Unpacking Wine Terms: Natural Wine

We get asked pretty frequently if our wines are natural. And it's a tricky one to answer - not because the wines are not natural. They absolutely are. That's a big part of why we love them. It's because natural can mean a lot of things. 
What does it mean to us?
It's getting a coffee at Detour instead of having a cup of instant coffee. It's a meal at Brut! (#shamelessplug) instead of McDonald's. 
Don't get us wrong - there's definitely a place for Big Macs, but they're not what we like to eat every day. 
We like to, as much as possible, eat things we know are nutritious. Things that keep us healthy and hopefully, have been grown with care. 
We apply the same consideration to the wines we drink. It boils down to what's in that bottle and how it came to be there. 

It's not very commonly known, in part because ingredient labelling isn't required for wines, but there's A LOT more that can go into wine than just grapes and sulphur - in the cellar and the vineyard. The list is about as long as my arm and my brain starts to melt a little thinking about it - from fish bladders to cow pancreas, and those are just the words I can understand. 

So when we say a wine is natural, we mean that, as far as possible, it's just grapes and possibly just a little sulphur to save it from turning to vinegar on the way to Hong Kong. That's in the vineyard and the cellar.

Does that mean our wines are cloudy, weird, funky, possibly faulty? Some of them, sure. Most of them, no. 

Image cred: whitandwine.com