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Natural wine is wine made from grapes grown under organic farming, adhering to a series of basic principles, such as: using exclusively grapes from organic and biodynamic cultivation; using spontaneous/wild yeasts (rejecting commercial, lab-cultured ones); refusing the use of any flavour enhancers; limiting, as much as possible, filtering and fining (ideally avoiding these processes altogether); using sulphites minimally, in cases where it is clearly impossible to avoid them, whether during production or during bottling. In short, natural wine follows the motto of “non-intervention”, meaning the practice of adding or removing little or nothing from the final product, as opposed to the production of commercial wines, which are manipulated so that more or less acidity, alcohol and other flavours are added, according to the commercial ambitions of those who craft them.
As a result, this nature-respecting approach to farming produces wines that, compared with commercial, mass-produced wines, have a very different flavour. They can be hazy, with flavours and aromas that may seem unusual at first, and they are certainly much more intense and profound in their relationship with the grape and the land. These are wines that seek a lost nature, which is to say, the tradition of the grape for the grape’s own sake.
Natural wine is, therefore, a living wine. It is the microbiological life of the vineyard, tended by a grower who wants their land to be a healthy, wholesome habitat, and who lets the grapes live out the transformation of juice into wine without technological shortcuts. As such, a living wine comes from living soil.
For those who produce wine this way, and also for those who enjoy drinking it, what is at stake here is a wine that is more than a wine, in the sense that it is a philosophy and a way of life. This love of the land is a special way of declaring a love of life. Natural wine = wine not nailed to the cross of numerical rating.
