DROPLETS: The Week in Natural Wine
Vital natural wine counter-propaganda. This week: L'Affaire Natur-All. Should sommeliers push de-alcoholized "wine"? Claire Naudin's bird concerns. Haut Les Vins is not a natural wine salon. And more.
DROPLETS is an irregular round-up of quick takes, clapbacks, shout-outs, and other miscellany related to natural wine, wine-at-large, and the restaurant scene in Paris and beyond. It’s a smorgasbord of natural wine counter-propaganda to the Anglophone and French wine media. The first three topics in a given week are free, with access to the full deluge of ten topics limited to paid subscribers.
1. NATUR-ALL FOR ONE, ONE FOR ALL
Earlier this month, prominent Auvergne vigneron-négociant Patrick Bouju and his longtime supporter, the natural wine impresario Clovis Ochin, set natural wine social media abuzz with posts announcing their unexpected departure from Natur-All, a natural wine salon (now it its fourth year) helmed by Massimo Marchiori of Partida Creus.
Citing “deep disagreements with the organizers,” Bouju concluded his departure announcement by declaring: “Natural wine is a free world and no one will dictate how I make wine!”
Ochin, for his part, wrote “I am no longer involved and will never be again in ‘Natur-All. The new rules made by the remaining organizers make this impossible for me.”
Given the context that all participants in the Natur-All salon produce wines with zero sulfite addition and zero additives or filtration, the posts left many onlookers scratching their heads, wondering what specific winemaking disagreements apparently led Bouju and Ochin (and others) to jump ship. The situation implied a new ideological schism within what purports to be the more radical, zero-zero wing of natural wine production.
“At least, explain what changed you don’t like [sic],” Burgundy négociant Jean-Pascal Sarnin commented on Ochin’s post, asking what was on everyone’s mind.
I reached out to Bouju, Ochin, and Marchiori, but none was inclined to comment further. On the basis of what I have been able to glean from other sources, this is probably because there is no specific disagreement between the various parties regarding actual natural winemaking practice.
Rather, I gather that an unrelated fallout between Ochin and Marchiori - seemingly stemming from some kind of administrative cock-up regarding the former’s wine production, which had been occurring chez Partida Creus - led to Ochin’s precipitous ejection from the salon, which rubbed many of his vigneron friends the wrong way, particularly given Ochin’s central role in promoting the event.
If Bouju, Ochin, and others1 nonetheless instead cite philosophical disagreements as their reason for abandoning the Natur-All salon, they are are not being entirely disingenuous.
As far back as the 2024 edition, there were murmurs of discontent regarding the salon’s heavy-handed charter, which is written in a strident tone of consumer advocacy that betrays little familiarity with the aesthetics of natural winemaking, or the challenges of bringing natural wines to market.
Participating vignerons are asked to assure that they “present wines without flaws, without oxidation, without mercaptans or excessive reductions, and which don’t present ethyl acetates, and with a correct, well-integrated volatile acidity,” and to “provide salon organizers the results of official analyses of wines that will be presented, indicating acetic acid, residual sugar, and SO2.”2
Perhaps most controversially, Natur-All’s “conditions of participation” also stipulate that “if a wine presents signs of mouse at the salon, it must be removed from the table.”
In and of themselves, these won’t strike many casual wine drinkers as particularly egregious demands. But taken in sum they represent a wholesale adoption of the language and analytical modes of conventional wine, and as such can’t help sounding silly to vignerons (and others) well-versed in natural wine culture.3 Like many controversial wine salon charters before it, Natur-All’s “conditions of participation” are an attempt to officialize, in objective-sounding terms, an aesthetic that is necessarily quite subjective. (One might also add that Massimo Marchiori is a less-than-ideal messenger for promoting winemaking standards regarding volatility. Let he who has not sinned cast the first stone, etc.)
“I’m more in agreement with Bouju, [who disagreed with] this idea that wines need to be ‘straight,’” admitted one Natur-All participant, when I asked about the situation. “But I think it’s a tiny worry, in terms of what else is going on right now.”
