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Despite being an age-old facilitator of communion, wine has never been known for its accessibility – not least of all because of the industry’s dense, confusing vernacular.
The recent trend toward natural wine, and all of the lingo that comes with it, only further muddies the waters. From terms that feel interchangeable (natural, raw, naked, organic) to descriptors that sound more like trademarks than they do qualifiers (biodynamic, low-intervention), navigating a natural wine list these days is like walking across an unfamiliar room in the dark.
First, some baselines. In order to qualify as natural, sommelier Kieran Coyne of Toronto’s Union restaurant tells me, a wine only has to meet three conditions: “That the farming is organic, that the yeasts are wild, that the sulphur is kept to a minimum.”
Organic wines in Canada follow a slightly different set of criteria. According to Frogpond Farm, an organic winery in Niagara-on-the-Lake, Ontario, a wine can be Certified Organic here if it uses organic grapes and additives, and up to 100 ppm (parts per million) of total SO2/sulfites.
In other words, organic wine producers can use commercial yeasts and other additives, as long as they’re organic; natural wines depend on the ambient yeasts from the vineyard and winery.
As for biodynamic, another word often heard in the same settings – it’s a world unto its own.
The term describes wines made following the early 20th-century teachings of Austrian occultist Rudolf Steiner, where the focus is cultivating soil health by taking cues from lunar and planetary cycles and adjusting farming practices accordingly.
In short: The Venn diagram isn’t quite a circle, but between natural, organic and biodynamic wines, there are significant overlaps.
To complicate things further, the definitions change depending on where you are.
“Each wine growing region has its own rules and legislation governing wine production and the labelling of wine,” says the Frogpond Farm website. No wonder it’s all so muddy.
Under the added mire of trendiness, the “natural” label has become loaded, even for those who are fluent in wine.
“A lot of people perceive natural wine to be wine that tastes [and] looks a certain way,” says Laura Jane Faulds, sommelier and freelance wine writer. “I try to think about natural wine in terms of actual wine-making practices, rather than a style.”
To avoid colouring her customers’ perceptions of a wine, Faulds eschews “natural” (and “raw” and “naked,” which she tells me are the same thing) for “low-intervention,” a term that references an objective process rather than an interpretive quality.
“Nothing added, nothing taken away” is a common refrain in the natural wine world, a fallback definition in a space that lacks standardization. It is as much of a philosophical stance on wine-making as it is a production approach, a commitment to letting nature do its thing.
“There’s lots of tricks to fix wines in cellars,” Coyne explains. In other words, the interventions: stirring the lees, aging in new oak barrels that impart their own flavour, adding acids or sugars to the juice to get it just right. It’s how mass wineries produce wines that taste identical, year after year.
“That’s what natural winemakers are against,” Coyne adds, “Doing all these things to manipulate flavours. They just want to bring something unadorned and raw.”
Wine expresses fascinating things when it’s not tampered with. There are certain tasting notes that feel unique to naturals – wines allowed to express their true characters, unadulterated flaws and all.
A consistent note that Faulds detects in natural whites is “overgrown wildflower gardens”; one that comes up often for Coyne is acetone nail polish remover. Then there’s the “barnyard funk” that’s almost become a trope for the category. This note, Coyne tells me, is the work of a wild yeast strain called Brettanomyces. “It’s either in the winery, or it’s not.”
Some drink natural wine because they’re sensitive to sulfites, others simply because it’s what their favourite restaurants are pouring. I prefer natural wine because it tastes alive, with a shape-shifting dynamism I rarely get from the conventional offerings at my local LCBO.
Drinking a new bottle of natural wine is like meeting a person who is wholly themselves, with no regard for social conventions or etiquette – sometimes they’re not for me, too eccentric or too bold, but they’re always fascinating, and worth a try