Thought provoking. I chuckle at one of your observations, "Then there is the term’s combative nature. If natural wine is ‘natural’, it implies that other wines are unnatural." The only people who think that are insecure people. When a wine, for instance, says "Old Vine," it does not imply that wines made from young vines are not so good. When it says "Unoaked," it is not an insult to oak aged wines. A natural or low intervention wine is, simply, something that just *is*: A low intervention or natural style wine made by growers and vintners by choice, and which many consumers prefer, just like they might prefer the color blue or a wine without oak. Most arguments against natural style wines are a crock because wine, like everything else that is crafted or manufactured, is a matter of taste. If people didn't like them, the category, loosely defined or not, wouldn't exist. It doesn't take a lot of brain power to understand that.
Of course I agree with you, but it never ceases to amaze me that many highly educated wine professionals will use these repetitive and vacuous arguments against natural wine, acting as if they are passing on some kind of innovative or original thought.
I genuinely believe this has something to do with the seemingly controversial term natural wine, because I don't remember hearing the same arguments in the early 2000s in London, when I first started learning about wine and going to tastings etc. It was only once "the movement" got going, and "the term" became ensconced that opinions became so polarised. At least this is how I see and remember it unfolding.
Though to the point of this article, the way we choose to use language colors our perceptions whether we're fully conscious of the influence or not. For example, "unoaked" might be a neutral way to inform consumers the wine isn't oaked, but if the winey chose to say "oak free", that's suggests consumers want wine that's "free" from oak, thus passive agressively slamming oaked wine, or at least oaked versions of that type of wine. Language can be subtle, while still having profound impact due to those subtleties.
The use of the word "natural" is controverial for that reason and also because it's such a powerful marketing term - people very much want to believe they're buying and consuming something "natural", so this then becomes a double criticism, that it's claiming to be something it isn't entirely, while benefitting from the hyperbole without shame. No doubt "plain" wine and "low intervention" wine would never have quite the same marketnig impact, though they'd be far more accurate.
"Marketing" is part of the business, Dave. There's nothing wrong with it. You sell "natural" wine just like you sell "Barefoot Fruitscato" or "Meiomi Pinot Noir." If you're offended, then there's something wrong with you. To say a minimal intervention wine is being critical of conventional wine is ridiculous.
These aren't my own personal thoughts or feelings, just observations on pretty well documented human psychology and behavior - which by its very well known and everyday reality is far from "something wrong with" anyone. And a decent segment of those who jumped on the "Natural Wine" bandwagon absolutely, actively marketed their wines as something better than and "more natural" than all wines not under their banner. Which has always been disengenuous if not outright false.
Psychology, disengenuousness? Good grief, who cares? GEICO and State Farm advertise their insurance companies as being "better" than others. There are "burger wars" between McDonald's, Burger King, Wendy's, et al. Coca-Cola vs. PepsiCo, Samsung vs. Apple, or the bloodiest battle of all, Republicans vs. Democrats. The consumer isn't stupid, Dave, they understand the concept of competition. How do you expect brands to differentiate themselves? "Marketing" is not inherently "bad," it's reality, as much for gigantic commercial wineries as for tiny, handcraft brands driven by low intervention consciousness.
Pepsi and CocaCola did authentically hate each other at certain points, so much so that the “Cola Wars” made it into Billy Joel’s “We Didn’t Start the Fire”, a song entirely about humanity’s neverending combustability. The Burger Wars of the 80’s and 90’s were the same - the companies did authentically hate each other due to the competition (or, arguably, the style of competition.) Samsung and Apple went through a period where they were letigious to an absurd degree against each other.
Acknowledging all that, and pointing out that it doesn’t have to be that way, and that it often occurs if/when marketing goes beyond a certain expected nastiness, is just being observant.
Obviously, a lot of negativity always comes from the conventional side of the industry. It's as if they have something to "protect." I find that laughable, like an elephant afraid of a mouse, since at any given time the conventional industry always dominates the market. Changes in sales as well as attitude come excruciatingly slow, but they eventually get there. Remember, 10-20 years ago, when criticism of Biodynamic farming was at a peak of nastiness? These days you hear fewer peeps coming out of the mouths of naysayers; most likely because, as time goes by, even skeptics have to admit that many of the absolute finest wines in the world are, in fact, products of BD, natural or minimal intervention consciousness. Just yesterday I was at two different vineyard estates in Sonoma C., one which has received enormous acclimation for BD farmed wines, and the other which has been eschewing BD fundamentals such as composting yet has had just as much recent success with contemporary regenerative practices such as year-round cover cropping, animal husbandry and roller-crimping. Bottom line, vintners need to continue to do what is best for their individual terroirs, never mind the mindless nincompoops who don't quite get how site-specific ultra-premium winemaking is, nor value the time honored credo that the finest wines in the world are the ones that are absolutely original and unique unto themselves, not the same-ol'-same-ol'.
