Peeps, don't get me wrong.
I love trying all sorts of wine - from all sorts of places
. Thus far, my experiences of 'natural wines' (eg. orange, jura wines) have not done anything exciting for
me - and, while wine is largely about what you like personally, it does have quality parameters. So it's tended to put me off further exploration down that wormhole.
It just bugs me when the word 'sustainable' goes (simply automatically or thoughtlessly in most cases IMHO) as an
implicitly negative prefix or epithet to anything that is not modern, highly efficient agriculture that feeds the world that was supposed to starve by 1980 (
The Population Bomb - Wikipedia,
Club of Rome - Wikipedia).
Whether the 'green revolution' was a good or bad thing is, of course, debatable (eg. was the feedback loop positive or negative? - But I'd suggest think carefully about world-wide demographic trends before you answer that...). However, it did stave off the predicted starvation - and, notably, at the same time save a lot of natural habitat having to be destroyed to try to feed those masses from 'organic agriculture' with its ultra-low yields, poor quality product and crop and storage losses through pests and diseases.
Of course, the serious analogy is modern medicine. I wonder how many 'sustainable' wine producers when recommended immunisation or an antibiotic (read 'pesticide' - because that's all it is...) for their seriously ill child refuse it...
Meanwhile, I will make a more concerted effort to find a 'natural' wine that I find really enjoyable. That will be my excuse to re-visit a wine bar in PER that has a quite eclectic range of wine by the glass including orange wine and pet-nat. It's close to my bus route in case I get drawn in.
BTW - I'm thinking that many of the wines mentioned upthread fit more into the small-producer category than the 'heavy duty' offerings that I see as being what are generally described as 'natural wines' (ie. 'pet-nat', 'orange', fermented in 'eggs' and all that sort of thing).
Could it just be that the word 'natural' be the millennial version of 'sustainable', I wonder? After all 'sustainable' has been done to death since the 1970s. It's just soooo boomerish...
Bottom line: choose prefixes carefully...