The fads and future of Natural Wine

Tuesday, 21 April, 2015
Alice Feiring, PUNCH
There is no so such thing as natural wine because wine without intervention would turn to vinegar.” This is the predominant argument against the premise of natural wine. It’s true. And it would be damning if the definition of natural wine was, in fact, that it made itself.

But even the Japanese farmer Masanobu Fukuoka—famous for what some refer to as “do-nothing farming”—never meant to suggest that a farmer should be absent from the action. The same tenets hold with winemaking. To transform grape into wine is not a Jesus act—there is no magical staff, no Moses. In fact, remove miracles from the debate. A winemaker must be meticulously clean, a skillful, careful observer and above all, make the right decisions to achieve his or her goal: a palatable (if not delicious) wine. In the case of natural wine, that merely means that the winemaker is trying to achieve that goal without additives (with the exception of small amounts of sulfur dioxide) or unnecessary processing. Intervention is needed, even if the ultimate goal is minimizing it.

As natural wine grows up—and the discussion of it grows along with it—we’ve begun to understand it as a perspective on winemaking dictated by certain principles and philosophies that are evolving. Not only is there greater education about how it’s made and what it stands for, but more advanced discussions among winemakers about how not only to do less to a wine, but improve its stability along the way.

Most of these discussions involve technique. And like any subculture of winemaking, there are debates about what techniques—from cold carbonic maceration to skin contact to the use of clay aging vessels—will be discarded as fad, and what will be upheld as part of the future of the genre.

With this as the backdrop I asked some of the icons of natural wine—Éric Texier, Thierry Puzelat of Clos du Tue Bœuf, Luca Ferraro of BeleCasel and Elisabetta Foradori of Foradori—to help me take a look at the techniques now popular in their world, what they believe to have staying power and why.

+ Infusion

Infusion, which was merely a whisper last spring, has become a cacophony this past winter. But what does it actually mean? Rhône winemaker Éric Texier said that he feels he might have been the first to use the term to describe “the opposite of extraction”—or the process of trying to glean as much color and flavor from a grape as it can feasibly give. Instead of routinely punching the grape skins down during fermentation to get as much texture and color out of them, infusion is more passive. Texier likens the technique to making tea—or to the trend toward lighter roasted coffees, which combine an intensity of citrus and floral flavors without the bombast and girth of a darker roast. “Over-extracted tea,” he says, “leads to a lack of definition and finesse.” Similarly, according to Texier, “great grapes don’t need extraction in order to give the best they have to give,” he says. “Rayas [the legendary Châteauneuf-du-Pape producer] is a perfect example: it’s a wine of insane complexity and deepness without volume.”

Fad or future?
Jury’s out. While the word is trending, at present it’s more an example of the continued paradigm shift towards wines of more elegance and drinkability (with resorting to carbonic maceration) than anything else.

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