In 2017, I was wined and dined by a fancy Tuscan winery who boasted about using drones to spray their biodynamic preparations. The wines were pompous oak-bombs fussed over to the nth degree. The estate’s owner, a rich industrialist, had lavished money on every aspect of the project. I was scathing in my write-up.

Perhaps I should have taken them more seriously. Drones have since entered the mainstream, and not just as a tool for despots to wage war. Might they be a better solution than driving heavy, polluting tractors through the vines? Could they sit side-by-side with the ethics of artisanal organic, biodynamic and natural growers?

Slovakian pioneer Zsolt Sütó (Strekov 1075) and Spanish lofi winemaker and grower Raúl Moreno both believe they can. Others are sceptical. Raúl invited me to come to Jerez - the region where he’s based - to judge for myself.

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“You want to spend how much?” asked my girlfriend incredulously, when I shared what I was planning to drink on Good Friday. It was the perfect storm. My favourite wine bar had just advertised a bottle from the Jura’s most sought-after label. The listed price was a fraction of what we found online. A friend fanned the flames. “It’s a bargain” we told each other.

The plan was to hit the venue, deploy our charm and negotiation skills and enjoy a little Easter treat. I wasn’t sure if I believed my own words. Were we seriously about to spank €475 on a single bottle?

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It’s April 1st today, and I’ve seen a couple of great posts. Here are two faves. However, the below is no joke. Sorry about that.

Natural wine growers often come under fire for their resistance to authority or classification. They’re accused of lacking transparency, for using vague and legally undefined terms such as ‘low intervention’ or ‘natural’. And why can’t they play ball with regional bodies and damn well list their village or appellation on the label?

I’ve met hundreds of winemakers who would love nothing better than to write the wine’s origin, right down to the name of the vineyard. But the regulations are against them. If you dare to bottle a slightly hazy wine or an idiosyncratic cuvée where nature played a bigger part than interventions in the cellar, the might of the mainstream wine industry will be on your back.

Many growers I know personally have spent years, if not decades, fighting with a system that continually pushes them away. Michael Wenzel once admitted to me that the continued rejection from tasting panels starts to hurt after a while. Not only that, submitting your wine with a fancy appellation on the label is expensive and time-consuming. If it’s rejected for not being ‘typical’ enough, the grower has to decide between resubmitting (more costs but still no guarantee of acceptance) or declassifying to a level with less stringent requirements.

It’s hardly a surprise that many growers have chosen to opt out of a system that seems ranged against them. Eventually frustration kicks in. Winemakers mostly prefer to focus on what’s happening in their vineyards and cellars - not on what tricks are necessary to get their wines through a regulatory process. It’s a bitter pill to swallow when an additive-free wine produced from organically farmed grapes may not communicate its origin, whilst a heavily processed, chaptalised example carrying a charge of pesticide residues qualifies for a prestigious appellation.

You might think that wine regulation bodies would be content that they’ve wiped the natural guys off the appellation controlée map. But seemingly it doesn’t end there. Slovenia is the latest EU nation to double-down, in a move that looks set to further restrict and obstruct small-scale artisanal growers.

New wine law in Slovenia

This is a developing story. Here’s what I know so far.

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I will keep providing this digest for a few more months, but I note that out of over 4,400 subscribers, only 9 have signed up! So I’m not sure if this will be for the long term or not. I’m open to your comments.

This latest piece is free to read. It’s had a record number of comments so far. Not to mention some separate discourse here on Substack, about the use (or not) of swearwords in headlines…

The next three articles have additional content for paying subscribers, but there’s a generous amount to enjoy even if you’re not supporting my work (sniff).

I hope you enjoyed this month’s digest. Let me know what you think.

I’ll never forget the 2005 episode of Family Guy where Peter gets his own talk show, What Really Grinds My Gears. It’s launched a million memes, I just made that a million and one.

So you’re already tutting “hasn’t Simon got anything more important to worry about?” Well, short of the world ending, the death of print journalism, and the impossibility of ever tasting Domaine des Miroirs, no. I haven’t.

So what is it about skin contact?

Wine overflows with myth, mystique and confusion. We all love this, to a certain extent. But I’m a fan of inclusion too. I’d love more drinkers to discover the lesser known or under-celebrated nooks and crannies.

Orange wine is (or was?) one of those. The category has unleashed an explosion of flavours, aromas and textures that didn’t exist in a bottle, until a few decades ago. I’m grateful that someone figured out a simple, concise term to describe and distinguish these wines from regular whites. I love the Italian vino bianco macerato, but the phrase probably doesn’t fly as well in Hackney or Brooklyn as it does in Friuli.

The term orange wine was allegedly coined in 2004, and it’s long since become the most popular vernacular. So why do some establishments and wine professionals persist in using a wilfully technical and cumbersome alternative?

Is there a bit of ‘not invented here’ syndrome? Perhaps the name ‘orange wine’ just isn’t cool enough for some? I wish I knew. From a million justifications, I haven’t heard one that holds water (or wine).

Here’s why ‘skin contact’ is a fatuous way to describe orange wine

1. It doesn’t distinguish between red or white. Red wine is produced with exactly the same ‘skin contact’ technique. Which one do you mean?

2. Short skin contact (from a few hours to a day) is often deployed for white and rosé wines. Are they included in your category too?

3. It’s a technical phrase, unlike the terms white, rosé and red. We don’t call white wines “no skin contact whites”, nor do we call reds “red skin contact wines”. Why should the average wine drinker be compelled to engage with the method of production for this category only?

4. It doesn’t sit in the same paradigm as the terms white, rosé and red. Why not be consistent? If you have a personal vendetta against the colour orange, call it amber. The Georgians will love you.

5. It’s neither precise nor accurate. For the pedants, orange wine is skin fermented white wine. Skin contact often describes a pre-fermentation cold soak (aka the French macération pelliculaire). This technique does not impart the same aromas, flavours and tannins as skin fermenting.

The counter-arguments and ripostes

1. “Orange wine is a stupid name because not all orange wines are orange.”

