Europe's natural wine wars
Natural wine has made waves and caused huge arguments since its emergence at the start of the century. So has it come of age yet? Plus: where I've been drinking lately
For me, it was typical natural wine moment. Last week I was eating at Peckham’s splendid Levan restaurant, specifically a porky menu constructed by Austrian head chef Philip Limpl to evoke his nation’s “Pig Dance” autumn celebrations of nose-to-tail eating. To get into the spirit of the thing, we started with the two Austrian natural white wines, Martin Obenaus’s “MO Weiss”, a majority Grüner Veltliner blend, and Christina Netzl’s “Christina” Grüner Veltliner. Both were cloudy; neither tasted much like Austria’s signature white grape. I’d wanted something zesty to cut through pork fat. We switched to a safer red with the next course.
Neither the Obenaus nor the Netzl wines are actually very hard core in the natural wine world. They’re unfiltered and unfined (hence cloudy) but both use a little added sulphur dioxide to preserve and stabilise the wine. By contrast, a few days later I drank Olivier Pichon’s La Grange St André “Stella Maris” Syrah from the Languedoc. Typical of many French natural producers, Pichon rejects appellation labelling: instead his wines carry the designation Vin de France, the most basic level introduced in 2009 to replace “Vin de Table”. Pichon adds no SO₂, the great shibboleth of the natural wine movement, to this wine. But while I’m not sure I’d have guessed blind that it was a Syrah, it was delicious, brimming with sweet, very pure fruit.
Natural wine – made with minimal intervention in the winery – is like that: offbeat and unpredictable. This is partly because there is no accepted definition of what constitutes natural wine, much less the systems of accreditation that are in place for wine made from organically and biodynamically grown grapes (which includes many natural wines, even if they they’re not necessarily accredited as such.) That leaves a lot of room for argument. And indeed no subject in wine has created as much controversy over the past 25 years.
The upside is that natural wines have given the wine world – above all in France, the movement’s greatest stronghold – a welcome kick up the backside. The weight of tradition combined with bureaucratic French wine rules are a burden in many regions, and natural winemakers who have shrugged those off to experiment are always worth investigating. Their wines are usually interesting and different, even if not always easy or to my taste. This is why they have inspired many young sommeliers in France and elsewhere, and why they’re now prominent on many wine bars’ lists from London to Copenhagen to Athens.
In London, the charge was led by Terroirs, the wine bar and restaurant just off Trafalgar Square that opened in 2008. A project of the UK’s leading natural wine importer, Les Caves de Pyrene, it championed these wines as no other place in the capital ever had (it closed, to much wailing in the wine world, in 2021.) There followed a slew of new wine bars such as Hackney’s Sager + Wilde (2012) offering natural wines among eclectic selections. Also in 2012, maverick French Master of Wine Isabelle Legeron founded (now international) natural wine fair RAW in London; the following year, Les Caves de Pyrene spawned the Real Wine Fair. In successive years both were packed out with people noticeably younger and more excited than attendees at the industry-run London Wine Fair: these were frenetic but fun events.
No doubt in part because of natural wine’s unstuffy and rebellious image, it has found particular favour among younger drinkers, bucking the trend in wine sales to that generation. Some commentators have pointed to Gen X’s greater concern over what they put in their bodies as one reason for natural wine’s popularity (though given SO₂’s harmlessness compared to party drugs like ketamine or ecstasy, I’m not sure I buy this.) Either away, orange wines, produced by leaving white wines on their grape skins for varying amounts of time, have become remarkably mainstream in their popularity: they aren’t always made naturally but many are.
And for wine nerds, natural wine has also renewed debates over terroir – essentially, where a wine is from, in terms of soil, aspect and climate. It’s a central part of wine’s endlessly fascinating diversity. Most wine people will say they want wine to taste of where it’s from. But what does that really mean?
On a wine trip to Georgia in June, I got to know Emma Twiddle, until last August Levan’s very talented and knowledgeable Canadian sommelier. She’s an evangelist for natural wine and we sparred over the subject. She asked me: if a winemaker wants their wine to be faithful to their terroir, what can they do to express that other than keep intervention to a bare minimum? I didn’t really have an answer to that – except to say that I’m just not drinking wine which is manurey or cidery, which a fair few natural wines I taste still are. At that point, it seems to me, the wines have become more about the process and the ideology than about expressing terroir.
And it is this ideological cast – plus a few cidery glasses – that is for me the biggest downside of natural wines. The whole phenomenon is surrounded by frankly weird levels of anger and partisanship. Indeed I write about the subject at all with some trepidation.
To give an idea of the rage and bitterness involved, consider the row in France earlier this year over the country’s biggest natural wine fair, Saumur’s La Dive Bouteille. In her invitations to winemakers, the organiser, journalist and winemaker Sylvie Augereau, asked them to “please keep your slightly leftfield cuvées at home” adding that “There are additives that we prefer to certain intruders!” [Il y a des intrants qu’on préfère à certains intrus!] – a reference to the use of sulphur as a preservative against faults such as the yeast brettanomyces. As recounted by Paris-based American natural wine writer Aaron Ayscough, this triggered a long round of recriminations between more pragmatic natural wine producers such as Augereau and ultras who reject any addition of sulphur, even if that absence can sometimes render the resultant wine chronically unstable or undrinkable.
