Natural wine: how to pick a winner

The best way to approach the new trend in wine is to think about cheese. Which kind do you prefer? A slab of plasticky, pasteurised, supermarket cheddar, a cheese that you know will taste the same every time you buy it? Or something produced by a farmer on first-name terms with his cows, someone who uses unpasteurised milk and traditional methods to make characterful cheese that tastes slightly different from batch to batch? Or, to put it another way, do you prefer your cheese processed or au naturel?

The natural wine movement would like us to view wine in the same terms. This loosely affiliated, slightly anarchic but growing group of small-scale producers, believes that much of modern wine is too processed for its own good. Too many producers, they argue, are too reliant on a battery of tools and additives to take some of the risk out of winemaking. If nature hasn't given you enough acidity, tannin or sugar in the vineyard, then you can add tartaric acid, powdered tannins or concentrated grape juice to taste. Can't afford an oak barrel? Then chuck oak chips in the vat.
Natural winemakers are committed to the minimum of intervention in winemaking, leading, they hope, to wines with a sense of place. They farm their vineyards organically or biodynamically (although they may not be certified as such), but it's what they don't do that marks them out as "natural". They prefer wild, naturally present yeasts rather than bought-in, cultivated strains. They use very little or no sulphur dioxide. What you taste, in other words, is what you get.
The movement dates back to the 1970s in the Loire and Beaujolais, and it's in these French regions, as well as the Languedoc-Roussillon and parts of Italy, where it is most active. But it is catching on all over the world and I've tasted examples from Spain, Chile, the US, Australia and New Zealand. It is also developing a following among wine lovers, at least in part because of the perceived health benefits (asthmatics react badly to sulphur dioxide), with natural wine bars proliferating in Paris, New York, Tokyo and now London.
Doug Wregg is a director of the wine merchant Les Caves de Pyrene, importing and retailing around 400 "natural" and organic/biodynamic wines, and a major investor in the Terroirs natural wine bar just off Trafalgar Square and its spin-off, Brawn, in Columbia Road, east London. This has made him the UK's de facto natural wine spokesman. "People need to realise that it's about good wine," he says. "Wine that's food-friendly, local and drinkable."
Though I would welcome some formal codification of practice both to protect the genuine practitioners and to ensure punters know what they're letting themselves in for, for the most part I share Wregg's views. After a while, you really do know a natural wine when you taste one, and generally speaking that's a very good thing. Yes, there may be an element of risk: I've had natural wines that have tasted of scrumpy, others have called to mind a gastric incident in a farmyard. It's also true that many of my favourite wines have been made in ways that do not necessarily conform to the loosely defined practices of natural wine. All the same, the best (of which there are many) natural wines really do have a purity, vibrancy and drinkability that is as far from processed as it's possible to get.

from: http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2011/jan/23/natural-wine-david-williams