The Revolution Will Not Be Sipped

Why Natural Wine is slipping into novelty status

Can an entirely new kind of product set down roots, grow, and sustain itself based primarily on an ideological pretension? This was always the question that Natural Wine would one day have to answer. Today we are getting hints that the truth is, “no”, it can’t.

This was partially the subject of a recent and very good installment of The VinePair Podcast with Zach Gabelle and Adam Teeter in which they ask, “Why is Natural Wine In Decline?” The weekly podcast is among the best in wine and usually touches on cultural, business, and political issues roiling the wine industry. In this latest installment, Zach and Adam conclude that “the wind is coming out of the Natural Wine sails”.

I’ve questioned whether Natural Wine ever got its sails up the mast. We have never had much in the way of sales figures for Natural Wine. Since this category of wine is not recognized by any official body in the U.S., there have never been any sales tracked the way Cabernet Sauvignon, California, Imports or $15-$25 wines can be tracked. But if you looked at the press Natural Wine has garnered, you couldn’t be faulted for assuming the stuff is everywhere.

There was a time, as Adam and Zach point out, when Natural Wine was a legitimately new thing in the wine world. I can’t emphasize enough how unusual it is to have a new thing in the wine world. The selection of grape varieties used to make wine has been stable for centuries. The character, flavor, and texture of wine have been relatively stable for centuries and when it has evolved it has evolved slowly. The vessels into which wine has been placed have been consistent for centuries. And the demographics of fine wine drinkers have stayed the same for centuries. And the basic way wine is made has stayed relatively unchanged for centuries.

As a result of all this sameness, what’s written about wine has long tended to be variations on a few themes: the people, the wine, the place, the drinkers. But then came “Natural Wine”.

It was different. But not because a lot of it was celebrated despite commonly being flawed and dirty. Though celebrated as a virtue by some, the occasional microbial spoilage that infects some Natural Wines isn’t what sets it apart and made it something new. What set Natural Wine apart as a wine product was the ideological underpinnings of the category.

Zach and Adam over at VinePair describe the Natural Wine movement as “revolutionary” and they aren’t referring to a revolution in how grapes are grown or how wine is made. They are correct in alluding to Natural Wine’s ideological component. I noticed this too back in 2012 when I wrote about Natural Wine’s “Ugly Underbelly”.

At that time, I described the ideological component of the Natural Wine movement as a response to “a much smaller world where regionalism has been replaced by globalism. It is the slow food movement, the anti-globalization movement, and the embrace of Rachel Carson” all layer over the wine industry.

Having watched the movement now for more than a decade, what I see in the way Natural Wine has been pursued, championed, and promoted is a way to express progressivism, anti-globalism, and anti-capitalist sentiment through wine. How does a winemaker committed to these values enact them through wine? The Natural Wine ideologues did so by contrasting their efforts against “conventional” or “industrial” wine. Not surprisingly, when this perceived dichotomy was expressed, there was no middle ground in the battle between conventional wine and Natural Wine. It was this attitude that allowed Isabel Legeron to declare something this polemic and this shortsighted:

“Natural wines have purer flavours, more personality and are easier to digest. They are also better for you….The heavy-handed use of synthetic fertilizers, weed-killers, fungicides, pesticides and inappropriately applied heavy metals like copper have destroyed soil life in most vineyards….Wine today is far removed from its original definition of fermented grape juice. It is the by-product of chemically induced and tightly controlled fermentation through the aid of additives and structure altering equipment. Why? Because the vast majority of wine has become about the bottom line. I tis about producing more and more for less and less cash. It’s about producing it as quickly as possible then flogging a brand—an illusion of people at one with the earth, translating a grape and a piece of earth into a bottle.”

Particularly when the Natural Wine movement was ramping up, this kind of silly rhetoric was very easy to find. I came to call it “Denigration Marketing”—denigrating your competitor in order to market your product. That too was new to the wine industry.

What became perfectly clear over time was that choosing to make wine in a “natural” way and choosing to drink Natural Wine was as much an ideological choice as it was an aesthetic preference. It became, and still is in many circles, a form of virtue signaling.

Students of history will remind you that the vast majority of revolutionary movements fail. As they explore in the VinePair podcast how Natural Wine appears to be fading, Zach and Adam put as much blame on the quality of the Natural Wines as they do on the ideological fervor of the movement retreating. In their view, once enough folks got a taste of the wines, they discovered that too many were just “Natty Garbage Poop Wine”.

The podcast pair are right, to a degree. The fact is that the average Natural Wine doesn’t live up to the high standards that have guided fine wine producers over the past 25 years and that wine drinkers have happily encountered and embraced. If Zach and Adam’s observations about many restaurants and retailers in and around New York City backing away from Natural Wine and moving back toward “conventional wine” is correct, then the move away from Natural Wine is showing up in the marketplace.

The ideology that undergirded the Natural Wine movement has not faded, but in fact has only become more robust and widespread across society, culture, and government. However, the revolution does not appear to have taken hold in wine. This was bound to be the case when the revolution was also a commercial movement that depended on marketing and capitalism to succeed. This does not mean that Natural Wine as a category will go away. It was never that big a phenomenon to begin with. But every industry, including wine, will put up with and indulge in novelty. It appears to me (and to Zach and Adam too?) that this will be the fate of Natural Wine.