Best Natural Wine and Where to Buy Natural Wine

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What is natural wine? Frustratingly, and confusingly, there is no legal definition, but it is generally accepted to be made with minimal intervention in the vineyard and the winery. This means that grapes are grown organically and/or bio-dynamically (where the vineyard is treated as a complete ecosystem and governed by certain ecological, ethical and spiritual principles), and fermented with yeasts occurring naturally in the air in the winery. The wine is made with no additives – up to 70 additional ingredients are permitted in traditional wine-making (including some organic wines) which, allergens aside, don’t have to be disclosed on the label. These include sweeteners, acidifiers, stabilisers and other things to make the wine more palatable, as well fining agents to remove particles in the wine that make it murky, and sulphur dioxide to keep it fresh.

Natural wines particularly appeal to a millennial demographic, a generation turned off by what they see as the stuffy world of ‘serious’ wine, and are often made by their contemporaries who have thrown away the rule book of conventional wine-making. In fact, natural wine is nothing new: it is the way wine was made for thousands of years before progress bought the techniques we now term conventional.

That’s not to say that natural wines are more healthy – the alcohol in all wine is potentially more damaging to health than the minimal residues of substances used in wine-making that have all been screened for safety. The extremes of natural wine-making may be an acquired taste, but many natural wines are immaculately clean tasting and would pass muster with even the stuffiest of the natural wine deniers. These artisanal wines are labour-intensive to make, so tend to cost more than their massproduced cousins – one drinker’s fun and funky may be another’s fatally faulty, so seek out specialist suppliers such as Les Caves de Pyrene, or ask for guidance from wine retailers (virtually, if needed, via social media), and experiment to see where you sit on the natural wine spectrum.

@katehawkings