Over the past two years I have witnessed an increasing demand for natural wines from among our customers, sometimes to the exclusion of some of the wines I make. Certainly describing a wine as “natural” has broad, visceral appeal: natural objects are untainted by human vice and exist in a state apart from ourselves. When the architecture of civilization seems to buckle underneath the weight of the humanity it supports, a return to nature is a tempting siren.
I wish to query more specifically what constitutes a natural wine, and how wine would exist in a state of nature. Ultimately, I conclude that natural, as an adjective, is a poor descriptor for any wine: romantic at best, dangerous at worst, and ultimately unhelpful in ensuring the sustainable satisfactory enjoyment of wine as a beverage.
For the most part, wholesale buyers and the class of professionals that separate producers and consumers seem to agree only that natural wines are made without laboratory-selected yeasts. Wine professionals also speak broadly about natural wines as those that additionally have some combination of traits, the number and importance of which vary from person to person: whether the wine is grown sustainably or organically, whether the grower respects the environment, whether the winemaker practices minimal intervention in the cellar, whether the winery uses filtration or not. The criteria appear to reflect a view of what wine would be in the absence of a globalized, industrialized economic order.
The first problem I encounter in trying to understand natural wines is what they actually represent as a group. That natural wine encompasses so many concepts is problematic. There is no inherent, unbreakable link between environmental sustainability and minimal intervention in the cellar, nor is there a link between conducting fermentation with ambient yeast populations and the state of the vineyard from which the wine is made.
The focus on yeast selection, nearing on obsession among some buyers, is particularly baffling to me. Certainly, I understand and agree with the principles of minimal intervention. I make no argument here for over-worked, commercially-calibrated wines. Most wine is enjoyable, and great wine is impressive, precisely because it encapsulates the work of nature in its astounding complexity with very little work on the part of the creator.
The missing link in the concern over yeast selection or lack thereof is, in my opinion, the nature of wine itself as a product of man and a product inexorably linked to the spread of agriculture. There are no Cabernet Sauvignon (a cross between Cabernet Franc and Sauvignon Blanc) vines growing in nature. The grape variety is a selection through breeding, conducted by man, in order to produce tasteful grapes for the production of wine. Everything about wine agriculture: the selection of rootstocks, the method of soil preparation, the varieties of grape planted, the management of vineyard canopies, the choice of harvest date, and a thousand other decisions made during the course of a typical harvest reflect the hand of man in the making of wine. Wine simply does not exist in a natural state in any recognizable form.
To focus on yeast selection at the expense of these myriad of other important decisions is to place artificial emphasis on one particular aspect of winemaking. I admit to the allure of natural yeast as a “magic” moment in a fermentation, where something happens seemingly spontaneously. There is nothing wrong with ambient yeast fermentation, and some great wines are made this way. I cannot give anything other than unqualified endorsement for its careful and considered use. However, I refuse to accept that it deserves special status in delineating a class of wine that deserves attention above any other.
I challenge buyers to embrace complexity in the selection of authentic, tasteful, terroir-specific, and special wines without relying on the crutch of the natural adjective. The word connotes little except to a few who have imbued it with a false distinction among different wines. The informed consumer should take stock of whether a label applied to a wine correlates to a factually verifiable difference between a hypothetical panel of items, or whether the label imbues romanticized ideas about a wine’s character that are not specifically grounded in the mode of production of the wine itself.