What is it with Natural Wine Haters?

I tried to understand the polemic that never stops

Hating on natural wine has become a popular sport for conservative wine writers, journalists, restaurant critics and other miscellaneous blowhards over the past couple of decades. It’s basically shooting fish in a barrel - “let’s find something small and seemingly insignificant that hardly anyone understands, and stamp on it as hard as we can.”

I don’t generally bother to get involved. There’s no point in trying to reason with someone whose core argument is “I don’t like/understand this, so ergo it is bad and no-one else should like it either.”

The latest hatchet job - the usual confused narrative conflating orange wine and natural wine - appeared on the Vanity Fair website last week. The piece is so poor that I can neither bring myself to link to it nor credit the author – they’re not well-known, and let’s hope it stays like that. The venomous level was definitely on the Trumpian scale. Sample sentence:

Orange wine is a low-sulfite con—a prolonged student prank passed off as enlightenment, and like many student pranks, it smells of manure and failure. There is a juvenile glee in rejecting filtration, stability, or even consistency as moral virtues.

Of course this is clickbait pure and simple. More troubling was Konstantin Baum’s recent video The Truth about Natural Wine. Baum has often expressed his dislike for the term natural wine, as he did in our recent interview.