Sun Sentinel Palm Beach Edition
France defines natural wine; is that enough?
Natural wine is healthy and pure; natural wine is wretched and horrible. It’s the future of wine; it’s the death of wine.
For 15 years, natural wine has been a contentious time bomb that has divided many in the wine community, creating conflicts fought with the sort of anger that stems only from extreme defensiveness.
Since 2003, when I first encountered what has come to be called natural wine at the seminal restaurant 360 in Red Hook, Brooklyn, I have been a fan, though a clear-eyed one, I hope.
I believe in the promise and beauty of natural wines, while acknowledging that many examples are not good, as is true with all genres of wine. The truth is that natural wines have made all of wine better.
Natural wines could not have offered a more luminous contrast to the industrial practices of the wine industry, a business that marketed itself as pastoral. Many mainstream wines are made from chemically farmed grapes, then produced like processed foods, with the help of technological manipulations and artificial ingredients, to achieve a preconceived aroma-and-flavor profile.
Natural wines, made from organic grapes or the equivalent, and fermented and aged without additions, are unpredictable but alive, energetic, vibrant and surprising. It’s like comparing fresh cherries picked off a tree to red Life Savers.
The winemaking spectrum offers many shades and degrees. Not all conventional wines are processed wines. Not all wines called natural adhere to a strict “nothing added, nothing taken away” protocol.
But the appearance around 20 years ago of natural wines as a group challenged an industry dominated by a postwar promise of better living through chemistry and technology.
Back then, the prevailing wine culture was marked by increasing homogeneity. Wine was elevated to a luxury good, and grapes were placed in a caste system and ranked by their “nobility.”
Natural wine, on the other hand, promoted a diversity of styles. It resurrected and celebrated indigenous grapes and local traditions that had been forgotten or dismissed by wine authorities. It sought to knock wine off its pedestal with irreverence, presenting it as a delicious, fun drink that nonetheless packed emotional and cultural power.
This new popularity has forced the sort of reckoning that natural wine producers have for so long successfully avoided — namely, what exactly is natural wine and who is permitted to use the term?
In the past, it was the wine mainstream demanding a definition for natural wine, an entreaty that most producers blithely ignored. Definitions smacked of authority, orthodoxy and bureaucracy, exactly the binding forces that many natural wine producers have long viewed as inhibiting their freedom.
But the notion of natural wine producers as independent bohemian artisans is tough to maintain when the genre’s popular breakthrough radiates dollar signs, not only to corporate bean counters but also to small-business poseurs.
Jacques Carroget, of Domaine de la Paonnerie in the Loire Valley, led a group of natural wine producers that after a decade of work won approval last year for an official, though voluntary, certification of natural wine in France. Wines that join the approved trade syndicate and follow its rules governing viticulture and winemaking will be able to label their wines Vin Methode Nature.
As long as natural wines were the province of a small number of producers, he said, he saw no reason for an official definition. “Alas, the business, the greed — when we see natural wine emerge from its niche, we find unacceptable abuses,” he said.
The Vin Methode Nature charter requires its members to use only grapes that have been certified organic and harvested by hand. They must be spontaneously fermented with yeast found naturally in vineyards and wine cellars, and made without what the charter calls“brutal” technologies like reverse osmosis, thermo vin ifi cation or cross-flow filtration.
Only small amounts of sulfur dioxide, an antioxidant and preservative, may be used, and two different labels will distinguish between wines made with or without even this low level of sulfites.
The use of sulfur dioxide has been a difficult issue in the natural wine world. Some producers and consumers oppose any additions, while others are more tolerant of minimal use. The effort to accept both points of view is unlikely to satisfy everybody.
Neither will the requirement that grapes be certified organic at a minimum. Many producers work organically, biodynamically or the equivalent, but avoid certification because of the expense and the paperwork. That is unlikely to change.
Some leading figures in natural wine like Isabelle Legeron, founder of the
Raw Wine fairs, which bring consumers and producers together, generally favor the charter, though not without reservations.
“I understand people’s concerns around stifling creativity and freedom by applying rules,” she wrote in an email from England, “but from my personal perspective I don’t think this is something to worry about as a definition won’t kill the spirit of natural wine.”
Aaron Ayscough, a blogger who is also wine director at Table restaurant in Paris and is writing a book on natural wine, argues that labeling like “Vin Methode Nature” asks a lot of small producers and nothing of large industrial producers.
“It’s fundamentally regressive, because it puts the financial and administrative burden of proof on small-scale, artisanal natural winemakers rather than on industrial wine producers,” he wrote in an email.
Ultimately, nothing is wrong with the French label, which is voluntary and available only to producers in France. But for people who have not educated themselves, it may merely provide the illusion of discernment. They may be buying wines that are made naturally according to a set of rules, but that are not in the end natural wines.