Natty Wine: A Millennial Con?

[Marcu_Stanley]

For me, the really flagrant mistake is the claim that “Natural wines are those made from organic grapes, untreated with pesticides.” Now that might seem logical, but there are plenty of “natural” producers who farm using chemicals.

and the reverse – there are a ton of wines made with organic grapes and no pesticides that would not be classified as “natural wines”.

[Marcu_Stanley]

This thread is definitely tending in the direction that most debates about natural wine tend to take, which is a sort of circular and more or less acrimonious focus on definitions. I think that’s partly because, as Greg observes, natural wine is more of an “aesthetic” than anything else (I once described it as an aesthetic in search of a didactic), and thus inherently hard to pin down (“I know it when I see it” etc). It’s also because people sometimes resent the appropriation of the word “natural”, and its reduction to a question of sulfites, which does implicitly insinuate that other wines are “unnatural”—and yes, in a sense, inferior.

At the same time, the Vogue article gets it right when it attributes the popularity of natural wines to a pursuit of authenticity, whatever exactly that might mean. And here it’s interesting to reflect that we have artisanal bread, artisanal cheese, craft beer etc—but all the wine movement has is “natural wine”. Whereas with bread and cheese etc our conception of what an authentic product is makes plenty of space for craft and technique, in wine we have instead a movement that has come to be ideologically premised on the renunciation of technique (even though, in fact, its wines have come to be easily identifiable by two techniques: carbonic maceration and low sulfites).

I would love to see some sort of “artisanal wine” movement come into being, defined perhaps as wines made using techniques validated by a minimum of 150 years of experience. That would retain sulfites, inoculation, chaptalization within reason, and fining; but eliminate enzymes, centrifuges, filters, many oenological additives, and most obnoxious viticultural practices. Producers that would meet such a definition would include Foillard, Richard Leroy, Selosse, DRC, Thierry Allemand, etc etc; and the use of sulfites, instead of being definitional, would become just one aesthetic / technical choice. If the opposite of natural wine is some sort to of hypothetical “unnatural wine”, the opposite of artisanal wine would be industrial wine—which seems to me much more coherent. Some producers in France are talking in this sense, such as the Union des Gens de Métier, but the notion hasn’t really percolated into Anglophone wine discourse yet. Hopefully that will happen soon.

Exactly. It is a good thing to search for non-industrial, non-mass produced winemaking, but a huge error to identify this with a purely “natural” as opposed to a craft / artisanal process. Ironically foregrounding “natural” as opposed to craft is probably in part a result of mass advertising that presents wine through a gauzy lens of bucolic natural imagery and leaves out the craft element entirely as not sufficiently exotic/attractive.

Clark Smith in his great book on “Postmodern Winemaking” (one of the best wine books ever written IMO, although highly opinionated) has a great discussion of this where he likens winemakers to chefs. In that analogy the search for a fully natural winemaking is like a committment to only raw foods. One can fully acknowledge the role of the cook as the artisan while still rejecting fast food and McDonalds-ization.

The one problem I see with William’s framing above is the reference to artisanal wines as “wines made using techniques validated by a minimum of 150 years of experience”. Wine changes much more rapidly than that. If the time scale is 150 years, what would we do with stainless steel, temperature control, mechanized crushers, mechanical drainers? Advances in training and pruning in the vineyard? Capitalism revolutionizes productive techniques on the scale of a few decades not a few centuries. I feel like it is important for people (perhaps especially critics) to come to terms with the degree to which wine is constantly evolving due to market and technological trends and not mystify it as a time-hallowed eternal thing. Even though of course that mystique is a big contributor to the market value of high end wines.

[Josh_Grossman]

I was just pointing out the difference between O. oeni and L. plantarum when you said nearly all wine goes through MLF. L. plantarum gives me a tell tale sour taste that I often find in natty wines; akin to sour beer, sourdough, and sauerkraut. I also often get a barnyard flavor.

