Wine: Strike a Raw Nerve

Wine expertise from Annabel Jackson

The rising number of serious restaurants and bars offering natural or raw wines lists, including Plateau in Brighton, indicates that this wine category is more than a passing fad. London-based and vegetable-biased Israeli chef Yotam Ottolenghi even has a natural, ‘orange’ white wine from Cascina Degli Ulivi in Italy’s Piedmont region, as the house pour in his feted Islington restaurant.

The Guardian’s wine critic Fiona Beckett says the natural/raw category defies distinct definition but is about “attitude”: an “alternative” for producers wishing to pursue winemaking in their own individual way.

Almost all natural wines are made from grapes grown according to biodynamic principles, but the sticking point in terms of definition seems to be the presence or absence of sulphur. For some, this is the one chemical critical to preserve wine on the bottling line, in travel, and in the bottle. For others, it is an evil.
Critics talk of massive vintage variation and bottle variation together with characteristics which have little to do with what we normally understand as ‘wine’. Proponents talk of getting back to what wine is supposed to taste like, before the post-war availability of chemicals to, for example, increase yield.

Might there be consumer uncertainty in this category, about not knowing what they’re buying into, if every bottle is different? Beckett says that expecting the unexpected is part of the “fun”, while British importer Doug Wregg points out that the absence of sulphur does not necessarily result in a rank or oxidised wine. Natural yeasts can produce a level of free sulphur, and skin contact can also protect a wine from oxidation.
The epicentre of the movement is the Loire region in northern France, but it is also big in Rouisillon and Beaujolais, as well as in the Friuli region of Italy. “Certain regions tend to build a concentration of natural growers,” says Wregg. “There may be cultural, historical or geographical reasons why vignerons work naturally.”