What is a Natural Wine?

Last week a customer asked about “Natural Wines” and I wanted to give a more nuanced take on the subject. It’s a thing now, wines labeled as natural or organic. What exactly does that mean? I think it means several things but I need to point out that all wines bottled and on the shelves at D. Schuler’s are naturally made. No one adds chemicals, preservatives or coloring to good winemaking. Remember that there are a lot of words that have been perhaps invented by some marketing department. Wine is grape juice, a little yeast and a controlled container. It’s been done this way for centuries. Beer is also very simply-made in a similarly natural fashion. It’s possible that large, industrial-sized wineries (looking at you Gallo) use some chemicals in their productions but I seriously doubt it. It’s too easy to make wine the old-fashioned way.

When it comes to creating natural wine there are perhaps more challenges posed than when making conventional wine. Without the protection of fungicides, herbicides or pesticides the farm is subject to that often cruel matriarch, Mother Nature. This means that if it is unusually hot, cold, dry or wet that year (and it usually is at least one of those things) or if the grapes fall prey to any disease this will enormously affect that year’s vintage.

This begs the question, why bother? The answer is two-fold; firstly because natural winemakers all hold the same belief that farming should leave the land in the same or better condition than it was found in. Secondly, all this work goes to create a wine that truly reflects the berries it comes from and the region it is grown in. This intangible and mysterious quality is lost when grapes are subject to heavy manipulation. A natural wine tastes a certain way because that how nature decided it should.

In the vineyard itself are several obvious candidates for some form of chemical interaction. However, here in the 21st century are the younger generations of vineyard managers & small farmers who wouldn’t even think about adding herbicides or pesticide chemicals to their farms. I don’t think that’s an issue with 90+% of the wines in the market.

The other, smaller issue is in the use of tractors inside the rows. You don’t want to have to have them going up & down row after row spewing diesel fumes & dust on my precious grapeskins. We really don’t want that. Keep the farm clean, clean, clean. Even if it means a few weeds growing inside the rows, we’re not gonna poison them or mow them. As mentioned above, for the vast majority of wineries would not have the gall to allow sloppy vineyard practices for their wines. Their long-term reputation depends on absolute integrity of their products. You can’t sell junk in the competitive marketplace and besides, Jane would never buy junk for the store shelves.

Organic practices – once the juice is converted into wine it has to settle any solid material left in the tank. Wine is pumped off the top of the tank and the settled material is shoveled & washed out. The wine at this point is slightly cloudy and is sometimes filtered with organic material such as egg whites. Not exactly vegan, is it? Are they organic eggs?

You’ll see the word “organic” on any given label but unless it’s also labeled as “Unfined and Unfiltered,” I find myself suspicious of what else that might mean for the juice in the bottle. Could it be that the winery doesn’t use soap & cleaning agents to sanitize itself? That might not be a great idea… Could it be that the use of sulfur is not allowed before the fermentation starts as you do not want to disrupt the natural yeast? This can be quite difficult as if you have any bad yeasts airborne in the cellar, many problems of fermentation can occur. There are some producers who will use sulfur in very small amounts and others who chose to use 0. If you are not able to follow the whole wine making process very closely the chances of having some kind of problem in the fermentation or even with the aging is quite possible.

Could it be one of the biggest challenges for this winemaking style, are the uncertainty of indigenous yeasts? Yeasts colonize and breed in any environment. You have hundreds if not thousands of types of Saccharomyces yeasts. These yeasts breed and create many different types of offspring, some of them good and many of them problematic. The ideal strain best suited for winemaking is Saccharomyces Cerevisiae. The problem in working with wild yeasts is that they, as the name suggests, wild and cannot be controlled. In a wild environment when you have many of these problematic yeasts the amount of uncontrollable flaws can easily get out of hand. Some of those typical flaws are volatile acidity, mouse, brettanomyces, as well as stopped fermentation due to tired yeasts. If any of these flaws appear in the finished wine your entire business model for the year is totally dead.

Finally, if the harvest is super weak in either sugar-content or lacking a nice solid acid content, the juice can be manipulated by acidifying or added sugar for the yeasts to eat and turn into alcoholic molecules. This is more common in the manufacturing of mass quantities and typically only used in poor vintages as a means for the manufacturer to keep the mega business model rolling along. The winery’s chemistry team would have to balance the sugar / acid proportions in order to keep the wine balanced & steady this year’s budget for the corporation. I can think of supermarkets and big-box stores that would carry these manipulated wines but again, you really won’t find these science-projects in our store. 

Unlike products with the certified organic label, which must adhere to a clear and regulated set of federal requirements, natural wine is at best the result of a set of well-intentioned, voluntary production principles: use organically farmed grapes; don’t add anything (like cultured yeast) or modify anything (like acidity levels) during the fermentation process; don’t filter the final product (so as to retain its funky natural flavors and microbes); and add few to no sulfites (chemicals naturally produced during the fermentation process or added to preserve freshness or minimize oxidation).

At worst, natural wine is a marketing buzzword, capitalizing on a hugely popular cultural trend. However, the term “natural” is not regulated, so if a company tells you they’re selling natural wine, it’s impossible to know what they’re actually claiming

Cheers,
Eric