Manu Guillot at Guillot Broux is well versed in the early history and might have thoughts on the changes in language in the 10's. His grandparents were part of the group of people in the original group who consulted with Chauvet and applied some of the things Chauvet taught. They went on to found the first organic certification groups in Burgundy, if my understanding is correct.
Before the 2012 SAINS group the Association de Vins Naturel existed. I have interviews with some of the organizers on the subject from that time, as well as Jean-Marie Puzelat, Guy Bossard, and Jean Schaetzel. I never thought to analyze the language for Nature / Naturel, but it might be insightful. I don't see them on Ask a Winemaker so I might not have posted. I'll have to search.
One other observation around Chauvet that you evoke but which people don't always appreciate is that in post war France, chemicals were the answer to the devastation of the prior decade and along with tractors, they came pouring in from the US. He was responding to the widespread industrialization of agriculture in the post war world and there were massive changes happening.
Most of the conversations I've had with families who converted to organics early start with stories from '55 or so and they say "grandma and grandpa started to notice things" including one baking family who said that their bread rose differently than it had in the past. I mention that because despite 20 years of conversations, I can't say that I truly understand the social, economic or emotional (post war) context in which Chauvet was working. When I hear his name used, I always have a sense of a much larger and difficult to imagine historical context. I appreciate that you note how his work at the moment was different than how we see it today.
Thank you so much for all this great info Damien. I will try to follow up with Manu, I don't know if you have a contact (to share privately of course, you can DM me here on Substack if you want). And if you dig anything interesting up from your interviews I would be so curious. I think this switch from "nature" to "naturel" was significant, but hey, I could also be completely wrong.
There is much that I left out of this piece, I wanted to keep it short and to the point. But one really interesting nugget (that I'm sure you're very much aware of) is that Chauvet came from quite a classical wine background. He created the ISO tasting glass, and pioneered the idea of describing wines by their aromas and flavours. So in some sense he actually created a lot of the mainstream wine world's paraphernalia, which the natural wine community is now seeking to dismantle.
In German practice and later German Wine Law wine, Naturwein referred to wine from musts to which neither sugar nor water had been added. The term was banished from the 1971 Wine Law that is still largely in force (which law also outlawed must-watering). In that sense, the term was consistent both with “natural” as unadorned or unadulterated, as well as with the connotation “in its natural state.”
If one researches uses of “vin nature” for most of the 20th century and before, one finds it generally used to reference the fact that a wine had not been chaptalized, and only occasionally as a means of distinguishing flavored and fortified wines (such as Vermouth) from those that are neither.
Thanks for mentioning this David. Andreas Wickhoff MW was telling me about the same thing, and even showed me a label from the 1970s (I guess it must have been 70 or 71 then) with the term "naturwein" written on it. And yes I think it's very relevant to the history of how this developed: the gradual change from natural (in various languages) meaning without additives, to meaning a whole lot more (or a whole lot vaguer).
Fascinating discussion. As you point out, the false friend analogy (especially "natural / unnatural") has led to a lot of acrimony and misunderstanding.
I was criticized years ago for writing that natural wine is too often "an excuse for lazy winemaking." Truth is, if you're not going to use commercial yeasts, tannins, acids and other additives to "correct" a wine, you have to be meticulous and fastidious in your winemaking, or Nature will throw in its own additives -- as in, microbial faults. (The vinegar analogy.) Made with care, low-intervention, additive-free vin nature can be thrilling.
"Truth is, if you're not going to use commercial yeasts, tannins, acids and other additives to "correct" a wine, you have to be meticulous and fastidious in your winemaking"
- I would just add that you have to be even more meticulous and fastidious in your vineyard work. Most commercial winemaking tricks are there to cover up or correct for sub-standard or otherwise sub-optimal grapes.
