More natural meanderings…
Natural wine is not a trend; it is a dynamic commitment. This means that growers do not perceive it as some mere quasi-philosophical movement to latch on to, but actively resolve to make pure, terroir-driven wines, a decision that drives all subsequent practice in their vineyards and wineries. Damascene conversions are rare and a natural wine philosophy cannot sprout fully-formed overnight; it requires clear objectives, an intimate understanding of the processes involves and a recognition that it is an ongoing approach that needs to be challenged and refined. Some growers are prompted to change methods in the vineyard and winery because they have tasted a natural wine which they admire and wish to replicate the style whilst others are stimulated by the aesthetic, ethical or philosophical desire to find “the truth within the wine”. Experimentation abounds – look, for example, at the number of cuvees that the Puzelats, Breton, Mosse and Courtois produce – their garage wineries are piled high with odd barrels of this, that and the other, a serious effort here, a grand folly there.
There are degrees of what might be described as natural - one grower’s natural wine may be another grower’s “super-natural” wine. Inconsistency and resistance to easy definition are natural wine’s most infuriating characteristic to the majority critics. Wines are snapshots – different grapes, different terroirs, different blends, young vines, old vines, different vinifications with the wild yeasts and low sulphur adding to the danger. Things happen. Not for nothing are cuvees named L’Echappée Belle, Hurluberlu. Natural wines reflect the temperament of the growers and the wild yeasts themselves – restless, dynamic, edgy and unconstrained.
– What is the wine about? Imagine a cathedral lit with every light and line focused on the high altar. And on the altar, very reverently placed, intensely there, a stave of oak, a punnet of blackcurrants and the gospel according to Robert Parker. (with apologies to HG Wells)
I love these wines for the same reason that I adore simplicity. They speak directly like an emotion communicated simply in a poem or cleanly presented food conveying strong natural flavours (who cares about rough edges) or an intense piece of music that moves us on our pulses. Art that aims at high art, an aesthetic intending to inspire awe or devotion, may be admirable, but I don’t enjoy it on a visceral level; I don’t feel as if I am participating which is also why I’m not a fan of would be architectural wines, painstakingly and preciously constructed in the winery, controlled, modulated, honed and toned. The wine is a means to end and that end is critical approbation, due respect which will inevitably command a certain price in the market. Most of us drink wine at the table, rather than on bended knee.
Eliminating risk helps to achieve consistency, but is that the point of making wine? Should the artist minimise inspiration (Picasso once said: I don’t take drugs – I am drugs) to please the broadest section of the general public or should he or she work passionately with the material in their field.
The first question the natural vigneron will pose him or herself is what is the nature of my terroir? Low sulphur wines are irrelevant unless they are a continuation of a non-interventionist process begun in the vineyard. Thus natural winemaker work not in monoculture, but in a varied landscape shared with nature. The vine is part of the landscape; it takes its signature from the landscape. Biodiversity is the key, the vineyard should be alive in every respect for here is where the language of the wine is primarily expressed.
The decision to use wild rather than cultured yeasts further determines whether a wine can be called natural. A natural fermentation with many different types of yeast will make the wine different every year because each yeast has different character and reacts and combines differently. For some winemakers it is a gamble they prefer not to take and cultured yeasts are used to give controlled fermentations. Natural wines depend on not filtering out natural diversity; conventional wines profile desirable characteristics.
More contentious is the use of sulphur. According to advocates of no sulphur (such as Houillon) healthy viticulture enables the wine to create its own defence mechanism to bacterial spoilage.
Having said that there is an element of uncertainty most natural winemakers are not swivel-eyed, hocus-pocus spouting fanatics leaving their wines in the capricious hands of nature. Wine does not always behave predictably, either in the winery, the bottle or the glass. As an extreme example the white and red wines of Cornelissen can pong to high Etna of sulphides, mercaptans and je ne sais quoi. Three or four days in an unstopped decanter, however, and the naughty whiffs disperse leaving a lovely, fresh wine. Although this is not always the way things work out, what does not kill the wine can actually make it stronger. The wine, like any living entity, may eventually find its unique natural balance.
