any consumers realize that we live in a Golden Age – the consumer has never had it so good. We have twenty times the choices we had two decades ago, and the incidence of poor wines has nearly vanished. If what you are after is drinkable quaff, you will find it more consistently and cheaply than ever before. And the New World has learned how to make Big Wines, just as workaday Hollywood now pumps out Action/Adventure blockbusters with machine-like dependability.

But the new millennium hosts a growing discontent with impact wines that lack finesse, fruit-forward styles which die young, and global monster wines which are hard to tell apart. The internet now resounds with voices demanding ”somewhere-ness”. Many critics, newly aware of the recent technological revolution in winemaking, have sought to demonize new winemaking techniques as sources of shallowness and sameness.

These arguments haven’t gone smoothly.

Two circumstances lie at the root of the considerable confusion which surrounds this subject. First, the rapidly expanding availability of new tools, coupled with a decreased willingness to share techniques, has led to a substantial information gap between winemakers and their customers, and a sudden sense of betrayal has emerged, leaving wine lovers with a desire to get back to basics.

Much more on this subject is enumerated in my piece “Spoofulated or Artisinal?” at APPELLATION AMERICA. Suffice it to say that most folks don’t know much about the new techniques, and a lot of them don’t trust winemakers to employ them properly, any more than they trust some airlines to service its planes. Having written for several years in an attempt to close this educational gap, I’m going to shift my attention here to the other problem.

To whit: The Natural Wine movement contains several strange bedfellows whose agendas can’t all be satisfied by a single set of winemaking rules. The more knowledgeable you get, the clearer it becomes that there is, in fact, no consistent stance that satisfies all players.

A simple example is the Federal requirement that all organic wine be sulfite free. This untimely bureaucratic decision has spawned a category crammed with defective and inconsistent products, which is shunned by nearly all producers and most serious buyers. Bingo: a schism between connoisseurs and health activists.

The Eight Constituencies Of The Natural Wine Movement

Below are the eight constituencies of the Natural Wine movement and a few words describing the motivations of each. I recommend to readers to peruse this list and rank them in the order in which you identify personally with each.

A. Non-Interventionist. Wine should not be fooled around with. Traditional winemaking is fine, but techniques which cheat or hide flaws are reprehensible. The best wine makes itself.

B. Environmentalist. Winemaking should not damage the environment. Concerns include erosion, petrochemicals, deforestation caused by barrel production, carbon deficit and recycling.

C. Conventionalist. I don't want to drink anything I can't pronounce. Give me standard winemaking without all the weird stuff.

D. Traditionalist. Pre-modernist who prefers time-tested methods; the older the better. I’m suspicious of all recent technological innovations including the use of electricity, chemistry, microbiology, genetic manipulation and petrochemical agriculture.

E. Health-conscious. I want to control my food sources and protect the health of winery personal as well. In addition to restricting the use of chemicals in vineyards and in wine, I prefer moderate alcohol and need full disclosure of potential allergens.

F. Collector. Serious investment in age worthy wine requires dependable microbial stability. My passion is great wine that improves with time. Don't take chances on my nickel. Techniques that haven't stood the test of time make me nervous.

G. Authenticity Enthusiast. Wine should be made from grapes alone, with as little addition and manipulation as possible in order to present a distinctive expression. If Nature gave us a difficult vintage, let's taste it!

H. Terroir Enthusiast. I want to taste the unique flavors of a place. Please don't obscure the wine's distinctive expression with excessive alcohol or wood, or employ practices that make wines all taste the same.

The table below is not data of any sort. I have simply expressed in numbers my own guesses about the way a person in each of the above categories, one sufficiently hip to the ins and outs of that topic, would rate each issue listed. In this scale, +10 is very favorable and -10 is very averse. Ratings are my own estimates of what a well-informed proponent of each position would be expected to conclude. I’m proposing here a temporary working algorithm which we can adjust later in response to reader comments.

