“There is no legal definition of natural wine,” Michel Bettane, one of France’s most influential wine critics, told me. It is a fantasy of marginal producers.” Robert Parker, perhaps the world’s most powerful wine critic, has called natural wine an “undefined scam”. Yet, as natural wine advocates point out, the way most wine is produced today looks nothing like this picture-postcard vision. The wine press tended to describe natural wine as if it were a minefield – with a few safe, conventional choices among a field of explosively bad bottles. When I spoke to Jay Rayner (no natural wine fan, to put it mildly) he drew a parallel between natural wine and the success of the organic food movement.

Source: The Guardian May 15, 2018 04:52 UTC