Making wine means deciding, all through the autumn. When do we pick? Whole clusters or destemmed? How long on the skins, when do we press, which barrel, how much time? Anyone who claims to simply let nature do the work has either had a lot of luck or hasn’t looked closely.

So the real question isn’t whether we intervene. It’s how much of the outcome we decide in advance.

Modern cellar technology is an impressive toolbox. You can secure fermentations, steer aromatics, prevent faults, and turn three very different vintages into three very similar wines. Some of that is smart. But every new tool raises the same temptation: to fix the result before the process has had its say. Natural wine was, for us from the start, an attempt to keep that question open for as long as possible.

Not Nature Against Culture

The term natural wine is imprecise. That bothers us less than you might expect. Nature is no guarantee of quality. Plague is natural, so is malaria, and vinegar needs no help from us at all. Every wine is human work, ours included.

This has little to do with handwork versus technology. A wooden barrel is technology, so is an amphora, and spontaneous fermentation is simply biochemistry. Skipping sulfur doesn’t turn you into a druid.

We think of winemaking as a collaboration, though not in the cozy sense of the word. We decide, the vines and the microorganisms respond, we respond to that, and every decision changes what’s possible next. The wine emerges from this back and forth. It is neither a product of what we imagined nor something nature would have produced without us. What interests us is work in which this counterpart never becomes mere raw material.

When Something Comes Back

In 2024 we sat in Italy with a few winemaker friends, at a table where more and more bottles kept appearing. We’d brought along a couple of barrel samples. With one of them, the conversation stopped.

We had made the wine ourselves, stood behind every decision in the vineyard and the cellar. And yet there it suddenly was in the glass, something we couldn’t have planned for. Not because it was inexplicable, but because everything we’d decided, every condition and every stroke of chance, had added up to something none of us alone had made.

This is how you recognize these moments: someone stops mid-sentence. A fork hangs in the air. Eventually someone just says “Wow” — and then nothing, for a long time. It has happened to us a handful of times: tasting with colleagues, in our own cellar, once even alone at the kitchen table. Never when we planned for it.

We call moments like these resonance. You can’t order them up. And they’re not proof that we did everything right. But they remind us why we work this way at all.

Less Control Demands More Attention

The most stubborn misunderstanding about natural wine is that it takes less work. You skip the sulfur, the cultured yeast, the filter, and lean back. Nice idea.

Giving up late corrections just moves the work earlier. The picking date matters more, healthy fruit matters more, cellar hygiene matters more. And above all, the ability to watch what’s actually happening, instead of already knowing what’s supposed to happen.

We both spent years working in publishing. That’s where you learn the difference between an editor who makes a text better and one who reworks it until it sounds like them. The cellar isn’t so different. Sometimes acting responsibly means intervening, sometimes it means waiting, and the real work is telling the two apart before it’s too late. (We don’t always manage.) What interests us about this pause isn’t passivity — it’s the chance to choose the next step only once we’ve actually seen what we’re responding to.

And when it goes wrong? Then it goes wrong. We call something a fault when a single trait drowns out everything else and a wine loses its many voices — like one musician overpowering the whole orchestra. That doesn’t get prettier just because it happened without additives. But anyone who refuses to let a result turn out differently than planned will also never get more than what was planned. That’s the price of work whose outcome isn’t entirely in one pair of hands. And its appeal.

An Open Question

After more than ten years of natural wine, we still don’t have a formula for it. Every intervention opens something and closes something else, experience helps, and the next vintage still puts it to the test again. “Naturalness” isn’t, therefore, the word that interests us most. More interesting is how much control we want to have over a wine. How much do we leave open? When does an intervention help, and when does it replace the wine with our idea of it?

How much a wine should be told what to do remains an open question. We ask it again every autumn.