The rise of natural wine
La fascinante histoire du vin naturel.
Contrairement au vin biologique, le vin naturel, fabriqué sans produits chimiques, ne possède pas de certification officielle. Pourtant, il commence à s’imposer dans les restaurants londoniens. En France, il représente moins de 1 % de la production, mais fait de plus en plus parler de lui. Tendance éphémère ou technique révolutionnaire pour faire du vin ? Le journaliste Stephen Buranyi mène l’enquête.
If you were lucky enough to dine at Noma, in Copenhagen, in 2011 – which had just been crowned as the “best restaurant in the world” – you might have been served one of its signature dishes: a single, raw, razor clam from the North Sea, in a foaming pool of aqueous parsley, topped with a dusting of horseradish snow. 2. But almost more remarkable than the dish itself was the drink that accompanied it: a glass of cloudy, noticeably sour white wine from a virtually unknown vineyard in France’s Loire Valley, which was available at the time for about £8 a bottle. It was certainly an odd choice for a £300 menu. This was a so-called natural wine – made without any pesticides, chemicals or preserva-
tives – the product of a movement that has triggered the biggest conflict in the world of wine for a generation.
A STAPLE IN MANY RESTAURANTS
3. The rise of natural wine has seen these unusual bottles become a staple at many of the world’s most acclaimed restaurants – Noma, Mugaritz in San Sebastian, Hibiscus in London – championed by sommeliers who believe that traditional wines have become too processed, and out of step with a food culture that prizes all things local. A recent study showed that 38% of wine lists in London now feature at least one organic, biodynamic or natural wine (the categories can overlap) – more than three times as many as in 2016.
4. But among wine critics, there is a deep suspicion that the natural wine movement is intent on tearing down the norms and hierarchies that they have dedicated their lives to upholding. The haziness of what actually counts as natural wine is particularly maddening to such traditionalists. “There is no legal definition of natural wine,” Michel Bettane, one of France’s most influential wine critics, told me. “It exists because it proclaims itself so. It is a fantasy of marginal producers.”
LIKE IN A PREVIOUS CENTURY
5. Sebastien Riffault, from the Loire Valley, runs the 10-year-old trade body L’Association des Vins Naturels. He told me his basic technique was simply “making wine like in a previous century, with nothing added”. This means using only organic grapes, picked by hand, and fermenting slowly with wild yeasts from the vineyard. No antimicrobial chemicals are added to the wine, and everything is bottled – bits and all – without filtering.
6. At first glance, the idea that wine should be more natural seems absurd. Yet, as natural wine advocates point out, the way most wine is produced today looks nothing like this picture-postcard vision. Vineyards are soaked with pesticide and fertiliser to protect the grapes, which are a notoriously fragile crop. In 2013, a study found traces of pesticides in 90% of wines available at French supermarkets. In response to this, a small but growing number of vineyards have introduced organic farming. But what happens once the grapes have been harvested is less scrutinised, and, to natural wine enthusiasts, scarcely less horrifying. The modern winemaker has access to a vast armamentarium of interventions, from supercharged labgrown yeast, to antimicrobials, antioxidants and filtering gelatins.
LITTLE INTERVENTION
7. Natural winemakers believe that none of this is necessary. In practice, this means going without the methods that have given modern winemakers so much control over their product. Even more radically, it means jettisoning the expectations of mainstream wine culture, which dictates that wine from a certain place should always taste a certain way. 8. In France, which remains the cultural and commercial centre of the wine world, the acceptable styles of winemaking aren’t just a matter of history and convention; they are codified into law. For a wine to be labelled from a particular region, it must adhere to strict guidelines about which grapes and production techniques can be used, and how the resulting wine should taste. This system of certification – the appellation d’origine contrôlée (AOC), or “protected designation of origin” – is enforced by inspectors and blindtasting panels.
“[Natural wine] is a fantasy of marginal producers.”
MODERNISATION OF THE INDUSTRY
9. France has long been the centre of the wine world, but until the mid-20th century most vineyards were small and worked mainly by hand. In the eyes of natural winemakers, the rot began in the decades after the second world war, as French vineyards modernised and the industry grew into a global economic behemoth.
10. By the early 1990s France was exporting more than $4bn worth of wine a year – more than twice as much as Italy, and more than 10 times as much as its new competition from the US, Australia and all of South America. And when it came to style, everyone still followed the French. Today, even the cheapest red wine found in the US or Britain is in some ways a tribute to that victory, having likely been soaked with toasted wood chips to approximate the vanilla and spice aromas of a French barrel.
11. Thanks to the industry’s embrace of technology, wine was more plentiful, profitable and predictable than ever. But in the 1980s, just as French wine was putting the finishing touches to its global conquest, stirrings of discontent began to be heard among winemakers.
IT ALL STARTED WITH BEAUJOLAIS
12. The blueprint for what came to be known as natural wine comes from Beaujolais, a pretty region of soft green hills and stone cottages just below the slopes of Burgundy proper. In the 1950s, the area had started making “beaujolais nouveau”, a cheap, easydrinking wine that was produced quickly and released early in the season. It was a huge hit, and by the end of the 1970s Beaujolais was producing more than 100m litres of wine a year.
13. Despite its commercial success, Beaujolais had become a dismal example of technical winemaking run amok. To achieve the short production time, winemakers relied on labgrown yeasts to jump-start the process, and big doses of sulphur to halt fermentation and stabilise the wine ahead of schedule. A small group of local dissenters loathed this conveyor-belt style of production. They coalesced around a winemaker named Marcel Lapierre, who, upon his death in 2010, was widely eulogised as “the pope of natural wine”.
EXPANSION IN THE 1990S
14. In the 1990s, as the natural wine scene made its way beyond Beaujolais, across France and Europe, it took on a gleefully anti-modern character. Many winemakers embraced hyper-localism, planting long outof-fashion native grape varieties and adopting archaic production techniques.
15. For a long time, natural wine seemed destined to remain a shaggy subgenre. But starting in the late 2000s, something changed, and natural wine began popping up on menus in Brooklyn, in east London, and in the hipper quarters of Copenhagen and Stockholm. This new type of wine fitted perfectly with a wider revolution in taste, as vague terms such as “natural” and “artisanal” became bywords for sophistication. What had once been the passion of a hardcore group of eccentric winemakers in eastern France had, somehow, become cool.