Natural Wine?

When natural wine is mentioned, I typically get: - you mean organic wine? Or - isn't all wine natural, basically fermented grape juice? Well, that's exactly what wine should be. But most of the time it's not.

Let's get down to what natural wine really is.

While there is a clear definiton of organic or biodynamic wine with corresponding certification programs, natural wine doesn't have a common agreed upon definition. It can be seen as a philosophy and an approach to winemaking to make wine as naturally as possibly by not using chemicals or other additions and not using technical processing changing the wines character. This way the wine can be authentic and a true expression of the terroir and grape variety.

It is a movement that started in the 1980's as an answer to the increasing industrialization, ever greater volumes, lower costs and harmonized international taste profile. Even though this is seen as new and radical, this is how wine was always made just a few generations ago before the large scale introduction of chemicals and heavy processing.

While organic and biodynamic deals more with how the grapes are grown, the natural winemaking is more about what is done in the production of the wine.

In practice, making natural wine technically means the following:

1. The grapes are grown as organic or biodynamic. (many natural wine growers and makers go much further with reducing intervention in the wineyard and promoting biodiversity)

2. Manually harvested (picking only healty grapes with the right ripeness is crucial for not having to use addions e.g. sulphites in the winemaking process)

3. Spontaneously fermented with the natural yeast on the grapes, no use of commercial yeast (only this can been seen as authentic and to express the terroir as commercial yeast strongly influences the taste profile of a wine)

4. No additions are used (no chaptalisation, tannins, acid etc.)

5. No fining or filtering which means the wine might be cloudy (no chemical or natural fining agents and no filtering)

6. No heavy processing that manipulates the structure of the wine (no inverted osmosis, flash pastorization, vacuum destillation etc)

Regarding 4. additions, the most strict ones add no sulfites while more moderate natural wine producers may add small amouts, of up to 30mg/l at bottling.

Source: Raisin

A rough comparison of conventional, organic, biodynamic and natural wine shows a quite striking picture of what is, or can be, in the wine. If you look at the EU Commission regulation of allowed additions in wine, it is quite a list of chemical substances, and nothing of this has to be declared on any ingrediants label on the wine bottle as is mandatory for all food stuff.

Natural wine is the term often used, but it is also referred to as minimum- or low intervention wine, "raw"- or "real"- wine, "vin vivant" (living wine) and in the 80's in France when it all started it was called "vin sans soufres" (wine without sulfites).