Natural Selections: Naked Wine

What’s in a name? That’s something natural and organic winemakers in California and the Pacific Northwest are pondering as they strip their wines of excess chemicals and let the grapes do what comes naturally.

by Julie Besonen

A food product labeled “natural” is more ambiguous than helpful in most instances, with no third-party certification to give the term solid ground. Yet natural does have meaning for winemakers, boutique retailers and oenophiles thirsty for authenticity in California and the Pacific Northwest.

But what, exactly?

Mark Ellenbogen, who oversees the organic and biodynamic wine list at the farm-to-table restaurant Bar Agricole in San Francisco, puts it bluntly: “I take the word natural seriously. It means don’t put a bunch of crap in it.”

Natural wines are made with minimal intervention. “Nothing added, nothing taken away,” says Alice Feiring, the author of the recently released Naked Wine (Da Capo Press). They are often subtler in flavor (not fruit bombs) and lower in alcohol. “When you’re talking to one of these farmers—the French call them vigneron—it’s clear it’s his artwork, it’s his soul,” Feiring explains. “They love to drink and hang out. They work with the soil and have dirt under their nails.”

Feiring would welcome people echoing the title of her book—naked meaning an exposed, vulnerable yet true style of winemaking—in describing these stripped-down wines.

Defining Natural

Natural wines are not sought out by those who genuflect to Robert Parker or Wine Spectator–style rating systems. To fans, it’s a choice of the individual palate over influential critics and an acceptance of winemaking without orthodox rules.

Winemakers that embrace natural choose not to doctor their wines in any way; grapes do what they do naturally. The patron saint of the movement is Jules Chauvet of Beaujolais, France, a scientist and winemaker who was known for his study of fermentation. The title for Feiring’s book was inspired by something Chauvet told an interviewer back in 1981: “Wine must be naked.”

But while committed winemakers share an understanding of the term, government regulations and labeling don’t necessarily align with the same definition. Natural wines can be totally organic or certified biodynamic (in which the farm is a self-contained, self-sustaining ecosystem), but don’t have to be, and certain additives are sanctioned while others are not.

There are 62 U.S.-approved additives and processes for winemaking, as noted in the appendix of Naked Wine, including acetaldehyde, defoaming agents, ethyl maltol, oak chips, silica gel, sulfur dioxide and thiamine hydrochloride. Feiring writes, “[the] strongest argument against using the word natural comes from the U.S. government’s strange use of the term. … Some of the treatments allowed are the additions of water, sugar, concentrated fruit juice from the same kind of fruit, malolactic bacteria, yeast, sterilizing agents, precipitating agents, and other approved fermentation adjuncts.” Suddenly “natural” doesn’t seem so.

Because of misleading standards and consumer confusion or distrust over what constitutes natural, some winemakers are finding other ways to differentiate their wines. Tony Coturri, of Coturri Winery in Sonoma County, has been part of his family’s organic winemaking operation since 1964, but organic isn’t on the label. “The public isn’t convinced organic wine grapes are high quality,” he explains. “There’s a lot of confusion about wine made with organic grapes, because the grapes do have to be certified organic, but then the wine can be conventionally made and, by FDA rules, still be called organic.”

Coturri has never used grapes treated with pesticides, fungicides or herbicides, nor does he add sulfites, yeast cultures, water, acid or concentrates to boost sweetness. So how does he signal to the public that his wine is different from the rest? “I put my home phone number on the label,” he says. “If people have any questions, I can fill in the blanks.” In a good year he makes only 5,000 cases, so he doesn’t have to field too many calls. (By contrast, Robert Mondavi Wines produces 10 million cases a year.)

Who’s Buying?

Progressive vintners like Coturri are finding more ways into the marketplace through distributors, retailers and sommeliers who gravitate toward natural wine for reasons of flavor and philosophy. They act as middlemen for the consumer and are finding that the message is most successfully reaching an under-40 audience.

Amy Atwood, a California-based distributor and importer specializing in natural wine, includes Coturri in her portfolio along with in-state winemakers Donkey & Goat and La Clarine Farm. Of the natural-wine movement, Atwood notes, “It’s definitely youth-driven. The people buying it are anti–big-corporate brands and aware of what they’re putting in their mouths. They eat organically and are finally asking the same questions of how wines are made.”

