Despite all the heated debate, isn't it time we accepted that natural wine is here to stay?
I think it's time to move on. I'm not entirely sure where we are in the 15-plus year-old debate about natural Wwines, but surely the time is up? It's here to stay, so let's just all get on with it.
They say there are five stages of grief and I'm quite certain we're past denial; I'm reasonably sure anger is also behind us (although in some cases, I have my doubts); there was, perhaps, some depression (I like to envisage the tears of repentance on an old-school critic's cheek in front of a Poulsard from Philippe Bornard, for instance); but I suspect we're at the bargaining stage. We really should just take acceptance in our stride and move on – for everyone's sake.
Some, still, like to trot out the droll observations that pruning is unnatural – an intervention – or that I put salt on my beef, so why wouldn't I make additions to my wine? There are no degrees, you see. We must live our convictions: natural winemakers must be grunting, hirsuite troglodytes unable to operate a destemmer or log on to Twitter. What happened to just making interesting wine? Imagine, for instance, if a vigneron says they are not going to prune their vineyard. There are basically two responses: "that's absurd" or "I wonder what that will taste like". Those are the positions, basically.
And how many of us signed a charter? I honestly don't like the term natural wine (for reasons I, and many others, have written before), but if I only have a few seconds to describe the wines I make, I use it. It's a very clumsy shorthand, for want of something better.
It reminds me a bit of the now accepted genre of Post-Rock. Twenty years ago the term merited a few paragraphs on Wikipedia; now it's got sub-headings. Still, in 2001, journalist Mark Redfern sat down with Dominic Aitchison, the bass player of Scottish band called Mogwai. Mogwai had got themselves something of a cult following and were, for better or worse, lumped in with the genre. So Redfern asks about it.
"It's kind of a stupid term," said Aitchesion. "It doesn't really make much sense. I don't know, it seems really pretentious to me. A lot of the bands are described as being post rock. You get bands like Tortoise, we're nothing like Tortoise, we're completely different. So it's a pretty vague term. It's a pretty lazy term."
And, I'd wager, a large number of natural wine producers, importers, distributors and writers feel the same way. Those who debate this publicly implicitly understand that the term comes with a lot of variation, nuance and fragmentation (who adds sulfur/who doesn't, just for starters) but two words paint a clunky, broad picture.
But even if you hate the term (as I do), what can you do about it? Honestly, how do you stop it being used? It's passed into the lexicon, into cultural vocabulary. It's a terrible definition but at the same time it is, to a degree, understood by swathes of people. It has become a brand. I suspect some of the hated comes from marketing people who realize more than most of us what a powerful brand natural wine is?
So how do we move on? Aside from using the words natural wine a lot less, there has to be a little bit of reconciliation. When I say I make wine with zero additions, that's not an implicit attack or superiority statement over those who do. It's the equivalent to a Pinot Noir producer stating she just works with one grape and a burly bunch of Bordeaux blend lovers getting all hot under the collar: "Ugh, listen to her with her 'one grape is all I need' talk, implying blends are rubbish". Nonsense, it's just a winemaking choice.
And then there's the faults thing. I can't begin to express how disingenuous this argument is. Faults – and I'm principally talking brettanomyces and VA here – are possibly the wine world's biggest conspiracy. Their detection and their appreciation/deprecation is remarkably personal and subjective, yet it's routinely trotted out to disparage minimal-intervention winemaking but at the same time its presence is never noted in high-end wines. If you point-blank dismiss wines for having brettanomyces, you are going to have to divest yourself of a lot of grand cru Burgundy and Bordeaux. And I got a legion of natty wine drinkers who will appreciate that stuff way more than you, mate.
Sure, there are differing levels of fault in a wine but until critics start stating where all their wines fall on this spectrum, then we're just unfairly slamming natural wines. If you want rigor in your winemaking philosophy ("natural winemakers need to stop using stainless steel tanks") then you should demand it of your critics (why, for instantce, do they not have a Brett scale next to the points awarded? "A glorious, if somewhat funky Saint-Émilion; 92 Pts, 3 horses.").
And on a pragmatic level, natural wine bashing seems short-sighted at best, albeit with zero risk of losing advertising revenue. Why wilfully close the door on such a clearly youthful, keen, engaged demographic? You can level some antagonism towards the establishment from the proponents of natural wine – sure, the natty crowd had a crack at norms, at established critics, Boomers, and mass-market wines – but in 15 years that's been repaid now, surely?
Let's embrace the fallacy that natural wines are all faulty and undrinkable. What of all those people who are enjoying them? If they really are terrible, are there not better strategies to bring them over to the dark side than by disparaging their choices? What's the game-plan there? Release your anger? Only your hatred can destroy the established wine critic? I reckon Darth Vader would have had more success with turning Luke if he'd played a more compassionate card from the start (but presumably mass infanticide doubtless has certain negative effects on your cogency). But no, there is to be little by way of conciliation it appears. As far as I can make out, the only thing that everyone agrees on is that Foillard's Beaujolais is hot shit.
It wouldn't take much though, because there are some phenomenal wines in the minimal intervention scene, and wines established critics will and would love. There’s no need to antagonize an entire category of (generally young) wine drinkers, not least when you have a roster of professional tasters who are able to give a heap of insight. The closest I've seen it come in recent memory is Simon J Woolf's piece in Decanter last year in which he touted 30 great orange wines. It’s not the full "natural" (and you can be sure that any publication that does a tasting of minimal intervention wines will slap "natural wine" on the headline, if not the front page, for reasons we all know), but it's getting there.
I'm still, though, astounded that major publications have yet to produce editions or even one-off, hors-série-style, magazines dedicated to the category. What is wine's future if we're only going to pander to the Bordeaux and Burgundy collectors and supermarket shoppers? No wonder Bernard Magrez himself is bored of Bordeaux – or at least he is when he's trying to tout his non-Bordeaux ranges.
And the producer? Put your hand up if you think the people at Château Giscours would be going around telling journalists that they chaptalized in 2016 had the case of their miscalculation not been made public. How many other châteaux – and you can be sure that if Giscours were pushing the envelope on chaptalization, it was broadly endemic – went around telling people they were adding some refined sunshine to the juice? Who of our commentators asked and published this? You don't read about it because, basically, everyone who makes wine is making natural wine – at least in image.
If you don't like the perceived (and doubtless sometimes, real) disingenuousness of the natty crowd, ask yourself how many people are touting everything they've done to their wines. After all, the notion of the "transparent" winemaker ("all the work is done in the vineyard") is a parallel to the natural wine ethos, and don't let anyone tell you otherwise – high-toast barrels with toasted heads obscure terroir as much as oxidative handling and as much as reductive handling. The Sherry process, the Madeira process, even aging wine for extended periods, obscures terroir as much as most forms of natural winemaking I can care to name.
So the criticism of the misty-eyed, romancing and lack of transparency within the minimal intervention crowd regularly fails to understand that, by-and-large, much of wine (and particularly within the more "interventionist" bunch) is shrouded in a mystery of being natural – and purposefully so. We're all natural winemakers now.
What's important is what comes after the "but", and I think this is where we are. I have issues with the term natural wine, but it's time we all moved on, no?
January 26, 2021 at 06:03AM
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Swallowing the Reality of Natural Wine - Wine-Searcher
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