I can’t help observing that Patrick Bouju, like many other vignerons who renounced participation in Natur-All this year, managed to tolerate the fair’s clumsily written “conditions of participation” for several years without protest. It took the expulsion of Clovis Ochin4 for many participating vignerons to act on their true feelings about Natur-All’s guidelines. One way or another, this is a measure of Ochin’s influence on the natural wine scene.
2. ONE-HUNDRED PERCENT?
One consequence of publishing quarterly round-ups of forthcoming natural wine salons is I often receive notices about wine salons that have no business being listed on a round-up of forthcoming natural wine salons. One such tip recently came from a winemaker friend who, I can only suppose, had no idea of the line-up or how it was being marketed when agreeing to present wine at in Paris at a forthcoming salon called Haut Les Vins.
Organized by Laurence Texier, wife of Rhône vigneron Eric Texier, Haut Les Vins bills itself in promotional emails as “100% vins vivants, 100% vins naturels, 100% vins de terroir.” A cursory look at the line-up reveals at least two of those claims are 100% untrue.
Haut Les Vins’ sixty-strong casting consists almost entirely of estates with zero interface with the natural wine scene, and many estates who are plainly in disagreement with the practice of natural wine. I count just five participating estates with any presence or standing whatsoever within natural wine circles.
None of this would be a problem if the salon were not billing itself explicitly as a “100%” natural wine salon. The very flippancy of the usage of the terms “vins vivants” and “vins naturels” implies a concerted attempt, on the part of the organizer, to drain them of any meaning. Natural wine may not have one universally recognized definition, but it does refer to a fairly well-defined and tight-knit community that has struggled for years to promote more-than-organic farming and additive-free vinification. This is the community whose valor Texier is trying to steal when she brands her humdrum roster of large-volume, more-or-less qualitative estates “100% vin naturels.” The sheer audacity of the lie reminds me of the signs outside the downmarket LIDL supermarkets in France: “Le vrai prix des bonnes choses.” (Tr. “The true price of good things.”)
Pretty much everyone working in natural wine - from vignerons to importers to retailers to restaurateurs to sommeliers - has at some point lamented the continuing confusion in the marketplace about what is, and what isn’t, natural wine. Rare are the occasions when blame can be so squarely placed.
3. WOOLF AT MY DOOR
In the course of a very coy, digressive December piece about the possibilities of integrating solar panels into vineyards, Simon Woolf of The Morning Claret inserted a defense of Austrian biodynamic mega-estate Meinklang’s use of machine harvesters.
Woolf is entitled to his opinion. I take issue however with his characterization of my reporting on Meinklang, when he writes “Ayscough pilloried the family online for their use of machine harvesters,” linking to this article about the use of machine harvesters.
To “pillory” is to publicly attack or ridicule. My article contains neither attack nor ridicule. Indeed, I bent over backwards to include multiple supportive quotes about Meinklang from figures such as Isabelle Legeron.
Noting that the purported “pillory”-ing occurred “online” is somewhat redundant, given that I publish on Substack; it serves merely to insinuate that I was doing something furtive and impersonal, when in fact I based my reporting on Meinklang on a visit to the estate and a conversation with Werner Michlits.
Finally, I might also underline that my reporting says nothing about Michlits’ family, as might be surmised by Woolf’s phrasing. Woolf’s phrasing makes sense only if you take any reporting on the Meinklang estate to be an attack on the Michlits family, in the same way that, say, reporting on the flagrant profiteering of the current US president via the Trump Organization is often characterized, in bad faith, as an attack on the Trump family.
Subscribers can scroll down for 7 more quick takes, on topics including: Claire Naudin’s bird concerns; Eric Asimov on “wine moms”; Michael Grunwald’s defense of Roundup; FKA Twigs’ questionable restaurant advice; French sommelier union president Fabrice Sommier’s endorsement of de-alcoholized “wine”; and more.