ACT winemakers are experimenting with their craft and returning to the early days of creating the perfect vintage.

It is called natural winemaking and involves little or no intervention while grapes are on the vine, continuing to when they are in the barrel.

Ravensworth winemaker Bryan Martin has been experimenting with natural winemaking for about three years.

He said it was about letting nature take its course.

"We're really not trying to use anything at all, just let the grapes ferment themselves," he said.

"We do use some preservative at the end but just try not to do any other additions, which are things like yeast and bacteria that you can buy."

Mr Martin said it was a "strange area of winemaking", all about taking risks and hoping for the best.

Most natural winemaking is being done on a small scale for a niche market. ( ABC News: Debby Vilensky )

A big part of the natural winemaking process was making white wine the way a red is made - fermented on skins, coming out orange.

Mr Martin was putting his white wine in 700 litre ceramic eggs to ferment and leaving it in there until it tasted good.

"Basically you lock it up, you don't touch it, so there's been no winemaking input," he said.

"It looks very odd, very murky."

Growing niche market for natural winemaking

Lark Hill winemaker Chris Carpenter has also been producing orange wine.

"You see plenty of orange wines that are cloudy and strange looking and can be pretty confronting," he said.

The focus for Mr Carpenter over the last few years has been making his Bungendore vineyard biodynamic.

Instead of chemical fertilisers and sprays, he has opted for mulches and compost, so he does not have to artificially add in, what the chemicals have removed.

Mr Carpenter said for him it was about a quality crop, leading to a quality wine and sustainability.

"There's no point doing something for five years or only 10 years and wearing out the soil and wearing out the vines," he said.

Although winemakers are experimenting with old style natural winemaking techniques, the equipment used is very modern. ( ABC News )

Mr Martin said natural winemaking was a niche market in Canberra at the moment, and because they were in the early days of understanding the process, the finished product could be unpredictable.

"I've tasted a lot of them, probably more I've tasted that I don't like than I do," he said.

As for whether it would catch on and dominate the market, Mr Carpenter said he was not convinced because of the risk,

He said that was why only the smaller labels were having a go.

"This is a tiny segment of an Australian wine market that is quite huge and dominated by incredibly large labels in terms of volume," he said.

"Any growth is fantastic growth, but it'll take a long time before any of this is really mainstream.

"There is no safety net, and if you're a big company you need every safety net you can have, so for small people and small winemaking companies, it's pretty easy to take the extra time and take the risk, but I think that's pretty hard to translate through to a large scale operation."