Ruminations on Blackpool Promenade

Most conventional winemakers make wine by processing grapes and yeasts to a formula with an eye for public approbation, to gain prizes in competitions and listings in supermarkets. Their work is a kind of profiling: correction and compensation (and consistency) are the watchwords – the wine must be transformed or refined into an “end product”.  Those who seek a further “impressiveness” are aiming at a kind of facile fabulousness; they are as chefs who enjoy finically arranging ingredients on the plate, prettifying the result until it has the facsimile of beauty. A great wine is not great because of high seriousness or bombast; its greatness resides in its individuality, whereby the taster recognises its inherent qualities.

As Charles Lamb said: Damn posterity! I will write for today. Most natural winemakers make wine for the present without fear or favour. They use instinct rather than precise calibrations and are prepared to accept that the wine will be different from year to year. They make wines for themselves because they can’t please everyone all the time. They see themselves as channellers or interpreters of great raw material rather than makers of wine. Their intention is generally to produce wines sans maquillage, which a pleasure to drink and simple to understand, rather than pretentious or spoofy.

Natural winemakers don’t enter wine competitions, they rarely seek certification, or chase publicity or critical approval; they defiantly leave the boxes unticked. The press and the public like certainty and affirmation of popular biases, whereas true science teaches us to doubt and be ignorant. Integrity has no need of rules or benchmarks, and genius, as Goethe wrote, is love of the truth. The genius of natural wine is that it expresses the truth of where it comes from, rather than hiding that truth under a welter of supernumerary interventions.