WHAT IS NATURAL WINE, ANYWAYS?
The term “natural” is bandied about widely in the wine world. From our experience, natural wine has quite a spectrum, sometimes electrically delicious, sometimes with so much sediment that we stop halfway through the bottle.
So when did this all start?
There’s a growing consensus that the natural wine movement is a response to “conventional” or industrial wine production that only started to take over in the last ~70 years.
In the pursuit of cheaper, quicker wine, producers began introducing machinery, chemicals, and pesticides in farming, and chemical flavors and reduced variability in winemaking. Their wines began to lose the complexities, nuances, and sense of place that make wine so special in the first place.
In 1978, four winemakers in Beaujolais, France sought to reverse the trend and started making wine the “natural” way. They were Marcel Lapierre, Jean Foillard, Jean-Paul Thevenet, and Guy Breton — called “the Gang of Four” by Kermit Lynch, an excellent wine importer based in Berkeley, California.
They eschewed chemicals in farming and wine production, and let the wines speak for themselves and their place of origin. Years passed, the trend grew, and now natural wine is a global movement (aided by passionate writers like Alice Feiring).
So if natural wine is not industrial, then what is it?
The criteria varies for wine to be considered “natural”, and as of today, there is no universally-accepted definition.
In 2020, the French created their own definition of natural wine and an accompanying certification, Vin Méthode Nature. It considers the amount of human-influence in a wine’s farming and production to rate how natural a wine is.
Some purists take this mindset further, believing a natural wine is only truly natural if it is zero-zero, with zero additions (like sulfur) and zero subtractions (no filtration or fining).
The French definition of Vin Méthode Nature is relatively simple:
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Grapes must be farmed (and certified) organic or biodynamic (we’ll talk about what these types of farming mean in a future newsletter!)
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Grapes must be hand-picked
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Grapes must be fermented with native, or naturally-occurring, yeasts
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No water, acids, chemicals, flavorants, or other additives
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No extreme process intervention seen in some industrial wineries (reverse osmosis, spinning cone filtration, etc)
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Minimal sulfur additions, to keep the sulfite level to 30mg per liter of wine (or 30 ppm)
VOON wines, by this definition, are natural wines with the only caveat that not all of the vineyards we work with are certified organic (even though most farm with organic practices).
We pride ourselves on our low intervention methods, because that’s what lets our wines shine!
Low intervention does not mean low effort, though. We make all of our wines in such small batches so that we can personally monitor, smell, and taste our wine every day before we bottle them.
So there you are! Hopefully you learned little more about natural wine and please, let us know your thoughts! As we mentioned earlier, even replying “thank you” to this email will make our day. We write these for you, after all.