How wine should be 🍇
The long but short history of Natural Wine
This Edit is long overdue. This topic has been catching dust in the Foodistory idea box. I actually wanted to write my second Edit about this topic. I’m glad I didn’t because since then my knowledge of this topic has been broadened a lot. And just like wine, the longer I would wait, the better it would get.
Now is the perfect time to open this bottle, with the summer almost in full swing it’s highly likely you will find yourself melting away in the park in the next couple of weeks. It’s crucial to take good care of yourself during these times, enjoy life a bit, and don’t worry about the time ticking away. Your best companion during these moments is a cold bottle of natural wine.
Pourquoi du vin naturel ?
‘Oui, oui, mothafucka,’ was the first interaction I had with natural wine. Four years ago a triple-long episode of F*ck that’s Delicious about Paris came out. During these episodes Action Bronson and, in my opinion, maybe one of the greatest humans alive; Clovis Ochin, stumble through the streets of Paris drinking crazy amounts of natural wine, smoking weed, and eating food made by upcoming talented chefs. You are basically watching two guys living life to the fullest while getting absolutely hammered on natural wines for 60 minutes long. While it might not sound very charming, these three episodes unknowingly made a big impact on me on how food should be reviewed, shared, and cherished. If you haven’t watched these episodes yet, please do, you won’t regret it.
This video was the first interaction I had with natural wine! I had never heard of natural wine before and so I started digging into it since I became curious about the colorful drink. After tasting it I was completely blown away by the taste of the wine. I began drinking it more regularly and started to explore the different sorts of natural wine. Eventually, I even worked at a natural wine bar in Rotterdam where my knowledge broadened even further (You had to taste every open wine for ripeness before starting your shift which was a very big plus).
Nowadays, I think most people have already heard of it or have seen it on a menu. Natural wines are being sold at almost every just-opened restaurant, everywhere in Amsterdam and overpriced bakeries throughout the Netherlands start selling them.
Qu'est-ce qu'un vin naturel?
There is no standard definition for natural wine. The phrase ‘natural wine’ does not exist legally. Winemakers, sommeliers, distributors, and writers take issue with the name ‘natural wine’ and often prefer to use terms like naked, low-intervention, or raw wine. This is because natural wine is more of a concept than a well-defined category with agreed-upon characteristics which brings us to a magnificent story:
Brothers Alessandro and Ricardo Bulzoni run a natural wine shop in Rome’s Viale Parioli, this shop has been selling natural wines since 1929. Suddenly, in the summer of 2012, the brothers received a fine and a possible prosecution for fraud in their letterbox from the Italian Ministry for selling natural wine without certification. The explanation of the Ministry was the following. Because the phrase ‘natural wine’ legally did not exist and no certification exists, it could be misleading to the public and damaging to other producers who did not label their wines in this way. The brothers Bulzoni paid the fine without any objection and went straight back to selling the stuff.
Since there is no clear explanation of the term natural wine a definition can’t be set in stone. In my own terms, natural wine is wine made with as less interventions as possible. Natural wines come from vineyards that nurture and protect life from vine to cellar to bottle. It’s how wine should be, wine in its purest form. No additives are used, pesticides, herbicides, or external yeasts are. Just fermented grape juice.
Natural vs Conventional
So where does that place the wines we are used to drink? Conventional wine and natural wine are very different from eachother in taste and the way its produced. This is already visible just by looking at the vineyards and the colors in the bottle.
In 2021, the Vin Naturel organization introduced a couple of rules that winegrowers must adhere to in order to call their wines 'natural wines'. And even though there are plenty of natural winemakers who do not follow these rules and still call their wines natural wines it gives a great overview of how natural wine is different compared to conventional wine.
Grow all your grapes organically at the very least.
Harvest your grapes by hand
Only work with naturally present yeasts
Do not add anything to the must or wine
Never manipulate the composition of grape varieties
Do not add sulfites for or during fermentation
To further explore the difference between the two, it is crucial to look at history.
L’Histoire du vin naturel
Allow me to pull the cork right off the bottle: Conventional wine is the newcomer in the wine world, natural wine is actually the OG wine. It’s funny how now natural wine is making a comeback and is being disregarded by the conventional wine world.
