Grape expectations

This stripped-back approach to making and drinking wine is now a hugely influential scene, one infiltrating restaurant wine lists everywhere and helping to modernise wine culture. But what exactly is natural wine, where can you try it and why do some drinkers absolutely hate it?

Olive’s natural wine primer

What is natural wine?

Simply, a rejection of modern wine production methods. Using clever science, cultured yeasts, stabilising sulphites and numerous additives, mainstream producers aim to create shelf-stable wines that, critics argue, sacrifice flavour for consistency. In opposition to this, in the 197›s a few maverick French farmers and winemakers started using ancient techniques to produce low-intervention wines (fermented using naturally occurring yeasts, unfiltered, with minimal sulphites) that tasted, they claimed, far more vividly of the