Has wine gone bad?
Has
wine gone bad?
‘Natural
wine’ advocates say everything about the modern industry is ethically,
ecologically and aesthetically wrong – and have triggered the biggest split in
the wine world for a generation.
Tue 15 May 2018 01.00 EDTLast
modified on Tue 15 May 2018 09.48 EDT
If
you were lucky enough to dine at Noma, in Copenhagen, in 2011 – which had just
been crowned as the “best restaurant in the world” – you might have been served
one of its signature dishes: a single, raw, razor clam from the North Sea, in a
foaming pool of aqueous parsley, topped with a dusting of horseradish snow. It
was a technical and conceptual marvel intended to evoke the harsh Nordic
coastline in winter.
But almost more remarkable than the
dish itself was the drink that accompanied it: a glass of cloudy, noticeably
sour white wine from a virtually unknown vineyard in France’s Loire Valley,
which was available at the time for about £8 a bottle. It was certainly an odd
choice for a £300 menu. This was a so-called natural wine – made without any
pesticides, chemicals or preservatives – the product of a movement that has
triggered the biggest conflict in the world of wine for a generation.
The rise of natural wine has seen
these unusual bottles become a staple at many of the world’s most acclaimed
restaurants – Noma, Mugaritz in San Sebastian, Hibiscus in London – championed
by sommeliers who believe that traditional wines have become too processed, and
out of step with a food
culture that prizes all things local. A recent study showed that 38% of
wine lists in London now feature at least one organic, biodynamic or natural
wine (the categories can overlap) – more than three times as many as in 2016.
“Natural wines are in vogue,” reported the Times last year. “The weird and
wonderful flavours will assault your senses with all sorts of wacky scents and
quirky flavours.”
As natural wine has grown, it has
made enemies. To its many detractors, it is a form of luddism, a sort of
viticultural anti-vax movement that lauds the cidery, vinegary faults that
science has spent the past century painstakingly eradicating. According to this
view, natural wine is a cult intent on rolling back progress in favour of wine
best suited to the tastes of Roman peasants. The Spectator has likened it to
“flawed cider or rotten sherry” and the Observer to “an acrid, grim burst of
acid that makes you want to cry”.
Once you know what to look for,
natural wines are easy to spot: they tend to be smellier, cloudier, juicier,
more acidic and generally truer to the actual taste of grape than traditional
wines. In a way, they represent a return to the core elements that made human
beings fall in love with wine when we first began making it, around 6,000 years
ago. Advocates of natural wine believe that nearly everything about the £130bn
modern wine industry – from the way it is made, to the way critics police what
counts as good or bad – is ethically, ecologically and aesthetically wrong.
Their ambition is to strip away the artificial trappings that have developed in
tandem with the industry’s decades-long economic boom, and let wine be wine.
But among wine critics, there is a
deep suspicion that the natural wine movement is intent on tearing down the
norms and hierarchies that they have dedicated their lives to upholding. The
haziness of what actually counts as natural wine is particularly maddening to
such traditionalists. “There is no legal definition of natural wine,” Michel
Bettane, one of France’s most influential wine critics, told me. “It exists
because it proclaims itself so. It is a fantasy of marginal producers.” Robert
Parker, perhaps the world’s most powerful wine critic, has called natural wine
an “undefined scam”.
For natural wine enthusiasts,
though, the lack of strict rules is part of its appeal. At a recent natural
wine fair in London, I encountered winemakers who farmed by the phases of the
moon and didn’t own computers; one man foraged his grapes from wild vines in
the mountains of Georgia; there was a couple who were reviving an old Spanish
technique of placing the wine in great clear glass demijohns outside to capture
sunlight; others were ageing their wines in handmade clay pots, buried
underground to keep them cool as their predecessors did in the days of ancient
Rome.
