Natural wines are trendy, making significant headlines. They are also generating an uptick of fruitful conversation, with a plethora of pro/con arguments, truths and misconceptions, agreements, and controversy. Setting it all aside, here is my position: Wine must taste like wine and be enjoyable to the drinker. If any wine doesn’t stand up to this criterion, why drink it? Natural or not, this is the Wine Golden Rule.
More casually defined, a natural wine is a low intervention wine, a naked wine, or a raw wine. In the vineyard, it means grapes are not sprayed with pesticides or herbicides. It means that grapes are picked by hand, not by machines. And in the winery, producers rely on natural, indigenous yeasts instead of cultured yeasts out of a Petri dish. No additives are used to make the wine (like fake oak flavor, sugar, acid, egg whites) at any point in the process. All in all, natural wines are intended to be an expression of terroir in the purest way, not a reflection of an artistic winemaker through careful or haphazard manipulation.
The irony of the trendy natural wine movement is that wine has been produced naturally for thousands of years, long before technology played any part in the vineyard and winery. And with sustainable, organic, and biodynamic certifications available today, the definition of a natural wine stands on shaky ground without clear guardrails. A natural wine could be sustainable, organic, or biodynamic. Or not. And contrary to popular claims, a natural wine may contain added sulfur dioxide, the preservative widely used to prevent oxidation and spoilage, albeit presumably minimal.
So, where does this leave us? I fall back on my Wine Golden Rule: Wine must taste like wine and be enjoyable to the drinker.
If a natural wine or conventional wine has not been fined or filtered and appears cloudy, does this bother your eyeballs? If a natural wine or conventional wine has no added sulfur dioxide, does it smell and taste overly funky, with unpleasurable barnyard-y or compost-y notes (a.k.a. poo-bomb)? The answer, of course, depends on your palate and taste preferences.
The bottom line is that I have tasted wines that fall into every possible mix-and-match category: natural, conventional, certified sustainable, un-certified sustainable, certified organic, un-certified organic, certified biodynamic, and/or un-certified organic. And I have liked and disliked wines in each bucket.
With all this said, here is a natural wine I particularly enjoyed! If you see this bottle, grab it.
The 2018 Viña Echeverria No Es Pituko was made in the Curico Valley, roughly 115 miles south of Chile’s capital, Santiago. This wine was made of Chardonnay and appeared cloudy in the bottle and glass as it was unfined and unfiltered. No additional sulfites were added on top of those created naturally by fermentation. “No es pituko” roughly translates to “It ain’t fancy.” And while I agree this wine isn’t polished, it still delivered palate satisfaction and fell into the “fun wine” folder of my mind.
This wine opened with primary aromas and flavors of bruised pear, red delicious apple, lemon and lime zest, a hint of fresh herb, dandelion, and stone. This wine was dry, with medium acidity, medium alcohol, medium aroma and flavor intensity, and medium body. The finish was also medium. Although characterized by many “mediums,” the No Es Pituko was fresh, lively, and offered a bit of complexity.
And that’s my wrap on natural wines! What’s your take?