   Show me a white wine that’s paper-white please. Or a red wine that’s actually red, and not purple, navy or pink? This was never about colour.

2. “People will think they’re made from oranges.”

   People will think what they’re going to think, you cannot outsmart stupidity. Hands up if you think rosé wine is made from roses?

3. “People get scared when they see the term orange wine, they think the wine will be disgusting or unapproachable.”

   Calling it by a more obscure and technical term is not going to change whether someone likes the wine or not. In most cases, people purchase orange wines because they already know and love the category.

4. “Orange wine and skin contact wine are not the same thing.”

   So why don’t you have two different sections then? Are red wine and red skin contact wine not the same thing either?

Bad choice road

I understand it’s not always easy for restaurants or retailers to figure out the best way of categorising - especially in the 21st century, where we have gender-bending styles such as red-white blends, orange wines made with gris varieties and reds made with almost no skin contact (cf. glou-glou).

I sympathise. But the following solutions for incorporating orange wines into a list are also sub-optimal:

1. Not separating them out at all

   This is bound to result in customer confusion if not disappointment. Someone orders what they expect to be a white wine, and when it’s served it turns out to be amber coloured and tannic. If that’s not what they were expecting…

2. ‘Not invented here’ methods of sign-posting orange wines, but still without separating them out.

   Why not just put them in their own category? It’s so much easier.

3. Bunching them together with rosé, under a heading such as “skin contact/rosé”

   So you’ve put wines made from red and white grapes, with and without skin contact/fermentation, under one heading. Well that’s not confusing at all….

Wall of shame

Skin Contact NYC - I’m sure it’s a lovely place, but. Here’s an excerpt from their by-the-glass list.

Brawn (Columbia Road, London) is one of my all-time favourite restaurants in the capital. But there’s room for improvement here:

Osteria Vibrato (Soho, London), who I wrote about last week, mix a number of fine oranges amidst their whites, leaving either the unwary customer or the waiting staff to disentangle the two. They don’t wield the dreaded SC term, but this is hardly a better solution.

Newcomer Wines, I love you for bringing so many of Austria’s top artisan winemakers to the UK. But I wish your categories were more equitable. Why should white, red and rosé be known by a simple colour, while orange is cryptically recast as “skins”?

Choux Restaurant in Amsterdam is another favourite. Despite their newly minted Michelin star, prices remain fair. But that a venue like this, which specialises in natural, does not give its countless oranges star billing just feels off. This is an excerpt from their ‘white wine’ section:

I’m absolutely not hating on these businesses. It’s just that their choice of nomenclature frustrates me.

I’ll get my coat. I’m off to go grind some gears.

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Further reading:

Thirst Behavior

Recoding Orange Wine

Thirst Behavior is a project about wine, taste, and the social performances that form around them, the rituals of enjoyment shaped by status, media, money, and desire. Wine is the entry point; the real subject is how taste gets made, circulated, and contested, especially in New York and the Hamptons, where leisure and tastemaking overlap most visibly…

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a month ago · 20 likes · 3 comments

Vintertainment: Wine and Movies

We (Do Not) Need to Talk About Orange Wine

I love orange wine. I've loved it since I sipped my very first. I thought it was wonderfully dimensional yet easy to enjoy, even though I had zero idea what precisely it was or how it was made…

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2 years ago · 20 likes · 25 comments · Dave Baxter

The UK wine trade hasn’t had it easy in recent years. Ever higher, more complex taxation and the sucker punch of Brexit pushed prices to levels that rival New York - a city where it’s hard to get a glass of anything potable for under $25.

Living in Amsterdam for over a decade, I’m used to low wine duty and EU mainland pricing. But last week I spent a few days back in my old stomping grounds. Gearing up for a night out with wine friends, I wondered what to expect. Penury? Disappointment? Abstinence?

Why so spenny

Since February 2026, UK duty applies on a sliding scale based on alcohol percentage. That means, for example, a wine with 12% ABV that retails for £10 carries a total tax burden of £4.43 (Duty of £3.30, which includes VAT, plus the VAT on the rest of the price, which is £1.33). That leaves barely half the cash to split between grower, importer and retailer.

Add the customs charges levied for bringing wine into the UK, and it’s not too hard to understand why a bottle retailing in the EU for £25 ends up costing £50 on the shelf in the UK. And then £100+ in restaurants. Both importer and restaurateur need a margin, and usually it’s percentage based - so small price increases at the beginning of the supply chain become exponentially larger at the point of sale.

I chose that £25 example deliberately. Honey Spencer, author of Natural Wine, No Drama and co-owner of restaurant Sune recently posted that she was sick of high priced wines that she can no longer personally afford to drink. Burgundy, amongst others, was named and shamed.

She listed some bottles from her list that she felt offered fair value. Gut Oggau’s Josephine at £104 was one1. Sune’s current published list includes their Atanasius 2022 for £99. Both are from the winery’s entry level tier. Atanasius retails for between £25 - £29 within the EU. I can drink it on a wine list in Amsterdam for around double that price2, so it hurts when it’s double again in London. And I have to wrap my head around drinking a basic cuvée for what will be, with service, well into three figures.

I’m not having a go at Spencer or Restaurant Sune. Their backs are against the wall, like everyone in the UK restaurant trade. But it illustrates one of the barriers to enjoying wine in London.

On the town

Back to my night out. We started by checking out a hyped new Soho opening, Charlie Mellor’s Osteria Vibrato. The name sounds a bit wanky, but it carries a story: Mellor used to sing tenor in a previous life. You get to sample some full-scale operatic warbling in the fancy bathrooms.

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Two weeks ago, I attended the fourteenth edition of Simplesmente Vinho – a now iconic artisanal wine fair that takes place every February in Porto. I’ve been along for the ride for almost all of them1, and I’ve watched the event evolve and change. When João Roseira and Mateus Nicolau de Almeida first conceived the idea in 2013, it was a far cry from today’s polished offering.

