The last word on natural wine - part one

Like the call of cuckoo or the thwack of leather against willow, the annual 'middle-aged writer turns his attention to natural wine column' is a sign that spring is in the air.

It’s traditional in April for crusty old wine columnists to turn their gaze to natural wine with the coming of the Real Wine Fair in London… or so I thought. It turns out that it normally takes place every two years but there won’t be one next year either.¹ Hook be damned, I’ve been thinking about this article for a while so I’m going all out with a two-parter on the subject. The first will look at my own changing views on natural wines and the second will look at the subject from a sociological point of view.

Rolled up trousers, deck shoes and a flatcap - all the rage in 2009

On this site I sometimes make disparaging remarks about ‘natural wine’ even putting the two words into quote marks like I’m Peter Hitchens complaining about ‘new year’. But I didn’t used to be such an old reactionary. I was once, whisper it, a bit of a hipster before the word was commonly used. From 2001 until 2013 I lived in East London, at one point living on Cheshire Street, at the north end of Brick Lane. I drank in the Golden Heart. My flatmates worked in advertising. I wore skinny jeans, I had a 1980s racing bike and wore vintage cycling jerseys. I even voted Liberal Democrat once.

Probably the first time I heard about natural wine - I’ll take it out of quotation marks now or this will get tedious - was from Patrick Matthew’s book Real Wine: a Rediscovery of Natural Winemaking. It was published in 2000 though I read it in 2008. I didn’t realise that there was a burgeoning movement, it just sounded like the sort of wine that I wanted to drink.

The concept of natural wine is best understood by what it is a reaction to. On my honeymoon in 2009, my wife and I stopped at a winery in the Napa Valley. There was a tasting room in varnished pine with a marble floor. We paid $25 each and the man behind the counter poured out a glass of something approaching the consistency of cough syrup. It smelled of coffee and Ribena. So thick was the wine that sipping it proved to be a challenge. On swallowing my mouth was overwhelmed with tannin, alcohol, sweetness, chocolate and coconuts. I made a face and the man behind the counter smiled and said ‘it’s good isn’t it? Our winemaker designs them so you can still taste it fifteen minutes later.’

Alice Feiring, a writer who is prominent in natural wine circles, has a word for wines like this – ‘spoofolated’ – high alcohol wines made from overripe grapes pumped up with added tannin, oak, enzymes, yeast and tartaric acid. Natural wine, in contrast, is made, as far as possible, from grapes and the yeast that lives on their skins. Fermentation would take place spontaneously, oak flavour kept to a minimum and nothing added like sugar, enzymes etc. Sulphur dioxide would be kept to a minimum, or in some cases, and this is the tricky bit, omitted altogether. An implied part of natural wine - there is no legal definition - is that the grapes would also be grown without synthetic pesticides, herbicides or fertilisers though many aren’t certified organic, biodynamic etc.

Clearly people have been making what could be called ‘natural wines’, there I go again, for thousands of years. But the impetus for a movement came from a group of pioneering winemakers in 1980s Beaujolais known as the Gang of Four who wanted to make wine without adding lots of sugar to boost alcohol levels. They were Marcel Lapierre, Jean Foillard, Jean-Paul Thévenet and Guy Breton who were in turn inspired by an older winemaker called Jules Chauvet who didn’t like how Beaujolais had become formulaic. Alice Feiring’s Naked Wine book is well worth reading on the subject.

From Beaujolais, natural wine spread across France and later the world. According to Simon Woolf, the term may be a misnomer, a mistranslation of the French vin nature meaning without additions not natural. Though English-speaking people have been referring to ‘natural wines’ deliberately as the subtitle of Matthews’ book demonstrates. He quotes Paul Draper of Ridge Vineyards in California, from a speech delivered in 1994:

“I sometimes think that my colleagues in the New World forget that the power and meaning of wine come from nature and from a natural process…..”