The greatest wines need time to settle and you should expect perfection from the moment you pull the cork. Aeration, the ideal temperature, the shape of the glass, are elements that shape the development of the wine and natural wines are no different in this regard. Reduction is a feature of many natural wines, but reductive winemaking is by no means exclusive to natural wine.
Those who attack natural wines do so on a number of fronts with curious assertions based on rank prejudice at the worst and poor information at the best. It is fine to claim that you don’t like a particular wine because it doesn’t conform to your particular taste, it is a different matter to lump into a group and dismiss that group unilaterally, and something else to use specious reasoning to reach that viewpoint.
THE ARGUMENTS
Natural wines don’t taste like wine. (Wines can be beery, cidery, reductive).
Wine doesn’t always taste like wine. Who is the arbiter here? The mythical consumer on top of the Clapham omnibus, a holographic projection of the palate of Robert Parker or other Rhadamanthine wine critic? Wines certainly don’t taste like each other, so what template should we be working from? Beaujolais Nouveau doesn’t resemble in the slightest Californian Cabernet Sauvignon. Blush Zinfandel, anaemic Pinot Grigio, Chardonnay with oak chips doesn’t taste like wine in any meaningful sense; it is confected grape juice, highly flavoured with external agents.
Show someone a poor quality natural wine and they may presume to pass judgment on all natural wines. Whilst there are inferior, clumsy examples of natural wine there are also inferior, clumsy examples of conventional wine. One doesn’t offer a blanket judgment about all conventional wines on the basis of a few rotten apples.
Natural wines are virtually never submitted to the major wine judging competitions. Because they incite controversy one could easily imagine panels split on a fundamental level. I know I would end up socking someone in the chops in a fit of pique. Their very existence points to an arbitrariness in the way we perceive wines; one person’s poison is another’s radical joy. The more orthodox taster will attribute his or her dislike to a technical fault in the wine; the “naturalist”, so to speak, will either dispute that is a fault or celebrate the fault as a beacon of individuality. As Goethe said “certain defects are necessary for the existence of individuality”.
I encountered an example of this contrary tasting mentality a few days ago when a wine I showed at an event was denounced as corked and oxidised (just to make doubly sure) by a customer who had evidently made up her mind to dislike the wine before she even sampled it. It was neither of those things as it happened, but it was bizarre and twisted. Chacun etc. There a huge number of wines that I will never allow to pass my lips, but there is a place in the pantheon of wine for them. If one’s criterion for faultiness is simple obnoxiousness we would all become arbiters of everyone else’s bad taste.
The winemaker has a duty of care to the consumer...
... is the kind of claptrap spouted by consultants to supermarkets. The consumer is a mythical, fearsome, hydra-headed beast created by consumer acceptance panels and so-called arbiters of taste. Let’s not second guess what people may or may not like to drink, but give them the opportunity to assay different things. The customer is perfectly entitled to make his or her own decisions without nannying protection; after all if you don’t like something you can simply avoid it in the future. The duty of care argument is a red herring; supermarkets may have restrictive buying policies but in the real world you can’t legislate for creativity or individuality. One might as well say that footballers have a duty of care to the spectators; that still doesn’t prevent zero entertainment spectacles. Or perhaps we should ask musical artists to compose exclusively for the charts to please the majority of people who buy cds. The natural winemaker is as proud of his wines as he would be of his children; he doesn’t require the imprimatur of a supermarket buyer or a tasting board to feel that he has made a legitimate wine.
You can’t taste terroir in natural wine...
... is a fallacy. Terroir differentiation in natural wines is every bit as delineated as conventional wine. One can produce numerous examples from Alsace, Burgundy and the Loire wherein the flavour of the vineyard shines through. The two white Sancerres of Sebastien Riffault are a case in point. According to some wine writers his style of wine-making interferes with the expression of Sauvignon in relation to its terroir. Poppycock! Everything he does may break with received wisdom (late harvest, malolactic, ageing in foudre, no sulphur) but if you taste Akmenine (caillottes terroir) versus Skeveldra (flint) you will immediately notice that the wines are entirely different. Undoubtedly certain types of natural wine closely resemble one another – those, for instance, that undergo reductive winemaking or whites that experience extended skin maceration or are aged in foudres (controlled oxidation) – this is the imprint of the winemaking. Terroir, however, is the subtle accent which, when you taste the wines next to each other, highlights their respective identity and emphasizes that they come from different places.