The very first Simplesmente took place in two cramped cellars on the Largo do Terreiro, a downtown side-street next to the Douro river. It was a gritty, punky affair with just 16 winemakers. The lighting was dim, the music loud. Bathroom facilities were nonexistent. When nature called, you either had to find a dark corner on the street, or sneak into a nearby restaurant and pretend to be a customer.

It wasn’t Portugal’s first grass roots wine fair, but certainly the first to focus entirely on Portuguese growers and to audaciously schedule itself simultaneously with Porto’s biggest wine event. Essencia do Vinho is a glitzy, commercial fair that takes place in the Palácio da Bolsa, the old stock exchange building. Producers pay a four figure sum to exhibit, and the event is mobbed by a public eager to ‘taste’ as much free wine as possible.

Simplesmente 2014 was revelatory for me. I met a young French-Portuguese engineer named António Madeira, a nascent Douro grower marketing his wines as Olho No Pé (Tiago Sampaio, who later changed his brand to Uivo) and an already confident Filipa Pato. This was a side of Portuguese wine that I’d never previously experienced. Heavily oaked reds, fizzy Vinho Verde and off-dry rosés were nowhere to be seen.

It may have begun as a tiny gathering for friends and friends of friends, but Simplesmente swiftly changed the game. It gave smaller, artisanal winemakers a platform. There was nothing else like it in Portugal. By 2016 the fair already started attracting international attention and the word was out. This was the hipper, more exciting gathering, for those who found Essencia do Vinho too tame and corporate.

Every year I returned and made new discoveries. I watched the careers of young winemakers blossom. Every year there were new names, and a heartening trend towards more and better low intervention winemaking.

In 2017, Simplesmente found its spiritual home in Cais Novo, a beaten-up but spacious old warehouse on Rua da Monchique. When the sun came out, people would spill out into the car park overlooking the river. With its graffiti-covered concrete and half-ruined walls, it felt like the after party of an illegal rave. If you were lucky, the toilets even functioned.

That era came to an end during Covid. Simplesmente pivoted to an outdoor summer affair during the pandemic. When the world returned to normal, Cais Novo was no more. Now, the fair has moved to the Alfândega, a massive old customs building on the river. It’s light, airy and functional, but a tiny bit sterile. I can imagine it’s much easier for the organisers: everything works, it’s clean and easy to access, exactly what you’d expect from a modern events space.

Personally, I struggle with the producer selection. Simplesmente always had a broad approach to curation: it is resolutely not a natural wine fair and its manifesto is simply “wines without makeup”. João insists that it’s important not to shut people out, even if they’re not (yet) farming organically, even if they’re still fermenting with selected yeasts or filtering. No dogma here.

Here’s how Simplesmente Vinho summarise their concept, on their website:

Simplesmente… Vinho is an off-salon, an independent and alternative gathering that brings together vignerons united simply… by Wine.

Wine that respects the land and terroir, the vineyard and the grapes, people and traditions. Wine that simply… wants to be wine — drunk, appreciated, shared.
Sincere wines, with a healthy dose of madness and poetry.

But what if the message becomes too dilute? If there are too many exhibitors pouring unexciting, mainstream wines, it’s hard to see the “alternative” part of the proposition. Then there’s the ever-increasing number of major estates - the port house Churchills was this year’s inexplicable addition. There are countless other opportunities to taste wines like these, and I don’t understand what purpose they serve at this fair.

Has Simplesmente simply become a victim of its own success? Once the counter-culture, it’s become an institution in itself. This year, the so called ‘off-event’ reportedly had more exhibiting winemakers (126) than Essencia do Vinho. Perhaps a stricter, more focused exhibitor policy would create a clearer point of difference - and help Simplesmente retain its cutting edge.

Another sign of the fair’s success is that there are now off-events from Simplesmente - ‘off-off events’ if you will. This year, the first edition of Mira Vinha took place just down the street. Organised by a small group of Lisbon-area growers who variously call themselves Passevinho or Os Invictos, it captured something of the old Simplesmente spirit - it was small, bustling and full of exciting wines.

Despite my wingeing, there were many highlights at this year’s Simplesmente. For paying subscribers, here are are some favourites:

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Reading last weekend’s news from an isolated Galician village was beyond surreal. I didn’t know whether to be terrified or comforted. World War III had just kicked off, but we were 6,000 km from the epicentre. The grill was fired up and the first of many bottles had just been breached. What to do?

Together with friends Ryan and Brian (more about them below), we have these little weekend summits about once a year. The idea is simple. We rent a house somewhere beautiful and stock it with unreasonable amounts of wine and food. There will be grilling: vegetarians need not apply. We each bring bottles, all of which are poured blind. We heroically fail to guess what most of them are.

As three geeks who have spent too long in the wine space, we share a love of new discoveries, handcrafted ideologies and anything that ferments. It doesn’t matter how obscure, bizarre tasting or genre-confused it might be. It’s a safe space for your most challenging bottle. Someone might pop a unicorn, next up it’s 50 year old vinegar.

We don’t taste blind to score points or impress each other - given my mediocre skills, that’s not happening anyway. It’s about shedding preconceptions and taking the gloves off. Ryan just poured fermented yak’s milk infused with the skins of Rkatsiteli? I’m calling top Meursault!

In this latest Galician edition, we developed two metrics for success. If you nailed the brief, the Nerdometer™ went into the red. Slovakian swamp water, Ethiopian orange wine or botrytis-affected Palamino foot trodden by septuagenarian nuns? Watch that needle fly.

A high Nerdometer reading says nothing about deliciousness - just that it tickled our perverse intellects. The Crushometer® was invoked to scientifically record the degree of smashability. Empty bottle = high Crushometer score.

(Note to self: next time add a Funkometer)

For paying subscribers, there’s a complete rundown of what we enjoyed below - with highly objective Nerdometer and Crushometer scores, naturally. All ratings reflect my personal judgement, and not that of Ryan or Brian. Sorry chaps.

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Ryan and Brian

Ryan Opaz is known to many of you as a former conference organiser, blogger, photographer and all round promoter of Portuguese food and wine. He heads up Iberian tour specialist Patamar Select (formerly Catavino).