Sebastien Riffault, from the Loire
Valley, runs the 10-year-old trade body L’Association des Vins Naturels. He
told me his basic technique was simply “making wine like in a previous century,
with nothing added”. This means using only organic grapes, picked by hand, and
fermenting slowly with wild yeasts from the vineyard (most vintners use
lab-grown yeasts, which Riffault says are engineered “like F1 cars, to speed
through fermentation”). No antimicrobial chemicals are added to the wine, and
everything is bottled – bits and all – without filtering. The result is that
Riffault’s sancerre comes out a deep amber colour and very sweet, tasting like
crystallised honey and preserved lemons. It’s excellent, but far from the “pale
yellow” with “fresh citrus and white flowers” described in the French
government’s official guidelines for sancerre. “It’s not for everyone. It’s not
made like fast food. But it’s totally pure,” Riffault told me.
Just 20 years ago Riffault and his
contemporaries were ignored, but now they have a foothold in the mainstream,
and their approach could transform wine as we know it. “We used to struggle”
the Burgundy natural winemaker Philippe Pacalet says. “People weren’t ready.
But chefs change, sommeliers change, whole generations change,” he went on.
“Now they are ready.”
At
first glance, the idea that wine should be more natural seems absurd. Wine’s
own iconography, right down to the labels, suggests a placid world of rolling
green hills, village harvests and vintners shuffling down to the cellar to
check in on the mysterious process of fermentation. The grapes arrive in your
glass transformed, but relatively unmolested.
Yet, as natural wine advocates point
out, the way most wine is produced today looks nothing like this
picture-postcard vision. Vineyards are soaked with pesticide and fertiliser to
protect the grapes, which are a notoriously fragile crop. In 2000, a French
government report noted that vineyards used 3% of all agricultural
land, but 20% of the total pesticides. In 2013, a study found traces of
pesticides in 90% of wines available at French supermarkets.
In response to this, a small but
growing number of vineyards have introduced organic farming. But what happens
once the grapes have been harvested is less scrutinised, and, to natural wine
enthusiasts, scarcely less horrifying. The modern winemaker has access to a
vast armamentarium of interventions, from supercharged lab-grown yeast, to
antimicrobials, antioxidants, acidity regulators and filtering gelatins, all
the way up to industrial machines. Wine is regularly passed through
electrical fields to prevent calcium and potassium crystals from forming,
injected with various gases to aerate or protect it, or split into its
constituent liquids by reverse osmosis and reconstituted with a more pleasing
alcohol to juice ratio.
Natural winemakers believe that none
of this is necessary. The basics of winemaking are, in fact, almost
stupefyingly simple: all it involves is crushing together some ripe grapes.
When the yeasts that live on the skin of the grape come into contact with the
sweet juice inside, they begin gorging themselves on the sugars, releasing
bubbles of carbon dioxide into the air and secreting alcohol into the mixture.
This continues either until there is no more sugar, or the yeasts make the
surrounding environment so alcoholic that even they cannot live in it. At this
point, strictly speaking, you have wine. In the millennia since humans first
undertook this process, winemaking has become a highly technical art, but the
fundamental alchemy is unchanged. Fermentation is the indivisible step.
Whatever precedes it is grape juice, and whatever follows it is wine.
“The yeasts are the key between the
vines and the people,” Pacalet told me, in a reverent tone. “You use the living
system to express the information in the soil. If you use industrial
techniques, even if it’s a small operation, you’re making an industrial
product.” Viewed in this quasi-spiritual way, the winemaker’s job is to grow
healthy grapes, tend to the fermentation, and intervene as little as possible.
Illustration by Pete Gamlen
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In practice, this means going
without the methods that have given modern winemakers so much control over
their product. Even more radically, it means jettisoning the expectations of
mainstream wine culture, which dictates that wine from a certain place should
always taste a certain way, and that a winemaker works like a conductor,
intervening to turn up or tamp down the various elements of the wine until it
plays the tune the audience expects. “It is important a sancerre tastes like a
sancerre, then we can start to determine levels of quality,” says Ronan
Sayburn, the head of wine at the private wine club and bar 67 Pall Mall.
In France, which remains the
cultural and commercial centre of the wine world, the acceptable styles of
winemaking aren’t just a matter of history and convention; they are codified
into law. For a wine to be labelled as from a particular region, it must adhere
to strict guidelines about which grapes and production techniques can be used,
and how the resulting wine should taste. This system of certification –
the appellation d’origine contrôlée (AOC), or “protected
designation of origin” – is enforced by inspectors and blind-tasting panels.
