“The World of Natural Wine”
I recently bought a copy of The World of Natural Wine ($40 hardback; $20 e-book) by Aaron Ayscough, a book which claims to be “the most comprehensive and definitive guide to the world of natural wine that every wine lover needs” and promises to “explore natural wine in Spain, Italy, Georgia, and beyond.” I picked it up with some excitement: natural wine is a prickly topic and difficult to define. Maybe this book would be a useful and important addition to an understanding of natural wine.
Ayscough is a former sommelier who while working in Paris gained an appreciation of natural wine, inspired in particular by Beaujolais where he has worked harvests. The book is over 400 pages, with many producers listed in detail, and is designed to convert the reader to the wonders of natural wine. There’s a comprehensive overview, lasting 110 pages, of how and why natural wine differs from and betters conventional viticulture and winemaking.
However, the overview falls into the trap that so many discussions of natural wine do: it’s a polemic rather than an argument. Ayscough has a website called Not Drinking Poison, the name of which highlights his subjective approach. In his opinion, all conventional farming has high yields and low quality; a natural wine comes from low yields and is therefore higher quality. What about producers who don’t consider themselves natural but work with low yields? What about champagne producers who are considered natural but have relatively high yields? Can we definitively state that high yields can never result in quality wine? And how do we define low yields? The 22hl/ha of Quarts de Chaume? The 35hl/ha of Grand Cru Burgundy? The 55hl/ha of Cru Classé Bordeaux? Why aren’t all biodynamic or certified organic producers considered “natural”? Who decides who is a natural wine producer and who isn’t? His polemic raises far more questions than it produces answers.
The polemical nature of the book results in ill-considered language, quoting, without question, François Morel, an early champion of natural wine who edits the magazine Le rouge et le Blanc: “The vigneron are peasants…they’re not imbeciles, at least not in their domaines.” Maybe that got lost in translation, but it shouldn’t have been put in print.
Despite being titled The World of Natural Wine, the book almost exclusively focuses on France which in the author’s opinion is “natural wine’s ground zero,” a debatable statement. There are 350 pages dedicated to French natural wine producers, 18 to the rest of Europe, and none to the rest of the world apart from a brief mention of Tony Coturri, a Californian of Italian descent who has been making natural wine since the 1960s, predating France’s “ground zero” which Ayscough defines as Beaujolais in the 1980s.
Other countries in Europe get cursory mention: the Czech Republic is featured but Slovakia not, nor Slovenia. Greece isn’t considered, nor Armenia. The rest of the world is dismissed in a trite sentence: “cultural, historical, and economic factors make it uncommon enough that…new world regions exert, for now, marginal influence on the wider landscape of natural wine.” In writing a book about natural wine, all producers around the world should be supported. There are plenty of producers in the USA, Chile, Argentina, Australia, and South Africa who form part of the natural wine picture. Testalonga in South Africa and Ochota Barrels in South Australia have influenced winemakers around the world.
If this book were called The World of French Natural Wine, it could have been a very useful guide. The profiles of each producer, although randomly selective (a number of Loire producers I expected to feature are absent), are detailed with genuine enthusiasm. But its Francocentric focus and dismissal of other countries undermines the potential global appeal of natural wine and just adds to the confusion around the subject. I’d recommend Natural Wine by Isabelle Légeron, for an equally polemic but more convincing and universal manifesto of natural wine; Amber Revolution by Simon Woolf persuasively brings skin-contact wine from Slovenia, Friuli, and Georgia into the centre of the conversation regarding natural wine. This book just adds to the confusion around natural wine, rather than clarification. Advocates of natural wine should be helping its cause rather than unnecessarily provoking would-be converts. And having read this book, I’m still not sure what natural wine actually is.