Brian Patterson created one of the first bars in Lisbon to focus exclusively on Portuguese natural wine. Black Sheep opened its doors in 2019 and Brian sold to the current owners a few years later. He’s now offering his own wine and food tours in the Lisbon area, and comes highly recommended as your guide.

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This piece is free to read:

This piece was originally for paying subscribers only. It attracted a lot of attention and some complaints. I removed the paywall and also edited the headline and the opening paragraphs to be less sensationalist than the original version. This was in response to Jamie Goode’s suggestion that the piece was not balanced or fair to him.

I decided that the original text did not meet my own journalistic standards and thus it has been toned down a bit.

The following two articles are for paying subscribers only, although you can enjoy my summary of today’s Georgian natural wine scene for free.

I hope you enjoyed this month’s digest. Let me know what you think.

I’m long overdue to revisit Georgia, but a recent tasting in Amsterdam provided an amazing overview of the country’s natural wine scene. import wines from all over Europe, and they really love Georgia: it’s their third biggest portfolio after France and Italy.

It’s heartening to see more and more young winemakers and new projects springing up - particularly in the westerly regions such as Imereti. Another welcome development is the number of female-lead estates. This isn’t something one takes for granted in a country as patriarchal as Georgia.

Another clear trend is the number of foreigners who visit, fall in love and never leave. And many of them seem to become winemakers!

There’s plenty of grumbling in the industry that the country’s traditional qvevri1 styles - of which amber wine is undoubtedly the poster child - are of minimal commercial significance. After all, they represent a tiny proportion of the total production, maybe as little as 5%.

I beg to differ. It’s true that the big volumes are semi-sweet wines exported to Russia by the truckload, or identikit white varietal wines tasting of aromatic yeasts and little else. But it was Georgia’s heritage winemaking tradition that put it on the global wine map, not oceans of Alazani Valley or Kindzmarauli.

The other complaint, at least historically, has been the wildly inconsistent quality of Georgia’s artisanal wines. Once word got out that you could sell anything with the word ‘qvevri’ on the label, the market exploded with rustic and sometimes impressively dirty wines.

Times have changed, Georgia’s winemakers have skilled up considerably and the market no longer accepts swamp water as readily as it once did. That said, there is still considerable variability. Choose carefully, especially if you like sampling a wine over multiple days.

This diversity is arguably part of the attraction. I know of few other countries where you can find such a huge variety of styles. Gone are the days when Kakheti’s powerful, tannic ambers dominated. Western Georgia has really opened up, bringing with it not just lighter, fresher styles but also a plethora of previously unknown varietals.

This is very much a country for the wine adventurer. It’s a paradise for lovers of rare grape varieties and heritage styles: unique flavours, textures and aromas abound. For more cautious drinkers, the mainstream producers have become adept at creating sanitised versions of qvevri wines. For the risk takers, step into the world of Georgian natural wines. There will be surprises. Not all of them are good, but some are truly exceptional.

Paying subscribers can read my tasting notes on 12 growers and 45 wines below. If you’re viewing this on the website, quickly navigate to your favourite grower by clicking on the dash links on the lh side of the screen.

You can also scan for the red hearts, which were my faves.

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If you want to play viticultural bingo, ‘regenerative’ is top of the list right now, up there with other dinner-party conversation starters such as soft pruning, dry farming and soil compression.

The R-word is everywhere, but it’s poorly understood. Deploy the phrase ‘regenerative organic’ and it gets downright divisive. Wine writer and viticulture expert Dr. Jamie Goode recently criticised the idea that organic viticulture must be a precursor to regenerative practices. Some practitioners take a different view.

Here’s some background, taken from my previous deep dive:

• The phrase ‘regenerative agriculture’ was popularised by Robert Rodale of the Rodale Institute in the 1980s.

• It refers to the practice of restoring soil health and vigour but also tackles the long-term sustainability of ecosystems, communities and social welfare.

• The Rodale Institute created the world’s first regenerative agriculture certification programme in 2020, and founded the Regenerative Organic Alliance (ROC) to regulate and promote the scheme.

• The ROC and the RI maintain that regenerative agriculture is ethically and practically impossible in the context of conventional synthetics and fossil-fuel driven agriculture

• A proliferation of newer certification schemes are more permissive.

• The term regenerative is not legally protected or defined, allowing major agribusinesses such as Bayer and Cargill to dream up their own regenerative programmes which promote the use of - surprise, surprise - their own synthetic products.

A small fancy club?

Dr. Goode recently spoke at a regenerative viticulture forum hosted by Domaine Lafage, a major winery farming 300 hectares in Roussillon. His robust stance on regenerative and organic was summarised in an article published in The Drinks Business. Andrew Neather quotes Goode as saying:

“If we tie regenerative viticulture to organics, it’s finished,” he said. “It will be a small, fancy club for people to feel good about themselves. It’s bullshit. This patronising ROC approach is nonsense.”1

Goode’s position is slightly more nuanced than this snippet suggests. Check out the official video from the conference and make up your own mind. Most of Andrew Neather’s quote is taken from a short segment around eight minutes in.

Domaine Lafage and Goode seem to be aligned. The domaine reportedly struggled to convert some plots to organic viticulture and has now opted for a hybrid approach. Jean-Marc Lafage said “we can’t be organic everywhere … but we feel comfortable working in regenerative.”

Lafage recently gained regenerative certification for 80ha via A Greener World, which allows the use of synthetics with justification. The domaine also has a separate 20ha certified by the Regenerative Viticulture Association2 - a scheme created in 2023 which specifically forbids the use of synthetics. It looks like they cherry-picked different schemes to suit different parts of their estate. I have not spoken with them directly about this.

The gold standard

I contacted several growers who hold Regenerative Organic Certification (ROC) for their reaction. Most declined to make a public statement, with one exception. Jason Haas has been responsible for steering his family’s Tablas Creek estate first towards biodynamics and then to becoming the world’s first Regenerative Organic Certified winery in 2020. He certainly has skin in the game.