Wines that fail to conform to these standards are labelled “vin de France”, a
generic designation that suggests low quality and makes them less attractive to
buyers.
Some natural winemakers have
rebelled against this legislation, which they believe only reinforces the
dominant styles and methods that are ruining wine altogether. In 2003, the
natural winemaker Olivier Cousin opted out of his local AOC, complaining in a
letter that meeting their standards meant that “one must beat the grapes with
machines, add sulphites, enzymes and yeast, sterilise and filter”. When he
refused to stop describing his wine as being from Anjou, he was actually
prosecuted for labelling violations. In response, Cousin put on a good show,
riding his draft horse up to the courtroom steps and bringing a barrel of his
offending wine to share with passers-by. But he ended up changing the labels.
“The AOC are liars,” Olivier’s son
Baptiste, who has taken over several of his father’s vineyards, told me. “The
local designations were created to protect small producers, but now they just
enforce poor quality.”
The
expectations of how a wine from a certain region should taste go back hundreds
of years, but the global industry that has been built atop them is largely a
product of the past century. If natural wine is a backlash against anything, it
is the idea that it is possible to square traditional methods of winemaking
with the scale and demands of that market. There is a sense that alongside
economic success, globalisation has slowly forced the wine world toward a dull,
crowd-pleasing conformity.
France has long been the centre of
the wine world, but until the mid-20th century most vineyards were small and
worked mainly by hand. In the eyes of natural winemakers, the rot began in the
decades after the second world war, as French vineyards modernised and the
industry grew into a global economic behemoth. To these disillusioned
observers, what seems like a story of technical and economic triumph is really
the tragic tale of how wine lost its way.
Before the war, France had just
35,000 tractors; in the next two decades it would acquire more than a million,
as well as access to US-made pesticides and fertilisers. At the same time,
oenologists, people who study wine, looked to science to refine their product.
Two men in particular, Emile Peynaud and Pascal Ribéreau-Gayon, worked
tirelessly to first establish their subject’s academic legitimacy, and then to
build a bridge between the laboratory and the wine cellar. “In the past we made
great wine by chance,” Peynaud declared. The future would be more rigorous.
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Peynaud helped standardise the way
wine was made. His greatest, and simplest, achievement was to convince winemakers
to pick higher-quality fruit and use more sterile equipment. But he also
pioneered and popularised the use of laboratory-inspired tests for things such
as pH, sugar, and alcohol, which gave a new scientific clarity to winemaking.
This modernisation process was an
enormous success. By the end of the 1970s, France’s wine exports totalled over
$1bn, almost 10 times what they had been just two decades earlier, and more
than those of its competitors Italy, Spain and Portugal combined. As the market
expanded, other countries scrambled to emulate the French model. French
technicians and consultants were hired by new world wineries to teach them the
new science of oenology, and the classic French style. At one point Michel
Rolland, the most influential of these itinerant advisors, had more than 100
clients around the world.
And so, even as more countries began
producing wine, they all coloured within lines drawn by the French. Cabernet
sauvignon and merlot, grapes associated with Bordeaux – long considered the
king of French wine regions – were planted in new vineyards emerging everywhere
from Chile to Canada. Even Italy, which had always been a distant second in
terms of profit and prestige, scored hits at international competitions with
bordeaux-style wines made with traditional French grapes grown in Tuscany.
From the 1980s onward, these kinds
of bordeaux-esque wines – heavy, slightly sweet and highly alcoholic, made with
the help of French consultants – came to dominate the global market. A new
generation of critics loved them, especially the all-powerful Robert Parker, a
self-styled “consumer advocate” who tasted 10,000 wines a year from his home
office in Maryland, and whose recommendations could make or break a winemaker’s
year. (The British wine critic Hugh Johnson, in his memoirs, refers to Parker
as a “dictator of taste” within an “imperial hegemony” for the extent to which
he controlled the fortunes of the worldwide industry.)
