by Al Drinkle
One day when the weather was more humane and the bike paths clear of snow, I pedalled past stationary railcars emblazoned with the provocative statement, "So Few Want to be Rebels Anymore". I was already thinking about wine, and the defaced train units catalyzed another deliberation upon what we now colloquially refer to as “natural wine”.
Before diving into this, I must assert that the core values of the natural wine movement are highly attractive to me. The idea that, through holistic and environmentally sound farming and by eschewing as many additions, subtractions and manipulations in the winery as possible, one can produce wine that is reflective of grape, place and season, is unquestionably appealing. And it's a necessary response to “industrial” wine, where the important decisions are made in boardrooms and carried out with advanced chemical and technological impositions in the “cellar”.
25 years ago, natural wine, to the extent that there was even a name for it, was a precarious enterprise. It took belief and conviction to produce wine this way, along with a willingness to risk financial ruin. The shops and restaurants that chose to work with these wines also showed daring in doing so, and wouldn't have bothered without worthwhile qualitative and stylistic reasons. Just as you'd expect and want, the most successful producers within the movement were those whose non-interventionist pursuits were secondary to the fact that their wines were singularly appealing. Lapierre, Overnoy and Radikon were embraced because their wines were very good in a unique way, and at the time, that mattered more than how those wines came about. Now it seems that what matters most is the nebulous set of tenets that determines a producer's inclusion in the natural clique, and few are paying enough attention to whether the wine is good, great or shit because the process (and often the striking, Instagramable labels) is of more importance than the result. Obviously this isn't the philosophy of all makers and proponents of natural wine, but the prioritizing of dogma over drinkability is disturbingly common.
So what of the rebels? If they're lacking, it might be a reflection of how little there is to rebel against. Gone are the times when going “natural” meant doing what you believed in without sympathy or understanding from consumers, and if you made the wrong mistake, your wine would have to go to the distillery or down the drain. Today, if I meet a winemaker my age or younger and they're not going down the natural path, or at least talking the talk, they’re the exception. Given the ubiquitousness of natural-focussed importers, wine bars, restaurants and retailers throughout the world, and the fact that a huge cross-section of the international wine-drinking populace will buy, drink and Instagram a cleverly-labelled, cloudy wine regardless of how closely the aromas and flavours resemble fermented elephant diarrhea, it's time to recognize that “natural wine” is no longer the statement that it used to be. Those involved might think they're rebelling against the mainstream, but if part of the definition of what makes something trendy, and therefore commercially safe, is blind, unquestioning partisanship on the part of consumers, then natural wine's integration into the establishment cannot be denied.
One of the most serious problems with the natural movement is that so much of the wine is as predictable as industrially made wine, albeit in a different way and despite their antipodal ideologies. While industrial wine might be homogenized in a safe, international way that features ripe, anonymously sterile fruit with no allegiance to any particular place, far too much natural wine is recognizable by a narrow range of identifiable consequences of skill-less laissez-faire wine making, rendering place and grape just as inconsequential. For a style that professes to be a servant to terroir, far too many examples from around the globe taste predictably identical, only recognizable as “natural” wine and not as liquid ambassadors of anywhere at all. In this way, the movement is overwhelmingly failing—which is sad for the few practitioners who are making what might be the most exciting wines on the planet.
Elsewhere, I've already ranted exhaustively on the annoyingly amorphous application of the term "natural wine”, so I'll spare you that here. But it's recently occurred to me that there's no possible way that the movement could have achieved its current popularity without the parallel advent of social media. There's no faster or more convenient way for an easily impressionable drinker to be intimidated into thinking that they should like a certain wine than by seeing it championed by the right authority on Instagram. And now a wine-drinking generation of all ages can default to "natural” when someone asks them what type of wine they like, only having to recognize a few of the labels that they've seen pop up on their phones (labels that seem expressly designed to vie for this form of association) to be a modern wine expert. No more having to familiarize oneself with the sub-districts of Tuscany, or learning which grapes apply to which appellations throughout the Loire—one only needs to know that the wine is “natural” to affect a sufficient level of snobbery, and as a bewildering result, many undeserving producers have found otherwise inexplicable market success.
The remaining rebels are those who are making the most honest wine that they can by proudly capturing the spirit of a delicious place. Some of them are abiding by many or all of the tenets that even the most militant whistleblower would want associated with natural wine, and some of them have compelling reasons for working otherwise. But when we inquire with winemakers about parts per million of sulfur dioxide, filter microns and other minutiae of detail, we should do so in order to learn, and not so that we can impose tenuous moral judgments upon them.
If the pursuit of superfluous values has led us astray, the answer for winegrowers, importers, retailers and restaurateurs alike is to restore the focus to good, authentic wines instead pledging allegiance to a vacuous movement. This would be inclusive to everything that actually matters about natural wine, and we can leave the elitist dogma and barf-bag bottlings behind.