Tablas Creek was created as a joint venture between Château de Beaucastel and the Haas family in 1989, in Paso Robles, California. They farmed according to organic standards from the start, and then adopted biodynamic practices starting in the 2010s. As Jason put it, organic is “just a list of things you can’t do, whereas biodynamics is a list of things you should do.”

He explained that “we decided to limit any input that was coming off the property. We started planting fruit frees amidst the vineyards, we got our own sheep and shepherd. We doubled down on soil health, eliminating tillage and prioritising dry farming.”

He added that “we were doing all the regen stuff before we knew what it was called. When they [ROA] called us to take part in the pilot, they mostly just had to explain that this is what we had been doing, and they were giving it a name.”

Asked about the importance of organic practices, Jason was unequivocal: “If you are trying to rebuild your soils, to use them to foster macrobiology and biodiversity, any application of synthetic chemicals is going to be counter to that goal.”

However, he acknowledged the challenges in parts of the worlds with higher disease pressures or damper climates - factors that make it harder to convert to organic. He said “I’m sympathetic to that big tent idea to include and recognise the people who for whatever reason are not able to move to being entirely chemical free.”

“I understand wanting to give people the runway to being chemical free” he added, but voiced a concern that permissive certification standards might not give estates sufficient motivation to break their dependency on pesticides.

Following our conversation, Jason sent me this written response to Dr. Goode’s comments:

The value of an approach like that of ROC is that it sets an aspirational goal and a gold standard. Is there room for approaches that are short of full organics but make a measurable improvement in practices and outcomes within the regenerative movement? Absolutely. But is there a risk that regenerative becomes diluted to the point that it doesn’t mean anything more than “sustainable” does now? Also absolutely. It’s important that someone be setting the bar high, and ROC is doing that.

A fragmented picture

The differences between the available certification programmes for regenerative viticulture are subtle but important. Here’s a brief summary:

The Regenerative Organic Alliance is the longest established and the only organisation with direct links back to regenerative farming’s origins. It is also the strictest, requiring not just organic farming practices but also organic certification as a precursor. It certifies everything from grain-growing mega-farms to cattle ranches to food processing plants.

The Regenerative Viticulture Association is a specialist body established in Barcelona in 2021. Its regulations prohibit any use of synthetic products, and although it does not require organic certification, it requires adherence to organic practices:

A Greener World is a global non-profit headquartered in Oregon which offers multiple certification programmes. Certified Regenerative by AGW provides a highly detailed set of standards, but becomes slightly nebulous when it comes to synthetics.

All synthetic products (herbicides, fungicides, insecticides) are listed in their annex of restricted products with the following advisory: “The Restricted Materials listed above may only be used if planned and targeted as part of the approved Regenerative Plan. Use must be phased out over time, as agreed with AGW.”

Am I alone in finding this incredibly vague?

Regenified is a Dallas-based organisation whose certification allows the use of synthetics under certain conditions. For orchards and other perennial plants including vineyards, It stipulates that pesticide usage “must decrease each year”.

There are vague statements such as “Before the use of any pesticide (herbicides, fungicides, or insecticides), a basic pest management plan must be developed.” - so it’s fine to spray chemicals as long as you have a plan!

Keep it simple

I’ve only scratched the surface. The number of routes to something called ‘regenerative’ certification keep increasing. Jason Haas’s fear that “regenerative becomes diluted to the point that it doesn’t mean anything more than ‘sustainable’ does now” seems justified.

Given that organic and biodynamic certification schemes typically define the period when an estate is in conversion - something that can often legally be stated on the label - I suggest that this picture could be simplified.

If growers accept that the core goals of regeneration include phasing out synthetic treatments - something all the standards above assert - it should be possible to work within the bounds of existing organic schemes. Once an estate gains organic certification - however long that takes - they move on to tackle regenerative.

There’s a broader question around the average wine drinker’s ability to make sense of the verbiage festooning back labels. Organic, biodynamic, regenerative, sustainable, natural, sulphite-free, B-corp and vegan appear in endlessly multiplying formations.

The real danger is not the coupling of regenerative and organic. It’s the fragmentation of the certification picture, into thousands of competing logo-shards that hold little to no consumer recognition.

This is a controversial topic. The idea that ‘organic’ is good and ‘conventional’ is bad is overly simplistic. I’d love to hear your thoughts and read your comments.

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Veganism is a lot like natural wine. There’s no universal definition, and its adherents span the gamut from reasonable people to ultra-radical zealots. Combine the two for a recipe that confuses the hell out of people. Whaddya mean, wine isn’t plant-based?

My alarm bells started ringing after some wine importer friends described a recent experience at a fancy vegan restaurant. They arrived with a case of wines the restaurant had ordered, from Austrian grower Nibiru. The somm asked why the wax capsules looked a little different than normal. “They’re made from bee’s wax” came the reply.

The somm looked concerned. At the end of the night, she returned the entire case along with their coats and explained that she couldn’t sell the wine to their customers. Bee’s wax is an animal by-product, and its use is unacceptable for vegans.

There’s more. Strict vegans also have issues with the use of animals in the farming system, as this might represent “exploitation of, or cruelty to animals”. So what about all those super-ethical biodynamic estates stuffing cow manure into cow’s horns and using horses to help plough their vineyards? Is their wine off-limits too?

Would a committed vegan be able to drink any of the good stuff? I contacted The Vegan Society to find out more. Based in the UK, they are the world’s largest certifying body for vegan products. Their trademark graces around 73,000 items, including foodstuffs, beverages, cosmetics, clothing and even a car interior.

Here is the society’s definition of veganism - I’ve bolded what I see as the key parts:

Veganism is a philosophy and way of living which seeks to exclude—as far as is possible and practicable—all forms of exploitation of, and cruelty to, animals for food, clothing or any other purpose; and by extension, promotes the development and use of animal-free alternatives for the benefit of animals, humans and the environment. In dietary terms it denotes the practice of dispensing with all products derived wholly or partly from animals.