Lactobacillus doesn’t give you barnyard flavor. Brettanomyces does. I don’t know about sour taste, because sour beers taste “sour” because they ARE sour: they have lactic acid in them. The same stuff as in all wines that have gone through MLF. The same applies to sourdough and sauerkraut. Bread or cabbage does not taste sour because they have no acidity in them (well, cabbage has a little bit). Once you introduce acid to them, of course they taste sour, because they are noticeably more sour than their non-sour counterparts!

To me, those are both faults.

I can understand a bretty barnyard character can be a fault to some; for me, it isn’t. But are you saying that lactic acid is a fault? The more you explain these things to me, the more it seems to me you don’t know yourself what you are talking about.

Acetic acid is also a fault.

Agreed pretty much. All wines have acetic acid, though, so it isn’t really a fault - only elevated levels of acetic acid are. The threshold for it being a fault varies from person to person. I’d say I’m a medium - I can tolerate a little bit of acetic acid, as long as it doesn’t go beyond subtly balsamic, but if it gets full-blown vinegar, it’s a horrible fault, no matter how wonderful the wine is otherwise.

You have over 100 tasting notes on orange wines

And at +10,000 tasting notes that’s less than 1% what I taste. Furthermore, not nearly all of these orange wines are natural wines; I’ve had lots of commercial orange wines that have nothing to do with natural wines.

nearly all your TN seem highlight that they are no SO2, non-interventionist, and naturalist wines.

All? Really, all? Out of my +10,000 TNs only a small handful are on non-interventionist wines. I’ve been to two (EDIT: three - I forgot the Heinrich one) naturalist tastings this year and based on that, ALL my TNs are on non-interventionist wines now? Or what? Care to elaborate?

I’m really not trying to be mean but if you don’t see how it pertains, I’m sorry…

I still don’t see it. How my TNs relate to anything we’ve discussed above? Could you PLEASE point it to me, exactly, what are you trying to get at?

Of course you knew, from the above conversation that I was implying Brett; now who is being a child. There is no acid added to these things, only bacteria. Are you trying to say wine with L. plantarum, doesn’t taste more sour? Sour beer - Wikipedia

Maybe my perception is wrong, but there has never been a natural wine or orange wine thread that wasn’t dominated by you. Most of the TN I’ve seen, come from you. Too each their own is all I was saying. If you’ve had +10,000 wines, drink what you like.

[William_Kelley]

The one problem I see with William’s framing above is the reference to artisanal wines as “wines made using techniques validated by a minimum of 150 years of experience”. Wine changes much more rapidly than that. If the time scale is 150 years, what would we do with stainless steel, temperature control, mechanized crushers, mechanical drainers? Advances in training and pruning in the vineyard? Capitalism revolutionizes productive techniques on the scale of a few decades not a few centuries. I feel like it is important for people (perhaps especially critics) to come to terms with the degree to which wine is constantly evolving due to market and technological trends and not mystify it as a time-hallowed eternal thing. Even though of course that mystique is a big contributor to the market value of high end wines.

Good point! Perhaps a better phrasing would be “filtered by 150 years’ experience” or a similar formulation. My intention is not to advocate some form of winemaking Luddism. And certainly, it’s of the nature of any kind of living craft to refine itself over the years. By 1870, in fact, there were mechanical stemmers and crushers; but clearly, from a point of view of preserving fruit integrity the materiel of today is superior, so don’t imagine I’m advocating returning to Victorian models. Similarly, heat exchangers are clearly better than throwing blocks of ice in the tank; and stainless steel is clearly a more easily sanitized material to use for racking and bottling tanks than wood. (As for pruning, there’s not much being done today that isn’t in Guyot’s book - unless you are looking for Geneva Double Curtain or some of the other yield-maximizing systems that were figured out in the second half of the 20th century).

