Natural Evolution

What is natural wine to you? Is it the same for me? What should it be? A look at the divisive journey so far, and where it all goes from here.

WORDS Kathleen Willcox
IMAGES Frankie Gutierrez

Let’s get etymological for a second.

The word natural is derived from Latin naturalis, from natura, and in many ways, hasn’t evolved much since. In Middle English, it meant “having a certain status by birth.”

Today, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, it means “existing in or caused by nature; not made or caused by humankind.”

In other words, raw, untampered with, untamed. Pretty straightforward.

But natural wine? To insiders in the wine community and the many people who just like to enjoy fermented grapes occasionally alike, the definition is not only less straightforward, but it has evolved considerably over time.

THE WAYS OF WINEMAKING

For millennia, winemaking—like all forms of agriculture—was plain and relatively artless. Blitzing fields with chemicals wasn’t an option, although as early as 400 BCE, Persian farmers were using a form of Pyrethrum (a plant-derived organic compound from Chrysanthemum plants) to control for pests.

By the late mid-1880s, an inorganic chemical pesticide made from copper sulphate and lime, dubbed the “Bordeaux mixture,” was deployed in vineyards as a fungicide. But it wasn’t until the 1940s that chemists began synthesizing broad-spectrum chemicals and turning them into commercial products that farmers and vineyard managers could use as “treatments.”

Fast-forward several decades and we are still working through the fallout of their widespread and persistent (and continued) use. In addition to polluting the air, soil and water, the effect on human­ health has also proven to be detri­mental, with one chemical company alone shelling out approximately $11 billion to settle the nearly 100,000 lawsuits brought against it by plaintiffs suffering from a range of maladies linked to use of its glyphosate-based herbicide (and more suits pending).

To many, farming without chemicals the way their predecessors did has come to seem not just sensible, but responsible.

But that’s just the fields. What about what happens in the cellar? Those practices have evolved rapidly too.

While some form of filtration, fining and the appearance of additives in wine have been widespread since at least Roman times (Romans sometimes added olive oil, sulfites and sea water to their wines as a preservative), it wasn’t until the 1970s and ’80s that vintners began using a range of commercial, inorganic additives to—depending on your perspective—­manipulate, transform, preserve or enhance their product.

Today, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) allows 70-plus additives to a bottle of wine, from dried fish bladders (for clarification) to di­methyl decarbonate (for stabilization and sterilization), with no disclosure requirements on the label.

THE PENDULUM SWINGS

Many vintners began to see chemicals as a kind of nuclear form of farming and additives as a paint-by-numbers approach to winemaking.

Inevitably, there was a backlash, and a formal movement to create more “natural” wines free of such manufactured manipulation arose.

The movement began, as many delicious movements do, in France. Beaujolais winegrower and Lyon-based Institute of Biological Chemistry academic Jules Chauvet posited that wine should be a simple expression of place and the vintage, without a lot of—or any—other ingredients.

WHAT’S IN A NAME?

There is no globally accepted definition of natural wine to this day, but France’s Institut National de l’Origine et de la Qualité (INAO) accepted Vin Méthode Nature as a qualification logo to represent natural wine on bottles, like a Demeter stamp or High Environmental Value (HEV) branding. France is often considered the standard-bearer of wine culture, so this is a notable step in the evolution of natural wine and the industry’s attempt to define it.

The Vin Méthode Nature initiative was launched in 2019 and has grown ever since. The rules of the road include: made exclusively from certified organically farmed vineyards, manual harvesting, native yeast, no additives or modifications, no filtration or reverse osmosis, no sulfites can be added before or during fermentation, and finished wine can be adjusted only up to 30 milligrams per liter of total sulfur dioxide.

It may seem like a lot, and to some, it is. For others, it’s not enough. Because to many, at the crux of this debate is the belief that natural wine is, at its best, a foundational philosophy for making excellent wine, and that core rubric can be defined in varying ways to different people.

“Natural wine is first and foremost about responsible organic or biodynamic farming,” says Jenny Lefcourt, cofounder of the New York-based Jenny & François Selections, one of the leading importers of wines broadly characterized as natural. “We all know we have to go in that direction. We have one earth and we can’t go back. I don’t care about the filtering or not filtering or no sulfites. I care about tasting wine with balance and ageability that is made responsibly. It should reflect the time and place it comes from.”

A BACKLASH AGAINST FLAWS

Ah, the F word.

“Flawed” is the “nanny nanny boo boo” of the wine world, an insult hurled—sometimes without merit, and frequently with impish delight—from the plain-old-wine camp toward the natural wine camp.

“I’ve definitely made flawed wine, especially when I started,” admits winemaker Craig Hawkins, owner of Testalonga in Swartland, South Africa. “I learned quickly that you have to be very conscious about what we’re doing step by step, and hygiene. I also learned more about grape chemistry. If you don’t want to add sulfites, or at least a lot of them, you’re going to want a low-pH wine, because that will prevent bacteria from growing.”

