Natural wine is wine made with minimal chemical and technological intervention in growing grapes and making them into wine

Wine

Wine is an alcoholic beverage, made of fermented fruit juice, usually from grapes. The natural chemical balance of grapes lets them ferment without the addition of sugars, acids, enzymes, or other nutrients. Grape wine is produced by fermenting crushed grapes using various types of yeast. Yeast...

. The term is used to distinguish such wine from organic wine

Organic wine

The most widely accepted definition of Organic wine is wine made from grapes grown in accordance with principles of organic farming, which typically excludes the use of artificial chemical fertilizers, pesticides, fungicides and herbicides....

. Organic wine is organic in the sense of having been produced made from organically grown

Organic farming

Organic farming is the form of agriculture that relies on techniques such as crop rotation, green manure, compost and biological pest control to maintain soil productivity and control pests on a farm...

 grapes, but may be subject to chemical and physical manipulation in the winemaking process.

Definitions

In an ideal natural wine, nothing is added and nothing is taken away from the grapes, must or wine. A natural wine may include some or all of the following features:

• Organically or biodynamically grown grapes, with or without certification.
• Dry-farmed, low-yielding vineyards.
• Hand-picked.
• No added sugars, no foreign yeasts, no foreign bacteria.
• No adjustments for acidity.
• No additives for color, mouth-feel, minerality, etc.
• No external flavor additives, including those derived from new oak barrels, staves, chips, or liquid extract.
• Minimal or no fining or filtration.
• No heavy manipulation, such as micro-oxygenation, reverse osmosis
  Reverse osmosis
  Reverse osmosis is a membrane technical filtration method that removes many types of large molecules and ions from solutions by applying pressure to the solution when it is on one side of a selective membrane. The result is that the solute is retained on the pressurized side of the membrane and...
  
  , spinning cone
  Spinning cone
  Spinning cone columns are used in a form of steam distillation to gently extract volatile chemicals from liquid foodstuffs while minimising the effect on the taste of the product...
  
  , cryoextraction.
• Minimal or no added sulphites aka sulfites.

Spirit

Natural wine is an umbrella term for producers who are defined more by what they leave out of their processes at many different points, than by what they put in.
Natural wine is the physical manifestation of the world view

World view

A comprehensive world view is the fundamental cognitive orientation of an individual or society encompassing the entirety of the individual or society's knowledge and point-of-view, including natural philosophy; fundamental, existential, and normative postulates; or themes, values, emotions, and...

 of some producers, whereas for others it is a reaction against the excesses of 20th Century chemical farming and additive based winemaking.
Natural wine producers are interested in the purity

Purity

Purity is the absence of impurity or contaminants in a substance or abstinence from vices in human character.Purity may also refer to:*Purity , an indication of the amount of other gases in a particular gas...

 of their work rather than in the physical perfection

Perfection

Perfection is, broadly, a state of completeness and flawlessness.The term "perfection" is actually used to designate a range of diverse, if often kindred, concepts...

 of the result.

Key individuals

The following people were or are particularly instrumental in the inspiration, production or communication of contemporary natural wine:

• Rudolf Steiner
  Rudolf Steiner
  Rudolf Joseph Lorenz Steiner was an Austrian philosopher, social reformer, architect, and esotericist. He gained initial recognition as a literary critic and cultural philosopher...
  
  , curator of biodynamics.
• Maria Thun, author of the biodynamic calendar.
• Masanobu Fukuoka
  Masanobu Fukuoka
  was a Japanese farmer and philosopher celebrated for his natural farming and re-vegetation of desertified lands. He was a proponent of no-till, no-herbicide grain cultivation farming methods traditional to many indigenous cultures, from which he created a particular method of farming, commonly...
  
  , Japanese philosopher of farming.
• Jules Chauvet
  Jules Chauvet
  Jules Chauvet was a wine négociant. He worked from La Chapelle-de-Guinchay in the Beaujolais.Jules Chauvet was a winemaker and a taster. He also possessed the skills of a chemist, which he obtained at the school of chemistry at Lyon, then with Otto Warburg, with whom he maintained a long...
  
  , developer of carbonic maceration
  Carbonic maceration
  Carbonic maceration is a winemaking technique, often associated with the French wine region of Beaujolais, in which whole grapes are fermented in a carbon dioxide rich environment prior to crushing. Conventional alcoholic fermentation involves crushing the grapes to free the juice and pulp from the...
  
   fermentation, sulphite free winemaking, and author.
• Claude Bourguignon, French agricultural scientist, consultant and author.
• Nicolas Joly
  Nicolas Joly
  Nicolas Joly, born 1945, is a French winegrower in the Loire wine region, and one of the pioneers and leading personalities of the biodynamic wine movement.- Biography :...
  
  , wine producer, head of Renaissance des Appellations Controlees, and spokesman for biodynamics.
• Marcel Lapierre, wine producer, mentor, and early adopter of low to no sulphite winemaking.
• Alice Feiring
  Alice Feiring
  Alice Feiring is an American journalist and author, for several years a wine and travel columnist for Time magazine, and known as an advocate for "natural wine"...
  
  , American writer.
• Josko Gravner, Italian wine producer and mentor.

Controversy

"Natural wine" is considered by critics to be a misleading term. There is no established certification body and the term has no legal status. Winemakers who describe themselves (or are described by others) as "natural" often differ in what they consider to be an acceptable level of intervention. The term might also confuse consumers into assuming that the wine is organically grown.