The Natural Wine Argument

The first thing to know about natural wine is that it has no legal definition. Organic and biodynamic farming are certified and auditable; there are inspectors and there are rules. Natural is a movement with conventions rather than a category with standards, and the various voluntary charters that exist carry no legal force. Before paying a premium for the word, it is worth knowing that what you are buying is the practice of one particular grower, and the only way to know what that practice is is to find out.

In practice the conventions are reasonably consistent: organically or biodynamically farmed fruit, fermentation with ambient yeast, no additions and no corrections, minimal or no sulphur, no fining and no filtration. Each of those is a real decision with real consequences, and they are worth separating rather than swallowing as a package.

Ambient yeast means fermenting with the population already on the fruit and in the cellar rather than with a selected strain. It is slower and less predictable and can stall. Its advocates argue that a succession of species through the ferment produces a wider range of compounds than a single strain ever will, which is plausible. The counter-argument is that the population in an old cellar is itself a selection, shaped by decades of what has happened there, so the contrast with a chosen strain is less clean than it sounds.

Biodynamics is where the conversation usually goes wrong, because two quite different things are bundled together. The organic component (no synthetic herbicides, pesticides or fertilisers) is measurable, and its effects on soil life are reasonably well evidenced. The additional preparations, the buried horns and the lunar calendar come from Rudolf Steiner and are not supported by evidence of the same kind. Separating the halves is the first step to a useful discussion, and almost nobody does it.

What is striking is how many openly sceptical winemakers practise it anyway, and the reason they give is the most interesting argument in the whole debate. The calendar and the preparations force a grower into the rows constantly, and somebody who walks their vineyard every few days catches problems while they are small and intervenes with small measures. Whether the mechanism is the one Steiner described is a separate question from whether the practice produces better farming, and conflating the two is what makes the public argument so unproductive.

Burgundy's version of all this is notably quieter than Paris's. A substantial number of well-known domaines farm organically or biodynamically, ferment with ambient yeast and use very little sulphur, and decline the natural label entirely. Partly that is because the term carries associations with a style they do not want. Partly it is that a name with no definition is a poor thing to attach to a wine you expect somebody to cellar for thirty years.

The real change, and the one that will outlast the argument about labels, is in the vineyard. Organic certification in the Côte has gone from a fringe position to a substantial minority in twenty years, and the conversion is expensive: yields typically drop for about three years while root systems develop where herbicide used to keep competition away, soil biology re-establishes, and mildew has to be managed with copper, sulphur and timing rather than systemic sprays. Most converted domaines report yields recovering substantially afterwards. Those three bad years are the entry cost, and they are why conversion is a commercial decision as much as a philosophical one.