Rather than winemakers pushing their green philosophy on consumers, Atwood says it’s the consumers who are pushing the growth of natural wines. “They’re learning about them online, caring more about wine that tells a story and not wanting something that’s found in every supermarket,” she says.

Atwood acknowledges that natural wines currently represent a “tiny percentage” of domestic wine sales, but she’s finding an increasing number of similarly minded retailers from Los Angeles to San Francisco. The inventory, however, is dominated by natural wines made in France, Italy and Austria, countries where the movement has been strong for decades.

Since natural wine is a loosely defined term with no sanctioning body, hard numbers reflecting growth and sales are not available. The escalation of interest is evident, however, in the number of distributors focusing on natural wine, including Atwood’s company, Louis/Dressner Selections, Jenny & Francois, Savio Soares Selections and Farm Wine Imports. Los Angeles is home to new progressive wine shops emphasizing this category, such as Buzz, located downtown and open until 2 a.m., and Domaine LA on Melrose Avenue. In Hollywood is a happening natural-wine bar, Lou on Vine. In San Francisco, bars and restaurants—including Terroir Natural Wine Bar, Gather, Bar Agricole and Arlequin Wine Merchant—are doing their part to advance the movement as well.

Risks with Few Regrets

Naysayers of the natural label abound, suggesting a marketing ploy for added sales. But not every winemaker has seen success in transitioning to natural. Wells Guthrie, the winemaker at Copain Wines in Healdsburg, Calif., says in years past, his ripe pinot noir was a highly rated critic’s darling, with cases selling out fast. Recently he made a more Euro-style natural pinot noir with lower alcohol content. “[Robert] Parker hated it,” says Guthrie. “Direct sales went down.”

Still, Guthrie has no regrets. “It wasn’t meant to follow a trend,” he says. “I just wanted to change for my own reasons, make lighter-bodied wines I wanted to drink. There’s better acidity, they’re more vibrant, [they] belong on your table with some food. It’s probably the best thing I ever did.”

The Organic Paradox

In specialty foods, becoming certified organic can mean a boon for business—and expectation of quality. Yet the same certification bestowed to wines doesn’t always translate positively, says Domaine LA owner Jill Bernheimer. “Some customers are receptive to organic farming practices or hearing about added yeast in wines, but others are suspicious or nervous of organics in a way they would not be if they were shopping for lettuce,” she says. “I haven’t quite figured out why that is. I see their faces change when I say it’s organic. There is this disconnect.”

While some consumers may need more convincing, Rudy Marchesi, owner of Montinore Estate in Oregon’s Willamette Valley, has seen firsthand the difference in natural versus conventional winemaking. He bought Montinore in 2005 and wasn’t pleased with the quality of the wine being made nor the health of the vineyards. Step by step, he eliminated herbicides and pesticides in the fields, started a composting program, worked with cover crops, and then took some trials with biodynamics before becoming fully biodynamic certified by Demeter USA in 2008.

“We saw a dramatic response in the soil within the second year,” Marchesi says. “The previous owners were using cultured yeast, and we’re using native yeast from our area and allowing the grapes to go through natural fermentation. The wines just keep getting more interesting in flavor.”

Marchesi saw some eye-rolling among his fellow vintners when he made the transition to biodynamic. “‘If you want to waste your time doing that, go ahead,’” he remembers them chiding. The heckling stopped when they tasted the resulting wines. “They recognized that something profound was happening in the glass and maybe it wasn’t such an oddball thing to be doing,” Marchesi says.

Montinore now produces 40,000 cases of wine per year and sales have recently increased almost four-fold on the East Coast. Marchesi believes New Yorkers are especially receptive to his wines because they are more familiar with an unadulterated, European-style. “Our wines reflect where they’re grown and how they’re grown in a big way,” he says.

How the grapes are grown has had an impact on Montinore Estate in another way. “My workers are no longer afraid of what we spray,” Marchesi notes. “Their role has changed from being just a worker to custodians of the land. They have a sense of pride when we pull in the harvest.” |SFM|

Julie Besonen is food editor for Paper magazine and restaurant columnist for nycgo.com.

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