Let’s Call the Whole Thing Off was a George and Ira Gershwin hit that made its debut in the 1937 film Shall We Dance?, sung by another incomparable duo, Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers (watch the scene here). The tune’s lyricsinclude the by now iconic line “You say potato and I say potahto” — a kind of anthem for couples who can’t seem to agree on much of anything, but can’t bear to part ways over their differences, either.
These days, the wine world is having its own little tiff — not over pronunciations, but over the vexed question of whether the unfamiliar flavors and scents generated by natural winemaking constitute faults we should be condemning, or, conversely, offer interesting new experiences we should be embracing.
You say naughty; I say natty. Shall we just call the whole thing off? Let’s, like Fred and Ginger, at least talk it over.
Natural winemaking has been described as a process that ‘adds nothing and takes nothing away.’ Ideally, this means healthy grapes whose sugars are fermented by populations of wild, local yeasts, the raw juice making the transition to wine, pretty much on its own steam, followed by maturation (by sitting still for a while) and bottling.
While all this may seem normal, very little wine produced for sale is made this way. This is in part the case because a very substantial constituency exists to make certain it isn’t. This includes agricultural research stations, schools of enology, equipment manufacturers, and an army of chemists that annually generates an arsenal of additives for use in the field and cellar.
Their efforts have been both beneficial and corrupting, I think it’s fair to say. Though it would take a lengthy essay indeed to sort it all out. In the most extreme examples, ‘wine’ hardly seems an appropriate term for what ensues. ‘Fermented wine-like beverage’ may be about as far as I’d be willing to go.
It’s true that wine subjected to minimum (or zero) doses of the most widely employed additive, sulfur dioxide, will be more biologically active than otherwise. In S02’s absence, microfauna generated during fermentation that would have been done to death by this antibacterial and antioxidant agent, live on. Their activities (not the creatures themselves) add naturalist flavor and aroma elements wine wouldn’t otherwise have, and when these are particularly noticeable, we generally say that the wine is natty.
During wine’s modern, technological era, these aspects (among them reduction, oxidation and volatile acidity) have been considered faults, not features — not just by the folks in the lab coats, but by the largest contingent of everyday wine drinkers, both casual and sophisticated. For these people, natty is naughty, not nice.
To put it another way, the question of what constitutes a genuine fault in wine — as opposed to a shortcoming, quirk or distinctive tic — is under current, extended, contentious review.
If you came of age drinking conventional, squeaky clean, enology-school approved wine, the natty stuff poses a challenge, both gastronomically and conceptually. If you began drinking wine in the last five years and make it a habit to prop your elbows on some of the city’s hipper wine bars, restos and pop-ups, then natty isn’t naughty — it’s perfectly normal.
As we see it, partisans of the Natty is Nice POV, need to at least acknowledge that there is such a thing as Natural Wine Gone Wrong (NWGW). At a certain point, nattiness crosses a boundary, becoming nothing more than good old-fashioned spoiled wine. Refusal to acknowledge this erodes the naturalist’s standing as a good faith participant in the natty/naughty debate.
Meanwhile, we expect the conventional contingent to recognize that wine is not a static cultural artifact. As in music, cinema, or literature, its creators are engaged in an aesthetic adventure that we ignore or disparage to our own disadvantage, risking missing out on the pleasure, interest and adventure that might be ours — though we don’t imagine every casual wine drinker will see it this way.
Naughty? Natty? Nice? Normal? Welcome to the conversation.
Stephen Meuse can be reached at stephenmeuse@icloud.com