We’ve all heard the phrase “natural wine” over the last few years, and these days, every hip neighborhood across the globe seems to have a bottle shop specializing in this style of winemaking. To answer every question about natural wine you might have, we spoke with experts ranging from professionals well-versed in natural wines to wine chemistry PhDs. The main thing to know is that the phrase “natural wine” applies to a wide-ranging and exciting category of bottles that includes organic, biodynamic, and more; a brave new world that’s just waiting to be explored.
Natural wines are made with less “added stuff” than their non-natural counterparts. In fact, UC Davis Professor of Viticulture and Enology Dr. Andrew Waterhouse says that you should think of “natural wine” the way you do “natural foods.” He says that the natural wine movement is part of the overall trend away from processed foods and toward understanding where our food comes from, a “wide-ranging market phenomenon” of a consumer preference for transparency. For a wine, this means less manipulation: few or no additives, filters, fining agents, or added yeast.
In traditional winemaking, depending on a given region or country’s requirements, a preferred yeast is used to kickstart fermentation, and various ‘ingredients’ are added to get the wine to its final form.
Vino Vinyasa founder Morgan Perry boasts a Wine & Spirit Education Trust Level 3 Award in Wines and is a natural wine fan and expert. “If you are a big winery mass-producing wines, there are certain things you can do to speed up the process to produce more wine for less money,” she says. “Things can be added to make wine more quickly, or make more of it, or make it taste more consistent with previous vintages or trending consumer taste.” An example of this, Perry says, includes using certain additives “to color-correct and provide body in wine, for instance, or making up for under-ripe grapes.”
“Natural wine is typically made using “no additives and only native (aka ambient, wild or naturally occurring) yeast.”
“A lot of what is used for fining and filtering is removed eventually from the wine,” she says, which means only trace amounts end up in your glass. These practices are used to make wines more efficiently as well as ensure that what you are expecting from your favorite bottle of wine is exactly what you will get each time you purchase it.
Meanwhile, natural wine is typically made using “no additives and only native (aka ambient, wild or naturally occurring) yeast,” says Jennifer Estevez, a Court of Master Sommeliers Advanced Sommelier and CEO and Founder of OmVino. She says that natural winemakers can “use a little bit of sulfur… but the finished product is meant to tell the story of the terroir and vintage more than manufactured wines.”
