1980s onwards · France and internationally
The natural wine movement
A reaction against industrial winemaking that has been both genuinely influential and genuinely contentious.
What happened
The movement began in Beaujolais and the Loire in the 1980s, in reaction to heavy intervention, additives and what its proponents saw as homogenised wine.
Its practices are broadly organic or biodynamic farming, ambient yeast, no additives and minimal or no added sulfur.
There is no legal definition, so the term guarantees nothing on its own. France introduced a vin méthode nature label in 2020, but it is voluntary and not universally used.
The category genuinely contains both excellent wines and faulty ones, and the absence of a standard makes it hard to distinguish in advance. Mousiness and volatile acidity are more common where sulfur is very low.
Its wider influence has been substantial and is often understated: mainstream producers have reduced sulfur, adopted ambient fermentation and reconsidered filtration partly because of it.
How firmly this is dated
Attested. Well attested, with the precise date or the attribution reconstructed rather than recorded at the time.
Producer accounts, the development of the Beaujolais and Loire circles, and the later French charter. No single founding moment is documented.
Sources
Sources consulted
- WSET educational materials and the Systematic Approach to Tasting — Wine & Spirit Education Trust
Along the timeline
Before · 1990s onwards
The orange wine revival
Producers in north-east Italy and Slovenia revived extended skin-contact white winemaking, drawing on Georgian practice.
After · 2000s
The screwcap decision
Australian and New Zealand producers switched to screwcaps almost wholesale, to eliminate cork taint.