We’re living through a period just now when the more natural a wine is, the more cachet it enjoys. We have no argument with this, exactly, except insofar as . . . well, insofar as it goes too far.
Exactly what too far may be will always be a matter of taste and judgment, but at this point in the evolution of wine-with-nothing added-and-nothing-taken-away, we’re pretty much over the idea that we should be drinking someone’s failed experiments. The very good news is that we’re seeing cleaner, healthier, more drinkable examples of the genre every week.
But in what sense can wine be said to be natural at all? It might be were it to gush spontaneously from underground, but not only are wine geysers a fantasy, winemaking is never just a matter of crush the fruit, throw it into a pot or vat of some sort and come back a few weeks or months later. This is in part because wine isn’t something nature can gin up on its own. The wine grape, like fruit of any kind, is part of an ingenious plant reproductive scheme that we humans take advantage of in numerous ways, but which wasn’t primarily designed to be of use to us.
One way to describe this is to say that nature gives the apples but not the apple pie — the production of a marvelous tarte aux pommes being quite irrelevent to the fruit tree’s crude, existential aims: the furthest thing from its wee, arboreal mind. So, one might think, nature gives the grapes but not the wine. Maybe not even that.
Consider the wild grapes that climb the trees lining the backcountry road we walk when in our favorite corner of Vermont at the end of each summer. Small, few, barely ripe and largely juiceless, they may please the birds who graze on them, spreading their seeds and genetic material far and wide. But it would be impossible to make anything but a meager and thoroughly disagreeable wine from them.
Wine grapes that exist today are a far cry from these — a long way from anything natural processes could produce unaided. On the contrary, the maker of the most natural wine in the world (whoever that might be) begins every vintage with fruit from vines that are themselves the product of several thousand years of diligent human selection and propagation.
In this sense, every winemaker who has ever lived has been the beneficiary of generations of sunk costs in ingenuity, experimentation, labor and luck. The process doesn’t always have to have been scientific. In the farming of wine grapes, the oral transmission of what we today call best practices reaches back perhaps two hundred generations — much of it still sound and useful. The fact we habitually take this legacy for granted doesn’t mean there’s anything natural about it. It just seems that way.
Speaking of science, the fact that we can today work successfully in ways more attuned to historic practice owes pretty much everything to our advanced understanding of, and ability to manage, microbial life. If fermentations were still as little understood as they were before the 19th century investigations of Pasteur, stable, durable, ageworthy wine wouldn’t be impossible, but winemaking would likely remain the mysterious, risky, mishap-prone adventure it has mostly always been. The degree to which natural wine has been made possible by people with labcoats and advanced degrees has always seemed to me a delicious irony.
We come to praise natural wine, not bury it. Not only do we love to drink (and sell) its best examples, we share its aspirations and admire the dedication of its good faith disciples. Let’s just try to keep its claims within the bounds of what we know to be true of wine’s long, tortuous history, shall we? We owe it this much.