How a Beverage Director is Seeing Natural Wines Find their Footing

The wine world is one that prides itself on definitions. Laws, rulings, and history have been cobbled together over time to make the wine world almost prohibitively complex. The well-trained can look at a wine label and tell you a great deal about the wine and how it was made because of these standards. With that in mind, let us talk about a mostly undefined category in wine that without a doubt draws strong opinions to it. Natural wine.

What Are Natural Wines?

Even with the wine industry's affinity for clear terms and definitions natural wines have been called skin contact, orange, and a slew of other names that are vague at best in their description. Simply defined, natural wine is a method of vinification that places the utmost importance on production using traditional methods and the least invasive actions possible. Where the definitions start to break down are in the concept of traditional and invasive. While these terms can have some flexibility, for the sake of simplicity we are talking about organically-grown grapes being made without any man-made additives to forward fermentation or stability.

Stainless steel wine filtration system — stainless steel filtration system used in modern winemaking

How Are Natural Wines Made?

Most commercially produced wine is made in large quantities, with industrial equipment, and with lab produced additives. Most large winemakers use pesticides and herbicides to keep their crop healthy and produce the most juice possible per grape. This kind of wine production leads to stable, consistent, and highly marketable wines. Natural wines, inversely, eschew the convenience and exactness that modern tools and methods produce. Without the aid of modern pesticides the idea of losing an entire harvest to pests or bacteria becomes a very real possibility. Without the tools of modern vinification however, one of the alluring qualities of natural wines becomes the notion that it is a living microbiome in a bottle. Still very much alive these wines are the natural reaction to time and circumstance and are allowed to follow their unaltered course.

Punctum sin sulfitos tempranillo — Punctum Sin Sulfitos

Marketing Natural Wines

One of the things that not only helps sell a brand but generates a bond between the brand and its consumer is the story behind it. The family that made the wine, the way that they choose to vinify the grapes, and how it got from them to your glass are part of a story that culminates with consumption. All of that is instrumental to the marketability of almost any product. Perhaps this is why the natural wines have struck such a chord. The story behind these bottles is often one of extreme care and detail. Natural wine producers are themselves a group that forms a fascinating subculture that is full of stories that resonate with wine lovers.

In the restaurant world, wine buyers and sommeliers live for this kind of wine. Great appreciators of wine who hand select every bottle within their establishment take great pains to be informed and highly selective about what they choose to offer. This breeds a natural affinity for esoteric wines and has worked wonderfully for the natural wine world as part of the rising trend of a generally healthier lifestyle. Being able to tell your guests about the sustainability and earth-friendly practices that go into the grapes is impactful with many consumers today. In addition, being able to discuss the lack of added chemicals, quirky producer, and the journey of the grapes, sets the stage for a truly unique wine experience. With this explanation under their belt servers and sommeliers alike are able to get diners to pay up for these wines.

Merkin Vineyards Shinoal Orancia, sold in restaurants

Off Premise vs On Premise Sales

While natural wines have been a growing part of the dining experience and are featured more often on today's fine wine lists, their sales have not translated to retail sales nearly as well. It's no secret that when ordering a bottle of wine at a restaurant the markup can be orders of magnitude beyond the wholesale cost of the wine. The retail world, by contrast, works on comically smaller margins. Despite this difference, people are willing to pay a much higher markup to be served wine in a restaurant. The ideal life cycle of a wine, to many winemakers, is to build the brand in restaurants and then retire it to the wine store as restaurateurs move away from a popularized brand in search of something new. I have had countless experiences with wine drinkers who come to me looking to buy a bottle of natural wine, saying they had just tried one at a restaurant and they loved it. Yet when they see the price on the shelf they almost always leave with something less expensive that they are more familiar with. I don't blame them at all, we have all splurged on a bottle of wine that seemed interesting and then been filled with buyer’s remorse after it turns out to be not as good as we had hoped. This is compounded by the overall variability of natural wines.

Having tasted and selected wines in a professional setting for almost a decade, when I began to see natural wines come into my office I came to some rather harsh conclusions. I more often than not would say that natural wines were an example of taking a two thousand year step back in vinification and charging people, somewhat exorbitantly, for the history lesson. While recently I have found some less-expensive options from the new world that still fit the style and have somewhat softened my overall skepticism of this category I still feel that the market for natural wines will be bottlenecked for some time. Something will have to budge before they can see any wide scale acceptance outside of a wine list.

The Future of Natural Wines

So what will become of natural wines in the future, on whose table will they sit? That will ultimately be determined by the average wine consumer's steady hand. We could potentially see large wine producers start to make wines that fit the parameters of natural wines and get them into retail stores at a more approachable price. Small producers may stick to their guns and stay relatively inaccessible outside of the hand sold bottle at a restaurant with a passionate wine director. Many is the time a wine salesman has told me that this or that will be the new “rage” in the wine world and those trends seldom materialize beyond the hopes and dreams of the marketers behind them. Like many other goods, wine is produced and sold by demand. In spite of a lack of demand the natural wine producers have made quite a name for themselves. It will certainly be exciting to see where these wines go in the coming years and where we as wine consumers take them.