The kinds of wine Parker and his
peers championed became known as the international style. There was a hint of
disdain in the phrase, the sense that a bland internationalism had severed the
connection between a type of wine and the place where it is made. In truth,
this criticism was hard to dispute. To take just one example, since the 1970s
the acreage devoted to native grapes in Italy has declined by half, often
replaced with traditionally French varieties.
By the early 1990s France was
exporting more than $4bn worth of wine a year – still more than twice as much
as Italy, and more than 10 times as much as its new competition from the US,
Australia and all of South America. And when it came to style, everyone still
followed the French. Today, even the cheapest red wine found in the US or
Britain is in some ways a tribute to that victory, having likely been soaked
with toasted wood chips to approximate the vanilla and spice aromas of a French
barrel, and spiked with sugar and purple colorant to ape the velvety sweetness
and inky shade of a good bordeaux.
In the 1990s, a quote attributed to
the Bordeaux winemaker Bruno Prats began being repeated in the mainstream wine
press and among wine investors like a sacred mantra: “There are no more bad
vintages.” The implication was that advances in farming and winemaking
technology had all but conquered nature. In 2000, the late wine journalist
Frank J Prial declared in the New York Times: “The fact of the matter is that
in the cellar and the vineyard, the winemakers of the world have rendered the
vintage chart [a historical record of which years are considered by critics to
have been good or bad for winemaking] obsolete.” Just as the end of the cold
war led some to declare ‘the end of history’ a decade earlier, it seemed that
mankind had arrived at the end of wine. There was nothing to do but accept the
new reality.
Thanks
to the industry’s embrace of technology, wine was more plentiful, profitable
and predictable than ever. But in the 1980s, just as French wine was putting
the finishing touches to its global conquest, stirrings of discontent began to
be heard among winemakers.
The blueprint for what came to be
known as natural wine comes from Beaujolais, a pretty region of soft green
hills and stone cottages just below the slopes of Burgundy proper. In the
1950s, the area had started making “beaujolais nouveau”, a cheap, easy-drinking
wine that was produced quickly and released early in the season. It was a huge
hit, and by the end of the 1970s Beaujolais – an area roughly the size of New
York City – was producing more than 100m litres of wine a year, and exporting
more bottles than Australia and the state of California combined.
Despite its commercial success,
Beaujolais had become a dismal example of technical winemaking run amok. The
New York Times complained about how producers would “‘push’ the vines” to twice
the recommended yield, a process known locally as “faire pisser la vigne”,
or “making the vine piss”. To achieve the short production time, winemakers
relied on lab-grown yeasts to jump-start the process, and big doses of sulphur
to halt fermentation and stabilise the wine ahead of schedule.
A small group of local dissenters
loathed this conveyor-belt style of production. They coalesced around a
winemaker named Marcel Lapierre, who, upon his death in 2010, was widely
eulogised as “the pope of natural wine”. According to his friends, Lapierre
complained that chemistry had destroyed the taste of Beaujolais, and that his
contemporaries had “mortgaged their future” by producing low-quality wine at a
frantic pace. He felt winemaking was being strangled by the demands of the
market and the strictures of beaujolais AOC.
Lapierre was a radical – a friend of
the Marxist theorist Guy Debord and the situationist poet Alice Becker-Ho –
with no clear path to revolution. “We wanted to have a different life, to
propose a different wine, one that respects ourselves and the people who drink
it”, Lapierre’s nephew and fellow winemaker, Philippe Pacalet, told me.
What they seized upon was a
heretical idea from an unlikely source. In 1980, Lapierre met Jules Chauvet, a
tweedy local wine merchant, then in his 70s, who had been making small amounts
of wine without additives for years. Chauvet, who had trained as a chemist and
published widely on fermentation, believed that a healthy, diverse wild yeast
from the same vineyard as the grapes produced the most complex, desirable
bouquets in a wine. Sulphur dioxide is a potent antimicrobial, and Chauvet
wrote that he considered it and other additives “poison” that restricted his
beloved yeasts.