I spoke with Karen Spinner, the society’s sales and marketing manager. We skipped through the obvious parts: wines clarified with animal-derived products such as isinglass (a gelatin made from fish bladders), casein (milk-derived) or even egg whites (the traditional method in Bordeaux) are clearly out.

What about those beeswax-capped bottles? She concurred that “this would not be acceptable for our standards.” Bad news for vegans then: Heinrich’s elegant ‘Freyheit’ series is out, along with wines from many other environment-conscious growers who spurn plastic (oil)-based wax. Karen agreed this is a conundrum but reminded me that “what we stand for is not a sustainability claim, it’s a clear and simple guarantee that the product is free from animal ingredients.”

My next question was about the use of animals in the vineyard. Karen gave the example of truffles. “If they’re harvested by hand, they are vegan. But if they were harvested by pigs or dogs then they don’t meet our standards, because we deem this to be unnecessary” she told me. I pointed out that, to the best of my knowledge, most animal usage in vineyards relates to ploughing, management of grass cover or vineyard pests. For example, some growers keep flocks of sheep or ducks for seasonal usage amongst their vines.

Karen didn’t have a clear answer. “We don’t accept products where animals have been used to harvest or transport products” she explained, “but hypothetically, if ducks happen to wander through a vineyard then we wouldn’t see a problem.”

When we got onto the subject of biodynamics, Karen had no such doubts. It was a resounding no. “Biodynamic farming doesn’t meet our standards because of the unnecessary use of animal body parts like cows horns” she said.

So would the use of animal manure for viticulture or agriculture bar a product from the vegan society’s certification? Karen said no. She referred me to the key phrase “possible and practicable” in the society’s definition. “If we ruled out the use of animal manure, we wouldn’t be able to certify many products at all” she admitted. So the society takes a pragmatic - some might say inconsistent - view on this point. But might there be super-strict vegans in this world for whom even the use of manure is verboten? Karen agreed that there might, adding that “they would have to come up with their own code of what they consider to be acceptable or not”.

No biodynamic wine for vegans?

If you’re vegan and you insist on Vegan Society certified products, here is the payload: All Demeter or Biodyvin-certified wineries are automatically disqualified. That’s because these schemes require the use of the two key biodynamic preparations 500 and 501. Both are over-wintered in cow’s horns. Preparation 500 is, additionally, based on cow manure.

You don’t have to accept The Vegan Society’s definition. Parés Balta is a medium-sized winery in Penedès, northern Spain that holds Demeter certification. They also warrant on their website that all their wines are suitable for vegans. I asked if this is based on any particular certification. The estate’s Marta Ràfols told me it’s not. She sent me this further clarification:

The term ‘vegan’ is not legally defined in wine, and different organisations apply different criteria. In our case, when we say our wines are vegan, we mean that we do not use any animal-derived products in the winery or during winemaking.

Parés Balta are absolutely within their rights to make this claim, as Karen Spinner agreed. Their narrower definition of vegan wine is popular. US online retailer Primal Wines is a specialist in natural wines, and their website includes a specific page listing all product lines suitable for vegans - together with an explanation of what that means. They only tackle the issue of fining agents, saying “Most natural wines are also vegan-friendly since they are unfined and unfiltered.”

Their list includes wines from prominent biodynamic estates such as Gut Oggau and Meinklang - both Demeter certified. Primal Wine’s list doesn’t appear to be based on any specific certification programme. It certainly wouldn’t meet the criteria for The Vegan Society.

My take

I am personally uncomfortable with veganism as a concept, due to its conflicts with sustainable, environment-conscious and heritage traditions in farming and winemaking. The bee’s wax capsule is just one small example.

As a lifelong supporter of organic and biodynamic farming and of the humane use of animals in the farming ecosystem, it frustrates me that vegan certification slams the door in the face of some of these estates.

That said, The Vegan Society is nothing if not transparent and thorough. If you consider yourself to be a strict or ethical vegan (as Karen terms it), their certification scheme will be very helpful. The lack of overall regulation means it’s a confusing picture out there. Self-certification is rife - anyone can slap a ‘vegan friendly’ logo or tagline on their product. And we didn’t even mention the more nebulous term ‘plant-based’.

Me personally? I’ll continue to enjoy my flexitarian diet with a bottle of low-intervention wine - whatever type of wax it happens to have on top.

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Whilst researching this article, I also looked at one of the US’s biggest vegan certification bodies, BeVeg. There isn’t enough detail on their website for me to figure out if they take the same line as The Vegan Society. I contacted them for comment but they did not reply.

In this post: Reviews of six wines from Château Shuette and two from Ormiale - two estates in Bordeaux making natural wines with a zero-zero approach to vinification.

It’s official. Bordeaux’s Conseil Interprofessionnel du Vin de Bordeaux (CIVB) - the organisation that represents and regulates the region’s growers - has introduced a new legally defined style named Bordeaux Claret.

If you’re a Brit like me, the C-word hardly needed clarification. For centuries, we referred to Bordeaux’s classical red wines simply as claret1. Sadly, it’s become a dusty concept, conjuring up images of privilege, stiff upper lips and pin-striped suits. I say sadly because I remain a Bordeaux-lover, despite the associations.

The CIVB wants to re-imagine ‘claret’ as a light-bodied, easy drinking red to be served lightly chilled. The full description in the cahiers de charge is as follows:

Clarets are red wines with a light tannic structure and a ruby ​​to pale purple color. They are luscious (gourmand) and offer aromas of ripe red fruit. These wines are best enjoyed chilled and in their youth.

Uncharitable readers might smell a whiff of desperation. Bordeaux has hit hard times, famed for a heavier more structured style that is no longer à la mode. The region is awash with oceans of bulk wine that isn’t shifting even at one Euro per litre. The head of the local farmer's organisation insists that Bordeaux’s vineyard surface must be halved to resolve the problem. This just published piece from the Wine Spectator is even more depressing.

