“You find them on the best restaurant lists and even odd examples in local pubs. Today, it distributes 220, and sales are growing fast. In 2007, UK importer Les Caves de Pyrene handled, perhaps, 15 natural producers. Indeed, Oddbins has announced it will stock nine natural wines in selected stores. From Bristol’s Bar Buvette to Edinburgh’s Good Brothers via Brighton’s Plateau or Chester’s Covino, you can find natural wine in most British cities. Leeds has two venues (the other is Ham & Friends) pushing natural wines, and the Reliance will soon open a bar-shop, Wayward.
The magazine Wine Business International (WBI) estimates that natural accounts for less than 2% of global sales, but, in hotspots such as New York, Copenhagen, London and Paris – where a small, fast-growing network of militant bars sell nothing but natural – it is very much a thing.Ī thing that is breaking nationally in Britain, too. Natural wine has been fermenting in France since the 1970s, but recently such epiphanies have turned it into a phenomenon.
With, there are extreme highs and lows, but when you get one that really sings, it’s whoosh …” Nuttall trails off, making a soaring motion with his hand.
“Sulphur mutes everything it makes wine orderly, neat, considered. But, for many, that unpredictability is exciting. It is high-wire winemaking and, as Nuttall concedes, some are “shit”. These are sustainably produced, handmade, wild-fermented wines that wear their idiosyncrasies proudly and change subtly, bottle to bottle. In contrast, natural wine is additive-free, regularly unfiltered and utilises only a tiny amount – if any – of sulphur. Using added sulphur, lab techniques and about 70 legal additives, industrial wines are manufactured to be stable, consistent and, arguably, narrow in their flavours. The reason for this flavour carnival? Additives – or the lack of. Photograph: Christopher Thomond/The Guardian
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