I used to laugh at "Wine is made in the vineyard," because it seems like a "Well, duh!" statement. But I came to realize that it reflected an important shift in the wine zeitgeist, as it were, away from a clean-cut, well-heeled and almost certainly white "winemaker" working in the winery, photographed in the barrel room (new oak symbolizing prosperity and no-expense-spared-for-quality winemaking) to a sweaty, weathered and often non-white vineyard worker tending the grapes.
I never like to blame the media, because I'm part of it, but the glorification of the winemaker must have contributed to this misperception. The best wines have always been made through a partnership between vineyard and winery, but somehow the balance became skewed for awhile.
Availability of all those additives to correct wines also devalued the vineyard, and to use my own phrase, became an excuse for lazy winemaking.
Yes, I think it was also part of a paradigm shift in farming in general. I've spoken to a lot of old-timers about this, in various European countries. I remember Portugal someone telling me "well, we realised when this salesman came with the herbicides, it was great - we didn't have to do any vineyard work any more. We just sprayed the maximum amount that he recommended and that was that."
I just had a chuckle when I scrolled back and read your piece from a couple weeks ago and saw you saying the exact same points I made here, only much more eloquently.
Very interesting article! I too have battled with this especially when I was a caviste in Paris. “Vin nature” can be a divisive term in a shop with mixed bottles. Since I leaned towards minimalist wines, I always sold them as such, “vin minimaliste”. Sometimes even just mentioning the word organic would set people off. Oh well, you can lead a horse to water and so on but consumers are influenced from many different medias. Us wine professionals can only try to guide them.
Also to consider the Naturwein movement of the German winemaker of the XIX that were a gainer the addition for sugary water solution in unripe white must (ref. wine of Germany, 2024)
Thank for that great article that left me thinking for hours! And still, I am not fully convinced that we have an issue with mistranslation...
Let’s start with the language.
Word „nature” in French can be both adjective and noun. When it comes to adjective, it’s used to talk about food, dishes, drinks that are served, sold or consumed as they are, without any addition. Noun is not in the centre of our interest, but we can’t turn our heads from it. Its meaning is close to English word nature. It means among others natural world, so unspoilt wilderness echoes somehow in it. If we switch to English, we will read according to Cambridge Dictionary that „natural food or drink is pure and has no chemical substances added to it and is therefore thought to be healthy”. No additions seems to be our mantra.
OK, so let’s stick to this definition: plain, without any addition.
Plain yoghurt makes sense in English, but plain tea (without milk or lemon) not really.
In French both (yaourt nature, thé nature) are perfectly fine as they are.
In English natural beer sounds odd, but natural mineral water doesn’t.
Let’s make it worse: some plain yoghurts are labelled natural. And even worse: some of them contains things that probably are not supposed to be in plain or natural yoghurt (I mean additions that are not chemical substance, but which are not yoghurt’s essence, i.e. skim milk powder).
This is why I think that from linguistic point of view natural wine is not a false friend, it’s just an ordinary equivalent of „vin nature”.
Language tries its best to englobe reality, but the reality is an infinite tangle.
It would be a fascinating research to see if there was a switch from vin nature to vin naturel or if both terms were perfectly interchangeable since the beginning. Term vin naturel was already used at the beginning of XIX to indicate wine without added sugar, opposed to the wine that was subject to fraud (thanks Wikipedia!). I've already seen in the comments same reference for German wines.
So where really lies the problem?
Is the term polluted? I agree. But I know even better example of inflammatory term!
If I say that I am feminist, I’ll hear: „but you’re not ugly, fat, full of hatred towards men…”.
If we take a natural wine that is not funky, you’ll hear: „but it’s not hazy, stinky, weird…”.
Same story for me. Both terms have combative nature. They reveal the hidden secrets. I think we shouldn’t be afraid to use them even if we are tired of explaining it over and over again. This is our only weapon to help the others to understand how the things are. As they are.
Even good wineshops make fair points when they say there is no real definition of what a Natural wine is. My purchasing experience has been very mixed, from some of the best wine I have tasted to stuff that tastes and smells as you'd imagine a puddle in a farmyard would. And at very high prices too.
