Where Natural Wine Started

Jules Chauvet was a négociant in the north of Beaujolais and a trained chemist, and the combination is the whole story.

He wanted the wine he remembered from before the war: juicy, lower in alcohol, alive in the glass rather than corrected into shape. Modern winemaking as it developed through the middle of the century was moving the other way, towards cultured yeasts, chaptalisation to raise alcohol, and sulphur used liberally at every stage.

What makes Chauvet important is not that he objected. Plenty of people object to change. It is that he objected from the laboratory.

He worked on yeast, on fermentation temperature, on what sulphur actually does to aroma. He argued for indigenous yeasts because he had reasons about the aromatic result, not because they were traditional. He argued against chaptalisation on the basis of what added sugar does to the balance of the finished wine. He argued for almost no sulphur, doses small enough that people describe them as homeopathic, and he could say what he thought the trade-offs were.

A romantic objecting to modernity is easy to dismiss. A chemist with data is not, and that is why the argument survived him.

He mentored Marcel Lapierre in Morgon. Lapierre's circle came to include Jean Foillard, Guy Breton and Jean-Paul Thévenet, and those four names became the standard story of how natural wine began.

Here is the part that is usually omitted.

The Gang of Four was invented by their American importer, Kermit Lynch, as a way of selling the wines. The growers did not think of themselves as a group with a name. Plenty of other people in Beaujolais were working the same way and were simply not included in somebody else's marketing.

That is not a criticism of Lynch, whose label did more for those wines than anything the growers could have done themselves. It is a note about how movements acquire names: usually from somebody downstream who needs to explain them to a market, rather than from the people doing the work.

Now the structural question, which is the interesting one.

Why did this happen in Beaujolais?

Because Beaujolais had the least to lose.

Consider the same experiment on the Côte d'Or in the 1980s. A grower with grand cru holdings, selling into a market that will pay enormously for consistency and is watching closely, proposes to abandon sulphur and see what happens. The downside is a spoiled vintage of the most valuable wine in France and a reputation that took four generations to build. Almost nobody takes that bet, and the few who do take it carefully.

A grower in Morgon in the same decade is selling into a market that already thinks the region makes cheap wine for November. The reputational downside is close to zero, because there is not much reputation to spend.

Regions at the bottom can afford experiments that regions at the top cannot, and this is where that shows up most clearly in the whole subject. The Côte d'Or's own natural wine conversation, two books back, arrived later and more cautiously, and it arrived from here.

It is worth holding on to. In a hierarchy this old and this rigid, the innovation does not come from the famous slope with the most money and the most to protect. It comes from the one next door that everybody had already stopped paying attention to.