Now take your top two categories and scan the table below, looking for disparities in ratings between one of your positions and the other.

Those are the issues for you to study in order to develop a personal position. That’s what my blog is for. To get started in your research, just use the Search function to bring up my blogs on these subjects.

As you can see, despite mutual attraction to the aesthetic trappings of naturalness, there is room for lively debate on its ethics among these groups. I’ll touch on a few more points of difference.

From the conventional perspective, French oak barrels symbolize the epitome of artisanality, separating the diminutive chapels of the boutique elite from the immense tank farms of the typical Central Valley industrial mega-producer. Yet, to the informed environmentalist, they represent the grossest form of wastefulness and affluent display, which today is no longer restricted to small wineries.

The trees from which French oak barrels are made must be 200 years old, and ever since Robert Mondavi chose the device of installing a hundred thousand barrels to distinguish his infant Woodbridge within the Big Valley, Bronco and other competitors have followed with six figure installations of their own. Today, the lion’s share of barrels are housed in vast Valley warehouses, resulting in deforestation on a scale unanticipated by plantings and never before seen.

For each of these venerable trees, 75 percent of the prime wood is discarded because it cannot be fashioned into a piece of fine watertight furniture. These portions can instead be used as sources of oak extractives (chips, staves, nuggets or whatever), and in conjunction with existing neutral barrels, could reduce this carnage four-fold. Chips or barrels: which is the reprehensible practice?

The use of micro-oxygenation poses conundrums of equal depth. On the one hand, what additive could be more natural than the air we breathe? Indeed, it is recent technology, stainless steel and inert gas, that have permitted modern winemakers to exclude oxygen in ways unavailable to traditional winemakers in the previous 6,000 years.

Yet having lost the ancient expertise in non-reductive winemaking, it is reasonable for collectors to be suspicious of the prospects for longevity of wines so treated, and for authenticists to oppose the restructuring of tannins. In time, some will come to understand that this restructuring is the same as the conversion of cocoa to chocolate or the miracle uses of eggs such as béarnaise sauce and the soufflé, and as we age these wines their enhanced longevity will become apparent.

For now, the most important benefits of MOx are its health benefits. Conventional tannin management centers around the removal of the tannins responsible for excessive astringency with animal proteins from milk, chicken eggs, sturgeon, and beef tendon, all possible allergens for sensitive individuals.

More importantly, any winemaker will tell you that the procedure of stripping wine of tannin with fining agents is detrimental to terroir expression and also robs wines of soulfulness by deleting the tannin structure responsible for aromatic integration. All these problems are averted by the refining of tannins by a skilled hand. It is true that many winemakers who claim to employ MOx lack technique, and those who wish to play out the prospects for ageing should limit their collecting to winemakers with sufficient experience, such as Michael Havens, Randall Grahm and of course…moi!

In all humility, the WineSmith Roman Syrah I will pour in Portland is a triumph of postmodern winemaking which by itself leaves conventional practice as far behind as a great unpasteurized Epoisse stands above the finest pasteurized Vermont cheddar. I could never have conceived of this project without both the tutelage of Patrick Ducournau in postmodern élevage principles and the guidance of Paul Frey, Tony Norkog and Gideon Beinstock in the power of grapes grown in living soil to conserve wines without sulfites. In such wines, sulfite-free wine production becomes not only possible but superior to conventional methods. Such wines are high adventure to cellar, but what else is natural wine all about? To the sincerely curious, I recommend them.

The key to bringing winemakers and consumers back together is greater openness about production techniques, even the controversial ones. Consumers can only apply informed choices if winemakers will be frank with them about their methods and their thinking. I hope our discussions in Portland lead to a system of voluntary disclosure that wineries become eager to support. Each of these techniques is employed for a reason, and often the rationale runs deeper than is reported by reactionary paparazzi. Winemakers are a sincere and introspective bunch, with very few bad apples. Once consumers begin to learn the trade-off involved in each practice, every winemaking strategy can develop its own following of those it is designed to serve.