Sulphur fundamentalist Jean-Pierre Robinot is one of the latter. He told Ayscough earlier this year, “I prefer to drink a natural wine full of faults than a chemical wine.” Ayscough says Augereau counters: “I’m sick of throwing my friends’ wines in the sink.” Indeed there’s a wilful contrarianism in the tastes of some natural wine enthusiasts. Twiddle admitted to me that she had some customers who would come in and ask her just to give them her funkiest, most challenging bottles.
Or consider the incident a few years ago when one prominent British wine writer and authority on natural wine gave a talk at a wine fair: natural wine activists went around the room putting flyers on every seat attacking him for his alleged betrayal of true natural principles.
I confess that I don’t understand this level of anger about wine. Natural wine isn’t really about environmental principles: while efforts to cut the wine industry’s pesticide use and carbon footprint are vital, what makes sustainably grown grapes into a natural wine, rather than just an organic or biodynamic one, happens in the winery, not the vineyard. And sulphur dioxide isn’t, in the amounts used in winemaking, a chemical harmful to our health. Personally, I find there are bigger issues to get cross about.
Yet natural wine’s prominence has also fuelled plenty of anger in the wine establishment. It tends to make quite a lot of wine professionals’ hard-won knowledge redundant. As I found at Levan last week, it can be disappointing when wines don’t conform to any of your expectations. It’s even disempowering: I feel this a little at my local wine shop/bar in Brittany in the town I go every summer, the excellent Cave d’Erquy. It offers a mainly organic and biodynamic selection, many of which are natural too. A lot of these labels tell you nothing at all about the wine: they may or may not say what grapes it contains or give a vintage, and Vin de France-labelled wines are not legally allowed to say where in France they are from. So I always have to ask the owner for advice and explanations.
Indeed paradoxically for a style of wine touted as more democratic and less controlled by industry specialists, finding your way around natural wine requires detailed producer-by-producer knowledge. As wine writer Henry Jeffreys recently observed, “selling natural wine requires well-trained and extremely enthusiastic staff… Natural wine was a great way of remystifying [wine] and giving power back to the gatekeepers.”
Some commentators have detected a maturing of the natural wine scene in the past decade, with a more pragmatic approach to sulphur and an ambition to make more serious wines rather than the thirst-quenching fruit bombs beloved of many enthusiasts. The flip side of that is harsher criticism from within the natural movement of the funkier wines – though Ayscough cautions that this divide has been there ever since the movement’s rise in France at the start of this century. Earlier this year, Catalonia-based US wine writer Miqel Hudin mounted a full-throated attack on what he calls “trash natural” - wines that are “abrasive, unintentionally oxidized, unintentionally reduced to a cabbage-y state, smell like a diaper due to excessive Brettanomyces,” and that “arrive pre-spoiled and without the joy that is wine”.
I’m certainly not about to drink such “trash natural” wines, however cool their principles. There are plenty of interesting winemakers producing brilliant, innovative wines around the world that aren’t natural. But the sector has proved a wider source of inspiration: for example as I’ve argued elsewhere, principles of lower intervention are helping drive some interesting shifts in styles in Spain. So I’ll keep exploring natural wines - even if there are times when I end up ordering a second glass of something safer.
Where I’ve been drinking lately
Just to mix things up a bit, rather than what I’ve drunk, these are some of the places I’ve been drinking over the past couple of weeks (as well as what I drank in them):
Los Mochis London City - the bigger of the two branches of Los Mochis takes this swanky Mexican-Japanese fusion restaurant-bar to its logical conclusion, a rooftop joint about 10 floors above Liverpool St station, stuffed full of Mexican Day of the Dead paraphernalia and bankers. If you suspect that this Tatler-recommended spot isn’t really my scene, you’d be right - but I was here for the launch of the 2018 vintage of Henriot champagne’s top cuvée, L’Inattendue. It’s a serious expression of Côte des Blancs Chardonnay, all sourced from Chouilly Grand Cru vineyards: crisp, precise, mineral. Meanwhile I shall return to Los Mochis on a summer evening for the view.
Café François - this ambitious French bistro in Borough Market is just the latest London eaterie billing itself as an “all-day” restaurant (I can feel a blog coming on about this odd phenomenon.) I went with my friend Victoria Moore, the Telegraph’s wine critic, and we enjoyed classics like Jambon de Bayonne with celeriac remoulade, and Bleu d’Auvergne with walnuts, as well as innovations including a very good lamb merguez flatbread. I wasn’t especially impressed with the wine list but we managed happily enough with a bottle of Lo Sang del Pais Marcillac 2022.
Bird House Brewery - I somehow hadn’t been to this new micro-brewery on my home turf of Herne Hill, south London, since it opened at Easter, even if my kids have (and to judge by the pictures on their website, it is already a favourite of their generation.) Previously the Canopy Brewery, both indoors and the large outdoor space have been smartened up. It’s a fine watering hole - quiet on a Sunday lunchtime - and their Bird House Lager may now be my favourite local brew.
Transparency declaration: I was a guest of Champagne Henriot at Los Mochis, and of Café François.
Very good. Thank you.
Joe Heitz used to say “God wants to turn grape juice into vinegar—we just interrupt the process, and hope we get it right.”