What is natural wine?
Simply put
By definition, wine is a cultural product. You can’t stumble across some wine out in the wild, it requires the intervention of a winegrower to make it from grapes (those guys are natural).
So simply put, natural wine is a wine which is made as naturally as possible:
- No synthetic products: not in the vineyards, not in the cellar, anywhere
- Manual harvesting
- A total sulphur/SO2 level lower than 40mg/L
In other words, we aim for pure fermented grape juice. Yes, this should always be the case, but it’s not that simple. Nature is capricious and we don’t follow its rhythm anymore.
A bit of History
The history of naturally produced wine goes back to Antiquity, well before the arrival of 20th century industrial winemaking techniques, which were doubly amplified by the Second World War: the rapid development of petrochemicals (notably for armaments) and the race for yield (during reconstruction).
In France in the 1980s, the movement for a return to natural wine production was spearheaded by such illustrious figures as the Beaujolais "négociant-éléveur" Monsieur Jules Chauvet, who was also a writer, scientist and fine wine taster. Jules Chauvet was a pioneer, one of those rare human beings for whom the adjective "genius" means something. As early as the 1950s, he was producing natural wines. His methods slowly caught on with curious minds such as Jacques Néauport, itinerant wine producer, and the emblematic Beaujolais winemaker Marcel Lapierre (and many others).
During the 90s, the natural wine movement continued to gain popularity in France, Italy and Slovenia, then spread rapidly across Europe and the world (including the USA and Australia) from the 2000s onwards.
Nowadays
Today - as the general public becomes increasingly aware of the benefits that such production brings to their health and that of our environment - many winemakers are converting their vineyards or opting from the outset for healthy agriculture and natural winemaking methods.
The image below summarises the differences in winemaking methods:
And as we are seeing a wave of greenwashing, keep one thing in mind: free wine doesn’t exist. Either we pay with cash, or we pay the price by damaging the environment.
Orange, the fourth color of wine
What is orange wine?
Orange wine, made exclusively from white grapes, is also called “skin-contact” white; a clue to the origin of this orange color coming precisely from the maceration of the skins with grape juice. Orange wine is therefore a white wine vinified like a red!
While for the majority of modern white wines, the grapes are directly pressed, those used for orange (and red) wine macerate with the skin, seeds, and sometimes stems, for a duration ranging from several days to several months. This maceration, this contact with the solid parts of the grape, gives white wine its orange color.
Origins
Contrary to what's often heard, orange wine is not a new trend. It's an ancient practice, with its modern revival dating back to the 1990s, in the Friuli-Venezia Giulia region, specifically in its cross-border area with Slovenia. The major winemakers behind this revival are Slovens: Gravner, Radikon, and Vodopivec. Since then, many wine producers have followed in their footsteps... including Caaaaaaat!
So, the first white wines were orange wines. It's difficult to pinpoint exactly when they appeared, as it seems these wines existed even before writing (which goes to show how far from a new trend this is). However, it's likely that the origin of orange wine can be traced back to Georgia – known for its terracotta amphora winemaking (qvevri), still practiced today – and then integrated into the winemaking methods of Antiquity. During this period, wine preservation was achieved through the addition of exogenous materials (pine resin, honey...) and/or prolonged maceration to extract the famous polyphenols, powerful antioxidants, from the grapes.
Today
It's not by chance that orange wine is reborn in the realm of natural wines. Tradition is alive, in perpetual motion. It accompanies societal changes, the desire for change in new generations ready to act for their well-being and that of their environment, even in the realm of pleasure.
If you want to taste one of the many examples of orange wine, start with O.G. Caaaaaaat; O.G. for "orange," O.G. for "Original Gangsta," because you now know that orange wine is the O.G. of white wines... and if you still don't understand what we're talking about with this O.G. story, go listen to Ice-T’s album released in 1991.
To learn more about orange wines, taste them at your favorite wine shops and wine bars!
Cheers!