DROPLETS: The Week in Natural Wine
Vital natural wine counter-propaganda. This week: How many wine salons is too many? Isabelle Legeron returns to "controlled" styles. Organic turncoats in Chablis. 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. NATURAL TURNCOATS
The natural wine movement’s roots are in rebellion: against outmoded appellation authorities, against aesthetic groupthink, against global market forces that exert a homogenizing effect upon wine. With the current wine market slowdown, it has been striking to witness many prominent supporters of natural wine renovate their language, some transforming, almost overnight, from defenders of vigneron liberty into fairly typical hectoring wine critics bent, above all, on consumer advocacy.
La Dive Bouteille organizer Sylvie Augereau ruffled feathers last year when she cautioned participating vignerons that enological additives were preferable to undesirable elements in fermentation. RAW Wine fair series founder Isabelle Legeron, while never a voice of radicalism in the first place, adopts an even stricter tone in a slightly fawning interview by Eliza Dumais in Swurl.
“ I think we really need to focus more heavily on delivering wines that are drinkable, well crafted, and balanced. In the world of natural wine, it should no longer be acceptable to pour wines that are mousy, unbalanced, or fragile, and expect that the market is going to buy them,” says Legeron. “I think we’re seeing this in all markets: people are leaning away from some of the crazier bottles and returning to more controlled styles.”
A journalist might well have picked at that word, control. How, exactly, do you control a wine? And what aspects of a wine’s profile might make a consumer applaud a wine’s controlled quality?
Perhaps more pertinently, given widespread public ignorance of viticulture and the (complex but still fairly straightforward) processes of natural winemaking, why is it that wine must be controlled to conform to the market’s demands, and not vice versa?
For a renowned natural wine writer and events organizer to insist that natural wine conform to market demands is to highlight the limitations, if not the utter superfluity, of her own public platform. If many excellent masterful natural vignerons are today having difficulty selling their excellent masterful natural wines, it is rather too easy to blame unnamed but implicitly lazy or careless natural winemakers releasing bad natural wines. I would instead point to the public figures exacerbating public wine miseducation by insisting that truly natural wines should taste just like filtered and sulfited “natural” wines.
2. ORGANIC TURNCOATS
The stylistic and, I think, phonetic allure of Chablis is such that one of my favorite writers, Donald Barthelme, once titled a story after the wine. In it he portrays himself sipping a glass of Gallo (California) Chablis with an ice cube in it while trying to write at 5:30am. Many great writers have appalling standards when it comes to drinking.
Writing in the New York Times last week, Eric Asimov doesn’t let his longstanding affection for Chablis cloud his vision to quite that extent. But he does in perfect credulity repeat one of the more common fallacies of conventional winemakers, when he reports that Chablis vigneron Edouard Vocoret “was one of those organic farmers who had to revert to chemicals in 2024.”
“He says he had no choice,” Asimov writes, showing more delicacy here than in the accompanying photo caption, which flatly states: “Confronted with catastrophic levels of mildew in 2024, Edouard Vocoret, an organic farmer who makes excellent Chablis, had to resort to conventional methods to save his crop.”
For one thing, it is no longer correct to refer to Vocoret as an organic farmer, since he applied synthetic fungicide treatments in 2024. The caption should instead refer to him as a former organic farmer who renounced organics out of fear of losing his crop to mildew. (Organic certification of vineyards is a three-year process; you can’t just opt in and opt out every other year depending on the prevailing mildew pressure.)
For another thing, there is no way of controlling for the truth of Vocoret’s claim, since there is no way of knowing for certain what would have happened to his mildew-threatened crop in the absence of his synthetic fungicide treatments. In mildew-stricken vintages like 2024, it’s a routine, grim joke among vignerons that conventional farmers lose just as much to mildew as their organic peers. It is, in sum, highly misleading to suggest that the use of synthetic fungicides will necessarily save a harvest, or even necessarily save an estate much money.
Ultimately, Vocoret’s rationale and Asimov’s reporting on it both lean heavily on the weaselly phrase “had to,” which functions as a way of eliding Vocoret’s demonstrably weak attachment to the principles of organic farming. For Asimov to persist in referring to Vocoret as “an organic farmer” throughout the article does a disservice to the efforts of actual organic farmers, the ones who arrange their lives and their finances in such a way as to withstand the occasional catastrophic vintage.