Equally, though, these improved and refined tools can be used in ways that have not been, as I put it above, “filtered by experience”. Temperature control can be used to preclude heat spikes and stuck ferments: but it can also be used to make tediously estery white wines fermented at low temperature; or over-extracted reds with long heated post-fermentation macerations. Mechanical pumps in the winery can really facilitate pumpovers and make many processes easier; but they can also lead to over-processing of the must and the extraction of coarser tannins (the formerly very long must lines chez Faiveley are one factor in why François Faiveley’s wines were so brutally tannic). And some developments in winery technology have arguably been more conveniences than improvements: mechanized punch-downs are quicker and safer than punching down by foot, but they are not as gentle on stems and grapes. There have also been a lot of unintended consequences: cleaning with bleach, or using wood treated with chlorine-containing fungicides, was responsible for endemic TCA issues in several wineries in the 1970s and 1980s; chlorinated tap water has caused similar problems in some wineries in Burgundy recently. Most obviously, the agrochemical revolution of the 1950s on, with herbicides, pesticides and fungicides, was advertised as “progress”, yet today the biggest challenge in many regions is how to roll it back while producing a product that can be sold for more than it costs to make.

This is all thinking aloud, but my aspiration is to come up with some formulation that is on the one hand pragmatically open to refinement and evolution, but which is also very cautious about outright revolutions in practice that represent a departure from approaches known to produce very high quality wines. People have been doing this for thousands of years, at a very high level (try a perfectly preserved 1919 red Burgundy and one wonders how much those guys had to learn!), and my contention is that we should be more interested in the results of their experiments over time than in trying to reinvent the wheel.

[Otto_Forsberg]

Of course you knew, from the above conversation that I was implying Brett; now who is being a child.[/quote]

What? We’ve been discussing the whole time on MLF and not with a single word you’ve mentioned brett relating to MLF. How on earth were I to know you are suddenly referring to brettanomyces if you comment on features relating to MLF and what features L. plantarum gives to wines? Re-read your message and point out where and how was I supposed to understand you suddenly change the subject to brett.

There is no acid added to these things, only bacteria.

What are you talking about? Who said anything about adding acid anywhere?

What I said was they taste more sour because acid is introduced to them - as a result of LAB fermentation. Nothing about adding anything anywhere.

Are you trying to say wine with L. plantarum, doesn’t taste more sour? > Sour beer - Wikipedia

I honestly don’t know, because I don’t get microbial analyses with the wines I taste. I don’t know which wines have their MLF done by oneococcus alone, which ones might have lactobacilli as well and which ones with lactobacilli have also L. plantarum in them. How do you know these things? And I still don’t understand what you mean by “sour”. Acetic acid? Higher TA (that’s impossible since LAB increase pH)? Some flavor or a fault? To me, “sour” just means that there is acid and “more sour” means higher acidity.

And could you explain why you’ve included that Wikipedia article there? It pertains to what exactly?

Maybe my perception is wrong, but there has never been a natural wine or orange wine thread that wasn’t dominated by you. Most of the TN I’ve seen, come from you. Too each their own is all I was saying. If you’ve had +10,000 wines, drink what you like.

I think that it is quite obvious that I drink what I like and I don’t need somebody telling me it repeatedly over and over for some reason I still don’t understand.

And I’m 100% positive there are lots of natural wine threads I haven’t said a single word, but I do comment many such threads because I might have some experience with those wines and thus maybe something worth contributing. Is this something you disapprove?

[Ben_M_a_n_d_l_e_r]

The UK focus of this article might be important. I’ve always wondered if natural wine might find a more enthusiastic consumer base in the UK, where there is already a cultural interest in funky alcoholic beverages because of the cider industry. I went to college in Bristol and, aside from discovering wine at Averys, spent much of the rest of my time drinking what we call “real cider” which, to my understanding, is a fairly close analogue to natural wine in terms of crafting philosophy.

This is a West Country phenomenon (which you would have experiences because you were in Bristol), so not really extensible to the rest of the UK! The US analogy might be saying e.g. all Americans relate to hot, spicy cuisines because in Louisiana they eat Creole food.

I take your point and agree to some extent, though the UK market is more culturally condensed than the US. It’s more like saying that you’d expect some higher appreciation of Creole or related food in Texas, whichI think you do see to some extent. Growing up in London and Cambridge I fairly often found myself in pubs with strong real ale preferences that would also sometimes extend to a broader cider portfolio including some funky stuff. Now ok, maybe not so much in, say, Scarborough or Grimsby, but overall I’d say the UK market has a fair bit more exposure than the US, where natural wine seems to have more spread than funky ciders, which seem of only very localised and recent interest.

