As Food & Wine columnist Lettie Teague has written, to a growing number of zealots, “natural wine is not just what you drink with dinner, it’s a crusade . . . against ‘industrial wine,’ a reclamation of the honest and handmade.”
Among other departures, “natural” wines are typically made “without intervention” and unfiltered. The strategy is supposed to preserve hitherto overlooked qualities that natural proponents claim have been lost through modern methods. ...
Making wine the “natural” way usually yields a clunky product — at their worst, as rough-edged as the eerie, grape-based beverage my paternal grandfather and uncles once made in their Brooklyn back yards and cellars.
Often they’re inherently unstable. As Reynard sommelier Lee Campbell gleefully told an interviewer, they can change character not only from year to year, but day to day — “that yeast is really showing its ass today,” she laughed. At prices up to $100, some of us prefer an orderly and predictable ass.
Indeed, in my experience, wines made with a judicious amount of technology and science are usually more reliable and tastier than those made "naturally."
