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What the term does (and doesn’t) mean and how to find ones that actually taste good
Happy Snow Day!
As you're bundled up all cozy in your PJ's watching the flakes fall, I figured I'd send you some reading material to make you thirsty. As promised, I’m here to continue our conversation about how to drink wine while still prioritizing your health. And my aim this week is to give you a general overview of natural winemaking… what the term means, what it is, what it isn’t, why it’s controversial - all the juice. So let’s dive in.
First off, let me tell you what ‘natural wine’ isn’t. Natural wine isn’t a defined wine term. Meaning: it’s not tied to any specific legal governing body that regulates the term (unlike organic, biodynamic or salmon safe, all of which I’ll detail further in coming weeks). Rather, the term natural wine has come to be understood as wine that is unmanipulated in the extreme… nothing added to it or subtracted from it and not pushed through invasive processes such as excessive fining or filtration.
But even the term ‘unmanipulated’ can feel murky because, as winemakers like to say, ‘wine doesn’t make itself - vinegar does.’ The winemaker has to do some things to help the process along (such as deciding when to pick, how long to macerate, the temperature at which to ferment, what vessels to use, whether or not to stir the lees etc.). But a winemaker going a more unmanipulated route would most likely avoid the following actions: adding commercial yeast to kick start fermentation, adding tartaric acid to brighten the juice, adding sugar to sweeten it, adding food color to reach a desired hue, adding thickening agents to make it more viscous, adding tons and tons of extra preservatives to make it ultra-shelf stable, stirring it with oak chips to enhance oak flavor, filtering it through aggressive charcoal filters, using reverse osmosis to concentrate the flavors - the list goes on and on.
You may think these actions sound extreme but, sadly, most commercially produced wines (especially those produced on any large scale) utilize many of those techniques to produce a consistent product for a cheap price in very high quantities.
So a winemaker producing natural, unmanipulated or low-intervention wines (all interchangeable terms) is one that helps the wine along with smart decisions, but doesn’t add anything to it except maybe a little bit of sulfur dioxide at bottling.
A Note on Sulfites….
Sulfur dioxide has gotten a bad rep in the wine world of late and - in my opinion - unfairly so. See, many blame the vague term ‘sulfites’ for the reason they get a headache, itchy eyes or a flush to their skin when they drink red wine. But really, sulfur dioxide is a naturally occurring antioxidant that lives in the skins of all grapes, and acts as a natural preservative to the wine itself. Because red wine soaks on its skins and white wine does not, winemakers actually need to add more sulfites to white wine than they do to red, since it didn’t pick up those natural preservatives in the fermentation process.
And even for red wines it’s okay for a winemaker to add just a little bit of SO2 at bottling. Wine is a live agricultural product, after all. So it can spoil just like a loaf of bread can. And if the wine was made in France and had to take a bus to a boat to a plane to a hot loading dock to a sunny retail shop before it makes its way into your glass, you’re going to be grateful for that little bit of antioxidants that helped keep it fresh. (If you’ve ever wondered why some natural wines get stinky, it’s for exactly this reason - the winemaker maybe should have added just a pinch more SO2!)
So to wrap up the controversy, the reason people have a negative reaction to red wine is actually histamines. Histamines also live in the skins of fruit, so people who have lower histamine thresholds than others will most likely flush from red wines since they have skin contact and white wines don’t! So if you’re someone who flushes from wine, perhaps veer towards whites or light style reds without much skin contact.
So How do I Find These Wines?
You can hopefully now see that unmanipulated wines are better for your health, just like whole foods are better than processed foods with mile-long ingredient lists you can’t pronounce. But I personally also want to drink wine that also tastes good (not funky or stinky; where I can taste the character of the grape and the place). So this is the magic formula I’ve settled on: seek out wine that is free from additions except for a little sulfur at bottling.
And to find these wines, my recommendation is the same as always: ask your sommelier or the proprietor at your local wine shop to help you! I promise that if you’re at a restaurant or wine shop worth their salt, they will have plenty… You can use the terms low or minimal intervention, unmanipulated, or natural - just adding the caveat that you are looking for clean styles and don’t mind a little SO2 at bottling.
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