Thought provoking. I chuckle at one of your observations, "Then there is the term’s combative nature. If natural wine is ‘natural’, it implies that other wines are unnatural." The only people who think that are insecure people. When a wine, for instance, says "Old Vine," it does not imply that wines made from young vines are not so good. When it says "Unoaked," it is not an insult to oak aged wines. A natural or low intervention wine is, simply, something that just *is*: A low intervention or natural style wine made by growers and vintners by choice, and which many consumers prefer, just like they might prefer the color blue or a wine without oak. Most arguments against natural style wines are a crock because wine, like everything else that is crafted or manufactured, is a matter of taste. If people didn't like them, the category, loosely defined or not, wouldn't exist. It doesn't take a lot of brain power to understand that.
Of course I agree with you, but it never ceases to amaze me that many highly educated wine professionals will use these repetitive and vacuous arguments against natural wine, acting as if they are passing on some kind of innovative or original thought.
I genuinely believe this has something to do with the seemingly controversial term natural wine, because I don't remember hearing the same arguments in the early 2000s in London, when I first started learning about wine and going to tastings etc. It was only once "the movement" got going, and "the term" became ensconced that opinions became so polarised. At least this is how I see and remember it unfolding.
Though to the point of this article, the way we choose to use language colors our perceptions whether we're fully conscious of the influence or not. For example, "unoaked" might be a neutral way to inform consumers the wine isn't oaked, but if the winey chose to say "oak free", that's suggests consumers want wine that's "free" from oak, thus passive agressively slamming oaked wine, or at least oaked versions of that type of wine. Language can be subtle, while still having profound impact due to those subtleties.
The use of the word "natural" is controverial for that reason and also because it's such a powerful marketing term - people very much want to believe they're buying and consuming something "natural", so this then becomes a double criticism, that it's claiming to be something it isn't entirely, while benefitting from the hyperbole without shame. No doubt "plain" wine and "low intervention" wine would never have quite the same marketnig impact, though they'd be far more accurate.
"Marketing" is part of the business, Dave. There's nothing wrong with it. You sell "natural" wine just like you sell "Barefoot Fruitscato" or "Meiomi Pinot Noir." If you're offended, then there's something wrong with you. To say a minimal intervention wine is being critical of conventional wine is ridiculous.
These aren't my own personal thoughts or feelings, just observations on pretty well documented human psychology and behavior - which by its very well known and everyday reality is far from "something wrong with" anyone. And a decent segment of those who jumped on the "Natural Wine" bandwagon absolutely, actively marketed their wines as something better than and "more natural" than all wines not under their banner. Which has always been disengenuous if not outright false.
Psychology, disengenuousness? Good grief, who cares? GEICO and State Farm advertise their insurance companies as being "better" than others. There are "burger wars" between McDonald's, Burger King, Wendy's, et al. Coca-Cola vs. PepsiCo, Samsung vs. Apple, or the bloodiest battle of all, Republicans vs. Democrats. The consumer isn't stupid, Dave, they understand the concept of competition. How do you expect brands to differentiate themselves? "Marketing" is not inherently "bad," it's reality, as much for gigantic commercial wineries as for tiny, handcraft brands driven by low intervention consciousness.
Pepsi and CocaCola did authentically hate each other at certain points, so much so that the “Cola Wars” made it into Billy Joel’s “We Didn’t Start the Fire”, a song entirely about humanity’s neverending combustability. The Burger Wars of the 80’s and 90’s were the same - the companies did authentically hate each other due to the competition (or, arguably, the style of competition.) Samsung and Apple went through a period where they were letigious to an absurd degree against each other.
Acknowledging all that, and pointing out that it doesn’t have to be that way, and that it often occurs if/when marketing goes beyond a certain expected nastiness, is just being observant.
Obviously, a lot of negativity always comes from the conventional side of the industry. It's as if they have something to "protect." I find that laughable, like an elephant afraid of a mouse, since at any given time the conventional industry always dominates the market. Changes in sales as well as attitude come excruciatingly slow, but they eventually get there. Remember, 10-20 years ago, when criticism of Biodynamic farming was at a peak of nastiness? These days you hear fewer peeps coming out of the mouths of naysayers; most likely because, as time goes by, even skeptics have to admit that many of the absolute finest wines in the world are, in fact, products of BD, natural or minimal intervention consciousness. Just yesterday I was at two different vineyard estates in Sonoma C., one which has received enormous acclimation for BD farmed wines, and the other which has been eschewing BD fundamentals such as composting yet has had just as much recent success with contemporary regenerative practices such as year-round cover cropping, animal husbandry and roller-crimping. Bottom line, vintners need to continue to do what is best for their individual terroirs, never mind the mindless nincompoops who don't quite get how site-specific ultra-premium winemaking is, nor value the time honored credo that the finest wines in the world are the ones that are absolutely original and unique unto themselves, not the same-ol'-same-ol'.
