There was a time when wines were judged against a criteria of objective parameters – color, clarity, acidity, tannin, absence of off-aromas, etc. Admittedly, this was a difficult way to judge wine as there was no accounting for its subjective, hedonistic character. Nevertheless, it did give an element of objectivity to an otherwise hopelessly futile task, one of qualifying and quantifying traits that may or may not be of importance to anyone else. However though, it’s difficult to understand what a score of 10/10 for “color” means anyway. As a result, wine writing today often makes little mention of the wine itself, striving instead to characterize elements of the process or story behind the wine that may only be of tangential relevance to your enjoyment of it.
Why is this direction successful? Because enjoying wine is as much a psychological endeavor as it is a sensory one. Expectation is often paramount amongst all the factors involved in the experience. An understanding of the labor involved in the creation of anything adds to the enjoyment or appreciation of the object, regardless of how well it performs in any quantifiable way. This is nothing new though in the wine industry. How many times have you heard a reference to the “long, cool growing season” on the back label of a bottle of wine? France markets its wine as the product of a multitude of environmental factors that are “irreproducible” outside of certain, demarcated growing regions (appellations). Sometimes these factors result in a wine you would enjoy, sometimes they have nothing to do with your appreciation of it.
These days, upscale wine is made without the criteria long-held as paramount to being upscale – that of pedigree. But how do you market a luxury item without pedigree? Build a story. Focus on the process, the labor, the “passion” that went into it. But this can only get you so far. Highly-regarded wines are being made in larger quantities from more areas of the world than ever before. What is all the rage now is to tout the degree to which your wine is “natural.”
Sounds innocent enough. “Natural” is more healthy and better tasting, with an emotional quality immune to criticism. But is “natural” wine any more natural than the wine we’ve been drinking all along? Depends on your definition of “natural.” Let’s look at the processing criteria most often associated with “natural” wine.
1. The big no-no in “natural” wine is the addition of yeast. Yeast is, of course, responsible for the conversion of sugar into alcohol and is present in every fermentation. There is, essentially, one species of yeast that is responsible for this conversion in all wine, beer, and bread making. Whether added in purified, powdered form, or having arrived amongst many non-winemaking species of yeast already present on the surface of the berry at harvest time, only one species of yeast will be present at the end of the fermentation. The result is the same, the conversion of sugar to alcohol. The end result was always intended to be the same. What then, is the significance of the origin of the yeast? The “natural” wine crowd will say that the wine should be a reflection of place, and in order to achieve this, there should be no or limited outside influences, including yeast having been packaged in a laboratory in France or Belgium.
There are several things wrong with this notion. The first is that it is very likely that the yeast that came in on the surface of the berry, and the one that will conduct and finish the fermentation, is none other than the same cultured yeast that your winemaking neighbor down the road used from a package. The reason is that winemaking yeast are virtually non-existent in nature. This species has co-evolved with human activity and is really only found in wineries. They will establish themselves as part of the microbiological flora of the environment and are notoriously difficult to eradicate. Thus once you have introduced winemaking yeast into your winery, it’s there for life. Most wineries do not start off as “natural” winemaking endeavors, rather, they almost always begin with conventional winemaking methods. Furthermore, as part of the culture of “natural” winemaking, many wineries take spent grape skins and use them as part of a compost that is destined to be spread back into the vineyard as a fertilizer. Red wines are made by fermenting on the skins and each remnant of the solids are essentially little vectors for innoculating the entire vineyard with the strain of yeast you used to ferment the wine. It certainly is possible for a new winery outside the traditional winegrowing regions of the world to evolve its own strain of winemaking yeast. This occured in Europe for centuries before it was even known what the causative agent of fermentation was. But this is precisely why it is unlikely to happen in the New World – it takes centuries. In the mean time, you are inevitably forced to use a strain of yeast from the Old World.
This isn’t a bad thing. After all, do “natural” wine winemakers make wine from indigenous grapevines? Of course not. We use the very same varieties that have been synonymous with France for hundreds of years. Not only that, but we ensure that these vines won’t produce offspring with characteristics any different from the parent generation by artificially selecting for self-fertilizing grape vines. The offspring are clones of the parent. Imagine, making wine from non-indigenous vines that are forever destined to be clones! How unnatural is that? The choice of whether to add cultured yeast or not innoculate at all pales in comparison.
2. Organic or biodynamically grown grapes. Organic agriculture is, in many ways, a noble pursuit. The goal of any conscientious wine grower is to grow healthy grape vines while using as little synthetic sprays (fungicide, insecticide, herbicide) as possible. Whether the process to achieve this qualifies as “organic” or not is as much an endeavor of politics as one of agriculture, however, as the list of approved chemicals is ever-changing. Furthermore, what comprises the list aren’t chemicals that the lay person would consider benign. For example, the USDA recognizes copper sulfate as an approved organic fungicide. Few conscientious wine growers would actually apply this chemical as it does not break down in the soil, thereby accumulating indefinitely. The pursuit of organic agriculture is often one of emotion; few consumers look beyond the “organic” label. One might be surprised to learn that chlorine bleach and peracetic acid (a nasty, corrosive chemical) are USDA-approved for some kinds of processing in organic agriculture.
