Natural wine

Natural wine is an umbrella term for wine made with as few interventions as possible, both in the vineyard and in the cellar. The idea is to let the grapes and the place speak, rather than steering the process with additives and technology. The grapes are typically grown organically or biodynamically and harvested by hand, and fermentation happens with the wine's own natural yeast cells rather than added yeast cultures. In the cellar, winemakers usually refrain from adding substances otherwise used to adjust, clarify or stabilise wine, and they keep the use of sulphur to a minimum or avoid it entirely.

This matters for what you taste. Natural wines can have a more unpredictable character, a lively freshness and a fruit that feels very direct and alive. Well-made natural wine is clean and clear with no signs of oxidation, though the genre also includes wines with more unconventional, yeasty or sherry-like notes. The style can vary a great deal from bottle to bottle, because there is no intervention to make things uniform.

A widespread misunderstanding is that natural wine is always entirely free of sulphites. Wine itself forms small amounts of sulphites during fermentation, so a label may carry the text contains sulphites even though nothing has been added. The label alone therefore does not tell you whether sulphur was added or arose naturally.