Natural wine should not exist, or why drink natural wine today

July 25, 2026

Finding natural wine today is easy. In the middle of any big European city, open the Raisin app and you’ll find somewhere to drink one. It’s true for Paris, London, Warsaw. It’s still true for cities under bombardment, Kyiv and Odesa, and for cities in Africa, Vietnam, Thailand.

Whether we’re pouring a glass of Savagnin from the Jura or a slightly wild orange wine, we rarely stop to ask ourselves a strange question: what if natural wine had never existed at all?

It’s not a silly question. Natural wine is an accident. It wasn’t born from an ecological conviction, but from a stubborn hunt for a taste. And it very nearly stayed a footnote: had a handful of winemakers not chased that taste at exactly the moment French wine drinking itself was starting to change, we might never have gotten to ask the question at all.

Looking back in the 70s in France and other major European wine countries… Mechanization limited arduous manual labor. Chemical products improved yield… compared to the years before the Second World War.

Only a few producers offered their own wine in bottle… Most of the wine was sold in bulk… Tanker trucks, pinardiers, delivered the wine across the country. Wine was a commodity, an essential drink

Winegrowers used to sell the grapes or the wine to a wine merchant, a negociant, sometimes, long before the harvest. They had no contact with the end customers and no need to make a good wine.

How did the idea of making natural wine come up in the middle of the 70s?

Was it for ecological considerations? Difficult to say. Organic was a byproduct, taste was the driver.

The main motivation was the taste. This was the main research of wine merchant and scientist Jules Chauvet, soon followed by Marcel Lapierre and a few others

This research of taste is often associated with an idea: making wine the way our grandparents did. In the middle of the 70s and the beginning of the 80s, it meant winemakers from 1900 to 1930.

A time when chemicals were limited but present. But also, a time when winegrowers from famous regions kept some grapes to make wine for their family and friends.

If this tradition existed long after this generation, it is unlikely that a whole generation of young winemakers in the 80s had a chance to test a 50-year-old wine. With the exception of a few lesser-known regions at the time, like Jura, Savoie, and some plots in the southwest.

We need to look at the other side of the Channel, where a group of students started to make their own beer — Pale Ale — in reaction to the omnipresence of industrial beer. Their motto: find the taste of their grandparents’ beer.

In his biography, “Les Tribulations d’un amateur de vin,” Jacques Néauport, who was in the UK as a French teacher, was in contact with this movement and came back to France with this idea, just before he started making wine in Beaujolais.

But what does it mean? Before the Second World War. Chemistry and agronomy did not yet have a big impact on viticulture. But mostly, as most wine growers worked with négociants and did not produce wine directly, except for the family and the neighbors. This wine was made without much intrant, artisanal and simple. That’s the wine we’re talking about.

One notable exception: wine regions where négoce was not implanted, because the regions weren’t well known and could not sell wine outside their limits. Before the chemistry and modern oenology, the wine was similar, simple, artisanal and without a lot of intrant.

This grandparents’ wine slowly disappeared after the war. European vineyards started its modernization, followed by the new world, South America, Australia, USA and South Africa. This is the new normal, the new tradition.

Any school teaching wine making, any manual was full of chemistry, cloned vine roots. Learning winemaking started to look like a chemistry lesson.

Using these products was less regulated than today (conventional winemaking today uses less controversial products than in the 70s). Protection was optional, and limits and controls were largely theoretical.

If winemakers adhered to this new normal, there was a reason. Using these products was less regulated than today (conventional winemaking today uses less controversial products than in the 70s). Protection was optional, and limits and controls were largely theoretical.

Pesticides in the field, sulfite on the must and aroma correction in the wine became the state of the art of wine making.

Now imagine being a young winemaker in your parents’ vineyard, telling your family that you will make wine without artificial things to pursue a quest of original wine taste. People will not understand. Why risk a harvest while you can safely sell to négoce. In a recent interview, Jean François Ganevat said he had to hide from his banker and his father how he was working.

For the pioneers, Marcel Lapierre, jean Foillard, Guy Breton and many others in Beaujolais, but also Jean Francois Ganevat in Jura, had a hard time at the beginning of what would become the natural wine movement. Natural wine wasn’t natural wine, the name came later, they called it wine without sulfite, it was a quest for an authentic taste. But like any quest it comes with the amazement of their relatives. How on earth can you turn back the relative security of making standard wine for négoce to make wine nobody wants.

It was a bet. Others joined it, many others didn’t. But a few years later, in the 90s, with bars and wine shops opening in Paris and elsewhere, it was a winning bet.

It is also the tipping point where basic consumption wine started to decline and when people started looking for quality. The collision of these two facts made the natural wine movement we know today.

Conventional wine, at the same time, started the long decline we know now. People stopped drinking every day and instead had a good bottle during the weekend. At the beginning of the 70s an average French adult could drink more than 100L of wine per year, only 60 in the 90s and less than 50L in 2010. In a space of a generation, wine usage changed, the natural wine movement took place here with the promise of a different taste and a beautiful experience.

If the movement had come earlier, I’m not sure we’d enjoy natural wine today, maybe not as we think.

Remember that same reaction on the other side of the Channel — a revolt against industrial beer that, decades later, gave us the current craft beer movement: imperial IPAs, chocolate stout, coffee stout, candy-like sour beers. Everything, in other words, except the plain pint their grandparents drank.

Natural wine followed the same arc and could easily have gone the same way; orange wines, cloudy pét-nat, wines that taste more of intention than of grape. But it didn’t have to earn its place twice. It arrived exactly when conventional wine was losing its drinkers and a new generation was looking for something to replace it with. That’s the accident: not that a few winemakers chased their grandparents’ taste, but that the rest of us were finally ready to want it. Open the Raisin app tonight, in Paris or in Kyiv, and you’re drinking the result of that timing, not of some inevitability, but of a bet that landed.