Natural Wine Is Bullshit

I hope I got your attention with the title of this post (which is mostly a transcript of an episode of the Organic Wine Podcast). I also want to point out that there is a bit of irony in that I’m speaking as one who makes, or aspires to make, what some would consider to be Natural Wine.

We released our first wines under our Centralas label in the fall of 2020. It was a terrible time to start a winery, or any kind of business really, but, hey, I’ve never done this before so I have nothing to compare it to. Anyway, I’ve started going around giving samples of our wines to various wine shops around Los Angeles – you know, the sales part of the business – and I’ve had some really interesting conversations with shop managers and owners who interface with the natural wine drinking public. Some common and troubling themes emerged. So this is an attempt to address the alarming trends I’ve become aware of… and if you hang in there you’ll hopefully see that it actually fits with the overall theme of the Organic Wine Podcast, and Centralas.

The fad of Natural wine has some serious problems, and, hey,  that’s all okay with me – everything has problems. I just did an episode about some of the problems of organic. But let’s not pretend Natural wine is superior, morally speaking, because of its priorities or in any other way. I actually think its priorities are out of whack, even with its own values.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. Let’s just jump in.

Look, I can say a lot of good things about natural wine, and most of the time I do… but this isn’t one of those times.

So, here are 4 reasons why Natural Wine is Bullshit:

1.      The attention given to sulfites is utter and complete Bullshit.

Whether a winemaker adds sulfites to a wine has absolutely no impact on anything in the world. To not add sulfites is a purely philosophical choice that arises from some ethos of purity that has become at times a little Nazi-esque, to be honest.

Sulfites have no impact on the environment, the carbon footprint of the supply chain, nor the health of the drinker. I’ll come back to that last one, but the point is that sulfites are meaningless to pretty much everything that is important in the production and consumption of wine… except your philosophical prejudice against them.

[I have overstated here for effect. Sulfites do affect one thing: the smell & taste of a wine. The thing is that this effect can be very positive, especially from a standpoint of protecting the good work done in the vineyard. See point #2 below.]

You know what part of wine does have a massive impact on everyone and everything in the world? The way the grapes were farmed. And the great tragedy of natural wine is that it has trained a whole generation of new wine drinkers to again focus on the wine making instead of the wine growing. The average natural wine consumer who goes into a wine bar is going to ask “Did they add sulfites?” rather than “Did they grow organically it, ethically, and equitably?”

Of course organic farming is one of the tenets of natural wine, but that has almost been forgotten. And it can never be assumed. It should never be the unspoken and understood basis for natural wine. It should be the primary focus.

A Zero-Zero wine is not a natural wine.

Only a Zero-Zero-Zero wine qualifies to be natural wine.

There are three zeros in natural wine, and without the first zero, the other two zeros – the two everyone talks about – are pointless.

The first zero is: no synthetic chemicals in the vineyard. Organic farming is the foundation without which you cannot have natural wine.

Honestly, if you used Round-up in the vineyard, I couldn’t care less about your native fermentations, no filtering, and no sulfites. Your “natural” wine is a joke.

And maybe we even need a fourth zero: Zero exploitation. If your pet-nat was made from grapes that were grown by indentured servants, it doesn’t deserve the honor of being called wine, let alone natural wine. Yeah, I’m looking at you Italy and South Africa.

But all of us better realize that if we’re buying natural wine from California (or anywhere else) and expecting it to be cheap, we better be really sure that the economics make sense for everyone involved. Because someone is paying the price if you aren’t.

Now let me go back to sulfites and their impact on a wine drinker:

Once and for all, No, you don’t have a sulfite allergy. The reaction that you think is from sulfites is actually from histamines that occur naturally in wine, or maybe from the alcohol – I mean how much did you drink anyway? The truth is that only a fraction of a percentage of the population has a legitimate allergic reaction to sulfites. If you haven’t been tested by a specialist and your allergy confirmed, you don’t have one.  

Now, I’m not advocating we add sulfites any more than I’m advocating we should not add them. My point is that they have no impact on the world, and the outsized importance they have in the philosophy of natural wine is utterly absurd.

