Starting to see more natural wines locally including some AoC (in the past week I’ve had natural Beaujolais and Cahors) but I’m not finding the spectacularly different natural wines ones I’ve had in Spain with amazingly different strong tastes despite being very low in alcohol - 9-10%. Around us the natural whites are more interesting , whereas the red tend to be too fruit juicy.
Would be interested in others’ local experiences of natural wines…
We have lots! They are a bit of a thing round here,
And this is our favorite so far. Expensive so have many yet to try.
Isn’t all wine natural? “Natural wine” isn’t a term I’d come across before: is it just another way of saying “bio”, as @JaneJones’s link suggests, or something more?
Think of it as the equivalent to sourdough using organic flour rather than industrial aerated white bread. So not just what happens outside in the vineyard with no pesticides etc, but also a winemaking process that uses no or minimal industrial chemical like sulphites. They can be very slightly sparkly - more of a frisson than an actual bubble tho’.
I used to make wine like that at home. As noted elsewhere, shelf life can be quite short, and not because it gets drunk quickly.
Interesting - thanks. I can drink pretty much anything but Mrs P prefers to avoid sulphites (and I’d noticed that being bio doesn’t necessarily mean no sulphites).
I’ve seen wines without sulphites, some not even bio.
Had a couple of these recently from Spain, very pleasant, and quite reminiscent of the Italian frizzante wines.
I once challenged a bio winemaker in Germany, that if his wine had sulphites in it it wasn’t really bio. He said that his sulphites were “naturally occurring”, whatever that means. I didn’t enquire further unfortunately.
A bi-product of the fermentation of wine.
Then how can they make wine without sulphites?
I somehow doubt that the forced addition of sulphur dioxide gas would count as “naturally occurring” in most people’s understanding of the word, unless you happen to be a French (or possibly European, e.g. your German organic) vintner.
They do not add additional sulphites, so the levels left are miniscule.
They don’t in natural wine.