I’m not sure if AOC Bordeaux Claret is a clear-headed solution. It’s confusing partly because Brits like myself understood something very different from the term, and more so due to the pre-existing clairet category - a classification officially defined as a dark rosé but in practice falling somewhere between rosé and red.

The CIVB’s marketing includes entertaining advice for French speakers on how to pronounce and differentiate ‘claret’ from ‘clairet’, with clarette offered as a phonetic guide to how ze eenglish massacre the former. If native speakers struggle, God knows how the rest of us will manage.

The new ‘official’ claret is also ironic, because some of the region’s organic and biodynamic growers already produce wines with precisely these lighter, fresher stylistic qualities, which are inevitably declassified and thrown out of the appellation.

TMC’s Low Intervention Red Bordeaux wine guide, published last year, profiled some of those innovators. But there were two omissions that I’m delighted to add today:

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These two pieces are without paywall:

I tried recording my own voice-over for this piece. Check it out if you want to enjoy my dulcet tones!

Paying subscribers have access to two more articles. Preview them below:

I hope you enjoyed this digest. Let me know what you think!

Everyone has an opinion on wine preservation - what to do with a half-finished bottle? We’ll skip the fatuous “just drink it” comments. As a single-person household, I can tell you that doesn’t always end well.

I’ll also ignore the vast array of snake-oil merchants who claim to have your back. Vacu Vin sort of works, Coravin is reliable for a week, perhaps. But let’s go old-school for a moment:

Corkscrew - bottle - fridge.

Once it’s open, how long have you got? Thousands of websites offer helpful advice. This Wine Enthusiast piece is just one example. But like all the others, it misses a vital point.

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String quartets and formal speeches are hardly what you’d expect at a natural wine fair. But together they created a poignant moment at last weekend’s Bottled Alive, held in the Czech town of Tábor.

Organiser Jan Čulík took to the stage, a couple of hours into the Friday session. After a considerable effort to shush the enthusiastic crowd, he read these words from a crumpled sheet of paper:

Tábor is a town of 35,000 residents, yet this weekend it has welcomed 160 winemakers from 13 countries and 40 wine regions. For a mid-sized Czech town, these numbers are almost unreal. Why is that? The answer is community. Right after the family, it is the most vital and fundamental building block of society.

As we listen to this piece of music, I would like us to reflect on the power and the necessity of building similar communities beyond the world of wine in your own villages, towns, and regions. Wine is a magnificent tool for this. Let us use it not just for enjoyment, but as a way to deepen local relationships in the places where we live.

These social ties grow from shared hobbies, common interests and activities. They are our best medicine against a superficial world. They protect us from today’s fast pace. Let us use wine to create healthy, functioning local connections. Our greatest strength lies in these friendly ties which exist somewhere between the family and the municipality. Here, we have the power to shape our society.

Drink wine & build community!

The Epoque Quartet then ripped their way through Zrození, by Czech composer Jan Kučena. The title means ‘birth’ in English. Stylistically, I’d describe it as a mash-up of Bartók, Janáček and Philip Glass: folksy and energetic with a decidedly Slavic thrust.

The music was spirited, but Jan’s words stayed with me for longer. I loved the concise, positive intent. He didn’t talk about the growing challenges faced by wine producers. There was no mention of the racial and political hatred driving an unprecedented number of wars and conflicts worldwide. Neither did he invoke the familiar battle-cry against the evil forces of ‘conventional wine’.

Nonetheless, these spectres circle around Jan’s entreaties like vultures. The wine world as we know it is under attack from every corner: the anti-alcohol lobby, climate change, tariff-loving megalomaniacs and societal change in general.

Just take a look the headlines racked up in the first few weeks of 2026: Constellation will shut down a massive winery in California “as a result of rapidly shrinking demand for commodity brands”, a major cave coopérative in Rousillon has just gone into administration and 63% of Gen-Z are afraid to get drunk in case they’re shamed on socials.

It’s tempting to view this carnage dispassionately, as if it doesn’t affect artisanal growers. But it does, and it is. I have had many worrying conversations with winemakers over the last year. Their mantra is as deafening as it is monotonous: sales are down, importers are not increasing portfolios, Asia is a write-off. The boom years are over.

All of this is why Jan’s missive matters now. Wine’s unique cultural place in our civilisation has become endangered, its potency weakened by transformation into a commodity - or even a supposed poison. Fairs like Bottled Alive remind us that a different reality exists.

Jan marvels at how these events bring people together. They are head-on encounters with an ad-hoc, international community: a wraggle-taggle band of obsessives, dreamers, idealists and hangers-on who gather together, united ostensibly by a love of fermented grape juice. In practice, what unites them is far more profound: the belief that wine and food embrace craft, poetry and culture. How could a commodity preserve those qualities?

I love Jan’s suggestion that wine could be the starting point for community. Getting together for a glass could build a new friendship or break down barriers. The standard 75cl wine bottle is itself a social device - it’s not designed for one person. I have nothing against innovation but this is the biggest argument against single-serve packaging. Sharing a bottle means sharing a conversation - and isn’t that how you build community?

Here’s a recording of Zrozeni, in an arrangement for string quartet and piano. I preferred the string quartet-only version played in Tábor, but couldn’t find it online.

We’ve all been there. You spent all your money over the holiday period. Gifts, fancy restaurant dinners, grand cru Champagne, your subscription to this site (whaddya mean you’re not a paying subscriber yet?).

Now reality bites. It wasn’t supposed to be dry January, but the cupboard is bare. Worse still, you ruined your palate with too much premium natty. Lidl’s €5 Oaked Chardo is dead to you. Your credit card statement shows line after line of triple-digit purchases from stores such as ‘Mother Nature Wines’ and ‘Gluten-free Grape Merchants’.

I’m here to help. Last year’s Top Ten Budget Natural Wines proved popular, and all those recommendations still stand. But I need to address a couple of failings.

First, it seems the term ‘budget’ is divisive. A valued subscriber told me he automatically ignores any article with the b-word in the headline. I thought the association with frugality, compromise and shame would resonate with my northern European protestant readers. I guess they already left the building.

