46 JULY 2020
BOTTLESERVICEOMETIMES IT TAKES a large issue to put a small issue
into perspective. Take the ongoing wine-world battles
about natural versus conventional wine. This some-
times vitriolic black-and-white commentary, which
can be boiled down to “natural wine is flaw-ridden
mouse-cage-smelling crap” versus “conventional wine is chemi-
cally steroided soulless corporate garbage,” really started to seem
a bit ... oh, beside the point back when the coronavirus upended
everything in March.
The basic tenets behind natural wines are essentially organically
grown grapes and as little intervention as possible—no fining, no
filtering, no commercial yeast, no mechanical harvesting, and
minimal or no sulfur. They run the gamut from clean and pristine
to cloudy and in-your-face funky. Some people find them a near-
religious calling; some feel they are a threat to everything they
consider to be wine (and a lot of people think they sound kind of
interesting and are curious to try them). Twitter being the id pit
that it is, we were only two or three weeks into the pandemic
before the more intolerant people on either side were lobbing
missiles at each other again.
But why all the drama? What is it about natural wine that’s so
polarizing? Personally, I’d say that it’s because it calls into question
a crucial, taken-for-granted assumption about wine: How it tastes
is more important than how it’s made. (The term “natural wine”
itself also annoys some people, as it implies that all other wine is
somehow unnatural, which may be why “minimal intervention”
and “raw” wine have gained ground as alternative names.)Regardless, all this ruckus has happened with-
out there actually being that much natural
wine around. Zev Rovine, one of the top im-
porters of natural wine, says, “Even if you took
a big estimate of the sales for our whole com-
munity, I’d max it out at like $70 million in
wholesale revenue [in the U.S.]. What percent-
age is that of the wine industry? Way less than
1%, right?” In fact, “way less” is an understate-
ment: The number Rovine suggests isn’t 1% of
U.S. wholesale wine revenue, but one tenth of
1%. It’s minuscule. Yet the amount of press
devoted to natural wine has been huge, and
sales have been skyrocketing. I’m reminded of
Hermia in A Midsummer Night’s Dream: “A n d
though she be but little, she is fierce.”
The other thing I was thinking about while
doing my end-of-the-world pandemic isolation
stint was how fiercely I missed going out for a
drink. (Staying in for a drink? That I had plenty
of). The spirit of wine, after all, is social. Wine
brings people together; that’s its great magical
property. And natural or conventional, it
doesn’t mix well with intolerance. I think
that’s particularly why I was missing hanging
out at places like Brooklyn’s The Four Horse-
men. Though it’s a do-not-miss destination for natural wine fans,
wine director Justin Chearno’s list strikes a balancing point be-
tween camps. “Sure, most of the wine we love happens to be pretty
noninterventionist,” he says. “But if I get an offer for a really in-
teresting conventional Barolo that people will really enjoy, I’ll bring
it in. We’re not dogmatic. We’re a taste-great-first place.”
Open-mindedness is the operating principle for most
forward-looking wine bars, if that’s even the right thing to call
this movement of small, sommelier-founded (or wine-forward)
places. At Ungrafted in San Francisco, which Rebecca Fineman, a
Master Sommelier, opened with husband and fellow sommelier
Chris Gaither, the list is reversed from The Four Horsemen’s: Natu-
ral bottles are the minority rather than the majority. But there are
plenty of both. What Fineman looks for, she says, is “a mix of in-
teresting and off-the-beaten-path, with some things that are very
classic. I get frustrated by the polarities I see in the industry. You
go to a Michelin-star restaurant, and all they have is $30 by-the-
glass famous names; then you go to a cool wine bar, and everything
on the list is natural-funky and $10 a glass. There needs to be an
in-between.”
Here’s to the in-between. Personally, I’ve long had a love-hate
relationship with natural wine. The philosophy behind it—organic,
unmanipulated, small-scale, real—makes absolute sense to me. But
often the wines leave me cold. To take one example, the yeast
Brettanomyces, or brett, widely considered a winemaking flaw, is
common in some natural wines. For me, a large amount of brett
obliterates the character of a wine; “sheep’s butt” is not terroir. OnSSpecial thanks to Golden Age
Wine in Birmingham,
Alabama, where we shot the
photographs for this story.