How Natural Wine Ruined Everything I Love About Wine
Natural Wine: The phenomenon. The marketing slay of the wine world. The… utter bullshit?
I’ve worked in London’s wine scene for over a decade. I’ve traveled Europe and North America and have met countless winemakers. I’ve had the fortune to taste some of the world’s best wines, and the misfortune to taste some of the world’s worst.
And I have an itch to scratch…
In the early noughties a small revolution began to take hold, one that would see biodynamic wines move from the streets of Paris, into London, New York, and parts of Asia.
Small pockets of sommeliers and wine geeks were gagging for it and they treated them all with the scientific respect they deserve.
They would quiz importers and sellers on the levels of sulphur added (or not), the number and types of sprays they use, and where exactly the shit filled cow horn was in the vineyard (!) — the kind of interrogations that Robert Oppenheimer might have got (stay with me on this analogy…).
But then, it all ended.
Enter stage right, natural wine. Unlike biodynamic wine this has no legal definition but is loosely understood to be: grapes; turned into alcohol; bottled; drunk. Nothing added, nothing taken away.
So, sorta the same as biodynamic wine, but not quite the same.
Gone were the generations of winemakers and farmers working tirelessly to distract Mother Nature’s bad bits (disease and rot) with natural resilience and cunning.
Gone was the microscope that would examine fermentations and make sure the wine would still taste pretty good without adding things.
All that was needed now was a crown cap and a jazzy label. It’s kind of like if Oppenheimer picked up failed prototype no 2, made the casing transparent and popped a wee bit of wax on the top. Sorta the right thing, but really not at all.
We all got so caught up in what we thought Natural Wine was that we forgot where it all stemmed from.
We forgot that it came from people wanting to do better by the earth and give drinkers an experience that felt closer to where the grapes were from, and what they were grown on.
We all started to accept that if something tasted not very nice it was ok, as it was natural. When the aforementioned sommeliers would serve a customer a not very nice biodynamic wine it was sent back — now we have a crutch to lean on, NATURAL!
Some of the finest wines in the world are produced biodynamically and it’s widely understood that growing grapes this way and producing wine this way is better. Better for the soil, better for the wine and, ultimately, a better experience for the drinker.
But making wines this way is incredibly hard and requires years of experience. As in many industries, shortcuts exist, and with that clever ways of covering your mistakes. Like marketing these bad wines as natural. We’ve encouraged a culture that allows people to get away with selling not very nice things and that needs to stop.
I have not decided whether this article is a plea, or a rant. Maybe it’s a bit of both.
A plea to everyone who got this far reading it to think when you drink wine: is this nice? If it isn’t, it’s ok to say so. If it tastes a little like licking the inside of a rabbit hutch, then say so and put the glass down.
And maybe it’s a rant as well.
A rant on behalf of all the people who are doing the right thing and working hard to make something for you that has all the ‘credentials’ of natural wine but does actually taste nice and won’t make a nice addition to your vinegar collection before it’s even opened.
