Just how many years into the natural wine era (trend? wave? meme?) we may now be, is, like many other aspects of natural wine itself, not very clear. But I can say with certainty when I first encountered the phenomena.
It was 1999, and arrived in the form of a bottle of Angiolino Maule’s La Biancara Gambellara, put into my hands by Richard Kzirian of Violette Wine Imports here in Cambridge. I like to call Richard the godfather of natural wine in the northeast. I don’t know anyone who has thought more about the category, or done more to advocate for it.
In those early days, folks dedicating themselves to the pursuit of self-consciously natural winemaking were few in number and operating on a very small scale. Over the years, I’ve developed a taxonomy of those involved, based on their sources of inspiration. Four broad categories suffice to sum them up.
First, Primitivists, for whom the model for natural wine is, essentially, neolithic. Next, Folklorics, whose models are historic, rather than prehistoric, and traditional. Then come the Cosmics, by which I mean those in thrall to Viennese education reformer and astral traveller Rudolf Steiner, father of biodynamic agriculture. Lastly, the Hygienics, those in it purely because they consider naturalism beneficial for people and for the planet we all inhabit. Cheers to each of them, I say.
But — may I be frank? — not everything these intrepid experimentalists have produced is brilliant. This is in part because natural wine isn’t just wine with everything that could be added or fiddled with neither added nor fiddled with. No, it’s a different thing entirely, requiring new techniques and approaches by winemakers, and an aesthetic adjustment on the part of consumers. Fermentation of fruit sugars by yeasts may be a natural process, but if what you’re looking for at the end is a healthy, stable, agreeable wine, the process is fraught with peril and has to be managed.
The current state of things evidences a split between hardliners who say we should all adjust our tastes to fit the character of what some have called, not without justification, raw wine, and those who have the idea that more work is needed to figure out how to make every bottle clean, healthy and readily appealing to a broad swath of consumers, not just the geeks among us, without recourse to off-farm additions or undue technical manipulations. It’s not like it can’t be done, but there are always judgments — and concessions — to be made along the way.
Here in your wine corner, we’re in search of wines made in good faith, rather than rigid adherence to theory or ideals. For us this means an expectation of consistent, progressive efforts toward responsible, sustainable farming and cellar work — the kind that intelligently guides rather than coerces. Our sense is that the natural wine ship is slowly turning in this direction. In light of it, we might need to add another genus to our taxonomy: the Pragmatics.