Homogeneity is the curse of the international style whereof the wine is so denatured, so reliant on the heavy hand of the winemaker that one might struggle to discern from which hemisphere it originated.
Natural wines are expensive
By definition, organic and biodynamic viticulture cannot be done on the cheap. A truly natural wine will often come from a small domaine with scattered vineyards that are often difficult to farm except by hand and horse. The eventual quantity of wine produced may be minuscule, often numbering hundreds of bottles. An artisan product is, by definition, one that is made by hand, not in vast bulk. Relatively speaking the wines are inexpensive compared to those spoofy efforts concocted by oenologists to appeal to a certain kind of wine critic. Take away the marketing subsidies, trumpery and deep discounting of brands and natural wines don’t seem costly at all.
Natural wine is only popular because it is currently trendy
The natural wine scene in the UK, such as it isn’t, is a pinprick, a pleasing divertissement. Those who support the wines are passionate about them and happy to trumpet their virtues. And why not – it is difficult to be passionate about over-marketed brands and the same old growers who have been on the scene for years. To have a scene you must have an organisation and a mouthpiece, thankfully, the growers are sufficiently independent to plough their own furrow. When they convene it is at La Dive, La Remise and satellite wine festivals which are more like parties or family affairs. In France you have Sylvie Augereau, in the States there is Eric Asimov and numerous bloggers, whereas in this country only Jamie Goode and Isabelle Legeron have taken up the baton.
I think we are too hung up on definitions and labelling. We’ve seen how the appellation system can stifle creativity by setting artificial (and occasionally anomalous) constraints. When I buy a unpasteurised cheese in a farmer’s market I’m taking a certain amount on trust and use my knowledge of the maker – and my senses – to make an informed buying decision. I am not buying a label or a movement but a cheese, after all. In the same spirit natural wines are wines made by bunch of growers who happen to feel the same way about wine. They know what they mean individually what it means to work naturally, but don’t feel it is appropriate to have a binding definition to take account of all the nuances and niceties of their craft.
And, as I’ve said, natural winemakers are not targeting supermarkets, high street stores, competitions or international tastings. As I discovered a lot of growers prefer to sell directly to wine bars rather than wine merchants and, in Paris, you see them in those wine bars pouring their own products. That’s what I call getting close to the consumer.
Natural wine is not a mass movement nor is it a visibly marketed one. It is simply that an expanding group of (mostly young) growers is making wine with minimal interventions and there is a small core of devotees who love the way the wines taste. I think we all need to learn to be less concerned about labels and more interested in what’s in the bottle.
The reaction I get from people who drink natural wine ranges from bemusement, amusement, excitement and adoration. Most acknowledge that these are not run-of-the-mill wines, by which they mean wines that feature in supermarkets or the high street. Most acknowledge that the wines possess strong flavours – reds are said to be earthy, rustic, meaty, wild whilst whites are cidery, funky, spicy, mineral, challenging, food-friendly.
There is a pseudo-academic backlash to natural wines. In my house there are many mansions. A few years ago biodynamics was scornfully dismissed as a shitty philosophy buried in a cow horn. Nowadays, so many of the world’s greatest growers are biodynamic, or in conversion, that it is nonsense to call it a fringe philosophy even if you think it is hippy-dippy. Evidence for the validity of an action is not what we calibrate in a laboratory but also the evidence of the opinions who taste and drink the wine. We shouldn’t really say that certain agricultural philosophies or winemaking practices are invalid because they have no scientific underpinning any more than we should dismiss all religions for being based on voodoo belief systems. Natural wine is a choice, the very simple logic being that the best and truest wine is made with the fewest possible interventions. Each year is the beginning of a journey that will take the vigneron in a different direction; the creativity of nature is like Dante’s Virgil (or Beatrice, if the outcome is heavenly!) . The role of the winemaker is to reflect what he or she is given, not to compensate for or hide his bounty under a ton of make-up.