Don’t buy the natural wine hype

The wine business is not immune to fads and crazes. There is constant chatter when a “new” grape variety comes along and we are forever hearing that X is the new Y, or something that will replace the previously popular grape whose cool quotient has now dwindled.

When I say new, that is a bit of a misnomer. The Vitis genus has been stalking our planet since well before the dinosaurs even popped on to the scene. Adding to that, we humans have demonstrably been fermenting grape juice to make wine for roughly six millennia, so in reality, nothing is really new. Like economic principles, hemlines and music, wine fads are cyclical and whatever is trendy now can very often be traced back to its roots in the past.

One of the hot topics in the European wine industry at the moment is “natural” wine.

This “natural” moniker has been adopted by a relatively small group of winemakers, in essence, to signify that they have added nothing to their creation. It is a movement that champions minimal chemical and technological intervention in the farming and production process. The core aim is really for producers to differentiate themselves from, as they see it, the big corporate and industrial producers. They want to create a niche of “ethical” winemakers who deliberately eschew “artificial” additives, laboratory created strains of yeast and, specifically, the use of sulphur dioxide (sulphites) for preservation. All are legal, but the question is whether excluding them from production is actually going to produce a “better” wine. Ultimately, to make the tastiest wine should be every winemaker’s goal.

Just to add to the fun, the natural wine movement is a very broad church with no clear set of ground rules and no specific definition. With no definitive set of rules a lack of a clarity is often exploited and the door is opened to an “Emperor’s new clothes” scenario, where consumers are led to believe that a substandard, “funky” or cloudy wine is phenomenal and that they are ignorant heels for not enjoying it.

Personally, I’m not sure what level of paranoia or distrust would make one think that the average bottle of supermarket plonk is unnatural. Even at this entry level bracket, it is still fermented grape juice and not something that can be plausibly created in a laboratory. On top of this, the use of sulphites in modern wines (which  the natural wine movement opposes) is done in such a controlled and minuscule way, typically using twenty to two hundred parts per million, that it has been proven even the theoretical adverse reaction is extremely rare.

On a positive note, I am greatly in favour of producers making their wines in an environmentally sound and ethically sourced manner. There are a multitude of brilliant wines from the portfolios of established “ethically sound” vegetarian, vegan-friendly, biodynamic and organic producers out there. My advice though, on anything that specifically styles itself as “natural” is – caveat emptor, “let the buyer beware”.