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.

Unfortunately, when it comes down to it, natural wine is just another marketing term. The people who make and enjoy these wines would like more people to know about them, so they feel the need to differentiate it somehow from the rest of wine. And along with that comes a certain amount of propaganda too. Natural winemakers become champions of nature and traditional ways, and big businesses using pesticides and synthetic yeasts become anti-terroir oppressors. Just like every other marketing term applied to wine, you can punch it full of holes pretty quickly.

For example, the French Appellation Origine Controllé (AOC) system was set up to tell consumers which wines were better. A Grand Cru is better than Premier, which is better than Vin de Table, and so on. But does it work out that way? No way! There are plenty of Grand Crus resting on their AOC designation making average wine, and there are plenty of crazy talented winemakers doing their own thing in the Vin de Table AOC making amazing juice. And there's no difference with natural wine. It would be great if you could come up with a definition, slap it on the label, and then you'd know you were getting a beautifully cloudy, original wine with real terroir. But alas, that's not the case. People can't even agree on what the term means in the first place.

The term is frought with ambiguity and misunderstanding, but that's just like everything else in wine, so might as well make an attempt. Alice Feiring, one of the most outspoken natural wine proponents, has proposed one here. The idea for her is that the winemaker should make as little intervention as possible into what nature does.  And, I must say, in every wine class I took, and every accepted wine book I've read, this conforms to how they say a wine of terroir should be made. It's not the winemaker's job to impose flavors or techniques to make it taste a certain way. The winemaker is supposed to step out of the way to let nature express itself through the wine.

Having said that, when you really look at it, the winemaker has to impose some control. If he (or she) was really non-interventionist, he would just let the grapes grow like crazy, come back in the fall, pick them and let them sit in a barrel until they were ready. The fact is vines don't make good wine left to their own devices. The best wine comes when vines are stressed just enough. They have to think they're dying, so they pour all the energy into their fruit, and thrust their roots deep into the ground, pulling out the complex nutrients and minerals that make just a few potent grapes, which make complex wines. The moment the winemaker decides to prune to reduce the amount of fruit produced, he's intervened.

The person who is usually credited with starting the natural wine movement is Jules Chauvet, a biochemist and négociant who worked in Beaujolais. The chauvet method, as it's been called, is to vinify using carbonic maceration, with dry ice on top of the grapes during fermentation. Dry ice, which is really just carbon dioxide in solid form, is a natural by product of fermentation, so it would be there anyway eventually. The layer of dry ice acts as protection from bacteria, and allows the winemaker to avoid the use of sulfur. There's nothing harmful about it, but does this sound natural and non-interventionist to you? Nevertheless, many natural wines (some of my favorites) are made this way .

Unfortunately, like with everything else in wine, the term natural wine pretty much becomes useless when we try to examine it closely. So if you want to find good wines that express terroir, how do you do it? My answer is, find a good retailer! Or read a lot. Or turn the bottle around and buy by importer. In spite of all the confusion, when you find a person that dedicates themselves to tasting lots of wines and presenting what they think is the best to you, you'll end up tasting some amazingly made wines, each more individual than the next.

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!