Manu Guillot at Guillot Broux is well versed in the early history and might have thoughts on the changes in language in the 10's. His grandparents were part of the group of people in the original group who consulted with Chauvet and applied some of the things Chauvet taught. They went on to found the first organic certification groups in Burgundy, if my understanding is correct.
Before the 2012 SAINS group the Association de Vins Naturel existed. I have interviews with some of the organizers on the subject from that time, as well as Jean-Marie Puzelat, Guy Bossard, and Jean Schaetzel. I never thought to analyze the language for Nature / Naturel, but it might be insightful. I don't see them on Ask a Winemaker so I might not have posted. I'll have to search.
One other observation around Chauvet that you evoke but which people don't always appreciate is that in post war France, chemicals were the answer to the devastation of the prior decade and along with tractors, they came pouring in from the US. He was responding to the widespread industrialization of agriculture in the post war world and there were massive changes happening.
Most of the conversations I've had with families who converted to organics early start with stories from '55 or so and they say "grandma and grandpa started to notice things" including one baking family who said that their bread rose differently than it had in the past. I mention that because despite 20 years of conversations, I can't say that I truly understand the social, economic or emotional (post war) context in which Chauvet was working. When I hear his name used, I always have a sense of a much larger and difficult to imagine historical context. I appreciate that you note how his work at the moment was different than how we see it today.
Thank you so much for all this great info Damien. I will try to follow up with Manu, I don't know if you have a contact (to share privately of course, you can DM me here on Substack if you want). And if you dig anything interesting up from your interviews I would be so curious. I think this switch from "nature" to "naturel" was significant, but hey, I could also be completely wrong.
There is much that I left out of this piece, I wanted to keep it short and to the point. But one really interesting nugget (that I'm sure you're very much aware of) is that Chauvet came from quite a classical wine background. He created the ISO tasting glass, and pioneered the idea of describing wines by their aromas and flavours. So in some sense he actually created a lot of the mainstream wine world's paraphernalia, which the natural wine community is now seeking to dismantle.
In German practice and later German Wine Law wine, Naturwein referred to wine from musts to which neither sugar nor water had been added. The term was banished from the 1971 Wine Law that is still largely in force (which law also outlawed must-watering). In that sense, the term was consistent both with “natural” as unadorned or unadulterated, as well as with the connotation “in its natural state.”
If one researches uses of “vin nature” for most of the 20th century and before, one finds it generally used to reference the fact that a wine had not been chaptalized, and only occasionally as a means of distinguishing flavored and fortified wines (such as Vermouth) from those that are neither.
Thanks for mentioning this David. Andreas Wickhoff MW was telling me about the same thing, and even showed me a label from the 1970s (I guess it must have been 70 or 71 then) with the term "naturwein" written on it. And yes I think it's very relevant to the history of how this developed: the gradual change from natural (in various languages) meaning without additives, to meaning a whole lot more (or a whole lot vaguer).
Fascinating discussion. As you point out, the false friend analogy (especially "natural / unnatural") has led to a lot of acrimony and misunderstanding.
I was criticized years ago for writing that natural wine is too often "an excuse for lazy winemaking." Truth is, if you're not going to use commercial yeasts, tannins, acids and other additives to "correct" a wine, you have to be meticulous and fastidious in your winemaking, or Nature will throw in its own additives -- as in, microbial faults. (The vinegar analogy.) Made with care, low-intervention, additive-free vin nature can be thrilling.
The most toxic additive to wine is ideology.
Absolutely!
"Truth is, if you're not going to use commercial yeasts, tannins, acids and other additives to "correct" a wine, you have to be meticulous and fastidious in your winemaking"
- I would just add that you have to be even more meticulous and fastidious in your vineyard work. Most commercial winemaking tricks are there to cover up or correct for sub-standard or otherwise sub-optimal grapes.
