Many of you may have noticed how many buzzwords there are these days regarding the world of wine (specifically, natural wine), so we thought it might behoove us all to take a moment (or many) to delve into these words and phrases that have become so commonly used of late. Words/phrases like “natural,” “organic,” “biodynamic,” “unfiltered,” “low intervention,” “pet nat,” “chillable red,” “skin contact,” and “glu glu” are all terms you may have heard, but what do they mean? Like REALLY mean.
When it comes to “natural” wine, there’s no single clear definition that encompasses the term fully, so today we’ll tell you how WE define the word “natural”; over the next few months we will tackle all of those related terms as well.
How we define “natural wine”
While the word “natural” seems to be a general, catch-all phrase and vague attempt to make food and beverages sound healthy, we actually do have a definition that we find is solid and pretty easy to understand:
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A natural wine has nothing added and nothing taken away.
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Simple, right? “But Kristen,” you say, “isn’t all wine just grapes?”
Hell, no! is the simplest answer.
Wine can contain pesticides, from their uses on the vineyards, and can contain any number of additives like color, tannin, sugar, flavor, fake oak, and a plethora of other nasty things. Additives and pesticides are used all over the world, so the myth that California wines are the ones with all the chemicals added is just NOT true; California produces tons of well-made, wonderful, natural wine, as does the rest of the world.
Nothing Added
The “nothing added” part, then, refers to no pesticides of any kind in the vineyards and no additives in the winery. People add stuff to wine to make it more stable, to make it higher in alcohol, to make it taste and feel smoother, and to make a quicker-made wine taste more aged. Natural wine uses none of these tactics in the vineyard or winery.
Natural wine truly is just grapes and yeast, but here the yeast is naturally occurring in the winery or on the grapes, so no commercial yeast is needed. Also, commercial yeasts can alter the direction in which fermentation would naturally go, so we also require that natural wines not use commercial yeast.
Nothing Taken Away
The “nothing taken away” part means that a natural wine is not filtered or fined. You may have seen evidence of zero filtration in a wine bottle before — that’s just yeast, and it’s harmless. We like to say it adds MORE flavor or character to a wine, like salt to food. When you see no sediment in a natural wine, it may have been gravity-filtered naturally so that the sediment fell over time and then was removed.
Several agents can be used for fining wine, and it is the use of animal-derived products such as egg whites or milk casein that can prevent a wine from being marketed as vegan. Filtration strips a wine of character. The more you filter, the more you strip. So, as we see it, to be natural, a wine cannot be filtered.
To sum up, a natural wine:
- has nothing added and nothing taken away
- is fermented with native yeasts only — no commercial yeast
- contains no pesticides or additives
- was not fined or filtered
What about sulfur?
That’s a separate conversation, but we’ll say this: Sulfur is not a poison. It is a natural preservative. It helps wine from turning bad or creating weird bacteria over long stretches of travel. The more healthy a vineyard is, the less sulfur a winemaker will need; the more unhealthy the vineyard, the more they’ll need. Some people are dogmatic about sulfur, but we still consider a wine natural if it contains a small amount of sulfur, a few parts per million, say. Zero sulfur wines can be super fun to explore, but a winery has to be very good at what it does to make a clean wine without it.
That’s natural wine, y’all! While there’s much more to say, we’ll leave you with this: Natural wine is trendy and cool, sure, but natural wine is great because it is living! It is grapes in their rawest form, a true expression of a vineyard and a winemaker and terroir. It doesn’t have to be funky or weird; it can be clean and traditional and classic and gorgeous. It can be inexpensive or wildly pricey. Natural wine has been made for thousands of years, and there’s nothing new about it except more people are talking about it and looking to make more hands-off wine. It will not stop you from having a hangover. It is not healthy — it’s still alcohol, after all — BUT it is fun to support and drink and share and talk about, and we are here for it!
If you have any other questions, ask! You can email Kristen at kristen@mwineonline.com.