The history of wine dates back to China 7000 B.C. and as you can imagine, at that time things like pesticides, additives and preservatives did not exist. They just squashed the grapes, let the juice ferment with the skins and twigs, and drank it before it would turn sour. This method of winemaking has been finetuned by the Romans, Greeks, Persians, and Ottomans in the years that followed. Actually, the method of winemaking without using additives, pesticides, and preservatives was seen up to 150 years ago.
It was during the Industrial Revolution when the wine world flipped upside down. Louis Pasteur was a vital player in this transition. Monsieur Pasteur came to the finding that yeast turns fruit sugars into alcohol and carbon dioxide, revealing the method of fermentation. Next to that he also figured out that bacteria turn wine into vinegar, revealing how wine often turned sour.
Armed with knowledge and abetted by breakthroughs of the industrial revolution, winemakers went from dumping juice in a vat and praying to understand fermentation and then, critically, putting the product into mass-produced, uniform bottles sealed with a cork so bacteria could not do their vinegar-making thing.
The taste and quality of the wines became consistent and could be shipped worldwide. 1900 until 2000 was truly the golden age of wine. However, not everyone shared that view. Especially the French.
A movement initiated by the Pack of Four was started around the 1960s. This movement looked for a re-visitation of the manner in which their grandparents made wine before the invasion of pesticides and engineered synthetic compounds that had gotten so common in agribusiness after the finish of the Second World War. The Pack of Four consisted of four winemakers from the Beaujolais: Marcel Lapierre, Jean Foillard, Charly Thevenin, and Fellow Breton. These four men described the industrialized wine as dead wine, so dead it gave you headaches.
The town of Villié-Morgon turned into the central spot where winemakers and wine fans could gather to draw inspiration from the Pack of Four. Slowly but surely the movement initiated by the Pack of Four started to spread to different wine regions in France like Jura, Loire, Rhône, and Bourgogne.
Les vins naturels
If you never had a natural wine before and feel intrigued to try it, download the app Raisin on your mobile and check for the most nearby shop or bar. The next question will be: ‘What kind of wine will you drink?’
As mentioned before, there are different sorts of wines in the natural wine world. Just like the conventional wine world, there are wines like red, rose, and white. Natural winemakers dare to step outside the boxes and so there are a few unique wines to pick.
Orange wine
The picture above is part of the painting ‘bread and wine’ glass by Isaack Luttichuys. This painting has been painted in the 17th century. The colour of the wine is remarkable, where we expect it to be crystal clear white, the wine has a orange/amber colour. How come?
Conventional white wines are made by pressing the grapes, seperating off the juice and discarding the skins, stems and pips to produce a pale white wine. If you let the juice ferment and macerate with the skins, stems and pips you end up with a wine that eyes orange. This is the wine we see in the wineglass of the painting.
The reason why people chose to let the juice ferment and macerate with skins, stems and pips all those years ago was because the wine became less vulnerable to oxygens and external bacterias. Nowadays, the same method is used by many natural winemakers.
Petillant-Naturel (Pet-Nat)
Pétillant-Naturel a.k.a. Pet-Nat is a sparkling natural wine. There are different methods to create a fizz or bubble in a wine. The method for the Pet-Nat is perhaps the most ancient technique, this technique is called ‘traditional method’. The process starts with still wines, called the base wine, these are then bottled, together with yeast and sugar but in case of natural wines with native yeasts and natural sugars. This causes secondary fermentation in the bottle itself. The dead yeast cells, also called lees are expelled by the action of what is called ‘disgorging’ and I have to say, it looks pretty spectacular. Have a look by yourself:
Pet-Nats come as red, white and orange wines and they are easy recognizable by their crown caps. They are often super light in taste and refreshing because of the bubble.
Santé!
And there we are, now you know a thing or two about natural wine. Which is good since you are now able to impress your friends with this exiting product or you’re able to outperform the waiter server on knowledge. Have fun with exploring the natural wine world!
The country of Georgia is usually credited with inventing winemaking from grapes.