dogma |?dôgm?|
a principle or set of principles laid down by an authority as incontrovertibly true

Lately, natural wine lovers have been accused of being overly dogmatic. If you say your wine is natural, you're implying that other wines are less natural, and therefore inferior. Traditional wine fans bristle at this comparison, and assert that their wines are the best in the world, and they have a lot of books and articles on their side to back that up. But isn't that just dogma of another color? In my opinion, if we natural wine fans are being dogmatic, it's only in response to an overbearing dogma that's been the order of things for quite some time. The old school dogma is one that needs a bit of toppling, and the insane prices of the "top" wines of this world are proof enough of that for me.

My training in wine began at the Wine Spirit Educational Trust (WSET), a British-based organization that is almost universally accepted as the most professional and widely available wine training out there today. I'm going to be a bit critical of the WSET here, but let me first say I think it is a fantastic place to start from. You can't beat the palate training you get there, and it gives you a very solid command of the basics of how wine works all over the world. The problem I have with it is that it's not a truly objective view of what wines are good.

You see, there's an established order of the top wines of the world. This includes the top growths of Bordeaux, the best parcels of Burgundy, Barolos of Piedmont and such other similar fine-wine producing areas of the world. And the WSET teaches this established order. The WSET education is full of ideas like, "Chardonnay reaches its fullest expression in Burgundy, France" (not a direct quote, I'm paraphrasing from memory here.) Now doesn't that sound like dogma to you? Anyone out there prefer the chardonnays being made in the Jura right now? Not to mention everyone out there who loves a tropical oaky chard from California much better than a steely minerally one from chablis. They also make it sound like you can't make good wine without sulfur, and that indigenous yeasts are unpredictable and dangerous. You could argue that they're just teaching about the bulk of wines, and don't have time to cover a very small minority of wines being made in different ways. But in my opinion, that skips out on some of the most interesting and complex wines being made today. The further I've gotten into learning about natural wines and meeting with the winemakers, the more I've had to discount most of what I learned about winemaking at the WSET. Seems like a pretty big omission to me.

As someone who worked in retail, the point where this old school dogma really falls apart for me comes when we start to talk about price. Of course there are some very fine chardonnays being turned out in Burgundy. But they cost 2-3 times as much as the natural stuff from other areas. Even if the prices of Burgundies somehow magically came down to equal the other wines, I would still prefer some of the crazy, funked out, natural wines I've tried. Now, of course, as with everything, some of this does come down to personal preference. I don't think Kermit Lynch, for example, would always agree with me. I like crazy funky wines. I like them a lot. I think he probably prefers wines that are a little more "normal" than I do. Others prefer their burgundies oaked to the max. And that's ok, there's room for all our palates at the table. But if it's a question of personal preference, why all the dogma?

So imagine you're someone like me who prefers the crazy wines. In fact, you think they're your favorite wines in the whole world to drink. You like them so much you decide to start making some of your own. Maybe even your father made wines like this, and your grandfather before him, and you see yourself just continuing their work the way it's always been done. Then you have all these people saying that the way you make wines isn't the best way, that theirs is instead. Don't you think it would be natural for you to get some friends together and start talking about how your way is better instead?

So what we have here are two competing dogmas. According to the definition of the word, both of them can't be right. In fact, I don't think either of them are right, for everyone. It just depends on what you like. But I think you can understand why it happens on either side. People like to categorize and rank things. They like to make top 10 lists, and they to disagree with other people's lists perhaps even more. It's just the way we work.

Truthfully, in my experience over here in France, if you ask most winemakers if they make natural wine-- even if you're talking to them at a natural wine tasting-- they usually won't say yes. They might even belong to the AVN (Association des Vins Naturels). They're not particularly dogmatic people. They tend to be people that like to do their own thing and don't follow along with existing trends just because lots of other people out there are. They resist pigeonholing and stratification. It's really mostly the writers, bloggers, critics, and fans that come up with all this anti-dogma dogma.

Natural wine as a term certainly is full of flaws. You can't pin down exactly what it is, and it's ripe for big commercial business to come in and pluck for their own nefarious marketing plans. But you could say the same thing about any other wine marketing term out there. How about Grand Cru? Does that mean it's the best wine? Even the WSET wouldn't argue that. So does natural mean good? Absolutely not. How do I know when a wine is natural? I can tell when I taste it. Or I buy it from someone who I trust to know what natural wine taste like. Simple. No need for dogma. Just drink it and see if you like it.

