Skip to content
WineHQ
Search

Wine myths

Natural wine contains no sulfites

“Natural wine has no sulfites in it.”

Not true

All wine contains some sulfites, because yeast produce them during fermentation. Natural wine usually means little or no sulfur dioxide was added — which is a different statement.

The full answer

Sulfur dioxide is a normal by-product of alcoholic fermentation. Yeast make it whether or not anybody adds any, typically at levels around ten milligrams per litre and sometimes considerably more. A wine with genuinely no sulfites does not exist.

What producers mean by "no sulfites" is almost always "no added sulfites" — no sulfur dioxide introduced at crushing, during maturation or at bottling. That is a real and significant difference in how the wine was made, and it is worth knowing about; it is simply not the same as absence.

Labelling rules reflect this. In the EU and the UK, a wine must declare "contains sulphites" above ten milligrams per litre, and many zero-addition wines sit above that threshold on their own fermentation-derived sulfur alone.

WineHQ takes no position on whether anyone should seek out low-sulfite wine, and makes no health claim in either direction. Questions about sulfite sensitivity are clinical and belong with a health service, not a wine site.

What is true underneath it

The difference between a wine with 15 mg/L of total sulfur dioxide and one with 150 mg/L is real, large, and exactly what low-intervention producers are describing.

Why the belief persists

"Sulfite-free" is a far easier thing to print on a shelf-talker than "no sulfur dioxide added at any stage", and the shorter version is what circulates.

This correction is a established mechanism

A biochemical or physical process that has been demonstrated experimentally and is not seriously contested — the sort of statement that appears in enology textbooks without hedging.

What would settle it: A controlled experiment failing to reproduce the process.

Sources

Sources consulted