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13 August 2019

What is natural wine?

Natural wines are growing in popularity, with more people making it, importing it and most importantly, buying it. However, natural wine is far from being simply the latest fad. Here’s the information you need to know. 

Natural wine might seem like a bit of an odd phrase. Isn’t all wine natural? Well, no, actually it’s not. The wine that has dominated the market shelves for the last couple of decades is made from fermented grape juice, but it can also contain a whole host of other ingredients and is often manipulated and messed with both on the vine and in the winery. This kind of wine, let’s call it conventional wine, is what most of us are accustomed to drinking.

On the other hand, natural wine is made with organic grapes, contains almost no added ingredients and is produced with far less intervention from the winemaker. When it comes down to it, natural wine is simply nothing added and nothing taken away. With more people venturing into the production of natural wine, more vinters importing it and more people making a swap to natural wine - it’s not a fad, it’s a change in taste.

In recent years, winemaking has become increasingly technical, but natural winemaking is actually the traditional approach. Natural wine is here to stay - for those who have tasted the real thing, there’s no going back to the conventional stuff.

So, what is natural wine?
There isn’t actually any formal certification for natural wine, which makes it difficult to get a hold of an agreed upon definition. But the main idea of nothing added, nothing taken away seems to work for most people in the community.

Natural wine starts with organically grown grapes, so there are no nasty pesticides. It is also free from additives - this is starkly different from conventional wines which can have over 72 legal additives in them. Conventional winemaking allows for steps like fining and filtering, all designed to create a wine to suit the market; natural winemakers do a lot less fussing and just work with what nature has given them in that year.

Is natural wine always cloudy?
Sometimes natural wine is cloudy, only because it has not been fined or filtered - the two steps which keep conventional wine “nice and sparkling”. However, natural wine can be clear if the winemaker takes the time to let it settle and so the cloudy bits fall to the bottom. Not fining or filtering also explains why some natural wines have a lot of sediment in the bottle.

Is natural wine always fizzy?
Carbon dioxide gas is a natural by-product of fermentation, but conventional winemakers de-gas their wines in order to remove any fizziness. Natural winemakers on the other hand, bottle the wine as it is. Any fizziness will go away on its own accord, but you can always decant natural wine and give it a good swirl to dissipate the gas.

Is natural wine better for you?
There’s quite a lot of buzz around natural wine being healthier, but this is hard factual distinction to make. Alcohol is alcohol at the end of the day, it is a toxin and drinking too much can lead to hangovers. You can make the argument that natural wines are better for you as they don’t contain any residual pesticides from the grapes.