As far as I was concerned natural wine was simply wine made as it should be. Full of enthusiasm, in 2011 I attended The Natural Wine Fair organised by Doug Wregg from importer Cave de Pyrene and Master of Wine Isabelle Legeron at Borough Market in London. I eagerly tasted everything. I didn’t swallow. I spilt biodynamic wine on my trousers. Arianna Occhipinti looked on askance.

The following year, 2012, there were two natural wine fairs as Legeron and Wregg had parted ways, artistic differences, I presume. I attended Wregg’s Real Wine Fair in Bloomsbury. The wines were varied. There were many that I loved, often with a remarkable vivacity about them². But alongside fairly conventional producers like Mas de Daumas Gassac in the Languedoc and Davenport, an organic vineyard in England, there were some wild wines: cloudy bottles, thick with sediment because fining or filtering your wine in anyway robs it of character; wines made with zero sulphur so they were unstable; wines that tasted of vinegar or smelt like scrumpy.

Then there were the wines tainted with what’s known in the business as mouse - a bacterial infection which can’t be detected by smell but you can feel when you swallow and gets worse with each sip (it’s well worth reading Simon Woolf on the subject). I had never tasted it before but at the various natural wine fairs I attended, it was common. What was frustrating is that a little sulphur dioxide can prevent this infection - so why not use it?

This pointed to a certain dogmatism in the natural wine movement. For some a little compromise along the way was fine, for others it was a badge of honour to dispense with sulphur dioxide - a largely harmless chemical that has been used in winemaking for centuries - even if it meant their wines were unstable.

But worse than the knackered, flawed or plain bizarre wines was the fact that many wines tasted the same to me. There was often a slightly farty nose and then a light body that didn’t taste of much. Tasting the lavishly-praised Beaujolais wines from Foillard or Julien Sunier, I found I just didn’t like them. I much preferred more conventional producers like Château Thivin or Jean-Marc Burgaud.

For wines that were meant to be the ultimate expressions of terroir, it was strange how so many tasted the same³. I wasn’t being contrary, I really wanted to like these wines. In fact, I pretended that I did like them. But my revealed preferences showed that I didn’t. In 2021 I took part in a blind tasting of cinsault from around the world. Largely my fellow judges and I agreed, especially on the superlative quality of the South African wines, but the very natural Chilean wines that everyone else liked, I scored low.

While the rest of East London went natural wine crazy, I began to avoid the sort of places that sold them. I loved the food at Terroirs, a now defunct wine bar run by Cave de Pyrene, but often found it a struggle to find something I wanted to drink. In other places I used to dread the young waiter with a gleam in his eye when suggesting something I might like to drink.

I left East London in 2013 and moved to Blackheath and from there to Kent. Though I now live in a small market town, I don’t think my tastes have changed that much, I’m just more honest about what I enjoy. I’m a bit basic. While I don’t want ‘spoofilated wine’, chapitalisation is fine, I like a little oak, or even a lot in some cases, cultured yeast is not a problem and sulphur dioxide is a wonderful thing. I have learned to stop worrying and enjoy conventional wine.

Part two looks at natural wine from a cultural point of view and then part three next week will ask what the legacy of the movement is.

1. Doug Wregg from Cave de Pyrene wrote: “It would have been (as we decided to hold it in alternate years), but the venue became ridiculously expensive and unreasonable in their demands. Since Tobacco Dock was the best (and probably the most appropriate) venue for an event of this scope and nature, we have decided to suspend the fair in this form and focus on smaller events under The Real Wine banner next year. We want to keep it fresh rather than just be another massive fair. 2024 was fantastic, arguably the best version ever, and we feel if it we have to quit on a high, then that is a good memory to take with us.”

2. I have added this line after publication just to make it clear that I like, love even. some wines that fit under the natural wine umbrella. It is a very broad church.

3. I appreciate that conventional wines can also taste remarkably similar no matter where they came from but I thought natural wines were meant to be different.