38 THENEWYORKER,NOVEMBER25, 2019
stable. Beinstock auctioned off his col-
lection of grand-cru Burgundies and
other well-aged wines to help finance
the construction. In 2010, they cut ties
with the Fellowship.
They didn’t advertise Clos Saron as
natural wine, because that wasn’t a
widely understood term in the U.S. In-
stead, Beinstock described
his wines as artisanal, ter-
roir-driven, minimalistic,
or low-intervention. “I was
not thinking about being
green or being politically
correct or about being cool.
To me, it was one thing
only—how do you express
the soil to the fullest ex-
tent possible?” Beinstock
said. “And then, ten years later, came
the natural-wine phenomenon, and we
were discovered.”
I
n 2000, Alice Feiring, a freelance writer,
was hired to create a wine guide for
Food & Wine. “I had to do so much tast-
ing for that book, and I realized that the
wine world was in deep shit,” she told
me. Feiring placed the blame largely on
one man: Robert Parker, the critic be-
hind the influential newsletter The Wine
Advocate. When Parker launched his
publication, in 1982, he considered him-
self an outsider in the snobbish world of
fine wines. His most notable innovation
was grading wines on a hundred-point
scale. “Seeing a wine slapped with a num-
ber was new and startling,” Elin McCoy
writes, in “The Emperor of Wine: The
Rise of Robert M. Parker, Jr. and the
Reign of American Taste,” from 2005. It
was also enormously effective. Consum-
ers intimidated by the mystifying lan-
guage of wine labels now had an easy
way to decide what to buy.
High-scoring bottles often sold out
immediately. Vintages receiving a per-
fect score could quadruple their prices—
which meant that there was strong finan-
cial incentive to make the kind of jammy
and oaky high-alcohol wines that ap-
pealed to Parker’s palate. Wineries around
the world adjusted their processes ac-
cordingly. This homogenizing effect ap-
palled Feiring; Parker-anointed wines,
she wrote, “had no sense of place.” (She
also described wines she disliked as “stu-
pid,” “emasculated,” “some Body Shop
concoction,” “the vinous equivalent of
bottle blonds,” “airbrushed,” and “dead.”)
Like Parker two decades earlier, Fei-
ring saw herself as an outsider, revealing
the wine world’s dirty secrets in several
books and articles. She wrote about the
lab-manufactured yeasts that allow grow-
ers to tweak their grapes’ naturally oc-
curring flavors, the enzymes that shape
aroma and texture, the pow-
dered tannins that enhance
mouthfeel, the colorants
that deepen hues, the filtra-
tion and fining processes
that remove particulate mat-
ter, the sulfites that aid in
preservation, the micro-ox-
ygenation machines that
smooth tannins—or, ac-
cording to Feiring, “turn
wine into baby food”—the reverse-os-
mosis machines that she called “torture
chambers” for wine. (Parker, too, is a prom-
inent critic of filtration, and was an early
champion of several key figures in the
world of low-intervention wine, includ-
ing the importer Kermit Lynch and the
Sonoma winemaker Tony Coturri.)
A countervailing trend had taken
hold in Beaujolais in the nineteen-eight-
ies, where the winemakers Jules Chau-
vet and Marcel Lapierre refused to use
commercial yeasts and added little or
no sulfites during vinification. Elsewhere
in France, there was a growing interest
in biodynamics—a mystical version of
organic farming, based on the agricul-
tural theories of the nineteenth-century
philosopher Rudolf Steiner, which uses
a planting calendar that aligns with the
cycles of the cosmos. But consumers
sometimes assumed that these wines
were of lower quality. One study found
that wines with eco-certifications earned
slightly higher scores from critics but
that listing those certifications on a
wine’s label led, on average, to a twenty-
per-cent reduction in price. Coturri,
who began making natural wines in the
nineteen-sixties, has said that his meth-
ods were long considered a liability, not
a selling point. “I learned quickly that
you couldn’t go in and start talking about
natural yeast and not adding sulfites and
organics,” he told the Web site Sprudge.
“When I did make the mistake of talking
about how the wines were made, how
the grapes were grown, there’s wine shops
in the city that were afraid of the wine.”
By the mid-two-thousands, though,
consumers’ tastes were changing. People
who shopped at farmers’ markets, drank
craft beer, and ate heirloom tomatoes at
farm-to-table restaurants were alarmed
by reports of lab-made yeasts, grapes
doused in the weed killer glyphosate, and
enormous corporate conglomerates. The
qualities that had once made natural
wines seem unsophisticated or suspect—
the obscure grapes, the rustic producers,
the occasionally funky taste—began to
look like authenticity. Natural wine fit
in with the urban appetite for move-
ments that evoked a slower, more earth-
bound past. (Steiner was also the father
of Waldorf schools, which take the same
holistic, experiential approach to educa-
tion that biodynamics does to farming.)
The vines were often dry-farmed—that
is, cultivated without irrigation—mak-
ing them drought-tolerant and better
suited to a changing climate.
Foodie pilgrims who travelled to Co-
penhagen to eat at Noma found a wine
list with no Bordeaux and plenty of
wines that were “wild” enough to match
the food. “These past few years, it’s out
of control,” Feiring said. “There was no
place to drink wine in Boston—then,
last year, Rebel Rebel opened. Last year,
in Houston, Light Years opened. There
was one place to drink in Austin. Now
there are several.”
To label a wine “organic” or “biody-
namic” requires following a long list of
rules and paying for certification; to call
it “natural” is merely to make a general
claim of virtue. “Stasis, purity, unchang-
ing essence—these are at the heart of
the natural myth. Natural means the
original version—and, as with holy books,
original means best,” the scholar of reli-
gion Alan Levinovitz writes, in his forth-
coming book, “Natural: How Faith in
Nature’s Goodness Leads to Harmful
Fads, Unjust Laws, and Flawed Science.”
But turning grape juice into wine means
intervening in the course of nature. What
people mean when they declare a wine
to be natural, then, depends on a con-
stellation of factors: the soil, the grapes,
irrigation or its absence, the harvest meth-
ods, the amount of sulfur, what machines
were or were not involved—even, per-
haps, the winemaker’s personality and
politics, and where and how the bottles
were sold. There are many ways to be
virtuous, or to fail at it.
This vagueness is part of what has al-