Chauvet’s rules for winemaking
followed from his obsession with fermentation and eliminating chemicals: the
grapes had to be healthy and pesticide-free to cultivate the wild yeast; the
winemaking had to be slow and extremely careful, as without preservatives any
bit of rotten fruit or unclean equipment could wreck the whole process. “He
gave us these rules, and the scientific background,” Pacalet told me,
describing Chauvet’s techniques as “the foundation of natural wine”.
It is difficult to overstate how
ridiculous all this seemed at the time. In the 1980s, making wine without
sulphur was like climbing a mountain without ropes. The French government had
promoted and regulated its use since the 19th century, and modern oenologists
thought it impossible to make wine without it. Sulphur offered control over
fermentation and protected from bacterial spoilage. It was a panacea, the wine
world’s equivalent of penicillin.
The odds of making decent wine
without any sulphur seemed slim, but Lapierre and his friends persisted.
Lapierre’s diaries recount bad harvests, temperamental yeasts causing entire
vintages to go milky and sour, and nearly 15 years of experimentation – during
which time Chauvet died, in 1989 – before he was consistently making good
“low-intervention” wine, around 1992.
Having proved they could do the
impossible, Lapierre and his friends achieved a strange success, a bit like a
band that sustains a vital sound totally outside the geographic and cultural
mainstream. Locally they were seen as eccentrics. The wine journalist Tim Atkin
once wrote in the food magazine Saveur that there was “a lot of behind the hand
sniggering” from their neighbours.
But Lapierre’s band of natural
winemakers cultivated a small, dedicated following in Paris and abroad who were
willing to evangelise for them. “When I tasted it [in the 1990s] I almost
levitated. My god, I thought, the spirit of Chauvet is still alive,” the
American wine importer Kermit Lynch told the magazine the Wine Spectator in
2010. The Japanese were also enthusiastic early converts – they were “the first
big customers”, Olivier Cousin told me. “They had good taste and they paid
well.”
Lapierre wasn’t the only person to
try making wine without sulphur – a number of isolated winemakers across France
and Italy were experimenting in similar ways – but some combination of
dedication, his personal skill as a winemaker, and the scientific imprimatur of
Chauvet’s process resonated. After years of toiling in obscurity, Lapierre’s
work was vindicated by the scores of other winemakers who used his prototype to
form a loose movement, free themselves of convention, and become the barbarians
at the gates of the wine world.
In
the 1990s, as the natural wine scene made its way beyond Beaujolais, across
France and Europe, it took on a gleefully anti-modern character. Many
winemakers embraced hyper-localism, planting long out-of-fashion native grape
varieties and adopting archaic production techniques. A group based in the
Loire valley pushed mysticism to the forefront through an interest in biodynamic
agriculture, invented almost a century earlier by the Austrian occult
philosopher Rudolf Steiner (he of the controversial schools). This involved
promoting biodiversity in the vineyard, but also burying cow horns and entrails
to form cosmic antennas in the soil – “raying back whatever is life-giving and
astral”, according to Steiner.
For a long time, natural wine seemed
destined to remain a shaggy subgenre. But starting in the late 2000s, something
changed, and natural wine began popping up on menus in Brooklyn, in east
London, and in the hipper quarters of Copenhagen and Stockholm. This new type
of wine fitted perfectly with a wider revolution in taste, as vague terms such
as “natural” and “artisanal” became bywords for sophistication, and consumers
found themselves wanting to dine at farm-to-table restaurants and furnish their
homes with reclaimed wood and industrial fittings. What had once been the
passion of a hardcore group of eccentric winemakers in eastern France had,
somehow, become cool.
London’s wine cognoscenti started
noticing the style around 2010, and didn’t know what to make of it. “We were
scratching our heads, because the definition was very vague. You could have a
very good wine made in this way, then one which is just horrible – fizzing, bubbling,
and smelly,” Ronan Sayburn of 67 Pall Mall told me. The wine press tended to
describe natural wine as if it were a minefield – with a few safe, conventional
choices among a field of explosively bad bottles. “Don’t make the mistake of
thinking that just because a wine tastes different or unexpected that also
means that it’s good”, the Telegraph’s wine critic Victoria Moore wrote in
2011, in an article titled “Be wary at the Natural Wine Fair”. David Harvey, of
the London importer Raeburn Fine Wines, recalled that “many wine professionals
and writers pooh-poohed the whole thing early on. They assumed because they
knew conventional wines, they knew it all.”
