"Wine is not natural"

Why "natural wine" is problematic, a chat with sommelier Marco Lami

Many of you already know that my husband Marco Lami is a top sommelier. His resume includes working with some of Australia’s best chefs, like Neil Perry at Rosetta, and Andrew McConnell at The Builder’s Arms in Melbourne, and the Michelin starred restaurants of Il Pellicano in Porto Ercole and the Four Seasons Florence. And if you’ve had the chance to let him choose you a wine, you’ll know that it would be a so-called “natural wine,” which we love, and some of you may also know that we are planning to open our own “natural” enoteca, Marilu, next spring. But Marco has long said that he avoids using the term “natural wine” and that it is in fact, a terrible term. It is misunderstood; it is misleading.

I asked him to explain why and I think the answer will fascinate you:

“Wine is not natural, vinegar is. If you want wine not to turn to vinegar you need some sort of human intervention—not necessarily chemicals. You need knowledge. But wine’s natural course is vinegar.”

“Think of wine as a product that is related to time. It is a period, a moment of time in between grape juice and vinegar:

Grape juice—fermented grape juice—wine—wine—wine—oxidation— acetic fermentation—vinegar.

There are two types of intervention [to keep the wine from turning into vinegar]. You can do a chemical intervention, like using chemicals such as sulfur dioxide, the least problematic of many, or procedures such as stabilisation or pasteurisation. Or you can use knowledge to try to keep it as stable as possible so that the wine can express itself for the longest amount of time before decaying.

Think of sourdough. You start with the yeast and flour, then you reach the peak of the fermentation, when you need to refresh it. But if you let it go, what happens? It ends up smelling like vinegar. If you don't handle it properly, you end up with the same situation. The middle stage, where you refresh the sourdough, that’s the stage you want to keep it, so you have to keep refreshing. But it's not the end product — the end product is always vinegar. Wine is the same. To keep wine at the stage where it's drinkable, you always need human intervention.

That's why I don't like the term natural wine. There is always human intervention. It should be called “knowledgeable wine making”, not natural [wine]. You're not just letting it go to do what it wants. You need to know what is happening, you need so much knowledge in the vineyards, in the tanks, and to intervene only when absolutely necessary. It’s not a preventative intervention, it is knowing exactly what is happening and intervening only when necessary. Wine is a man-made product, not a natural product.”

Above, the winery of Elisabetta Foradori in Trentino, one of our favourite natural wines.

So what is exactly “natural wine” anyway (or Marco’s preference, “low intervention” wine)? Part of the problem is there is no set definition for “natural wine.”

On Wine Folly Madeline Puckette describes natural wine as: “the unfiltered, untamed, un-photoshopped version of what we know to be wine.”

But this definition doesn’t represent all natural wines — some natural wines for sure, but it doesn’t give the whole picture.

The description in the Oxford Companion to Wine is better, where natural wine is described as having manually picked grapes from sustainable, organic or biodynamic vineyards, coming from small, independent producers, with no added yeast (only naturally occurring yeasts are used for fermenting), or yeast nutrients and with little to no sulfites.

The topic of no added yeast and minimal additives is a very important point here. I think sulfites are also a misunderstood component of wine and a topic I will drag out of Marco soon too. But perhaps more could be added about the concept of minimal human intervention.

“It would be so much easier if you could put ingredients on wine bottles,” Marco says of helping people understand the difference between natural and conventional wines. “You aren't required to, but there would be up to nearly sixty additives in [conventional] wine if you were.” In the EU, fifty-nine additives are approved, while in the US, the FDA approves over seventy additives for wine. And certainly then I think people, who are already used to looking at ingredients on packaging for food, would grasp quickly a big part of what means to be considered “natural wine”.

Something we often hear people say is that they don’t like natural wines, that they are too “funky” for their tastes, a sweeping generalisation. But “natural” doesn’t equal “funky”; it isn’t the defining characteristic of natural wine. That ‘funk’ can actually be a flaw, but it can also be used purposefully, either as a style or to add complexity.

An example is Brettanomyces, or “brett” which is a wild yeast that can be found anywhere, from the grapes themselves to the wine making equipment, and can deliver a smell reminiscent of a barnyard, wet dog, or, my favourite description, “sweaty wild boar” — but also leather, tobacco, spices, even the earthiness of truffle. A little bit can be great, too much can be overwhelming. It’s a yeast you’ll probably find in Sangiovese, Barbera, or wines from the Southern Rhône; the wines from Chateau de Beaucastel are well appreciated for it.

We happen to like a little bit of funky. But we also love elegant wines. And we even love elegant and funky wines (they aren’t mutually exclusive).

“We have become used to wines since the 70s and 80s that have been manufactured and marketed in a certain way. Anything that is ‘funky’ is just different from what you know and are used to. We have been trained to like standard, ‘clean’ wines that taste of what you expect them to taste like,” says Marco.

Funky is also not Marco’s favourite word. He goes on to point out that it is not really a good descriptor as it really doesn’t tell you anything, it just means it is different from what you are used to and quite often that ‘funk’ is something that will lead to some extra complexities if you give the wine time to express itself.

Marco likes this alternative definition of natural wine: Nothing is added and nothing is taken away.

Above, Marco on one of our food and wine workshops, photo by Mary Riazanova.

To go back to the beginning of this conversation, “There is a mistake in thinking that wine itself is a natural product. It isn’t, it is actually a temporary state. The idea of natural winemaking is to let the grapes express themselves while being expertly guided by the winemaker. It can be defined “natural wine” when the winemaker intervenes as little as possible [here, the term “low intervention” is self-explanatory] at the right moments, but you need a huge large amount of knowledge and skill —more than what you would need to make conventional wine— for this to work out well,” Marco adds.

“Natural wine is not so much a “recipe,” as many conventional wines are. Think of it this way, even an amateur cook can follow a recipe and it can turn out okay but to take an ingredient and make it shine and express itself fully, while doing as little as possible to it, you really need to know what you are doing and you need to do it well. And this is where potential quality comes from, along with the fruit itself — and starting with grapes that are organic or biodynamic and hand-picked is just the beginning.”

Side note: This is just the tip of the iceberg, this little snippet of conversation was a bit I managed to get while we were driving home from a beautiful lunch in the hills above Florence. This interview was edited for clarity because Marco talks at the speed of lightning when it comes to topics like this and because he has so much to say. I’m trying to convince him to do a course on “Natural”/low intervention wines — though we need to call it something else, of course! Would you like to learn more?