The last word on natural wine - part two

Why do people like natural wine? It’s not the reason you think.

Part one of my natural wine odyssey looked at the origins of natural wine and my own somewhat sceptical attitude to the wines themselves. Now there’s part two looking at the cultural and sociological forces behind natural wine. There’s also going to be a part three about the legacy of the natural wine movement, both good and bad.

Within Alice Feiring’s 2011 book Naked Wine there is a quest to meet Jacques Neauport, one of the godfathers of the natural wine movement in Beaujolais. It echoes The Wizard of Oz in that Feiring’s eventual meeting with the great man is an anti-climax, he claims no great wisdom and only wanted to make wine without sugar and sulphur so that he could drink it in large quantities with no ill effects.

Within the natural wine world this attitude is not uncommon. You’ll often hear certain wines being described as ‘smashable’. Or the French use the term ‘glou-glou’ to describe wines that are particularly easy to knock back. There’s often a bacchanal feel to natural wine tastings that makes a refreshing change to the white tablecloths and silence at more traditional events. Natural wine people tend to smoke roll-ups and not worry too much about spitting.

The sense of fun is a good enough reason to drink natural wines but peel the surface of most involved with the scene and there’s usually a political and environmental explanation as well. The aim for most producers is to make wine without synthetic chemicals. They tend to be left-wing people who see their vocation as anti-establishment though proper socialists would see natural wine makers as bourgeois romantics who need to be collectivised and sent off to the gulag for reeducation. It always makes me chuckle when winemakers pose as anti-establishment figures when making wine that sells for £100 a bottle in smart London restaurants.

Terroirs - hugely influential London wine bar, 2008-2021

There’s no doubt that natural wine can be egalitarian and democratic, the very opposite of the sort of hierarchical wines of Bordeaux and Napa Valley. The barriers to entry are a lot lower. You can just rent a garage, buy in some grapes and make natural wine. It probably won’t be very good, that’s not a problem as long as you have a funky label.

But for your average customer, natural wine is not accessible and that is why people who like it, tend to like it a lot. Natural wine is particularly popular in hipstery places like Hackney, Margate, Brooklyn and Belleville. Trendy folk don’t want to be drinking the same thing as the normies. They want their wines, like their bikes, music and jeans to reflect their exquisite individual taste. Which is why they all look and taste the same (partial joke).

I don’t think it’s an accident that natural wine broke out into the wider consciousness in the 2000s. Until the 1980s, wine itself was high status. The gentrifiers of the past, the sort knocking through houses in Islington and Camden, would have been happy with French country wines. But by the 1990s, it was all getting a bit too easy for the lower orders to appreciate.

On one hand you had fun fruity wines coming out of Chile, New Zealand and Australia labelled as shiraz or chardonnay that people liked. There were popularisers in the press and on telly like Oz Clarke, Jancis Robinson and Jane MacQuitty. You could now buy some nice bottles in Sainsbury’s. While at the other end of the market, the concept of scoring wines by super critics like Robert Parker took the difficulty out of buying Bordeaux. Why get to know the difference between Château Cantenac- Brown or Château Brane-Cantenac when you could just look up what Parker liked best? The growth of smartphones and wine apps meant that people could check this in an instant.

The public was getting too confident with wine. Something had to be done! The answer was natural wine.