Natural Wine Movement

“Natural wine” sounds like the newest thing in the wine world, and in one sense it is: a self-conscious movement barely forty years old, born among a handful of rebel growers in Beaujolais and now filling hip wine bars from Paris to Brooklyn. But in another sense it is the oldest thing of all — a return to how wine was made for eight thousand years before the chemistry set arrived. This is the story of how wine went back to nature¹. For the full story, see the history of wine from the beginning.

The oldest way to make wine

Strip away the modern winery — the cultured yeasts, the enzymes, the additives — and you arrive at the way humans made wine for millennia: crush the grapes, let wild yeasts do their work, and wait. In the country of Georgia, wine has been made this way in buried clay vessels called qvevri for some eight thousand years, a tradition so important that UNESCO recognised the qvevri method as intangible cultural heritage¹.

By that measure, natural wine is not an invention but a memory. What changed was everything that came in between.

How wine got “industrial”

Over the twentieth century, winemaking became a science. Growers reached for chemical sprays in the vineyard, and in the cellar for laboratory yeasts, acidity and tannin adjustments, fining agents, filtration and generous doses of sulphur dioxide to stabilise the wine. The results were cleaner, more consistent and more shelf-stable — but to a growing number of drinkers they also tasted increasingly the same, the fingerprints of place scrubbed away².

Jules Chauvet: the chemist prophet

The reaction began, improbably, with a scientist. Jules Chauvet (1907–1989) was a Béaujolais négociant and research chemist of formidable gifts, who studied the microbiology of fermentation and concluded that the healthiest, most expressive wines came from doing less, not more³.

Chauvet championed old vines, ripe and rigorously sorted fruit, spontaneous fermentation with wild yeasts, and scrupulous cellar hygiene as the alternative to heavy dosing with sulphur. He is often cast as an anti-sulphur zealot, which he was not; his real creed was minimal intervention — letting a great vineyard speak for itself. It made him the godfather of everything that followed.

The Gang of Four

Chauvet’s ideas found their disciples in the cru villages of Beaujolais. Around 1980 four growers — Marcel Lapierre, Jean Foillard, Jean-Paul Thévenet and Guy Breton, most of them around Morgon — began farming without synthetic chemicals, harvesting late, sorting ruthlessly, fermenting with wild yeasts and bottling with little or no added sulphur. The American importer Kermit Lynch dubbed them the “Gang of Four”⁴.

Marcel Lapierre was the movement’s beating heart. He had taken over his family estate in Morgon in 1973, but it was meeting Jules Chauvet in 1981 that changed his life and his cellar — and, through him, the wine world. His generous, perfumed, additive-free Morgon became the template for natural wine everywhere, and his influence still radiates through a generation of growers⁵.

The whole philosophy fits in a sentence: do as little as possible to the wine, and as much as possible for it.— the natural winemaker’s creed⁶

What “natural wine” actually means

There is no single legal definition, but the ideal is clear: wine from organically or biodynamically farmed grapes, hand-picked, fermented with wild yeasts, and made with nothing added and nothing removed — no cultured yeast, no acid or sugar adjustments, no fining or filtering, and little or no sulphur⁶.

The wines can look and taste startling to the uninitiated: cloudy rather than crystal-clear, sometimes faintly fizzy, often livelier and more savoury than their conventional cousins. The category also revived “orange” or amber wine — white grapes fermented on their skins, exactly as in those ancient Georgian qvevri.

How it went global

For years natural wine was a French secret, kept alive by a few growers and the merchants who believed in them. Kermit Lynch carried the Beaujolais rebels to the United States; sympathetic bars and importers in Paris, London, New York and Tokyo did the rest. By the 2010s natural wine had become a genuine phenomenon, the default pour of a certain kind of wine bar and a lightning rod in the wider wine trade⁷.

A movement gets a rulebook: Vin Méthode Nature

Success brought a problem: with no legal definition, anyone could call anything “natural.” So in 2020, after a French growers’ union formed the year before, France’s fraud-control office approved a charter and a logo — Vin Méthode Nature — the first official framework of its kind⁸.

It set real conditions, and for the first time gave shops and drinkers a way to know what they were buying⁹.

The great debate

Natural wine remains fiercely divisive. Critics argue that without sulphur many bottles are unstable and prone to faults — mousiness, volatile acidity, unwanted fizz — and that “natural” can excuse sloppy winemaking. Defenders counter that a clean, well-made natural wine is the most honest expression of a place there is, and that the faults are the exception, not the rule¹⁰.

Why it matters

Whatever one makes of the arguments, the movement has already changed wine. It pushed the whole industry toward organic and biodynamic farming, lower sulphur and greater transparency, and it reminded a high-tech trade of something old and simple — that the finest wine is grown, not manufactured. Not bad for an idea hatched among the Gamay vines of Beaujolais¹¹.

Frequently asked questions

Read more

• How crisis reshaped what we drink
• A history of rosé
• A history of French wine

References

1. UNESCO — Ancient Georgian Traditional Qvevri Wine-Making Method (Intangible Cultural Heritage). ich.unesco.org ↩
2. Encyclopaedia Britannica — wine (winemaking). www.britannica.com ↩
3. WineWiki — Jules Chauvet. www.winewithseth.com ↩
4. World of Fine Wine — Beaujolais’s “Gang of Four”. worldoffinewine.com ↩
5. SevenFifty Daily — The Enduring Legacy of Beaujolais Winemaker Marcel Lapierre. daily.sevenfifty.com ↩
6. Wine & Spirits Magazine — Fined & Filtered: Vin Méthode Nature. www.wineandspiritsmagazine.com ↩
7. Kermit Lynch Wine Merchant — Beaujolais and the “Gang of Four”. www.kermitlynch.com ↩
8. Decanter — Natural Wine Receives Formal Recognition as “Vin Méthode Nature”. www.decanter.com ↩
9. Forbes — There’s a New Natural Wine Designation in France. www.forbes.com ↩
10. Grape Collective — The Origins of Natural Wine: Camille Lapierre and Jean Foillard. www.grapecollective.com ↩
11. Encyclopaedia Britannica — Beaujolais. www.britannica.com ↩

Recommended reading

Vintage: The Story of Wine
Hugh Johnson
For the long history of how wine was made before the modern cellar.

A Short History of Wine
Rod Phillips
Useful background on winemaking, additives and the modern trade.

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