Restaurant wine lists are slowly but surely being infiltrated by a new movement: “natural” wine. But what does “natural” actually mean? And why is everyone getting so excited about it?

EatClub has just launched its bars and clubs experience meaning you can enjoy great offers of up to 50% off at your favorite watering holes! Simply filter for drink focused venues, redeem an offer and tap to pay using your EatClub card over the bar.

To commemorate the launch, we have planned a series of posts lifting the lid on some of the more interesting aspects of Australia’s beloved drinking culture.

Born Naturals

There’s not an honest one of us who can say that they haven’t been a little confused by wine gobbledegook at some point or another, but an influx of new terminology over the last few years have added complexities that can leave even seasoned oenophiles out in the cold. It’s no longer enough to know your Sauvignon Blanc from your Shiraz - in order to navigate modern wine lists, you’ll increasingly need to be fluent in the vernacular of what is termed “natural” wine.

The category of “natural” is slightly confusing from the outset - does that therefore imply that some wines are “unnatural?” There is no specific control system for natural wine, such as those that control Champagne, and therefore no specific criteria. Rather than being too literal, it’s more useful to think about it simply as a winemaking style.

Within this, there are two main areas that distinguish wines that are termed “natural” from those that are not: the way it is grown and the way it is made.

Where growing is concerned, the grapes for natural wine will likely be farmed organically and biodynamically, and the same rules apply to viticulture here as they do to agriculture. A minimum of pesticides will be used, or those that are used will be natural. Vines are planted to an organic calendar and with reference to lunar cycles.

Complementary crops and livestock are incorporated, composting is integral. Growers may even incorporate eccentric, almost mystical practices like spraying vines with homeopathic dilutions or ceremonially burying mineral-stuffed cow parts in the vineyards, depending on how literally they’ve taken some of the tenets of biodynamic farming (which can be really quite insane, but that’s a topic for another article).

For the most part though, if it applies to the fruit and veg you get from an organic greengrocer, it applies to the grapes used in natural wine.

In terms of how it is made, there are certain qualities that wines termed natural often share, though they are not prescriptive. If a wine is left to macerate on skins, it will acquire a blush of tannic colour, hence the tendency to also refer to natural wines as “orange.” Others may be lightly filtered or totally unfiltered, giving them a cloudy, sedimentary appearance.

“Minimal intervention” is the key term to unpack here, meaning that they are manipulated as little as possible during the winemaking process, mainly by the absence of additives. Larger winemaking operations will add a variety of yeasts, enzymes and assorted other fun ingredients, but the most notorious uninvited additive are sulphites, often added as a preservative.

Proponents of natural wines claim that the radically lower levels of sulphites in their product serve not just to enhance the drinking experience but to vastly improve the post-drinking experience, i.e. the hangover. Whether or not this is true is debatable, but there is no arguing with the fact that the lack of such processes is a crucial part of what gives natural wine its depth of character.

But really, none of this radically changes the rules of engagement when it comes to selecting something to go with dinner. At the end of the day, natural wine is not a new kind of wine, it’s a growing attitude towards wine; less of a technical term and more of an aesthetic.

It’s an attempt to appreciate the thing in a holistic, warts-and-all fashion that doesn’t try to smooth out imperfections but instead celebrates them, inviting us to appreciate the contents of our glass in ways we might previously have not - which isn’t really that confusing at all.

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