Have you been wondering if “natural” wine might be the thing for you? We haven’t either. Nonetheless, in the pursuit of greater knowledge, we did a little reading. The short-story version is that natural wine is not made using additives that regular wine makers use. (The exception is sometimes the use of sulfites to help preserve the wine.) In regular wine, additives are used to keep what goes into the bottle the same as what we end up drinking.The upshot is that natural wine won’t likely age well because wild yeasts and microbes may come alive in the bottle and give the wine a kombucha-like tang or even a barnyard-y flavor.
Traditional wine lovers generally prefer to let a good wine age and mellow which the additives allow them to do without changing the other characteristics. And traditional wine can also be organic meaning the grapes weren’t subjected to pesticides.
So add natural wine to your grape-based options. More choices is better.
- Jet Cannon