A wine’s pH can be controlled in the field and cellar, without manipulating the wine in any way that even the most stringent natural wine enthusiast would object to.

On the other hand, he says, “one man’s funk is another man’s Romanée-Conti.”

Still, others like Hawkins, who don’t necessarily classify themselves as natural winemakers first and foremost, insist that flaws that are often classified as “funk” are, in fact, giving all of the earnest low-­intervention winemakers out there a bad name.

“We are often pitched as a natural wine that actually tastes good, which I always find interesting,” says William Allen, vintner and cofounder of Two Shepherds in Windsor, California. “There is often a push for solidarity in underdog wine categories, be it domestic or a specific region or natural, people like to say ‘rising tides lift all boats.’ I like to say that the tides are bi-directional. Bad natural wine, cheap wine thrown into alternative packaging, etcetera. These things also drag the entire category down.”

Allen says that while most people respond positively to the low-sulfite, low-­intervention, organic wine he produces, others insist that it’s so flaw-free, it’s suspicious.

“People have told us our wine is too clean and not cloudy enough,” says Allen. “Some people tell us they want ‘funk.’ Those are often the same people who like what they call ‘natty’ wine.”

But that “funk” and “natty” flavor, Allen insists, is actually a flaw, and people have been trained, by being introduced to natural wine, to “expect that flaw in their glass.”

“I think people out there peddling wines that are fucked up with bacteria and trying to cover it by calling it natural wine are bringing down the entire category,” adds Allen.

Bacterial issues can strike anyone, anywhere, given the right (or wrong) set of circumstances. When Allen got sick with Covid, he had Picpoul in a tank for two weeks, and he had to trash it.

“That cost us $20,000—but it was mousy,” recalls Allen, referring to natural wine’s most common fault that presents as generally stale on the palate, like a mouse cage, stale cracker grains, corn nuts, puppy’s breath or dirty socks. “It would cost us more to bottle it and put out a bad product. As it is now, I have distributors buy our wine blind because they trust our quality. Once you break it, it’s over.”

Many others, he speculates, would have released the wine, safe in the knowledge that they could market it as “funky.”

For Lefcourt, there is a clear line between natural wine that is good and natural wine that is not.

“I will not work with winemakers who insist they have funky wines, but actually have flawed wines,” she says. “For me, natural wine is a way of life, and a way of drinking. Not a strict set of regulations.”

SO WHAT’S A NATURAL WINE NOW?

While Vin Méthode Nature has established guardrails around how natural wine is defined, the designation is new and acceptance of those guidelines is hardly universal.

“Serious winemakers who grow grapes organically have the tools to make excellent wine without additives,” says Lefcourt. “But there needs to be a way to talk about natural wine that isn’t absolute. It doesn’t have to be totally unfiltered all the time with zero sulfites.”

Pascal Schildt, like Lefcourt, imports and then sells wines from across the globe for his eponymous Pascal Schildt Selections. While many would pigeonhole his producers as “natural,” he doesn’t see it that way.

“My portfolio is filled with people who farm with organic and biodynamic principles at heart,” says Schildt. “They ferment without added yeast. They don’t interfere with or adulterate their wine. But the term natural gets abused a lot because people don’t understand what it means.”

Consumers often assume that natural wines contain no sulfur.

“But sulfur naturally occurs during the fermentation process,” Schildt continues. “The question is, how much do they add? For members of the trade, up to 30 parts per million is acceptable. But for consumers, they expect levels of zero. Sulfites are the Achilles’ heel of the natural wine movement.”

And many consumers who claim they are sensitive to sulfur are the same people who often blithely eat dried fruits, maple syrup, pickled anything or potato chips, all of which contain high levels of sulfites, to no ill effect. It’s likely too little water combined with too many glasses of wine, and not the sulfites in those glasses, that’s the problem.

For decades, consumers and even members of the industry were confused about what making organic wine meant. But after a number of regulating bodies—including the USDA and the E.U.—emerged with similar enough definitions to mainstream the term, people began to understand that organic wine entails farming without chemicals, but little else about how it was grown or made.

Many believe that natural wine is headed in the same direction with the Vin Méthode Nature debut. But not Stacionis.

“The term natural wine is too loaded at this point,” she says. “I have proposed a new term: Resilient Wine. It’s wine made with the intention of preserving our planet and people, so wine can continue to exist. It needs to be pragmatic and not dogmatic. About more than the way grapes are grown and treated, but also who grows them, and how those people are treated. About how the wine is transported, about the supply chain and vendors.”

A fitting idea for the evolution of this category, even if it carries the same difficulties of definition as its natural predecessor.

Indeed, the natural wine movement is nothing if not opinionated, colorful and diverse. It is even, perhaps, as Lefcourt says, “a way of life” that simply cannot be contained in a label.

And that may just be the natural [wine] order.