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To the average drinker, the terms might sound interchangeable. But some winemakers fear that “clean wine” is becoming a major threat to “natural wine.”
Brands founded on the promise of “clean wine” have suddenly proliferated. Cameron Diaz’s new Avaline label — which drew major criticism as soon as it launched in early July — is just the tip of the iceberg. The last year has also seen the launches of the Wonderful Wine Co. (“clean wine for better living”) and Good Clean Wine (“see the world through a cleaner glass”), joining 3-year-old companies like Scout & Cellar (“clean-crafted wines”) and Secco (“keto, paleo, low-carb”).
These companies capitalize on the mainstream American consumer’s interest in wellness products, an interest that’s no doubt grown during the time of COVID-19. And they co-opt the language that small-scale natural winemakers have spent the last two decades working hard to legitimize, a language based on principles of responsible farming, ingredient transparency and minimal intervention.
But in many cases, these “clean wine” brands are peddling false narratives, advertising low calorie counts when the wines have perfectly average-for-wine calorie counts, or implying that they’re sourced from artisanal family winegrowers when they’re actually industrially produced. The phenomenon may not be novel — Alice Feiring, the preeminent American authority on natural wine, called it “NatWashing” more than a decade ago — but it seems to be reaching a saturation point now.
To many in the wine industry, this is infuriating. “It’s been hijacked, this word ‘clean,’” says Todd White, founder of Dry Farm Wines, a natural-wine subscription service based in Napa. “It’s been hijacked by copycats and inauthentic players.”
Maybe so. But the truth is, natural wine has been vulnerable to these sorts of copycat attacks for a long time. In fact, natural wine may have even invited them.
That’s because natural wine has no official definition.
[Taste six California natural wines that are great for beginners.]
Other descriptors of virtuous winemaking, like organic and biodynamic, are policed by certifying organizations. But natural wine, especially in the U.S., is kind of whatever you want it to be. Unfiltered? Unfined? Fermented by ambient yeast? Undoctored by additions of acid, tannin, color? Most people would agree that these are some of the qualifications for a natural wine, but the details — particularly when it comes to natural wine’s biggest sticking point, sulfur — are very much up for interpretation. Nothing is stopping anyone from calling their wines “natural,” other than maybe some Twitter shaming.
Some say it was inevitable that big companies would capitalize on natural wine’s cachet without having to back up their claims. Many people are intimidated by wine, and easily fall for marketing tactics, says Noel Diaz (no relation to Cameron), the owner-winemaker of Purity Wines in Richmond. Diaz is hard core as natural winemakers go; many of his labels even carry the rare designation of “no sulfites added.”
“This was always going to get co-opted,” he says.
The world’s first attempt at an official definition of natural wine arrived in March, when France’s national agricultural department approved a new certification that will add a Vin Méthode Nature logo to qualifying bottles. The news was controversial. Some lovers of natural wine celebrated the promise of accountability. But accountability also means bureaucracy. Interviewed by writer Jamie Goode, Pipette magazine editor Rachel Signer argued that it was at odds with the spirit of natural wine, which encourages freedom and rejects the sort of top-down bureaucracy that a certification creates.
These are difficult paradoxes to hold. Proponents of natural wine have worked hard to build an audience and have fought against the accusation that the category is merely a fad — but now find themselves having to fight against commercialization.
Anyone skeptical that natural wine has breached the mainstream need look only at Dry Farm Wines, which sells curated boxes of natural wines from around the world. According to its founder, Dry Farm has 100,000 subscribers and sold 3 million bottles of wine last year. “We are the largest buyer of natural wine in the world by many multiples,” White says. (The claim is hard to verify. Natural wine sales aren’t tracked, since the category remains undefined in the U.S., but the country consumed about 67 million bottles of organic wine in 2019, according to industry analyst IWSR.)
A self-described “biohacker” who follows a ketogenic diet and leads his entire staff in a meditation every morning (these days, on Zoom), White says that his company is now seeing many “copycats” like Secco and Scout & Cellar because its success is well known.
Dry Farm’s pitch is that, unlike other sellers of natural wine, it tests every prospective cuvee in a lab. It will accept only wines that test for fewer than 70 parts per million sulfur and that are free of mycotoxins, a type of fungus. The lab tests also look for residual sugar (wines must have less than 1 gram per liter sugar) and alcohol (wines must be 12.5% ABV or lower), which aren’t necessarily markers of natural wine, but which have appeal for the health-conscious drinker. White has not yet found any American wines that meet his company’s standards, which also include dry-farmed, i.e. non-irrigated, vineyards and a price point of roughly $22 per bottle.
The lab testing is so integral to Dry Farm’s platform that White wouldn’t send me a list of wines it sells. “We don’t want to give away that information to our copycats,” he says. “If they want to do their own lab testing, they can do it.” He did, however, send me a representative box, which included wines like Frappato from the Sicilian winery Cos, a Swiss rosé by Domaine de Beudon Schiller rosé, a Beaujolais from Domaine Gregoire Hoppenot and an orange wine of Garganega from Dalle Ore in Italy’s Veneto.
What’s especially interesting about Dry Farm is that it has tapped into an audience for natural wine that isn’t necessarily the stereotypical set of cerebral wine nerds. That’s evidenced by its astonishing scale, and also by what White calls its “aesthetic”: The club does not sell anything that tastes “funky,” which has typically been a natural-wine hallmark. The cloudy, the sour, the barnyard-y — “That’s cool for hipsters and bearded guys in Brooklyn,” White says, “but I sell to housewives in Des Moines and Kansas City.” The typical Dry Farm customer, White seems to be implying, isn’t the denizen of hard-core natural wine bars like Ordinaire, but the average American Chardonnay drinker who just wishes her wine came with nutrition labeling.
But those sorts of stereotypes, especially when they fall along gender and class lines, are dangerous: Not only are they likely inaccurate, they can also alienate many would-be drinkers. And some natural wine adherents may bristle at White’s divisive language — at his refusal to publicly identify the wines he sells, his defensiveness against competitors, and his claim that his company “for all intents and purposes created the healthy drinking category five years ago.” (It didn’t.) Plus, despite his professed aversion to funk, some of the wines in the Dry Farm box I received were undeniably funky, including a Riesling blend from Austrian producer Christoph Hoch that tasted strongly of the spoilage yeast brettanomyces.
Still, it’s hard to deny that he’s found a way of communicating “wellness” values to his customers that has seemed to elude many U.S. wineries, even natural ones. Many artisanal producers would find it tacky to advertise that their wares are “friendly to keto and paleo,” as Dry Farm’s website does, but maybe they’re missing out on a major opportunity.
Meanwhile, the Avalines of the world are taking full advantage of that language, and potentially duping unwitting drinkers with their claims of industry-leading cleanliness.
Maybe the “clean wine” fad will benefit the real natural winemakers, too. Diaz says he is starting to see his audience expand beyond natural wine’s early adopters. Age groups other than Millennials, his typical customers, are showing more interest. “They want to know more about how the wine impacts the environment and health issues,” he says. That’s a good thing.
But unfortunately, Diaz says, responding to those concerns in a thoughtful way isn’t as simple as tossing around a few SEO-friendly buzzwords like “clean” or “keto” or “sugar-free.” Maybe it’s not even enough, anymore, to just say “natural.”
The right way to communicate what’s in a wine and how it was made, according to Diaz, is the old-fashioned way. “I think we have to just get people to pay more attention and to ask more questions,” he says.
The new revolutionary method for vetting natural wines: a conversation.
Esther Mobley is The San Francisco Chronicle’s wine critic. Email: emobley@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @Esther_mobley Instagram: @esthermob
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