In early 2011, as the natural wine
insurgency was growing, Sayburn invited Doug Wregg of Les Caves de Pyrene, one
of the largest natural wine importers in the UK, to give an account of the
style to a coterie of the nation’s wine elite at Vagabond, a small bar in west
London. Among the 12 people attending were Isa Bal, the sommelier of Heston
Blumenthal’s restaurant The Fat Duck, and Jancis Robinson, the Financial Times’
wine critic, who advises the Queen’s cellars. The group included eight of the
world’s 170 Master Sommeliers, and three of its 289 Masters of Wine, graduates
of gruelling professional programmes that can take decades to complete, and
produce the grandmasters of the wine world.
“I sensed a lot of hostility in the
room,” Wregg recalled. Robinson, the FT critic, characterised the mood as
“suspicious”. Among the wines Wregg presented, there were a few hits. A thin,
fresh Jura chardonnay by Jean-François Ganevat was well received. Less so a
tangy, peppery and slightly sweaty-tasting sulphur-free gamay from the
south-eastern Loire, which more than one person noted reeked of “VA”, or
volatile acidity – critical shorthand for a variety of acids that smell of
vinegar.
It wasn’t Wregg’s most contentious
tasting. (“I attended a lunch with him at [the London restaurant] Galvin that
winter, where we got cloudy bottles that smelled like the arse-end of a
farmyard,” Jay Rayner, the Observer’s restaurant critic, told me.) But the
sceptics’ main misgivings – that natural wines were hugely inconsistent,
difficult to define and failed to line up with traditional styles – remained.
“I feel like I left none the wiser,” Sayburn said. “Some were good, some were
horrible.”
There was also a feeling among
attendees that, like the paleo diet or probiotics, natural wine was at best a
trend, and at worst a cult, one whose supporters were prone to feverish
evangelism. Wregg, himself a true believer, was not best-suited to convincing
them otherwise. “Talking natural wine with Doug is like talking to a Mormon
about God,” one of the attendees told me. Two others compared natural wine to
the “emperor’s new clothes”.
Yet the very complaints critics
level at natural wine are the same things that now ensure its success. In 2007,
University of Toronto sociologists Josée Johnston and Shyon Baumann published a
landmark paper arguing that as the influence of French “haute cuisine” declined
through the 20th century, a more pragmatic, egalitarian, American-rooted
tradition arose. Analysing thousands of press articles, they showed that the
qualities of “authenticity” – including geographic specificity, simplicity and
personal connection – dominated contemporary food writing. “Authenticity,” they
wrote, “is employed to provide distinction without overt snobbery.”
The inconsistency, the impurity, the
strong smells, the bits of stems and yeasts that sometimes make it into the
bottle – all this signals to the consumer that natural wine is an alternative
to the bland, monotonous “perfection” of commercial products, in the same way
that slight asymmetries distinguish handmade furniture. Natural wine offers a
nothing-to-hide-here image at odds with the stuffy culture of the traditional
wine world. To many people for whom a restaurant wine list represents a hellish
combination of a geography, history and chemistry test specially designed to
make them feel stupid, there is something very appealing about upending the
critical hierarchy, or at least being told it can be ignored.
“When you decide consistency is less
important, you are more liberated in the way you taste. Instead of looking for
faults, you take what the wine gives you,” Wregg told me recently. We were at
Terroirs, a Trafalgar Square wine bar that Les Caves opened in 2008, surrounded
by mostly older patrons in Oxford shirts or suits, nearly all with a glass or
bottle filled with something that would have been nearly unrecognisable as wine
a decade ago.
Wregg is fastidious when describing
soil types or winemaking practice, but tends to interpret the final product
with a loose, anarchic air, like a seditious schoolteacher who knows the
curriculum but urges students to doubt the validity of the system that created
it. “Customers will tell me, ‘Oh, the 2015 is not like the 2014’, and I say
‘Good’, because, well, those are different years, and if the winemaker was
farming honestly and not trying to manipulate the wine towards some idea of
quality, it’s always going to be different”, he said. Once one accepts the
premises of natural wine, he continued, “In a certain way, all bets are off.