[William_Kelley]

The UK focus of this article might be important. I’ve always wondered if natural wine might find a more enthusiastic consumer base in the UK, where there is already a cultural interest in funky alcoholic beverages because of the cider industry. I went to college in Bristol and, aside from discovering wine at Averys, spent much of the rest of my time drinking what we call “real cider” which, to my understanding, is a fairly close analogue to natural wine in terms of crafting philosophy.

This is a West Country phenomenon (which you would have experiences because you were in Bristol), so not really extensible to the rest of the UK! The US analogy might be saying e.g. all Americans relate to hot, spicy cuisines because in Louisiana they eat Creole food.

I take your point and agree to some extent, though the UK market is more culturally condensed than the US. It’s more like saying that you’d expect some higher appreciation of Creole or related food in Texas, whichI think you do see to some extent. Growing up in London and Cambridge I fairly often found myself in pubs with strong real ale preferences that would also sometimes extend to a broader cider portfolio including some funky stuff. Now ok, maybe not so much in, say, Scarborough or Grimsby, but overall I’d say the UK market has a fair bit more exposure than the US, where natural wine seems to have more spread than funky ciders, which seem of only very localised and recent interest.

…and you will not find many natural wine drinkers in Grimsby or Scarborough, it’s true!

[Jan_Janas]

I would love to see some sort of “artisanal wine” movement come into being, defined perhaps as wines made using techniques validated by a minimum of 150 years of experience. That would retain sulfites, inoculation, chaptalization within reason, and fining; but eliminate enzymes, centrifuges, filters, many oenological additives, and most obnoxious viticultural practices. Producers that would meet such a definition would include Foillard, Richard Leroy, Selosse, DRC, Thierry Allemand, etc etc; and the use of sulfites, instead of being definitional, would become just one aesthetic / technical choice. If the opposite of natural wine is some sort to of hypothetical “unnatural wine”, the opposite of artisanal wine would be industrial wine—which seems to me much more coherent.

I’m so with you on this one.

(And probably a huge majority of the board members as well.)

Let’s see what people think… maybe I will write some kind of “manifesto” setting out the position.

I’d be quite interested in reading a “Manifeste Artisans du Vin” setting out the position

[Marcu_Stanley]

The one problem I see with William’s framing above is the reference to artisanal wines as “wines made using techniques validated by a minimum of 150 years of experience”. Wine changes much more rapidly than that. If the time scale is 150 years, what would we do with stainless steel, temperature control, mechanized crushers, mechanical drainers? Advances in training and pruning in the vineyard? Capitalism revolutionizes productive techniques on the scale of a few decades not a few centuries. I feel like it is important for people (perhaps especially critics) to come to terms with the degree to which wine is constantly evolving due to market and technological trends and not mystify it as a time-hallowed eternal thing. Even though of course that mystique is a big contributor to the market value of high end wines.

Good point! Perhaps a better phrasing would be “filtered by 150 years’ experience” or a similar formulation. My intention is not to advocate some form of winemaking Luddism. And certainly, it’s of the nature of any kind of living craft to refine itself over the years. By 1870, in fact, there were mechanical stemmers and crushers; but clearly, from a point of view of preserving fruit integrity the materiel of today is superior, so don’t imagine I’m advocating returning to Victorian models. Similarly, heat exchangers are clearly better than throwing blocks of ice in the tank; and stainless steel is clearly a more easily sanitized material to use for racking and bottling tanks than wood. (As for pruning, there’s not much being done today that isn’t in Guyot’s book - unless you are looking for Geneva Double Curtain or some of the other yield-maximizing systems that were figured out in the second half of the 20th century).

