Of Natural Wines and Unnatural Reactions
Stuff these ideas into a cow horn, bury it in the autumn, take it out in the spring, dilute, stir them one way then the other, and spray willy-nilly into the blogosphere…
If you are prepared to be spooked by strange wines you will inevitably find things that upset you.
Deconstructing wine is one thing but inveterate fault-finding is the narrowest remit of a critic. People aren’t perfect, nor are wines– that is their beauty.
If you covet belt-and-braces Bordeaux and overwrought modern Burgundy or sweetly-fruited New World wines you’ve come (or you came) to the wrong tasting!
Linear, chiselled wines, imho, knock holes through big, modern, bimboid blocks of flavour,
Why are low sulphur wines considered weird? Turn that question on its head. Aren’t wines with lots of sulphur a. unhealthy b. unnatural and c. faulty?
Or, are our palates skewed by having drunk so many confected wines that we assume a certain taste standard or profile?
Why is it that so-called the normal/conventional wines are the ones that are most manipulated?
If you are in the habit of making invidious comparisons, you will only see the wines for what they are not, rather than perceive their essence.
If you can’t create sensuous food and wine matches in your head many of these wines with their biting acidity and pronounced astringency are going to be difficult to understand.
Why do people say that real wines are oxidised when they patently aren’t. Some whites are made as a result of “controlled oxidation” whilst many of the natural wines with low sulphur are vinified in a scrupulously clean environment.
It is not the fact that a wine is cloudy it is the quality of the cloudiness that matters. Most natural winemakers don’t filter or fine their wines.
Natural wines live without the tricks and tropes of a winemaker. Take the ethereal Pierres Chaudes (Vin de Table from Domaine L’Anglore) with its wonderful nose of elderflower and delicate dusting of wild garrigue herbs and that prickle of mineral, yeast and gas. It’s a brilliant, refreshing cocktail of subtle aromas and flavours – it transports me to the region and conveys to me a sense of vintages as much as any wine I’ve tasted – and yet some people who taste it are looking for more wine, greater breadth of flavour, so to speak. You might as well say Syrah should be Grenache and vice versa and that all vintages should be uniformly rich and powerful.
Elegance and understatement are undervalued.
Although natural wines are precisely that, natural, there is a vast diversity of approaches and styles and to brand them as esoteric wines made by outsiders probably misses the point. On the one hand the one (mad)man crusade of Frank Cornelissen who makes completely non-interventionist zero-sulphur wines under the volcano. You have the crisp, floral, modern wines from Albert Mann juxtaposed with the cidery style from Jean-Pierre Frick. The need to define creates prejudice and hobbles one’s understanding of the wines.
Natural wines usually come with a distinctive story. To taste without the story is a bit like trying to read a book in a language that you can barely speak. The reason why growers make particular choices informs the very style of the wine itself and it not always the end of the journey that matters so much as how we arrive there. Blind tasting is fine for competitions; it is blind to the rationale of the wine though.