subject: California Cabernet And The Natural Wine Revolution [print this page] Natural wine can be seen as the natural progression of organic grape growing techniques. Although its meaning is difficult to pin down, the fundamental element of natural wine is that you don't add other stuff. It's just grapes. So while you can get a certified bottle of organic California Cabernet or French Merlot, finding a truly "natural" bottle of wine requires a little more work. That's not to say that there isn't a natural California wine for your taste palette, just that you need to know what it means and what you're getting yourself into before you start.
It all comes down to the stages of turning fruit on a vine into wine in a bottle: growing, harvesting, crushing, fermentation, fermentation sometimes, and bottling. Natural wine makers wants to get the best wine possible without additives, so they will change anything about how each of these steps is executed to make that possible. Organic and natural wine makers will do basically the same chemical-free stuff during the growing stage. The grapes will be chemical and pesticide free when they're ready to pick.
But that's where the similarities end. Natural wine makers will pick the grapes by hand so they don't get any broken grapes that have already started oxidizing. The absence of spoiled fruit means they can get away with adding fractions of a percentage of the amount of sulfites conventional wine makers add to preserve their wine. That's step one. No saving that minor dosage of sulfites until much later enables wild yeast to do its job during fermentation, instead of needing to be chemically produced, added, and supported with external sugars.
A whole host of other chemicals and products get added, processes performance to clarify the color of wine and control its balance, at least when the average bottle is concerned. That's all done away with by natural wine makers. They use as little external product as possible, even getting their yeast from the skins of the grapes themselves. And while the jury is still, probably eternally, out on whether natural wine is "better," it's certainly more free of outside influence on flavor.
The debate about natural wines has touched west-coast makers of everything including California cabernets. But it is far from settled. The essential question is whether modern, chemical refinement and processes should be applied to wine - and food for that matter. People have been making and drinking wine since long before we could manufacture the perfect strain of yeast, for example, so there's nothing wrong with going back to that. Or so the argument goes. On the other hand, controlled yeast does something deliberate and focused, and it is proven safe, argue those on the other side.
So in California, the trend that swept out of France and has garnered a small but vocal and growing following in major wine cities across the world, including New York, has just encouraged some adventurous experimenters. They are trying to figure out what they can naturalize and how that will impact their famous California Cabernets, Merlots, Pinot Noirs, and Chardonnays. While it's not clear how this trend will finally impact the entire wine world, it is obvious that naturalized food production has a strong appeal to certain people.
