How a False Friend Created Natural Wine

Did a mistranslation spawn an entire subculture?

Ever been a language student? Then you’re probably familiar with false friends: words that sound similar in two languages but mean totally different things. Examples for the English speaking world include slim in Dutch, or gift in German. Poison-pen letter anyone?

What about French? Let’s take the word Nature. No, it doesn’t mean an unspoilt wilderness where you can hike or picnic. Nature translates simply as ‘plain’, or by extension, without additions or adornments.

Andrew Jefford first opened my eyes to this small but significant point of order during an online discussion published by the Wine Scholar Guild. Here’s how he put it:

Nature in French means plain, unflavoured, as it comes, “undressed;” a yaourt nature is the unflavoured sort, as opposed to raspberry, apricot or vanilla yogurts. A better English-language equivalent of vin nature would therefore, for me, be “plain wine” or “unadjusted wine.”

I thought about this at length afterwards. The implications for the natural wine community seemed huge. Did we name what has become a global movement, based entirely on a mistranslation?

How did this Happen?

Let’s cycle briefly back through history. The gospel of vin nature, as preached by just about everyone, is that it coalesced as a thing in Beaujolais in the 1980s. Jules Chauvet, Jacques Néauport and Marcel Lapierre were the pioneers who proved that if you started with top quality grapes then selected yeasts, chaptalisation and sulphites were quite unnecessary.

Lapierre introduced the ideas to his friends, a group of winemakers now often named the gang of five - Guy Breton, Jean Foillard, Yvon Métras and Jean-Paul Thévenet. Their back-to-the-roots wines, and those of an ever-expanding circle of colleagues, started to be sold in bars in Paris from the late 1980s on. The venues where they were bought and consumed were initially dubbed ‘caves au vins sans souffre’¹, somewhat bizarrely focusing on the lack of added sulphites as the major point of difference.

Perhaps this was due to the widely held (if incorrect) belief that sulphites were the cause of hangovers. The focus on sulphites, or the lack of them, has been reinforced numerous times over the last few decades, not least by the winemaker’s association Vins S.A.I.N.S, founded in 2012. Their phrase Sans Aucun Intrant Ni Sulfite (without any additives or (added) sulphites) graces the back labels of countless French natural wines.

It isn’t hard to see how you get from vin sans souffre to vin nature, and it’s a better name as it reflects the lack of any other additives during vinification - or in the vineyard. These two terms became interchangeable at some point around the turn of the millennium. I’d love to document this more precisely, but I don’t have the evidence. If anyone does, please drop a comment below.

The subtle shift from vin nature to vin naturel - which does translate directly as natural wine - is the real headline here. I doubt that French native speakers were to blame, but we can date this reasonably accurately to the early 2000s. Japanese MW Kenichi Ohashi published his book Vin Naturel in Japanese in 2004. The word natural appears in the sub-title of Patrick Matthew’s book Real Wine: The Rediscovery of Natural Winemaking, published even earlier, in 2000. By the time Isabelle Legeron’s Natural Wine came out in 2014, the ubiquity of the English phrase was assured.

So it’s been a while, and the horse has well and truly bolted. We’re stuck with the mistranslation now, like it or not. I can’t help wondering how different it might have been if we’d managed to stick with the yogurt paradigm. Wine without additives. Wine with nothing added, as Frank Cornelissen used to say. Admittedly, it’s less descriptive of the movement - the sub-culture if you will - that has blossomed around the world over the last two decades. But surely there were other phrases that could have been brought to bear: artisanal, small production, craft. No-one talks about natural beer or natural spirits although similar movements exist.

Natural we have a Problem

The challenge with the term ‘natural wine’ is that it’s become poisoned, polluted and ghettoised, to the point where many of its supposed protagonists don’t even want to use it any more. It invites the inevitable if somewhat vacuous statement “there’s no such thing as natural wine” - on the basis that grapes left to ferment all by themselves will eventually become vinegar. Some level of human intervention is always necessary, be it the exclusion of oxygen or the addition of sulphites.

Then there is the term’s combative nature. If natural wine is ‘natural’, it implies that other wines are unnatural. Something that seems to get the industry’s backs up. Well, they often are. Tweaking your ferment with added acids, powdered tannins, yeasts, nutrients, enzymes and so on isn’t natural in my book. It’s processed and somewhat artificial. Still, mainstream winemakers don’t like being called out on this. It’s supposed to be the industry’s little secret.

I’m personally close to abandoning the term in favour of low-intervention wine, because I get sick of how inflammatory the n-word can be. The inevitable simplification into a kind of marketing term risks natural wine becoming a cliché. It was always supposed to be a philosophy, not a style, but this is not the perception of most wine professionals or wine lovers, who equate natural wine exclusively either with cloudy, cidery oranges or glou-glou reds. It’s a bit like presuming that all craft beer tastes and looks like New England IPA.

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It’s this pigeonholing that frustrates me most, and makes me curse whoever prompted that all-important pivot from vin nature to the broader but more divisive English mutation.

Admittedly, neither vin sans souffre or vin nature remotely express everything that Chauvet, Néauport and Lapierre were trying to achieve. These terms don’t even hint at the importance of the farming, nor do they capture Chauvet’s original imperative to make higher quality, more terroir-espressive wines. This is why the world needs good communicators who can translate complex ideas into pithy phrases or concise articles.

Now we have natural wine, both as convenient shorthand for fans like myself, and as cliché or bogeyman for those who just like being reactionary. I will continue to drink it and celebrate it. But in the future, you might catch me referring only to low intervention, artisanal, real, without additives or even…. just wine.

1. The phrase itself is frustratingly inaccurate, as wines never contain elemental sulphur (souffre), but rather sulphites (sulfites).