Natural Wine is Nothing More Than Good Marketing

A deep dive into natural selection, farming, and biodynamics

Beverly Garden’s Park — Rose Garden, October 2019

“Fizzy, unstable wine is universal. It knows no specific style, place, or grape.” — It’s Only Natural, Tim Gaiser, MS

I recently returned from a long trip to Paris. As my wife and I are interested in exploring culture through food, we spent a lot of time at restaurants and cafes.

On the flight, I had read an excellent piece by Master Sommelier, classical musician, and educator Tim Gaiser. I met him before as the instructor of my CMS Level 1 Class, and respect his way of thinking. His piece was about “natural wine,” the viticultural trend of the late 2010s, though it has been going on for far longer.

In Paris, natural wine is everywhere.

S’il vous plaît. Vin Rouge, pas naturel

The Nature in Natural Wine

Just what is natural wine exactly? I appreciate Tim’s definition:

“Natural wine is loosely defined as wine made with minimal intervention and without added sulfur.” Notice how he utilizes the term “loosely.” That’s because to be natural wine, you simply need to call it thus.

To understand natural wine we must first understand biodynamics. Natural wine is a clade upon the branch of thought called biodynamics, an “alternative” agricultural practice that aims to be the intersection between organics and spirituality.

Biodynamics

Biodynamics argues that the addition of free sulfur or any intervention following the fermentation of grapes is harmful to wine; that winemaking should be as hands-off as possible.

When I visited winemaker Bruno De Concilis at his property in Cilento, Campania last year, he gave me a curious definition. Bruno was the highlight of the trip, as he is well known for making interesting wines, and he judges a natural wine competition. He is moving toward biodynamics himself, doing things like stuffing an animal horn with cow dung and burying it in the ground.

Experience of a lifetime at Bruno’s Table, Ciento, Campania 2018

Biodynamics is not a natural practice. Biodynamics is a type of monoculture — which means growing or producing a single crop, livestock at scale — and monoculture is inherently unnatural. Especially if every species involved is a graft, a hybrid of two or more species, which in the case of wine is necessary to stave off extinction. Vineyards in Europe would be a rare thing to see today without genetic engineering.

Hazelnut orchard outside Paestum, Campania 2018 — Monoculture

In the 19th Century, the Phylloxera aphid ate 90% of European grapevines in a single year. Only grafts, cuttings from an aphid resistant American rootstock with genetic resistance duck taped to the European species now survive. This hybrid now flourishes across the European continent. The idea that it is “natural” is flawed from the start.

Modern agriculture has been unnatural since Mesopotamia. During the onslaught of Phylloxera, burying live toads to remove poison thought to be in the ground was seriously attempted, so it’s understandable how the idea of biodynamics took root. The day is coming where grafting is long dead, considered analogous to a lobotomy; the vineyards of the future will be designed to withstand climate change and grow in laboratories.

Biodynamics came from a man named Rudolf Steiner, an Austrian born in 1866 who claimed among other things that he could communicate with the spiritual world.

It is based upon the faulty foundation that additions to monoculture can solve it’s design problems. Steiner had some interesting ideas, but most of them are demonstrably false. Rudolf Steiner was extremely intelligent, but he lived in the 19th century and could not accept that natural selection, divorced from the spiritual realm, is the primary driver of evolution.

“To me, Darwinism appeared in its leading ideas as scientifically impossible. I had little by little reached the stage of forming for myself a conception of the inner man. This was of a spiritual sort.” — The Story of My Life, Chapter III, Rudolf Steiner

Fertilizer, and by extension nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium are the backbone of monoculture organic or otherwise. When studies have tried to prove that biodynamic agriculture is superior to organic agriculture using measures of soil health, the results have been inconclusive. Many biodynamic adherents cite the Mader 2002 study as an example of how the soil biodiversity is greater in a biodynamic environment than a conventional one. However, this is also exactly what you would expect.