So ‘affordable’ it is, for this new edition. It’s a better word since the recommendations below are genuinely without compromise: honest wines from organic or biodynamic farming, with nothing added and nothing taken away. Some have a pinch of sulphites, others don’t. A couple have been coarse-filtered. All of them are delicious.

My second failing was not to list any French wines. Sacré bleu! This time round, I asked the folks at Daxivin, Wilde Wijnen and The Wine Spot to enlighten me. Yes, J’ai vu la lumière. Finalement.

My definition of budget affordable is unchanged - wines that retail at or below €15 in Europe. That means up to roughly $25 in the states or £20 in the UK. No bargain basement, but a fair price for the ground floor.

You’ll notice that the US is often a vintage or two behind what’s on sale in Europe. In most cases, additional bottle age will benefit your drinking pleasure. I’ve noted dramatic vintage differences, where known.

Whites

⚘0️⃣ Mas d’Intras - Cuvée de la Montagnere 2024 (Ardèche, France)

Vermentino, Grenache Blanc, Viognier, Clairette, Floreal

Inviting salty freshness and soft texture in this big blend. Salivating acidity, baked apple and pear with a nice dried-herb thing that adds character. A grown-up aperitif wine. Gets even better after a day or two open. Demeter certified, no added SO₂.

EU: €12.90 from Intercaves (FR), €15.50 from Daxivin (NL), US: contact importer Zev Rovine, N/A UK.

🌿 Matthias Warnung - Potatoland 2023 (Kamptal, Austria)

Supple, soft-textured Grüner Veltliner that plays more to the grape’s fruity side than its vegetal alter ego. The merest hint of the pepper grinder. Lightly filtered.
The wine gets its name from an overheard conversation with a French winemaker, who suggested that Matthias’s vineyard was only good for growing potatoes. Sacré Bleu!

EU: €12.90 from Weinfurore, €14 from Reblaus (NL), US: $25 from Atlas wines (2024), UK: £19.35 from The Sourcing Table (2022)

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Happy new year to you all!

Below you can read about what this year holds for The Morning Claret, but first a very brief look back to 2025.

This week marks the two year anniversary of my rebooted site, which is a mild cause for celebration. Moving to a subscription model and committing to a weekly publishing schedule has been a game changer for me. It gave me a much-needed kick up the proverbial and also - through the patronage of my wonderful paid subscribers - justifies spending about half the week purely on researching, writing and editing content for you.

I am immensely proud of the numbers:

• Over 4,200 subscribers

• 51 articles published in 2025 - roughly 75,000 words

• Four wine guides published in 2025 - Collio Orange Wines, Brda Orange Wines, Bordeaux low-intervention reds and New Faces in the Mosel

• An archive that now tops 400 articles - all accessible to paid subscribers

• Subscribers based in 85 different countries - TMC has readers on every continent.

Enough horn tooting.

New for 2026 - TMC Digest

I know that many of you suffer from information overload. Some of you told me you just don’t have time to read a new article every week. I get it.

Here’s the solution: I’ve created TMC Digest for you. You can tweak your subscription so that you only receive a monthly email summarising everything I published that month. No more weekly messages or articles you won’t read clogging up your inbox.

Detailed instructions on how to access the TMC Digest here.

The first TMC Digest will be published on Friday 30th January. You won’t receive this as a regular subscriber unless you specifically opt-in - check the instructions above.

More Wine Guides

My God they’re a lot of work, but readers enjoyed the guides last year. Those of you in the US told me you really appreciate stateside sourcing info so I’ve tried to up my game there.

More guides are on the way. I’m open to suggestions but the first in 2026 will probably be budget natural wines from Burgundy. Perhaps it sounds like an oxymoron, but because it’s Burgundy I will take ‘budget’ to mean any bottle under €50 retail. Your thoughts are welcome - should I go lower?

There will also be plenty of new opinion pieces, ranty stuff and occasional satire. All things that you told me you also appreciate.

Residential Writing Course

I’ll be hosting and teaching a four day/five night course on non-fiction writing and editing in late May 2026. Full details coming soon but it will be somewhere gorgeous in Slovenia and will include at least one visit to a favourite winery (natural/organic of course).

If you’re a budding writer - or a seasoned one who wants to hone their craft some more - this is for you. Let me know ASAP if you’re interested. There will only be seven places available.

A Subscription Offer

It wouldn’t be January without an unbeatable offer to those of you yet to upgrade to a paid subscription. For the next few days only, take advantage of a 50% discount for the year (so €25 instead of €50) by using this link.

Talk to me

Tell me what you’d like to see on The Morning Claret this year. Or just say hi! I love to hear from my readers. My DMs are open to paying subscribers for any wine-related enquiry you might have.

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The TMC digest is for you if you enjoy my writing, but don’t have time in your life to read or engage with a new article every week.

Wave goodbye to email overload and just receive a monthly email summarising everything I published that month - together with links to each piece.

This way you can choose what interests you, and avoid your inbox filling up with articles you’ll never read.

To sign up for the TMC digest, here’s what you need to do:

1. Subscribe to The Morning Claret - you don’t need to be a paying subscriber, but please consider supporting my work. It’s 100% funded by my readers.

2. Click Sign In (you’ll be sent a one-time code via email)

3. Click on your profile icon and click Manage subscription

4. First select TMC Digest and then deselect The Morning Claret (see image below).
   It’s important to do this in the right order. If you first deselect The Morning Claret, Substack will assume you want to completely unsubscribe and unhelpfully logs you out.

   

   I’ve left the comments open on this post, feel free to give me feedback about the TMC Digest or ask if you have any issues signing up.

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I can proudly reveal that 100% of the predictions we made for 2025 did not come true. With a record like that, TMC has literally nothing to prove. Yet here we are again, about to enter a new year.

So once more we expose the stories no-one else has been talking about. Here is what the next 12 months will look like in wine.

You heard it here first. And, most probably, last.

Leaked report from Michelin Grapes will shock wine lovers

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