Everything is valid, everything is as good as everything else.”
Rigid
boundaries soften over time. Natural wine can’t remain segregated in its own
market for ever. There are natural winemakers who want to expand, and
mainstream winemakers – struggling with what a 2016 industry report called the
“long-term issue of youth recruitment” – eager to learn from natural wine’s
popularity with young people who are as interested in craft beer and spirits as
they are in wine.
Isabelle Legeron, an influential
sommelier and writer, told me her vision for the future of natural wine was “to
move away from this image of beatniks in sandals who have no idea what they’re
doing”. She would like more transparency and clearer standards about what
actually goes in the product – something she thinks favours natural wine’s
chemical-free process. She also wants to cut out “bottles with naked lady
pictures”, an unfortunate hangover from the scene’s crusty boys-club days.
When I spoke to Jay Rayner (no
natural wine fan, to put it mildly) he drew a parallel between natural wine and
the success of the organic food movement. Despite its enormous visibility,
organic food still accounts for only a fraction of the total market, but its
rise has provided a contrast and critique of the mainstream food world that
could not be ignored. As a result, the mainstream has become a little bit more
organic.
I caught a glimpse of this process
late last year at Château Palmer, one of the world’s most prestigious wineries.
While natural winemakers often tend toward lighter, brighter wines for
immediate drinking, Château Palmer makes dense, highly concentrated wines that
won’t age into their full potential for decades. It is wine for the yacht, the
private jet and the futures market.
Yet in a sign of how natural wine’s
thinking is infiltrating the highest levels of the industry, Château Palmer’s
CEO Thomas Duroux has converted the estate, which is in Bordeaux, to biodynamic
agriculture. This involves eliminating chemical fertilisers and pesticides, and
applying Steiner’s theories of biodiversity and herbal treatments in their
place. In 2014, Duroux declared that “in 10 years all the serious classified
growths [in Bordeaux] will go this way.” When I visited, rather than the usual
stark sight of thousands of vines in bare soil, there were rows of grapes
boasting a healthy-looking blanket of leafy greens. Cows provided abundant
natural fertiliser, and sheep for grazing between the vines waited in a nearby
barn.
Sabrina Pernet, the head winemaker,
assured me that the conversion wasn’t just marketing. “Consumers want to drink
more natural products. But it’s not just a trend. There’s no future in killing
the Earth,” she said. For the past few years, Château Palmer has also been
experimenting with lowering the sulphur content in their wines. “The first time
Thomas and I tried our wine without sulphur it was incredible”, Pernet said.
“It was so open, so expressive. Sulphur makes wine very closed.”
If this seems like the familiar
story of the market absorbing criticisms and turning them into new ways of
making money, it’s worth noting that some core elements of natural wine are
likely to defy attempts at scaling up. Everyone at Palmer is quick to point out
that they aren’t going fully natural, just dialling back their additives as
much as possible. “We can’t make wine totally without sulphur. I don’t want
fizziness, I want it clean,” said Duroux. And with 10,000 cases retailing at
more than £2,000 each, unlike small-scale natural wine producers, they can’t
afford mistakes.
“This is a problem for the big estates,” said
Cyril Dubrey, a winemaker in the village of Martillac, about 50km south of
Château Palmer. “You need to be OK with losing some barrels, or to simply
accept the wine you made.” Dubrey’s wine is fresh and very acidic, with a
slight dusty earthiness – a long way from the density and power of the Château
Palmer wines. But it is very good, and true to his DIY operation; Dubrey’s
small vineyard butts up against the basketball nets and swimming pools of his
neighbours’ yards.
“You should be free in your head and
heart,” he said, with a calm satisfaction. He comes from a mainstream
winemaking family, and studied oenology nearby. He has never regretted breaking
with that tradition. “I’m proud of the wine that comes from this place. There
is nothing added. The wine is free.”
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