"Natural" Wine

Off in the Iron Chicken to Slovenia tomorrow morning for an earlier than expected harvest due to some pretty dismal weather recently - detailed in a different post below.

No doubt plenty of interest in the days ahead - and an opportunity to see at first hand how many of the winemakers manage their own harvests. Bearing that in mind, I stumbled across the following:

http://www.slate.com/id/2268456

To me there is already enough confusion about Organic wines (i.e. in the vineyard, but not necessarily winery) and I have to be honest, the following excerpt sums up the problem neatly for me:

"Yet when you strip away all the rhetoric and dogma about "natural wines," what you are left with is essentially just a slogan, used by a group of people to champion some wines that happen to please their taste buds and/or sensibilities. It is a highly charged phrase, as numerous chat-room brawls have demonstrated, because it clearly implies that other wines are somehow "unnatural" and therefore inferior."

Jancis Robinson also tackled the issue recently on her site, along with a good few tasting notes of various Natural wines.

There's no substitute for passion and full understanding of a wine's origin when selling wine - irrespective of what the label says. Of course, it is certainly made more difficult by the number of links a bottle of wine goes through to make it on to a shop shelf, website or restaurant list for the eventual consumer to choose - and in many instances it's very much on its own at that point.

But to me, a "catch-all" or ("catch a good bit" at least) descriptor doesn't help.