DAN'S WINE BLOG- IT AIN'T NATURAL

Friday, April 8, 2022

Back on the 25th of February I had a bit of a rant about “Clean” wine – Well, today I am talking about Natural wine. Not ranting, just talking.

Currently, there is no legal definition of what constitutes “natural wine”. Die-hards define it as having no chemical additions at all, whereas more moderates define it as having the minimal necessary additions to ensure the safety and quality of the wine. This the die-hards label, “low intervention”, and thus the argument began!! There is a verbal war being waged out there as to what means what and who can call what, what.

So almost everybody in the Natural camp agree and acknowledge that the grapes must have been grown organically or even bio-dynamically – so far so good – no argument in the vineyard. Then, we get into the winery and this is where the “bun-fight” starts, with one side saying nothing (zero-zero) is allowed to be added to the wine. Whereas the other side says – Yes, it has to be fermented using natural yeasts, no added chaptalisation (added sugar), no filtration either BUT a smidge (minimal amounts) of sulphides to stabilise and preserve the wine is OK. They argue that this minute addition will stop the wine from going off too soon and help preserve the wine as the winemaker intended it to taste like. Unfiltered wine still has the dead/dormant yeast cells in the wine and without a modicum of sulphides, under certain circumstances, the yeast could re-activate and cause secondary fermentation in the bottle thereby ruining the wine.

The hard liners say – tough, that is the luck of the draw, while the moderates say we can add a drop of sulphides (like most of the food we eat has) and prevent this from happening without tainting or altering the flavour of the wine. This would be fine if all wine were consumed shortly after it was made and therefore did not need any preservative to ensure durability, like the homemade wines that the old Mediterranean men make at home and drink within a few months of making it. In the real commercial world, many “preservative free” or natural wines sit on a shelf for quite some time and therefore without preservatives can start to deteriorate. Imagine if your food items started to go off before you got around to using them, i.e. you had to go to the shops and buy fresh groceries every single day, trusting that the shopkeeper had not had the item for long enough, for rot or deterioration to set in – i.e. they were selling you edible food.

Another problem with the term “natural” is that it has been badly abused and overused in many other industries, especially in the food and cosmetics industries, so that it lacks the credibility it once had.

Like a number of other contentious issues in the world of wine (screwcap vs cork, glass bottle vs alternative packaging, etc.) this will not go away anytime soon. Therefore, until such time as there is a legal definition on these terms, I strongly suggest that you read the label very carefully when choosing a wine making claims, so as to determine exactly what the producer means by the terms they use on the label.

Personally, I am in favour of adding a smidge of sulphides so that my wine does not go off before I get around to enjoying it and as such I laud the increasing number of winemakers who rightly label their wine “Minimal Intervention” – it gives me the comfort that they care both about the environment as well the quality/drinkability of their wine when it reaches me.

So I say, cheers to the minimalists – even if it “isn’t natural”!!