Equally, though, these improved and refined tools can be used in ways that have not been, as I put it above, “filtered by experience”. Temperature control can be used to preclude heat spikes and stuck ferments: but it can also be used to make tediously estery white wines fermented at low temperature; or over-extracted reds with long heated post-fermentation macerations. Mechanical pumps in the winery can really facilitate pumpovers and make many processes easier; but they can also lead to over-processing of the must and the extraction of coarser tannins (the formerly very long must lines chez Faiveley are one factor in why François Faiveley’s wines were so brutally tannic). And some developments in winery technology have arguably been more conveniences than improvements: mechanized punch-downs are quicker and safer than punching down by foot, but they are not as gentle on stems and grapes. There have also been a lot of unintended consequences: cleaning with bleach, or using wood treated with chlorine-containing fungicides, was responsible for endemic TCA issues in several wineries in the 1970s and 1980s; chlorinated tap water has caused similar problems in some wineries in Burgundy recently. Most obviously, the agrochemical revolution of the 1950s on, with herbicides, pesticides and fungicides, was advertised as “progress”, yet today the biggest challenge in many regions is how to roll it back while producing a product that can be sold for more than it costs to make.

This is all thinking aloud, but my aspiration is to come up with some formulation that is on the one hand pragmatically open to refinement and evolution, but which is also very cautious about outright revolutions in practice that represent a departure from approaches known to produce very high quality wines. People have been doing this for thousands of years, at a very high level (try a perfectly preserved 1919 red Burgundy and one wonders how much those guys had to learn!), and my contention is that we should be more interested in the results of their experiments over time than in trying to reinvent the wheel.

This is a great rundown of the pluses and minuses of different technologies and the subtle and often unexpected ways that technology changes wine. Critics do far too little of this, instead boxing themselves into one camp where technology is ignored and wines are just getting “better and better” (read: more reliably international-styled and gleamingly fruity) or raging at wine having fallen from some imagined static state of grace in the past.

William, your post on the subtle ways in which technology and modern resources have changed site “terroir” and wine character in Cote de Beaune whites was an amazing example of how to do this kind of analysis. (It is post #173 on this page – Terroir vs winemaking -- Neal Martin lays the smack down - WINE TALK - WineBerserkers – though short, it is seriously one of the best pieces of analysis I have ever read on wine boards). Critics need to write about this far more often than they do. Note the breadth of change you point to as significant in that post, including not just technological change in winemaking but e.g. changes in social practices and communications technologies that permit on-demand consulting with experts outside of the locality on winemaking practices – something that would have been prohibitively expensive and difficult for almost all winemakers 100 years ago and has had a profound impact on the “locality” of wines.

With that said, doesn’t your own sharp sense of the constant flow of changes in winemaking and their sometimes transformational impact lead you away from the idea of defining any fixed set of practices as a definition of artisanal winemaking? The difficulty is that it is really about the spirit in which winemaking is approached. Is Randy Dunn not an artisanal winemaker because he used reverse osmosis machines? Would you really want to exclude a winemaker you respected from an artisanal definition because they tried an unprecedented approach? The difficulty of defining a spirit or approach and actually have it be meaningful instead of vaporous generalizations is why these efforts and manifestos often break down.

[A_Gillette]

This is all thinking aloud, but my aspiration is to come up with some formulation that is on the one hand pragmatically open to refinement and evolution, but which is also very cautious about outright revolutions in practice that represent a departure from approaches known to produce very high quality wines. People have been doing this for thousands of years, at a very high level (try a perfectly preserved 1919 red Burgundy and one wonders how much those guys had to learn!), and my contention is that we should be more interested in the results of their experiments over time than in trying to reinvent the wheel.

I can’t help but think that you are sort of missing the point of why many people like natural wine. When you talk about “approaches known to produce very high quality wines”, you are just talking about a fundamentally different system of evaluation. I think part of this goes to what some find so threatening about natural wines: It’s the idea that an accumulated body of knowledge about what makes wine good developed over many years of tasting might be fundamentally wrong.

