“La Pause” is not your familiar, easygoing gamay. Dark, verging on murky, it sends up a gamey whiff of sweat-stained leather. In the mouth, it’s deeply flavored, smoky. Compared to mainstream reds, it comes across as odd, untamed.
“We are changing the concept of what yummy is,” enthuses Lee Campbell, the statuesque beverage director at Reynard in Williamsburg, as she pours the wine.
“La Pause” is a natural wine, an increasingly popular but often infuriating category that’s sharply dividing winemakers and aficionados. Unlike more commercial wines whose color, flavors, and alcohol level may be tweaked in the winery, natural wines are made with minimum or no intervention, resulting in wines that are individualistic and quirky, but may stray far from the flavor norms you’re used to — think notes of smoked meat and licorice, rather than berries and pepper. Some praise natural wines for their unique character, while others say they don’t live up to the hype.
“Everything about winemaking isn’t natural,” insists Stuart Smith, veteran wine maker at Napa’s Smith Madrone winery. “We have to intervene.”
Others would beg to differ. “[Natural] wines are less pigeon-holed and more alive with unique flavors than standardized wines,” says Andrew Tarlow, the pioneering Brooklyn restaurateur behind Marlow & Sons, Reynard, and other Kings County hot spots.
The natural wine movement kicked off in France in the early 1990’s when a few Beaujolais vintners, unhappy with the sameness of the “modern” wines in their region, returned to basics. They abandoned lab-engineered yeasts in favor of those that occur naturally in vineyards; refused to depend on sulfites, a common preservative, to keep their wines stable and fresh; and stopped using winery tricks and tools to “correct” the alcohol, acid and tannin levels of their wine.
The result was a Beaujolais that was lighter in color and flavor than their neighbors’ wine, but more faithful to the fruit of their vines.
“I never tasted anything like it,” legendary California-based wine importer Kermit Lynch said upon trying the wines for the first time. “It was quite delicate from sart to finish but lively at the same time.”
In recent years, natural wines have taken off in the city, popping up on the menus of buzzy downtown restaurants like Carbone and Pearl & Ash, wine bars like Ten Bells and cutting edge wine shops.
“There’s been this explosion of inerest in our wines from people who are tired of homogenized wine styles that erase individuality,” says Jenny Lefcourt, the co-owner of Jenny & François, a TriBeCa-based natural wine importer. She says her sales have doubled since 2008.
The thirst for these trendy alterna-wined is especially strong in Williamsburg — naturally. “We have a clientele centered on openness and progressiveness,” boasts Campbell.
But not all customers are thirsting for something funky. “There just isn’t much demand from our clientele for these types of wines,” says Michael Stillman, president of the restaurant group that includes Manhattan meat-maven spots Quality Meats, Maloney & Porcelli and the New York outpost of Smith & Wollensky.
“I think a lot of diners are suffering through these wines because they are afraid to say they don’t like them,” griped an anoynomous critic on the foodie Web site Eater. “I am really tired of being served super-oxidized or bacterially spoiled wines that I am told are ‘natural.’”
Even die-hard defenders of natural wines admit that they’ve come up against some that are better spit than sipped. “I’ve had a well-known winemaker tell me that a wine is natural when it’s really vinegar with out-of-control puppy’s breath,” says Alice Feiring, a natural wine advocate.
But Feiring fiercely defends natural wine in her 2012 book, “Naked Wine,” and claims the booze has the ability to provoke intense feelings.
“The reaction goes beyond science.,” she writes. “There’s an emotional truth in natural wine that I cannot ignore.”
It such a holier than thou attitude of natural wine militants, more than the wine itself, that often riles their mainstream brethren.
“The sanctimony of the natural wine movement’s most ardent supporters suffocates their cause,” Wine Spectator’s Matt Kramer wrote in a recent column.
Winemaker Smith agrees. “These people choose to ignore that we don’t live in a perfect world,” he says. “Do they want vestal virgins stomping the grapes?”
What’s in a label?
“Organic,” “Biodynamic,” and “Natural” have all become buzzy word on wine labels in recent years, but what do they really mean?
- ORGANIC: No chemical fertilizers, pesticides, and fungicides allowed in the vineyard. The USDA sets limits on yeast and sulfite additives.
- BIODYNAMIC: In an attempt to bring grape-growing in tune with cosmic forces, sowing and harvesting are coordinated with phases of the moon and various potions, such as cow manure in a cow’s horn, are buried in the vineyard.
- NATURAL: Going beyond organic and biodymanic practices when growing grapes, natural winemakers heed the dictum “nothing added, nothing taken away” when it comes to actually making the wine after the harvest. That means, ideally, no usage of the more than 200 additives permitted by the USDA in winemaking.