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03 January 2013

Drinking Natural Wine and its future

The term ‘natural’ when it comes to wine is being thrown about a lot recently. But are there varying degrees of ‘natural?’ What exactly does drinking natural wine do for your body?

If you follow the developments of wine in media then you’ll have noticed the term coming up more and more. The scene is exploding and there are now about 400 natural wine producers in France alone, with natural wine fairs across the world. France and Italy home a good few, with the UK also getting involved, with their ‘The Natural Wine Fair’. There are even natural wine producers as far as the USA and New Zealand.

Given all this media attention it looks as though Natural Wines  are the ‘new kids on the block’ as its following is rising very quickly. However, it is not widely known that natural wine has existed for many years, because when wine was first made 8000 years ago, it didn’t use powdered tannins, enzymes, vitamins, packets of yeast, reverse osmosis, cryo-extraction, mega purple or any of the other additives and processes used in winemaking today. It was a lot simpler; made with crushed grapes by being fermented into wine.

There are lots of different winemakers who contributed to the upcoming of natural wine. It started as far back as the agriculturalists, where people such as Rudolf Steiner of Austria or Masanobu Fukuoka of Japan along with wine gurus lead the way to other producers. All of these individuals turned their back on the conventions used of their time to create wine using basic methods. This echoed down the line as more and more people began to switch to natural wine until we have what is here today. Some think that the point they are trying to make us that science is overused when it comes to wine, instead of using wine to get the product we want we use it every step of the wine creation process to speed things up and artificially enhance the flavour, which takes away from the soul of it. Natural growers however simply nurture the biodiversity of the plant while embracing nature, rather than trying to control it.
Instead of using chemicals to ensure that the plant survives, it is said that a vine grown in the same soil for a long time along with a diverse microbiology will be able to fend for itself when necessary with its immune system.

A lot of wine importers claim that ‘natural wines’ are marred by one fault or another, this includes Liberty Wines’ managing director David Gleave. They claim that you simply cannot get the same level of flavour as if you created the wine using science. But when you taste the beautiful bouquet of Le Casot desMailloles in Banyuls or Dormaine de Fontedico , you can’t deny its delicious flavour.

It just goes to show that natural wine does indeed still have a place in this world.