3. Sulfur: Organic in the vineyard, evil in the cellar? Sulfur is a very effective and widely-used organic fungicide for grape vines. It has also been used in wine to kill bacteria that might otherwise spoil it. The modern form of sulfur used in wine is sulfur dioxide. In concentrations as low as the part-per-million range, it not only kills bacteria, it also prevents oxidation that would otherwise turn a wine an ugly brown color. Its use is ubiquitous in the industry and is considered critical for preserving the fresh aromas and flavors so prized by conscientious winemakers. These characters are varietal specific and are a crucial aspect in characterizing place.
However, the use of sulfur dioxide is a big no-no in the cellar. Perhaps because the presence of “sulfites” must be stated on a bottle label, there is a psychological phenomenon that equates a warning statement with a health concern. Therefore the pursuit to eliminate sulfur dioxide is more about dealing with this psychological effect more than it is to produce a superior wine. The sulfite warning statement was, in fact, lobbied for by a known neo-prohibitionist organization. None of the data used to suggest that sulfur dioxide was a heath concern came from any cases involving wine consumption. The use of sulfur dioxide is so ubiquitous in the industry that there is no consensus among “natural” wine winemakers as to an upper limit.
4. Low-yielding vines. This one makes absolutely no sense at all. Grape vines don’t care about making wine, their pursuit is to produce as many grapes as possible. This is how any plant species survives to the next generation, by making more seeds. Winegrowers, however, grow the grapevine to produce the opposite effect. The training and pruning of a grapevine is, in itself, a means to force the grapevine to grow in a way that it wouldn’t otherwise want to (you never see a wild grapevine growing how you see it in a vineyard). One consequence of training and pruning a grapevine is that it will produce fewer clusters than it would had it been allowed to “grow like a vine” in the wild. Furthermore, most winemakers harvest some fruit from the vine at veraison (the beginning of ripening) in order to concentrate the vine’s photosynthetic activity into fewer clusters, thereby forcing ripening to unnaturally high levels to produce wines of higher alcohol, color, concentration, etc. There’s nothing wrong with this. But it can’t be considered “natural.” Why is this ignored by the “natural” wine crowd?
5. Minimal “intervention” in the cellar. The least amount of intervention in the cellar would preclude the use of any preservation techniques, so no “natural” wine winemaker would claim to be intervention-free. Of course, this is a matter of semantics as we each have our own ideas as to what a proper amount of intervention would be. Let’s go through the list:
a. Fining. To “fine” wine traditionally means to add a proteinaceous substance for the purpose of attracting a grape-derived substance of the opposite electrical charge. Once these substances find each other, they become a single insoluble entity, and simply settle to the bottom of the tank. These grape-derived substances are often proteins that cause the wine to either remain hazy, or to increase its propensity to become hazy in the future (i.e. after bottling). In the traditional sense, one would fine a wine simply to clarify it. This was before the adoption of cheap and effective methods of filtration. Nowadays, winemakers fine not for the purpose of clarification, but rather for the side-effects of clarification. This would include the modification of mouth-feel (e.g. the removal of tannin in red wine) and subtle modification of aromas (e.g. the removal of off-aromas in white wines). While most winemakers would use one or two fining agents to stabilize a wine or modify it subtly, few would not fine at all (or conversely use all available fining agents). For example, one ubiquitous processing treatment for white wines is to fine with bentonite, a very purified form of clay. This substance binds with proteins naturally found in grapes (and thus the wine) that are very susceptible to become denatured (unraveled) with modest heat. By this I mean the kind of heat you would find in the trunk of your car on a summer day. These denatured proteins are insoluble and thus cause the wine to become hazy. This can happen even after a sterile filtration of the wine. Therefore, this form of fining is considered standard in the industry. Few “natural” wine winemakers wouldn’t perform this kind of processing treatment. It is, though, a human intervention and entirely unnatural. There is nothing wrong with this processing treatment. But the “natural” wine crowd cannot cherry-pick which interventions are internventionist and which ones aren’t. They’re all interventions.
b. Oak barrels. Oak wine barrels have been around for centuries. Winemakers choose to put wine in oak barrels for a variety of reasons, but primarily to impart the character of oak into the wine. The newer the oak and the percentage of wine that is destined for oak barrels will determine the extent to which the wine is “oaky.” Last I checked, no wine or grape had the character of vanilla, toast, or coconut. But these are attractive aromas and flavors in wine. This isn’t an issue in “natural” winemaking. Why? How is this not an intervention? Other vessels, such as those made from stainless steel and concrete and much more benign in altering the character of wine.
However, oak-alternatives (chips, staves, etc) are sacrilege. Why? It’s all oak. The same composition. Same everything except for the shape. Many winemakers playfully consider oak-alternatives “little tiny barrels.” Winemakers understand that oak barrels impart a premium oak character to wine, over that of oak alternatives, but this would seem to be a separate issue.
I could go on and on about cellar processes, but they’re all interventions.
6. Additives in the cellar. This is a legitimate issue. It is common to add acid to high-pH wines, though the acid additions are nothing other than what is found naturally in the grape anyway (i.e. tartaric acid). Other common additions include tannin derived from oak, grape, and other plant sources. Color additions are relatively uncommon, as is sugar, even here on the east coast.
The processes utilized by “natural” wine winemakers do not differ significantly than that of other conscientious winemakers. Stewardship of the land and honest winemaking existed before the “natural” wine movement. The rationale used to explain why one process is “natural” and another is “conventional” or “industrial” is not justified. What then, is the impetus for this movement? Of course, this being the case only, we’d be happy to let each personality pursue their own agenda. But this isn’t it. There’s an implication that if what you’re doing is “natural,” then anything else isn’t natural, creating a “more natural than thou” attitude.