French wine labeling laws are one of the things people who work in wine spend a significant amount of time studying in wine class. Everything is legislated for what were originally very good reasons. Even more complicated than the laws behind the labels though, is the complex systems of appellations that the label expresses. It's one of the biggest complaints non-wine professionals have about French wine. If you don't know the appellation, you just don't know much about the wine. For example, most people know if they see Bourgogne somewhere on a label, that means it comes from Burgundy. But what if it says Chorey-les-Beaune (also Burgundy), or Condrieu (the Rhone Valley), or how about Saint-Emilion (Bordeaux). None of these, or the thousands of other appellations you could see on a bottle, even gets close to telling you what the grape is inside that bottle. Sigh.

Of course, there's a good reason for all that complicated silliness. It's because French wine (and  a lot of French things, like cheese) are based on a sense of place. People in France got to know products way back when based on where they were from. They know that the little village of Saint Marcellin makes a really nice creamy soft cows-milk cheese and that Gevrey Chambertin (another Burgundy) makes super prestigious wines. When people started making wines in the US, they didn't have any of that sense of place branding to build on, so they decided to go with grape names instead. That's why lots of people have an idea of what Chardonnay and Pinot Noir taste like. But in France you hardly ever see the grape on the label.

The French wine laws came about originally because some really shady people, desperate during the dearth of wine in the phylloxera epidemic, started making fake wine out of sugar and fruit juice and other weird things, passing them off with labels that said wine. The AOC system definitely worked to protect consumers against that nastiness. They set up all kinds of requirements like maximum yield restrictions, grape varieties allowed, and chaptalization standards for every appellation. They also set up tasting panels to test the wines, to make sure they are typical of what the appellation is supposed to be like.

Now that all sounds well and good, but it can become a problem when it gets to that tasting panel. Especially when the panel is made up of a bunch of people who taste an unusual natural wine, say it's not typical, and reject it from the appellation. Now this particular natural wine may indeed not be typical, but that doesn't change the fact that there are lots of consumers, sommeliers, and wine shop owners who think the wine is great, and think it should sell for $15 or even higher. But once the wine has been rejected, the winemaker is probably going to have to lower it down to the Vin de Table (VdT), or table wine level, like the one you see pictured up top of this post.

Vin de Table is supposed to be really cheap crap basically. They usually cost around a dollar or two per bottle, the grapes can come from anywhere in France, and they can be a blend of as many grapes as wanted. There are no rules against chaptalization, no yield maximums, and even different vintages can be blended, if you've got some really old juice lying around that you don't know what to do with. It's not permitted to even put a vintage on the bottle. Thus we end up with a label that looks like this:

This wine is made in the Macon area of Burgundy by Gilles and Catherine Vergé, and it goes for somewere over $25 a bottle. It's fantastically made, super duper funky, and most definitely not recommended for any new-comers to natural wine. You'll see it on the shelves on the best natural wine shops all over Paris. Notice how it says Lot 02 04 on the top? That means it was harvested in 2002 and bottled in 2004. How do I know that? Because the winemaker told me that's their "code" for showing the vintage. Lots of natural winemakers have come up with tricks like this to indicate a vintage and squeeze it by the laws that govern these things. If you look at the bottom it does say the postal code where it was made, but how many French zip codes have you memorized? So not only does this wine not say a grape variety, or a place it's from, it can't even really say when it was made. Needless to say, these wines are even harder for the average consumer to understand than the old-school ones.

This wine probably adhered to all those standards I mentioned required by the appellation. It's not made with any funky non-allowed grapes, and it certainly had a minuscule yield compared to most Macon wines. So why go VdT? Well, to get to the point where the tasting panel will test your wine, you of course have to pay a fee. Then you also have to make all the labels. Sometimes the tasting panel is made up of a bunch of old fuddy-duddies that don't enjoy a cloudy and funky natural wine, and the wine will get rejected. Then the winemaker will have to make all new VdT labels, and is out the fee plus the cost of all the labels. So a lot of these winemakers just elect to remain free of the system, and do what they want without worrying about the government. They could probably make more money and charge more per bottle if they had an AOC designation on the bottle, but a lot of them don't want the hassle and prefer to do their own thing instead.

Here's one the worst examples of a hard-to-understand wine label I've seen yet. In case you're wondering, it's a light and cheerful pineau d'aunis made by Pascal Simonutti from the Loire valley. I'm still not really sure what some of that scrawl towards the bottom says. It's almost like some of them don't even want you to know what their wine is. It's kind of similar to the speakeasy trend in bars going on in New York, places with no sign out front that you just have to be cool enough to know how to find. And it actually does seem to work that way.