I used to laugh at "Wine is made in the vineyard," because it seems like a "Well, duh!" statement. But I came to realize that it reflected an important shift in the wine zeitgeist, as it were, away from a clean-cut, well-heeled and almost certainly white "winemaker" working in the winery, photographed in the barrel room (new oak symbolizing prosperity and no-expense-spared-for-quality winemaking) to a sweaty, weathered and often non-white vineyard worker tending the grapes.
I never like to blame the media, because I'm part of it, but the glorification of the winemaker must have contributed to this misperception. The best wines have always been made through a partnership between vineyard and winery, but somehow the balance became skewed for awhile.
Availability of all those additives to correct wines also devalued the vineyard, and to use my own phrase, became an excuse for lazy winemaking.
Yes, I think it was also part of a paradigm shift in farming in general. I've spoken to a lot of old-timers about this, in various European countries. I remember Portugal someone telling me "well, we realised when this salesman came with the herbicides, it was great - we didn't have to do any vineyard work any more. We just sprayed the maximum amount that he recommended and that was that."
I just had a chuckle when I scrolled back and read your piece from a couple weeks ago and saw you saying the exact same points I made here, only much more eloquently.
Well, it's a theme that I'm quite obsessed with, this is true.
And thank you for the compliment!
Very interesting article! I too have battled with this especially when I was a caviste in Paris. “Vin nature” can be a divisive term in a shop with mixed bottles. Since I leaned towards minimalist wines, I always sold them as such, “vin minimaliste”. Sometimes even just mentioning the word organic would set people off. Oh well, you can lead a horse to water and so on but consumers are influenced from many different medias. Us wine professionals can only try to guide them.
A real eye-opener and written up eloquently as usual, thanks Simon!
Thank you for reading Allard!
Also to consider the Naturwein movement of the German winemaker of the XIX that were a gainer the addition for sugary water solution in unripe white must (ref. wine of Germany, 2024)
Absolutely, I think you and David S are referring to the same thing in the comments here.
Thank for that great article that left me thinking for hours! And still, I am not fully convinced that we have an issue with mistranslation...
Let’s start with the language.
Word „nature” in French can be both adjective and noun. When it comes to adjective, it’s used to talk about food, dishes, drinks that are served, sold or consumed as they are, without any addition. Noun is not in the centre of our interest, but we can’t turn our heads from it. Its meaning is close to English word nature. It means among others natural world, so unspoilt wilderness echoes somehow in it. If we switch to English, we will read according to Cambridge Dictionary that „natural food or drink is pure and has no chemical substances added to it and is therefore thought to be healthy”. No additions seems to be our mantra.
OK, so let’s stick to this definition: plain, without any addition.
Plain yoghurt makes sense in English, but plain tea (without milk or lemon) not really.
In French both (yaourt nature, thé nature) are perfectly fine as they are.
In English natural beer sounds odd, but natural mineral water doesn’t.
Let’s make it worse: some plain yoghurts are labelled natural. And even worse: some of them contains things that probably are not supposed to be in plain or natural yoghurt (I mean additions that are not chemical substance, but which are not yoghurt’s essence, i.e. skim milk powder).
This is why I think that from linguistic point of view natural wine is not a false friend, it’s just an ordinary equivalent of „vin nature”.
Language tries its best to englobe reality, but the reality is an infinite tangle.
It would be a fascinating research to see if there was a switch from vin nature to vin naturel or if both terms were perfectly interchangeable since the beginning. Term vin naturel was already used at the beginning of XIX to indicate wine without added sugar, opposed to the wine that was subject to fraud (thanks Wikipedia!). I've already seen in the comments same reference for German wines.
So where really lies the problem?
Is the term polluted? I agree. But I know even better example of inflammatory term!
If I say that I am feminist, I’ll hear: „but you’re not ugly, fat, full of hatred towards men…”.
If we take a natural wine that is not funky, you’ll hear: „but it’s not hazy, stinky, weird…”.
Same story for me. Both terms have combative nature. They reveal the hidden secrets. I think we shouldn’t be afraid to use them even if we are tired of explaining it over and over again. This is our only weapon to help the others to understand how the things are. As they are.
Interesting, I do think you have hit on an important point with which many of my French friends would agree.
Even good wineshops make fair points when they say there is no real definition of what a Natural wine is. My purchasing experience has been very mixed, from some of the best wine I have tasted to stuff that tastes and smells as you'd imagine a puddle in a farmyard would. And at very high prices too.