to their wine catalogue excoriating natural wines and the natural wine phenomenon, whereas another, a director of one of the largest wine companies, and a guest speaker at London’s Real Wine Fair, commented that he felt like Daniel in the lion’s den. Yes, natural wine had created a Manichean universe!

Not that any of this mattered. Farmers and vignerons continued to do their own thing, merchants imported the wines, wine bars, restaurants and retailers sold them, and hundreds of thousands of people drank and enjoyed them. And social media made a gradual irrelevance of the views of the commentariat.

The part of the wine world that espouses hierarchical systems of quality, that judges this wine to be better or worthy to be more expensive than that wine, that embraces market forces, is not the wine world that we inhabit. Artisan wine fairs helped to solidify the position of the wines. Bringing the growers and the wines to the people. Seeing hundreds of growers in one venue, making interesting, exciting and original wines, in a friendly democratic (trade and consumers) environment, had the effect of making the wines more real.

“Wine does not make itself”, as many a wine writer has said to me over time, wagging a metaphorical finger in admonitory fashion and stating the bleedin’ obvious. “The vine and the grapes are tended by the men and the women, that Wine is, by definition, a product in which there are interventions at every stage, therefore naturalness does not enter it.”

Ergo, there is no such thing as natural wine. Quod est demonstrandum.

Like all generalisations, this is incredibly glib as well as being disingenuous. One should not confuse wild wine (untouched wine) with natural wine. Humans are inextricably involved with the natural process. We are describing after all a product that is made, respecting nature and the natural process; one that is free of chemicals and free of artifice.

As it happens, wine, at its most rudimentary, could conceivably be something that just happens. Originally, vines were wild climbing plants. Thousands of years ago, our ancestors observed that animals, having consumed fruits that had been fermenting on the ground or from the bush or tree, start to behave in an erratic manner. We can justifiably assume that out of our ancestor’s experimentation with these fruits came a trialling and a culturing of process. They drank it and it was good. Scroll forward thousands of years and our modern perspective regarding consistency, perfectibility and usefulness, leads us evaluate wine purely in terms of its product-worthiness.  An egg is an egg is an egg, a loaf of bread is a loaf of bread, for all that, but a wine must stand before the Court of Criticism and Market Value to be assessed according to artificially-designated normative standards. It is more than fermented fruit – it is a product qua product.

Wine is the juice of grapes that is transformed by the magic/science of sugars and yeasts interacting. This transformation may be shaped and channelled in various ways. There is a big difference, however, between an “enabler” and a winemaker. Many vignerons, and that word is used advisedly, see themselves in the primarily as farmers, then, at most, as enablers or midwives, assisting transformations in as low-key a way as possible, and simply bringing the grape juice to the bottle, whereas the role of the professional oenologist is to make the most correct wine they can, using a battery of technical and chemical interventions, if necessary.

Let’s look at process. Farming itself might conceivably be described as a form of physical intervention since human beings are imposing themselves on the land and shaping it to their ends. Equally, one might also view natural farming as defending the interests of nature, as a partnership or progressive stewardship which helps to restore life to the soil and creates vital habitats for plants, bugs, birds and animals. Much vine farming today is still pretty small scale and personal.

In many domaines in the Languedoc, for example, vines are planted in clearings in the garrigue forests. When something is removed to make way for vine planting, then it is restored elsewhere. The ecological imperative being paramount, the delicate equilibrium is preserved. The alternative to this is a kind of intrusive conventional farming where nature is sacrificed on the altar of efficiency, and wherein the exploitation of the land by means of systemic fertilisers, insecticides and herbicides leads inevitably to monocultural aridity and the degradation of the natural environment.

It has been argued that, whether or not chemicals are used, approved viticultural methods, designed to ensure that the vines work more efficiently – encompassing pruning, canopy training, ploughing and so forth – mitigates against the pure natural element in our definition of natural wine. If one looks beyond the human throughout the animal and plant kingdoms, one will find many versions of farming (and co-dependencies). Yes, farming is part of nature.

Some growers are even finding ways to be more natural (or less interventionist) in the vineyard. Christian Binner in Alsace, for example, is currently experimenting with removing training wires and posts and having free-standing vines (like small trees), believing that it is against nature for the vine to be contorted into certain shapes. This idea of allowing the vines to flourish naturally, and for the vineyard to find its own balance, is gaining greater traction.

The wine called Graupert from Meinklang in Austria’s Burgenland, come from grapes from unpruned vines. Nearby, Gut Oggau have adopted the same practices in one of their vineyards, while Colombera in Istrian Croatia, a collaboration between Marko Kovac and Dimitri Brecvic (Piquentum), is a project to make a wine from an unpruned and unsprayed vineyard and brought to bottle without touching (no topping up, no racking, no sulphur).

In Chile and Georgia, also, you will find vignerons working with wild and abandoned vineyards. Liberating the vine, as it were, is fascinating, because it goes back to first principles, namely that farmer allows the vine to do what it would do naturally, rather than trains it to perform in a certain way.

When one talks about natural wine, the spotlight is mainly focused on the number and nature of the interventions in the winery.

The objective for an artisan vigneron, when making natural wine, is not to drive nature out with a pitchfork and batteries of thermo-regulated tanks, filtering pads and fining agents, but to preserve all those discrete elements that are distinctive, that make wine the singular thing that it is.

The approach is relatively simple. Some commercial wineries are like laboratories, others closer to modern factories. In this antiseptic world, cleanliness is godliness, for the purpose of wine is strictly commercial, the product is necessarily consistent and homogenous. This product has a profile - and a purpose.

If I am asked to define what natural wine is, I tick off the usual methodological bullet points. That it is the result of organic farming, native yeasts, ambient ferment, and nothing added other than a smidge of sulphur sometimes. It sounds simple, but this is not a lazy-faire approach. It is not non-interventionist except in the no-chemical-addition sense; there are a thousand decisions to be made, each one of which alters the direction of the wine. One might describe it the sliding doors approach to winemaking.

This aspiration towards transparency and simple purity is what drives a lot of natural vignerons to work alongside the wines and put them on their feet, as they would see it, rather than place their ideas, prejudices, and received wisdom in front of the wine. In the end, the wine is that which it is, the sum of its quirks and flaws and a liquid in which its natural origins can still be detected.

Taste is something that we are all taught in our wine education. We are instructed that this is good taste, and that is not. But taste is also primal. And it is a feeling. The other day I was offered a wine in a restaurant. It was as near to vinegar as I reckon a wine can (or ought to) be, but, at the same time, strangely addictive and drinkable. It possessed real energy. Now, somewhere in our sanitised universe a host of oeno-angelists will be fainting at the mere idea of such a liquid ever being thought of as “wine”.  For me, though, taste is not simply circumscribed by rules and boxes. It is more the sensation that when you taste something that seems natural, then you really know it.

My personal definition of natural wine is that which we feel to be natural when we are drinking (and each individual’s taste is entirely unique in this regard), a wine that is not denatured through over-processing and is liberated from techniques designed to artificially improve or homogenise, a wine which remains faithful to the personality of (living) vineyards and to the complex and unique nature of the vintage and the élevage, to one that tastes wholesome, nourishing and energetic, a wine that has unpredictability and even perversity writ into its DNA.

If Gerard Manley Hopkins were to describe natural wine he would surely write that it is “all things counter, original, spare, strange; /Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)/ With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim...”