So how do you read natural wine labels? You don't, unfortunately! You really just have to know the producer, or know who you are buying from and trust their advice. This puts the focus back on who is making this wine, which is really what natural wines are all about anyway. And a certain amount of mystery can be a good thing, as long as you have an open enough mind and palette to handle some experimentation.

Natural winemakers would rather take the risk of letting some of these bacterias in. That's because they prefer to use the wild yeasts, saying they add another essential element of terroir that makes each of their wines unique and different. I've also been told by a natural wine maker, who I consider quite extreme in his natural-ness, that I would be able to tell the difference in flavor if I tasted the same wine, one sulfured and bottling, and one not. I can't really say whether or not that's true, because I've never been able to carry out that experiment. But I can say the winemakers here in France that use zero sulfur make some of my most favorite natural wines.

So if most of the wine world thinks you have to have sulfur in there to keep the wine safe, how do the natural guys do it? The first and probably most popular technique in use today is Carbonic Maceration. Whether it was Jules Chauvet, or Jacques Néauport who made this method popular for natural winemaking, it doesn't really matter. In carbonic maceration, the winemaker tosses the whole bunches of grapes in the tank, rather than destemming and pressing them for their juice. The tank is sealed on top, and the grapes just sit there. The weight of the grapes starts to crush some of the grapes on the bottom, and fermentation starts naturally. The tank is sealed, so as carbon dioxide is produced, pressure is exerted on the remaining grapes, which pops any skins still not crushed. The resulting wine is usually quite fruity, light in tannins, and easy-drinking.

So, how does carbonic maceration help the winemaker avoid using sulfur? The answer is that the carbon dioxide gas released acts as an alternative protection against the evil forces of oxygen, by forming a protective blanket over the juice. The winemaker leaves the tank sealed until it's time to bottle, and then will usually let the gas escape right before putting it in the bottle. Sometimes they will even leave a little of the gas in the wine, to act as an additional preservative while the wine travels to its final destination. That's why sometimes you'll feel a little prickle for the first few sips of a natural wine.

Sounds simple, right? The thing is, as always with wine, it's not quite that simple. There are those winemakers who do strict carbonic maceration, but then there are also those who something called semi-carbonic maceration. These winemakers do the traditional fermentation I've described, but then they let the skins soak in the juice for a while longer to extract more tannin and structure, making a heavier, perhaps more serious, and age-worthy wine. They're still working under the cloud of protective gas, but then they're adding another layer of more traditional wine making on top, to make a very different style of wine.

And of course, it's not so simple as those two methods. There's really a whole continuum of people in between. Some will de-stem the bunches of grapes and then do a carbonic maceration style fermentation. And some will do a completely normal fermentation with a pressing, but then just leave the tank sealed to keep in the protective gas. So, for a wine professional who's trying to understand why a wine tastes a certain way, it can be pretty complicated. Basically, these winemakers do what they feel like and what they think will make the style they're looking for, with total disregard to all the established rules of winemaking you read about in books, and that's what makes it interesting. Basically you could say there are as many natural winemaking techniques as there are different natural winemakers. But what most of them do have in common is this use of carbon dioxide as an anti-oxidant, instead of sulfur.

If you're the kind of person who cares about eating organic fruits and vegetables, who is concerned about the proliferation of genetically modified food and beef injected with hormones, you might want to know if this conspiracy existed. Most people I talk to have no idea that such a controversy could exist in the wine world. People drink wine they like, and they don't think too much about how it was made, and there's nothing wrong with that. On the other hand there is also a very small niche of the wine world that talks about "spoofulated" mass market wines that all taste the same and don't display any real terroir. So who's right?

My answer to this question basically is, it depends. It's not a simple question, so naturally the answer won't be simple.

Let's start by laying out a few basics of winemaking. First of all, you should know that most wine in the world today is made with the use of sulfur during the winemaking process. If you took grapes right from a vineyard and let them sit in a vat, the natural yeasts living on the skins from the vineyard would start to eat the sugar inside the grapes, converting it into alcohol--fermentation. But the modern method of making wine is to put some sulfur in the vat, which kills off those natural yeasts. The winemaker then adds a synthetically produced strain of yeast to the vat and lets it do the job of fermentation.