A

[William_Kelley]

This is all thinking aloud, but my aspiration is to come up with some formulation that is on the one hand pragmatically open to refinement and evolution, but which is also very cautious about outright revolutions in practice that represent a departure from approaches known to produce very high quality wines. People have been doing this for thousands of years, at a very high level (try a perfectly preserved 1919 red Burgundy and one wonders how much those guys had to learn!), and my contention is that we should be more interested in the results of their experiments over time than in trying to reinvent the wheel.

I can’t help but think that you are sort of missing the point of why many people like natural wine. When you talk about “approaches known to produce very high quality wines”, you are just talking about a fundamentally different system of evaluation. I think part of this goes to what some find so threatening about natural wines: It’s the idea that an accumulated body of knowledge about what makes wine good developed over many years of tasting might be fundamentally wrong.

A

Well, my point was not so much to persuade naturalistas that they should be drinking Coche; but rather to suggest that the wine world could be doing a better job of articulating compelling options beyond merely natural wine to new wine drinkers who are looking for “authentic” products (and let’s reserve defining whatever authentic might mean for another occasion). It would be a pity, to my mind, if the natural wine movement were allowed to monopolize the concept of vinous authenticity.

[David_Bu3ker]

I can’t help but think that you are sort of missing the point of why many people like natural wine. When you talk about “approaches known to produce very high quality wines”, you are just talking about a fundamentally different system of evaluation. I think part of this goes to what some find so threatening about natural wines: It’s the idea that an accumulated body of knowledge about what makes wine good developed over many years of tasting might be fundamentally wrong.

And that takes it too far. It’s not that the “accepted” (my quotes for a reason) knowledge might be fundamentally wrong. It’s not. It’s just that there are other approaches, and both camps, need to get over their biases against each other.

[A_Gillette]

This is all thinking aloud, but my aspiration is to come up with some formulation that is on the one hand pragmatically open to refinement and evolution, but which is also very cautious about outright revolutions in practice that represent a departure from approaches known to produce very high quality wines. People have been doing this for thousands of years, at a very high level (try a perfectly preserved 1919 red Burgundy and one wonders how much those guys had to learn!), and my contention is that we should be more interested in the results of their experiments over time than in trying to reinvent the wheel.

I can’t help but think that you are sort of missing the point of why many people like natural wine. When you talk about “approaches known to produce very high quality wines”, you are just talking about a fundamentally different system of evaluation. I think part of this goes to what some find so threatening about natural wines: It’s the idea that an accumulated body of knowledge about what makes wine good developed over many years of tasting might be fundamentally wrong.

A

Well, my point was not so much to persuade naturalistas that they should be drinking Coche; but rather to suggest that the wine world could be doing a better job of articulating compelling options beyond merely natural wine to new wine drinkers who are looking for “authentic” products (and let’s reserve defining whatever authentic might mean for another occasion). It would be a pity, to my mind, if the natural wine movement were allowed to monopolize the concept of vinous authenticity.

While I’m sure that there are a few voices that evangelize natural wine as “authentic”, I think it would be unwise to make too much out of those few folks. For the most part, people can enjoy various styles of wine without denigrating others. And in general I’m not sure that most natural wine drinkers think of natural wine as more “authentic”. Most people can enjoy different styles of wine and laugh at examples within the styles that they like.

[Sean_S_y_d_n_e_y]

I can’t help but think that you are sort of missing the point of why many people like natural wine. When you talk about “approaches known to produce very high quality wines”, you are just talking about a fundamentally different system of evaluation. I think part of this goes to what some find so threatening about natural wines: It’s the idea that an accumulated body of knowledge about what makes wine good developed over many years of tasting might be fundamentally wrong.

A

Well, my point was not so much to persuade naturalistas that they should be drinking Coche; but rather to suggest that the wine world could be doing a better job of articulating compelling options beyond merely natural wine to new wine drinkers who are looking for “authentic” products (and let’s reserve defining whatever authentic might mean for another occasion). It would be a pity, to my mind, if the natural wine movement were allowed to monopolize the concept of vinous authenticity.