Yet the problem in agriculture has not been a lack of nutrients, but a lack of the proper biology to make those nutrients available to plants. The total extractable nutrient level is in excess in most soils examined so far. But the biology has been destroyed. — The Compost Tea Brewing Manual, Fifth Edition, Elaine R. Ingham, PhD

Biodynamics proponents do things like fertilize with cow manure, fermented with valerian root and yarrow blossoms, at different stages according to the lunar calendar. It’s probable that quality organic fertilizer pre-fermented will create the same effect, regardless of how much moonlight is shining or if it’s inside a horn when applied. One could likely replicate the same results with algae, seaweed, chicken manure, bat guano, or any other number of pre-fermented organic fertilizers. If the source of nitrogen is organically derived or synthesized in a lab will the grapes come out any different? At this point, the scientific answer is has been — no.

“All management practices were the same in all plots, except for the addition of the preparations to the biodynamic treatment. No differences were found in soil quality in the first six years. Nutrient analyses of leaf tissue, clusters per vine, yield per vine, cluster weight, and berry weight showed no differences.” Soil and Winegrape Quality in Biodynamically and Organically Managed Vineyards.

Biodynamics gets an A for attempting to rebuild soil biology which can be destroyed through monoculture. Yet Biodynamic farming has not been demonstrated superior to organic agriculture in any study in viticulture. It actually resulted in significantly lower yields than conventional fertilizers in a 21-year study, which is precisely what one would expect, given plants need high levels of nitrogen, potassium, and phosphorus, which is very difficult to sustain naturally over vast expanses of monoculture.

If you accept that all life is connected, and began with a common ancestor, you will grasp the fact that biology is in a constant state of modification. Human beings are a part of the process, as well as the product. To pretend that we can remove ourselves from our role in selection is a fantasy; at this point in history, our efforts and actions are visible everywhere, even from outer space. Biodynamics was a great idea, but science has moved on. Wine drinkers need to follow.

Intervention

The demonizing of intervention is what troubles me most. Let me provide an example of why.

The Rosaceae family of plants encompasses 4,828 species; everything from apples, pears, and cherries, to almonds and strawberries. All in one family. I like to focus on strawberries because they aren’t a berry, they are delicious, and they illustrate the idea that without modification the so-called natural world would be very different.

French spy and naturalist Amédée-François Frézier found the particularly interesting species Fragaria chiloensis on a voyage to South America. It was being cultivated by Chileans. In 1712 he wrote: “They there cultivate entire fields of a type of strawberry differing from ours by their rounder leaves, being fleshier and having strong runners. Its fruit are usually as large as a whole walnut, and sometimes as a small egg. They are of a whitish-red colour and a little less delicate to the taste than our woodland strawberries.”

He returned to Europe with samples of this species, and in the 1750s it was hybridized with Fragaria virginiana, the common American strawberry to create the modern version we enjoy today. It is difficult to argue with the results, borne from a series of events that cannot be described as natural as based upon artificial selection. Selection is the engine of evolution, and it occurs at all levels, from the molecular to the vineyard manager’s decisions in clonal vs. massal selection.

It only takes a quick read of Ian D’Agata’s tome Native Wine Grapes of Italy to realize that few other species contain more human manipulation than those belonging to Vitaceae, the family which includes the grapevine. Intervention, when it serves to increase sample diversity increases the evolutionary fitness of the overall population.

This is all to say that intervention can be a very good thing, genetic or otherwise. Undeniably a tremendous amount of intervention will be required by ours and future generations to save what is left of nature from total destruction by descendants of homo sapiens.

But beyond just being “good,” intervention is also “natural.” It’s perhaps the most natural thing that could possibly happen to a plant. Thus, the notion of non-intervention as something that keeps wine more “natural” is nonsensical and fallacious.

Sulfur

What about sulfur? In the Hebrew Bible, it is referred to as “brimstone” which might be the cause of some of the aversion to its use, yet the fifth most abundant element on Earth that gives scent to grapefruit and garlic is an essential element for all life.