Hey, I know I’m not the first to weigh in on this debate, and there’s some hypocrisy here in spending so much time talking about this issue when I’m arguing that we should pay less attention to it. I guess I just think it’s such tragedy that we’ve taken the eyes of the consumer off the truly important connection that should be made by wine to the farming. And that’s why I’m talking about it as the number one reason natural wine is bullshit.

Now, on to the second reason Natural Wine is Bullshit.

2.      A flaw is a flaw, and calling a flaw a feature is Bullshit.

Sure, when you’re young you’ll drink anything. And you may even get used to it and like it. But I’m not going to start saying that a wine that tastes of vinegar, smells of sewage, and has a finish of rodent is not flawed. It is. Wine that smells and tastes bad is actually bad wine.

I’ve been making wine as a home winemaker since 2007, and commercially since 2019. Over the years I’ve learned a lot, and the way I learned was by making mistakes. I’ve made lots. And you know how I knew when I made a mistake? The wine tasted and / or smelled bad. That’s why we sniff a milk carton that has reached its expiration date. Our senses have evolved to alert us to something that is spoiled.

You can call that sewage smell “funky” but it doesn’t change the fact that you are detecting an excess of hydrogen sulfide and/or other highly toxic gaseous sulfur compounds.

And, sure, a tiny bit of acetic acid and other volatile acids may add a sweet aroma and elevate some of the flavors of a wine, but when a wine tastes sour from it I just want to encourage the winemaker to bottle some salad dressing rather than trying to pawn it off as wine.

And mouse taint – what a great word – is probably my favorite flaw. It’s like the opposite of a refreshing finish. The wine smells pretty good, you get some delicious fruit as soon as it hits your pallet, and then, boom, you can’t taste anything but an animalistic, chalky, almost urine-tinged finish that wipes out any of the upfront goodness.

You can philosophically rationalize the existence of these flaws in wine, and others, by saying that our pallets evolve and taste is subjective, and you can call me names and say that I’m an unenlightened sheep of industrial winemaking for criticizing these flaws. And you can even point to people who prefer these flavors.

But I think that many of these justifications are really just rationalizations for a very narrow and misguided idea of winemaking when we have the understandable motivation to not want to have to pour a heartbreaking 10 barrels of a mistake down the floor drain. Let me explain:

Minimal intervention is a great idea, but let’s be honest: the truth is that winemaking is NOT natural. It is an agricultural and cultural act. It is necessarily a choice to intervene in a myriad ways in a myriad of natural processes. And please… ask yourself why we have intervened in these processes for millennia?

Why do we cultivate vineyards and stomp grapes and activate carbonic maceration and age wine in amphora or neutral oak or cement eggs? It’s not because those things result in wine naturally in nature without humans. We do those things to make good tasting wine… and I would argue that means wine without flaws. 

Viticulture is a good analogy. Doing nothing is not regenerative organic viticulture. If you want to grow a vineyard biodynamically, organically, and regeneratively, it actually involves more work and more careful attention than conventional viticulture.

So why do we think natural winemaking is doing nothing? Why are we okay with intervening in all the innumerable ways we natural wine makers manipulate nature to make natural wine EXCEPT at the exact point where that intervention could prevent flawed wine…? That’s bullshit.

I don’t want to give any more airtime to sulfites, but I will say that there are a couple completely natural additives that, if used judiciously and sparingly at the right moments when necessary, protect the natural flavors of wine rather than adulterate them, and prevent most, if not all, of the common flaws.

I am definitely not suggesting that winemaking should follow a recipe. But I am strongly suggesting that good winemaking should acknowledge that what’s in the bottle is extremely important to most people, and the average wine drinker can’t taste a philosophical rationalization.

And I’d argue, actually, that we are betraying all of the hard work and amazing values that goes into a well-grown and well-made natural wine if we let a philosophical prohibition against those minimal additives to ruin – yes, ruin – a batch of otherwise good wine with an easily preventable flaw.

The unfortunate thing is that those flaws have become synonymous with Natural Wine. And that, in turn, has likely relegated natural wine as we know it to being pretty much a generational fad that will pass as soon as someone influential enough admits that the Emperor is not wearing clothes, or when the folks who are drinking flawed wine grow tired of it, or can afford better wine.

