Natural Wines: Shifting Social and Ecological Rhythms

Abstract

Natural wines depend on production methods in the vineyard and the cellar that do not intervene with natural processes. This includes organic and preferably biodynamic or regenerative agriculture practices, spontaneous fermentation and no chemical intervention. Based on in-depth audio-recorded interviews conducted in multiple wine growing regions (Argentina, California, France, Italy, South Africa) and natural wine sellers, sommeliers, and proprietors in this locations as well as natural wine drinking cities (Stockholm, Sweden, Los Angeles), I explore how natural wine producers and consumers, frame their engagement with natural wine as resistant and challenge to corporate capitalism and conventional winemaking. By juxtaposing the radical positionalities, anarchist and environmentalist, of some in the natural wine project, with the conservatism and traditionalism of others, this presentation seeks to address the potential for relationalities across groups and regions and barriers to promote substantive social transformations in winemaking and the reduction of the ecological footprint of the wine industry as a whole. Applying an intersectional feminist approach, gender, race, and class, and colonialism are understood as a vivid part of the conventional wine's legacy is compared to the conditions and considerations of natural wine producers and sellers around these categories.