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”.

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This is a related piece that I just published. More on Plenér follows below.

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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.