The background to my natural wine challenge

Last summer, I wrote an enthusiastic article about rawfair – a hugely popular natural wine tasting about to run its third edition this weekend. My enthusiasm centred on the unstuffy atmosphere and the amount of vinous adventure that could be had in the space of a few hours.

Well known wine writer, marketeer and non-mincer of words Robert Joseph also wrote about his experience, in slightly less glowing terms. Robert is infamous as a natural wine sceptic, and his article centred on some blatantly faulty wines, even though his overall (if understated) conclusion on the event was positive.

Both articles invited a fair bit of discussion, but Robert took things one step further and implicitly accused me of sub-standard journalism. His reasoning was that by representing rawfair in such a positive light, when I had been deliberately selective about the wines and countries I tasted, I was somehow misleading the public.

The merest implication that the public pays any attention to wine writers (esp…