And as soon as they do that, you can bet they’ll throw the baby out with the bathwater too, and begin to blame the organic farming behind natural wine since these nuances about sulfites and yeast hulls is lost on pretty much anyone that doesn’t make wine. That’s exactly what happened to Organic Wine from 20 years ago or so. People didn’t know that the labeling laws don’t allow you to add sulfites if you put the words “Organic Wine” on a label. They only knew that the wine tasted like shit, sometimes literally. And so a generation of wine drinkers have associated organic wine with flawed wine. Do we really want to make that same mistake again?

I think the association of organic wine with delicious wine is far more important than any philosophical prohibition I have against adding a half a teaspoon of sulfites to 60 gallons of wine. Why? Because organic agriculture actually matters.

Now, this association by the consumer of natural wine with flaws brings up my third point about why natural wine is bull shit. And I promise these last two points are not as long-winded as the first two.

3.      Natural wine has become more about a style of wine than the principles and values behind it.

It’s gotten to the point that when most people think of orange wine, or pet-nats, or co-ferments, or piquettes, or verjus, or anything aged in an amphora, they now think that they are thinking about natural wine. The truth is that those are styles of wine that have nothing inherently to do with natural wine. You can make any of them in a way that would violate every single requirement of qualifying as “natural.” However, the average consumer of natural wine not only thinks that being a Pet-Nat is all that it takes to be natural, but also will turn their nose up at a Zinfandel made by a producer like Ridge, for example, which often meets pretty much every requirement of being natural.

Natural wine is not a style of wine. It is a set of guidelines for growing and making any style of wine.

Well, actually, I’m wrong, because it has become a style. And in becoming a style it has trained consumers not to care about what its really supposed to be about. So now to many people it’s pretty much only a style, and therefore it is really just a sales gimmick. And that’s why it’s bullshit. Seriously… let’s not pick on Cameron Diaz. To the average consumer her “clean wine” is completely interchangeable with what natural wine has become. And actually, she’s at least promoting the organic agriculture behind her wine. So props to her.

And now … drumroll… the final reason, at least for this episode, that natural wine is bullshit:

4.      Your natural wine from Georgia has a massive carbon footprint.

And I don’t mean to pick on Georgia. Natural wine aficionados love new wines from any far flung places. Japan, Armenia, Austria, Sicily, Lebanon, Bolivia, etc. The more obscure the origin of the wine, the cooler I am for drinking it. I was in a natural wine bar in Los Angeles recently where less than 20% of the by-the-glass options were from California, or anywhere in the US.

Honestly, when you consider what the natural wine ethos is supposed to be, that’s absurd. Natural wine should be drunk locally, out of kegs.

Wine moving around locally in glass bottles already has a pretty big carbon footprint. It’s a liquid in a heavy glass bottle, and it moves, often, a minimum of 5 times via burning fossil fuels before it reaches your glass. Now if it’s imported, add to those miles all the moves it has to make in its country of origin before it gets to port, and then a long diesel-fueled sea voyage. That’s a lot of carbon.

So when you’re sipping your Meinklang, don’t feel too cool. You just helped make the world hotter.

Look, we import coffee, tea, and spices from other countries because they don’t grow well here, for the most part. That isn’t true of grapes. In fact grapes grow really well here. North America has 25 species of grapevines compared to 1 in Europe and Central Asia. If we invested as much time, money, and energy in discovering and developing the wines from the local, indigenous grapes of America, as we do in importing and drinking the indigenous grapes of everywhere else in the world, we’d probably have a pretty amazing indigenous wine culture right here.

So there you go… that’s my editorial/rant on why Natural Wine is Bullshit. To consider some ways to improve natural wine, check out my companion post on How To Build A Better Natural Wine.

The truth is that I love Natural Wine. But I love it because of its values: Its values of equitable, organic farming, and its respect for the fact that we humans can’t really make the best wine… we can only carefully observe and gently guide a wild and constantly changing process.

In the best farming and the best winemaking, in my opinion, we are merely microbe shepherds. And that’s a beautiful and humbling truth.

Now let’s go out there and make - and drink - some organically and equitably grown, delicious natural wine!

… I’d love your feedback. Please email us to let me know what you thought about this.