Why Winemakers don't Like the Term Natural
On Moravian grower Dominika Černohorská (Plenér), and the growing denial of a popular term
I keep meeting winemakers who go all Groucho Marx on me. They don’t want to be part of the club that, as far as I can see, they obviously belong to. The latest was Dominika Černohorská, who I met in a beautiful old cellar in the village of Pavlov. No, I didn’t spot any hungry dogs while I was there.
The winery is named Plenér and you’ll find Dominika pouring her wines at fairs such as Karakterre or Bottled Alive. So it doesn’t take long before the N word crops up. And Dominika reacts strongly to that, as we talk in the atmospheric gloom of her barrel cellar. “I don’t think of myself as a natural winemaker” she says, adding “I felt so out of place, the first time I was at Bottled Alive. I was a weirdo for not having cloudy wines”.
This is a related piece that I just published. More on Plenér follows below.
Dominika ticks all the boxes as far as I’m concerned. Her vineyards are worked organically (certified since 2019), wines are wild fermented and (mostly) unfiltered - more about that in a second. The reason her wines aren’t cloudy? Mostly, I suspect, because she favours long lees ageing and doesn’t bottle or sell until a couple of years after vintage. So the wines have time to naturally settle and decant.
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