While I’m sure that there are a few voices that evangelize natural wine as “authentic”, I think it would be unwise to make too much out of those few folks. For the most part, people can enjoy various styles of wine without denigrating others. And in general I’m not sure that most natural wine drinkers think of natural wine as more “authentic”. Most people can enjoy different styles of wine and laugh at examples within the styles that they like.

I made this point elsewhere, but natural wine is, above all else, affordable. It’s a way to get into wine, develop an aesthetic, and stake a claim in a world where the classic regions and standard bearers are becoming increasingly out of reach. Most naturalistas - and most other sane people - can’t afford 1er crus, much less Coche; it’s almost impossible to get a comprehensive wine education and develop an extensive palate nowadays on anything resembling a reasonable budget for most people.

It’s no surprise it appeals to a generation that also values individualism and rejecting the need for gatekeepers.

[William_Kelley]

With that said, doesn’t your own sharp sense of the constant flow of changes in winemaking and their sometimes transformational impact lead you away from the idea of defining any fixed set of practices as a definition of artisanal winemaking? The difficulty is that it is really about the spirit in which winemaking is approached. Is Randy Dunn not an artisanal winemaker because he used reverse osmosis machines? Would you really want to exclude a winemaker you respected from an artisanal definition because they tried an unprecedented approach? The difficulty of defining a spirit or approach and actually have it be meaningful instead of vaporous generalizations is why these efforts and manifestos often break down.

Thanks for the kind words, and for this thoughtful riposte. I guess my priorities in talking about “artisanal wine” are simply to try on the one hand to make a case that intention and technique are not incompatible with “authenticity”; and on the other hand, to make a strong case for the just how powerful a filter two thousands years experience of making wine has been. I am not so much interested in making lists of producers to include and exclude, or writing rules—I am not, by nature, an ideologue or tractarian in these matters. In fact, what I am arguing for is not so much a “fixed set of practices” as a heuristic for establishing which practices it might be interesting to adopt and which it might be wise to be skeptical about.

I guess what I am trying to convey is not any kind of ideological opposition to change and progress per se, but rather, healthy skepticism about the claims of various technical innovations to genuinely represent progress. And I think that skepticism is justified by the way the viticultural and oenological “progress” of the 1960s, '70s, '80s and 90’s has thus far turned out. It may seem to follow that I put the early 20th-century winemaking on an artificial and anachronous pedestal, but beyond thinking that, yes, the red Burgundies (to confine myself to my region) of vintages such as 1919, 1929, 1934 and 1937 are more interesting wines than what was produced in the 1970s and 1980s for example, this isn’t really the case. Children do not as a rule end up drinking the same kinds of wines that their parents or grandparents did, and it has always been like that: for example, in the 18th and early 19th century, red Burgundy generally saw a very short maceration, sometimes less than a day; by 1900, up to a month was quite common. Using material and techniques that have been validated by long experience is quite compatible with immense stylistic diversity.

That said, to respond to your specific example: I do think Randy’s aspiration to keep his wines below 14% abv could be better accomplished (and here I agree with Mike FWIW) but just picking a little earlier—or even by leaving the wines a year longer in his humid cellar, where they loose 1% abv give or take each year (thanks to a natural osmotic pressure gradient - no need to reinvent this particular wheel). The flippant answer, of course, would be that if 117 years from now—counting from the 1987 vintage when Léoville-Las Cases first used RO, for want of a better starting point—serious winemakers are still using RO and can look back at a long track record of it making wines better, then I will consider it an artisanal technique.

[A_Gillette]

Well, my point was not so much to persuade naturalistas that they should be drinking Coche; but rather to suggest that the wine world could be doing a better job of articulating compelling options beyond merely natural wine to new wine drinkers who are looking for “authentic” products (and let’s reserve defining whatever authentic might mean for another occasion). It would be a pity, to my mind, if the natural wine movement were allowed to monopolize the concept of vinous authenticity.

While I’m sure that there are a few voices that evangelize natural wine as “authentic”, I think it would be unwise to make too much out of those few folks. For the most part, people can enjoy various styles of wine without denigrating others. And in general I’m not sure that most natural wine drinkers think of natural wine as more “authentic”. Most people can enjoy different styles of wine and laugh at examples within the styles that they like.