The key question at this point is: why? If you talk to the majority of winemakers today, they'll tell you it's because synthetic yeasts are predictable and controllable. In fact, there are many many different synthetic yeasts developed for this purpose, each one subtly changing the flavor of the resulting wine. It used to be quite popular for Beaujolais nouveau winemakers to use a certain strain that gave the wine flavors of bubble gum and bananas, for example. Modern winemakers say that using natural yeasts can be dangerous. Sometimes, the yeasts will be weak and they'll die before all the sugar has been fermented, leaving a sweet wine no one wants to drink. Other times, fermentation might take months to finish, or maybe it'll never finish at all. If you use a synthetic yeast, you can be quite sure fermentation will happen in x number of days, every time.

If you talk to most natural winemakers and enthusiasts though, they'll tell you that making wine is not a science, it's really an art, and the winemaker needs to be willing to step out of the way and let nature do its thing, to make some really amazing wine with special terroir. They say the natural yeasts add another element of individuality and terroir to the wine. Sometimes their wines might turn out a little funky in a bad year if they\'re made this way, but other times they might produce something totally amazing. Either way, they say, each wine will taste a lot more different than the way it did the year before, and each vineyard will produce it's own unique flavors, satisfying palettes yearning for uniqueness.

Modern winemakers also like to fine and/or filter their wines. They pass the wine through very fine metal mesh, or they might also add a soluble material like egg whites, which collect solid bits and help to clarify the color of the wine. This makes for clear wine that looks nice in the glass. Natural winemakers often don't filter their wines at all, and you'll find the wine quite cloudy, with a fair amount of gunk sitting in the bottom of the bottle. They say the filtering removes another level of unique flavor from the wine.

Then you have lots of other modern techniques, which modern winemakers hail as the benefits of scientific advancement, and natural wine fans declare chemical and artificial. There's micro-oxygenation, in which little bubbles of air are slowly introduced to a young wine, to speed up the aging process and soften harsh tannins. And there's reverse-osmosis, where wine is put into a huge centrifuge, where alcohol or tannins can be removed if there's too much.

And on the natural side, you have biodynamic winemakers burying cow horns filled with manure, talking about the importance spiritual frequencies, and deciding when to harvest based on the cycles of the moon.

Modern winemakers say there's nothing wrong with any of these new advances. They point to the stainless steel tank, which many natural winemakers use, as a scientific advancement that everyone is ok with, and say fear of the other techniques is just fear of change and advancement. And the biodynamicists  say that while some their stuff sounds a little crazy, it actually has some scientific basis. That cow horn is mostly calcium, which is a natural pH balancer and fertilizer, so it helps the soil when they grind it up and spread it all over the vineyard.

So who's right here? Well, in my opinion, they're both right, in their own world. I've tasted a fair amount of natural wines, and they can be very different and unique. Sometimes they're not my taste, and sometimes I absolutely love them. But they're usually interesting. I've also tasted a fair amount of wines that weren't made naturally that displayed a remarkable amount of terroir. And there are plenty of wines that claim to be made naturally, with organic grapes, but for a variety of reasons, they're just impostors and they're not that interesting.

I tend to prefer natural wines, but having worked in retail I can tell you for sure that some people just don't like a lot of them. I don't really believe there's any intentional conspiracy to cover up the natural wines' existence, but I also don't think anyone is being very open about all the processes they use to change their wine, because they're afraid of what people might think if they found out. And there's definitely a niche of foodie people out there that wouldn't like what they heard, if they knew all this stuff was being done to their wine. Is it as bad the semi-secret Confined Animal Feeding Operations (CAFO's) that may be responsible for creating e-coli? No, definitely not. But does it remove some terroir and uniqueness from the wines? Yes, I believe it probably does.

I think the answer here, is that you just have to go taste some and see what you think. If you're like me, and you're the kind of person who gets sick of something pretty quickly, even if it's really good, you might really love natural wines. Other people love to find a good bottle, buy it again and again, and never get tired of it. They might not like the craziness of some natural wines. There's just no accounting for the difference in taste, and I think there's room for all kinds of palettes in this world.

But until you try them, you won't know where your palette lies. And to be fair, you should probably try a bunch to give it a fair shot until you're sure you don't like them. Because one huge benefit about natural wines is they tend to be really cheap! There are a few cult natural winemakers out there that command high prices, but even those are nothing compared to the Premier Crus of Bordeaux. The mainstream, critic driven wine world really hasn't grabbed onto this natural wine thing yet, and they're the ones that often bring the outrageous prices. That explains why you may have never ever heard they existed yet. So if you like them, you can have wines with a lot of complexity that won't break your budget. It's one of the few bargains for really high quality out there in the wine world right now.

So now, you're probably wondering how to find these wines right? Well, I don't have time to discuss it now, but stay tuned and I'll be writing more on that soon!