I started thinking about what is now being described as ‘natural wines’ about five or six years ago after I read Alice Feiring’s book The Battle for Wine and Love: Or How I Saved the World from Parkerization, in which the former wine and travel columnist for Time magazine made her case for preserving authenticity and diversity in wines. In her wine travels she – and I can relate – experienced too many winemakers all over the world trying to make wine to please the palate of one of the world’s most influential wine critics, Robert Parker. I don’t have to spell out where the wine world would be without diversity.

In search of authenticity

In my own wine travels I continue to seek wines made from the original methods and traditions, because unfortunately our market is saturated with too much “sameness”. Most of the local importers represent “huge corporate winery owners” whose objective is to sell as many cases as possible. In order to do this, tremendous research is carried out to find out exactly what the majority of people want to drink and then “build” a wine for that palate. Take note of the amount of new ‘red blends’ on the market now. So I was most happy to have received an invitation recently from Annie Gourion of Vinum Society to taste a range of natural wines from France.

What are Natural Wines?

The simplest way to explain this is to say that it’s wine made the natural way nature intended, meaning it’s made from grapes grown without chemicals and then fermented and aged without the addition of chemicals, enzymes (used to bring out certain flavour profiles), or commercial yeast (used to ensure fermentation and also to influence the aromas and flavours in the wine).

One of the issues causing some concern with the natural wine movement is that there is no governing body. Therefore it can get quite fuzzy as to what is allowed to be classified as natural wines. Technically, natural wines have existed for a very long time. When wine was first made 8,000 years ago, it was not made using packets of yeasts, vitamins, enzymes, reverse osmosis or powdered tannins – some of the many additives and processes used in winemaking worldwide. The importance of history and tradition in Old World wine heritage is in the fact that it emerged before the days of advanced technology – vineyards had to solve problems using natural know-how, as neither machinery nor additives had even been invented. You might ask, how does natural wine differ from ‘organic’ or ‘biodynamic’ ? Wine experts suggest: ‘organic and biodynamic are the tools, natural is the philosophy’.

New World Wines

For the majority of wines consumed in Jamaica, very little is left to nature anymore, as most large wine producers in the new world seem to prefer to create, with a lot of technological assistance, wines that taste the same all the time for their mass market.

What we tasted

Vinum Society’s Annie Gourion offered us a wonderful multicourse lunch, pairing each dish with a natural wine which mainly came from the Loire region in France. Here is what we tried:

Christopher Reckord – Entrepreneur & Wine Enthusiast. Send your questions and comments to creckord@gmail.com. Instagram: @chrisreckord Twitter: @Reckord