I made this point elsewhere, but natural wine is, above all else, affordable. It’s a way to get into wine, develop an aesthetic, and stake a claim in a world where the classic regions and standard bearers are becoming increasingly out of reach. Most naturalistas - and most other sane people - can’t afford 1er crus, much less Coche; it’s almost impossible to get a comprehensive wine education and develop an extensive palate nowadays on anything resembling a reasonable budget for most people.

It’s no surprise it appeals to a generation that also values individualism and rejecting the need for gatekeepers.

I agree but you’re really making a point about the demand side. I’m not sure the people producing natural wine have gone that route because they feel like they are priced out of coche or that they don’t have the economic means to produce wines in a conventional style. I think they are making wines that speak to them and what they want to drink. That’s my sense.
A

[William_Kelley]

While I’m sure that there are a few voices that evangelize natural wine as “authentic”, I think it would be unwise to make too much out of those few folks. For the most part, people can enjoy various styles of wine without denigrating others. And in general I’m not sure that most natural wine drinkers think of natural wine as more “authentic”. Most people can enjoy different styles of wine and laugh at examples within the styles that they like.

I don’t know, there an awful lot of articles out there mentioning natural wine in connection with authenticity… one of which spawned this thread.

[A_Gillette]

While I’m sure that there are a few voices that evangelize natural wine as “authentic”, I think it would be unwise to make too much out of those few folks. For the most part, people can enjoy various styles of wine without denigrating others. And in general I’m not sure that most natural wine drinkers think of natural wine as more “authentic”. Most people can enjoy different styles of wine and laugh at examples within the styles that they like.

I don’t know, there an awful lot of articles out there mentioning natural wine in connection with authenticity… one of which spawned this thread.

That’s right! There is a reference to authenticity in the article in Vogue - a fashion magazine - and that reference to “authenticity” appears in a quote by someone named Joshua Lachkovic, who is described as “of wine-tasting start-up The Wine List”. So it is a quote in an article in Vogue - a fashion magazine - by a guy at a wine tasting startup. And my point is that I’m not sure we should take this type of thing as gospel.
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[William_Kelley]

While I’m sure that there are a few voices that evangelize natural wine as “authentic”, I think it would be unwise to make too much out of those few folks. For the most part, people can enjoy various styles of wine without denigrating others. And in general I’m not sure that most natural wine drinkers think of natural wine as more “authentic”. Most people can enjoy different styles of wine and laugh at examples within the styles that they like.

I don’t know, there an awful lot of articles out there mentioning natural wine in connection with authenticity… one of which spawned this thread.

That’s right! There is a reference to authenticity in the article in Vogue - a fashion magazine - and that reference to “authenticity” appears in a quote by someone named Joshua Lachkovic, who is described as “of wine-tasting start-up The Wine List”. So it is a quote in an article in Vogue - a fashion magazine - by a guy at a wine tasting startup. And my point is that I’m not sure we should take this type of thing as gospel.
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I certainly take your point, but if you search for “natural wine” and “authenticity” or “authentic” you’ll find a lot more than the Vogue article.

[Adam_Frisch]

I think, if there’s one thing the movement has done that’s permeated into the more traditional crowd, is a newer acceptance that certain areas, or terroirs, can have value and qualities. I don’t think this was the case just 10 years ago. Would people have tried either a Mission/Cab Pfeffer/whatever or even a Lodi wine as a discerning wine drinker then? Probably not. Or a Vin de France? I think we can thank that movement for this newfound curiosity, because that particular movement is not interested in place - they’re interested in practices. And I think that’s a healthy approach to the sustainability of wine and farming. We should focus less on place and more on practices.

A very direct result of that is more accessible wines. In Lodi, a small winemaker can buy Cabernet Sauvignon for $800/ton. 1.5hrs away, in Napa, the same Cab would cost a minimum of $6000/ton (and if you go to Beckstoffer and the likes, well over $10K/ton). That saving can be passed on to a modern consumer who’s less about place. That’s a win for all.