Feiring first found natural wines “confounding…as a wine writer, I was used to drinking wine in all its klutzy stages of development, but many naturels that I tasted were bubbly, fuzzy, cloudy, and [showed] high-toned notes of nail polish and apple cider. I didn’t have a tasting context for them. I didn’t know what the hell was going on.”

Pierre Jancou, who imports and sells wines of this kind, defines natural wines as those made in small quantities, by independent producers, on low-yielding vineyards, from hand-picked, organically grown grapes, without added sugars, foreign yeasts, acidity adjustments, micro-oxygenation, or reverse osmosis, and usually neither filtered nor fined.

Jancou has a point: many ‘organic’ winemakers grow organic grapes, but use conventional methods of vinification, like using lab yeasts, adding sugar, using new oak barrels, and dumping sulfites to stabilize the wines. “[Conventional] wines are dead, unhealthy and tasteless; they smell like wood and marmalade, and their high sulphur levels just destroy your head. These are wines [that] reflect a generation of humans that has industrialized all farming since the fifties. We know now that this generation was wrong and that we need to go back to real agriculture, for the sake of our children and for the future of our planet.”

Eventually, Feiring comes around to vin naturel. “It’s easy to see why some people call these wines real, authentic, or alive. Every sip often brings another taste, another impression, another nuance.” Most of the movement’s momentum is tangible in Parisian wine bars, but a few iconoclasts in San Francisco, New York, and Tokyo are bringing these ancient flavors to different audiences. 

Everything old is new again!