Natural wine has gotten plenty of attention and love around the world over the past few years. But while we’re seeing more of it now in bars, restaurants, and wine stores in Manila, it can actually be hard to get a straight answer to this: what exactly makes natural wine different from normal wine?

While you would be right to presume that natural wine is simply made differently, it actually goes deeper than this: natural wine is an entire philosophy of winemaking that affects how it’s made—and as a result, how it tastes.

What is natural wine?

Put simply, natural wine is made from unadulterated fermented grape juice, and nothing else—and while the buzz it gets makes it sound like an entirely new concept, this is actually the most traditional way to make wine. In fact, this is how the ancient Egyptians, Greeks, and Roman did it: how wine was originally made, without all the junk! Little to nothing is added, nothing is taken away, and the winemaker intervenes as little as possible in creating the purest expression of the wine grapes they’ve chosen to use. 

That said, the grapes used in natural wine are cultivated with no chemical fertilizers and pesticides—meaning that they’re organic wines by default, and have less impact on the soil and surrounding environment. Also as a result, the grapes take on the subtle nuances of weather and climate every year, and you may notice that different vintages of the same wine can taste different.

Some natural winemakers also take a biodynamic approach to winemaking, going beyond conventional organic practices to take into account the ecosystem that the vineyard belongs to. In practice, they take extra care to enrich the soil, introduce companion plants and livestock to encourage biodiversity, and even follow specific calendars based on the lunar cycle.

When they’re ready, the grapes in natural wine are usually handpicked instead of machine-harvested before they are fermented using the wild yeasts naturally found on them. From there, the winemakers will add little to no foreign ingredients—and if they do, it may be a bare minimum amount of sulphites, which are a stabilizer and preservative that help keep your wine tasting as fresh as when it was put into the bottle. On top of this, natural winemakers will often (but not always) skip fining or filtering the resulting wine before bottling it, making the liquid cloudy or hazy.

Being able to produce good natural wine with so many variables is a feat in itself, let alone making good bottles of the same wine year after year. This is one of the reasons why natural wine isn’t mass-produced and usually comes from small to medium wineries. 

And because many winemakers will have their own takes and variations on the process, the label “natural wine” itself is less a well-defined category and more a concept of a movement. It may even be more accurate to call it “low intervention wine,” for the principle of deliberately avoiding making any changes to the wine. But for all intents and purposes, natural wine is the term most people will understand when you’re looking for it at a restaurant, bar, or wine store in Manila.

How is natural wine different from normal wine?

Over the millennia that wine has been made and enjoyed all over the world, the process of creating it has understandably changed in the face of mass production, where commercial winemakers employ high intervention to control the process—be it to influence how a wine tastes, how long it stays drinkable, how much it costs to make, and how quickly and consistently they can produce it year after year.

In the vineyard, that can translate to using pesticides and fertilizers. In the winemaking process, this can be through the use of lab-grown yeasts to regulate fermentation, or adding things like acid, sugar, and a good amount of sulfites which preserve wines for longer. To introduce oak notes to wine, some winemakers save time by skipping oak barrel-aging and simply steeping oak wood chips in the liquid instead. Many even introduce egg whites, milk, or even bentonite clay as a fining agent to remove unwanted articles and give the wine clarity.

And these are only scratching the surface, as there are actually over 60 possible additives that producers in the United States can use in their wines without having to declare them on the label, so long as they remain within safe, accepted amounts.

There are many perfectly valid reasons for the use of these additives and methods, and employing them for the sake of cost, consistency, and stability does not make conventionally-made wine inherently better or worse. The main difference between natural wine and normal wine is simply the principle of how much or how little a winemaker should intervene in the process of fermenting grape juice.

Does natural wine taste different from normal wine?

You may be wondering, “With all the extra effort it takes to make natural wine, can you even taste a difference?” The answer is yes, but how subtle or how distinct that difference is actually depends on the specific bottle and the winemaker.

Many people will know natural wine for being “funky” or “wild,” with traces of that fermented flavor or aroma you often find in kombucha, beer, and yogurt. Some even call it a “barnyard” aroma. In a wine made conventionally, this would be a flaw, cause for concern in regard to quality. But in natural wine, this often reflects how little intervention there was in the fermentation process: it’s not a flaw, but a sign that the wine was allowed to develop all its different flavors freely.

But while many will know natural wine for its funk, many natural wines deliver that same clean taste and clear color that you get from conventional winemaking—but due to the use of organic grapes, every vintage has a special character and playfulness.

Some natural wines will present flavors that are very typical of the wine grapes used, while others go as wild as the winemaker allows. While a bottle of literally any conventional wine labelled “Sauvignon Blanc” is guaranteed to taste tart and herbaceous, a natural wine with that same label may also introduce unique notes of chamomile and papaya or even elderflower honey. That said, what a natural wine will taste like ultimately depends on the style of the winemaker.

But even beyond this, there may even be a case for saying that wine made even partially the natural way tastes better. A UCLA study found that organic and biodynamic wines in themselves are judged to be of higher quality by experts, even in blind tastings—meaning that grapes planted and harvested the natural way tend to subjectively taste better, to a trained palate at the very least.

In summary: how is natural wine different from normal wine?

Natural wine is an entire movement in the industry focused on low intervention winemaking. This entails organic, sometimes biodynamic farming of its grapes. In the winemaking process, they only use naturally-occurring yeasts to ferment the wine, and little to no sulphites or foreign ingredients are added to it before it is bottled. This can sometimes (but not always) result in the wine smelling or tasting funky, but the majority of natural wine will actually taste a lot like conventionally-made ones—though experts may say that the organically-famed grapes noticeably increase the quality of the wine by taste alone.

Meanwhile, commercial wine encourages high intervention methods. Mass producers are free to use pesticides and chemical fertilizers to help grow their grapes. In the winemaking process, they also use additives such as sulphites, sugar, acids, and other fining agents to refine their wines and create a consistent flavor vintage after vintage. This is the most common way to produce wine, as it allows producers more control over how consistent the taste of their wine is over time while also being more cost- and time-efficient—and high-intervention winemaking has produced many fantastic wines in its own right!

Where to buy natural wine in Metro Manila

If you want to taste the difference between natural wine and normal wine here in the Philippines, then you’re already in the right place. (Super)Natural offers great natural wines from esteemed winemakers all over the world including Gut Oggau, Jean-Francois Ganevat, and Milan Nestarec—and we also have our crowd favorites from not just famous wine-producing countries like France, Spain, and Italy, but also Japan, Austria, and the Czech Republic.

Whether you’re after something approachable or funky, shop natural wine at supernaturalwine.ph and place your order before 2 PM for same-day delivery in Metro Manila.