Natural Wine | ייו טבעי
Dispelling the Natural Wine Resistance
The style seizing wine lists is more straightforward than smelly, gassy glasses once suggested.
Styles have spectrums, and while natural wine may seem off the chart at first taste, it's all about resisting interference, however cloudy the outcome.
What Is Natural Wine?
As with any natural product, the term natural wine simply indicates that nothing artificial has been added to the grape growing or winemaking processes. Natural winemaking aims to express the essence of wine without interference, and it's up for interpretation.
Humans have intervened with wine to impact everything from flavor to appearance with conventional fining, filtering, degassing, and mass production.
The elimination of manipulation is all about understanding and potentially appreciating what's not happening — viticulture free of herbicides and pesticides and winemaking free of the more than 50 additives, from synthetic yeast to liquid oak extract, approved for use in Europe and the U.S. Everything in natural wine occurs naturally, and the fermented grape juice is produced with traditional practices – the term may be trendy, but the methods are actually ancient.
Not all organic wine is necessarily natural, but all natural wines are made with organically or biodynamically grown grapes, typically hand harvested. Natural wine can contain no or low sulfites (10-100 parts per million versus the 350 ppm allowed.
Natural wine can be cloudy or retain sediment from forgoing filtration and clarification. It can also be earthy, effervescent, wild, enjoyably unpredictable, and endlessly interesting. Each natural wine is as unique as its terroir and fermentation techniques.
What It Isn't
Natural wines aren't objectively better or healthier than conventional wine, and curious consumers can explore the style as with any other.
Evaluate aroma, appearance, body, and flavor, and consider comparative or blind tastings.
No wine needs to be intimidating, and natural wine celebrates simplicity the way that chefs champion simple preparation to let seasonal produce shine. There's a reverence to restraint. A wine shop guru in New York's Grand Central Station recently described a natural winemaker as "so primitive they practically don't have electricity" to conjure the image of ancient methods.
The term living wine and notion of respecting nature are not exclusive to this abstract, and with winemaking, intervention can have as much intentionality as the social change and sustainability we're seeing in the industry. Tasting is interpretation and all makers have a story to tell.
How It Started
World-renowned wine educator Kevin Zraly doesn't even touch on the term natural wines in his famous "Complete Wine Course," and like many old-school experts, he uses quotation marks when finally mentioning "natural" wine in a 2021 Facebook post: "These wines remind me of that saying 'what's old is new again,' with small, artisanal producers shaking up the wine world with their 'old-style winemaking' of returning to the earth and not interfering with nature."
להפריך את מיתוס היין הטבעי
The style seizing wine lists is more straightforward than smelly, gassy glasses once suggested.
Styles have spectrums, and while natural wine may seem off the chart at first taste, it's all about resisting interference, however cloudy the outcome.
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