If You Avoid Processed Food, Love Storytelling And Are Insatiably Curious, Why Haven’t You Tried Natural Wine?
I love natural wine. I love the stories of the winemakers and their winemaking philosophy. I love it that natural wine is made the same way wine was first made in Georgia thousands of years ago. And most of all, I love discovering new grape varietals, new regions, new terroirs, new producers.
What is natural wine?
Some of you may have heard of organic wine. Or biodynamic wine. Now natural wine? What’s the difference? Organic and biodynamic winemaking is how the grapes are grown. No herbicides, pesticides. Only natural fertilisers, e.g. compost. Biodynamic winemaking takes it one step further by following Rudolph Steiner’s methods, using the lunar cycle to decide when to plant, prune and harvest.
Natural wine is wine made grapes grown using organic or biodynamic methods. It’s not just what happens in the vineyard. How the wine is made in the cellar matters too. Generally, that means little or no additives. Many of you may not know this, but the regular wine you drink contains chemicals and fining agents like egg white or fish bladder to give the wine a certain colour, taste profile, consistency etc. Eww.
Natural wine is simply unadulterated fermented grape juice. Doesn’t that sound way better?
Natural winemaking is storytelling.
I love learning the stories of winemakers. Their personal stories, winemaking philosophy, choice of region and terroir, how they name their wines. Every bottle of natural wine has a story behind it. Ochota Barrels, for example. Their story began on a surf trip along the Mexican west coast in a Volkswagen campervan. Taras Ochota used to play bass in punk bands, so he named his wines after songs from his youth. A Sense Of Compression Mclaren Vale Grenache. Kids Of The Black Hole Adelaide Hills Riesling. You get the idea. Sadly, Taras passed away last year, so the 2019 vintage is the last vintage made by him. And that’s part of the story too. Wine lives on after the passing of the winemaker. Taras is no longer with us, but his wines are. Every time I open a bottle of his wine, I think about what he was trying to achieve with this wine, why he made it with this grape varietal and not another, why he named it the way he did.
The learning never ends with natural wine.
Because most natural winemakers have such great stories to tell, there’s a lot to learn. From something as basic as the colour of wine (orange wine, anyone?) to the way winemakers grow their grapes (some winemakers practice dry farming because not using irrigation forces vine roots to dig deeper, producing grapes that are better expressions of the terroir). There are also new regions to explore (Kazakh wine?), new varietals to try (Monica, for example, found only in Sardinia), and new producers to keep an eye on. I recently learnt about an ex-banker turned natural winemaker who went to the same school as me. I’m super excited to try the first ever Chinese High wine. Maybe one day I will be the second winemaker to come out of that famous school in Singapore. I recently bought myself a vintage Omega Cosmic Moonphase. For the day I need to look at the lunar calendar to decide when to harvest.
This essay is dedicated to my natural wine crew — Valentin, Roberto, Michelangelo, Shu, Yida, Sandra, Joyce, Milan, Dan, Kunal, Paulina. Thanks for the good times.
Follow my natural wine journey on Instagram @therealjohntan. I post about vin and vinyl.