3. SALON SATURATION
“Yesterday, everyone kept saying there would be a rush later on,” someone presenting wine at one of the key Montpellier natural wine salons this year told me. “But there was practically nobody all day.”
It wasn’t the only case of limited attendance at a southern French natural wine salon in 2025. Another salon (which, like the first, I’ll decline to name) drew no further attendance on its first night than the twenty estates presenting wines.
“We just all tasted each other wines and then sat down for dinner,” said one participant. “It was fun. But no clients.”
For what it’s worth, attendance picked up at both the aforementioned salons on their second days. I nonetheless sense that, among professional buyers and importers, enthusiasm for natural wine salons seems to be gently waning, even as the number of salons continues to rise, a testament to mounting commercial pressure among winemakers. In addition to Gianmarco Antonuzzi’s Il Etait Une Fois - an event that Soil Expeditions’ Brett Pallesen affectionately dubbed a “spite salon,” for being organized expressly to compete with the simultaneous salon of another Italian natural wine impresario - new and new-ish salons this year included Supernature (Angers), L’Autre Rendez-vous (Doué-en-Anjou), and Primaire (Angers).
US importer Joshua Eubank of Percy Selections skipped all the January-February wine salons this year, deciding instead to bring his collaborators to visit estates in his portfolio a full two weeks before the festivities.
“I’m still a believer in wine salon culture,” he says. “But I had a finite number of days to be away from my family and chose to prioritize one-on-one time with our growers.”
It’s a sentiment that finds a parallel among certain natural winemakers who declined to present wines at any salons this year, like Anjou’s Kenji and Mai Hodgson.
“We had no wines that were in bottle and available for sale,” explains Kenji Hodgson. “So we just sent out an invitation to existing clients to come by the cellar to taste.”
He says it worked, and they saw most of the clients they hoped to see. At a time of market slowdown, buyers and vignerons alike tend to prioritize existing relationships, rather than scouting out emerging talent or emerging markets, respectively.
For my part, family and work commitments prevented me from attending any of the Loire salons this year, much to my chagrin. (I finally have a shop to stock! Yet no time to go taste anything.) But I wasn’t the only restaurateur in France to miss the Loire this year.
David Loyola, proprietor of beloved Paris 11ème wine bistrot Aux Deux Amis, attended the scene-y, half-secret salon organized by Domaine de l’Anglore and friends in Tavel this year, but forwent a trip to Angers and Saumur.
“It’s cold, it’s dark, there’s too many people, you manage to taste for maximum two hours and then you’re tired of it all,” he says. “Then it’s completely impossible to reserve at any restaurants in the evenings, everything in the entire region is fully booked.”
For buyers based in France, he suggests, the alternative is obvious.
“I’ve always said it’s better to just take one week during the year and go visit a region and see all the vignerons that you want to see,” he says. “When it’s calm, without too many people around, when you can actually enjoy it.”
Lately I too find myself questioning whether the organization of more and more echoing half-empty professional natural wine salons is the most useful response to the present global slowdown in sales of wine at large. The existing network of natural wine sales channels (which is to say, that comprised by the buyers who go to these salons) appears to simply have little remaining bandwidth at the present time. It is a situation that is primed to get worse, with the threat of unpredictable Trump tariffs in the air.
I suspect the search for a silver lining nowadays requires a reorientation of our goals, as natural wine producers, importers, retailers, and drinkers.
It was a lot of fun, but the hot market of the late 2010s also inspired a lot of fuzzy, overcropped, volume-driven natural wine production, much of it négociant work. This would seem to indicate that greater and greater sales of (any kind of remotely) natural wine (in terms of units) is not, in and of itself, an entirely virtuous goal.
For more thoughtful natural winemakers, the present natural wine market might well suggest opposite tendencies : a conscious effort, in viticulture and vinification and sales, to produce the sort of wines that can benefit from longer aging periods pre-release, wines that don’t need to be sold as fast as possible as cheaply as possible. This is to say: lesser volumes of natural wine, but, often, better natural wine.
Subscribers can scroll down for 7 more quick takes, on topics including Jasper Morris on Chablis; Jay-Z’s champagne brand; London wine bar fatigue; La Cave du Centre in Le Fooding; Jamie Goode on mouse; Christopher Renfro’s Two-Eighty Project; and more.