The natural wine movement was born as rebellion. Some kind of a noble idea that wine should be an honest reflection of grapes and place, unmasked by chemical shortcuts or industrial manipulation. Let’s make it pure, alive, expressive, electrifying! Back to simplicity, back to authenticity, back to fermentation as nature intended. Yeah, and back to caves, why not?
But like all revolutions, it eventually developed a priesthood.
Today, natural wine has followers who speak not of taste, but of virtue. They will pour you a glass that smells faintly of hamster cage and vinegar, and when you flinch, they’ll nod approvingly and say, “Ah, that’s mousiness. It means it’s alive. It’s natural!” Of course it is, any shit is natural. But to question their gods it is heresy. To ask for clarity, stability, or pleasure is bourgeois cowardice.
They come into my shop and ask for natural wine. I wish at least one of them would explain to me exactly what they want and what they think natural wine is. No chance. The only thing I hear from them (besides some vague muttering about saving the planet) is, “well, like, there shouldn’t be sulfur in it.” The most gifted connoisseurs of natural wine also report that sulfur gives them headaches.
Let’s be clear: non-interventionist winemaking can produce some of the most thrilling wines in the world. Wines with texture, vitality, and a sense of movement — you taste them and feel the vineyard breathing through them. But that requires enormous skill and discipline. “Natural” doesn’t mean “lazy.” It means the winemaker replaces chemistry with judgment, technology with intuition. That’s hard. It takes rigor. It’s the jazz of winemaking, it is improvisation based on mastery, not on moralizing.
What too many self-proclaimed naturalists practice instead is dogma: a refusal to use even minimal sulfur (the most ancient and benign preservative known to winemaking), or to correct obviously flawed fermentations. They call it authenticity. But nature, left completely alone, is not generous — it’s microbial chaos. And chaos makes wine that smells like… like something unpleasantly natural.
The irony is that this “movement against manipulation” has become a brand—complete with its own aesthetic. Cloudy wine in minimalist bottles, hand-drawn labels, and poetic nonsense on the back: “fermented by moonlight,” “guided by intuition,” “whispered to by wild yeast.” No, whispered to by your customers’ delusions! It’s not wine; it’s an attempt to sell a lifestyle. No one is saying wine should be sterile, but your “natural” wine sometimes revels in its own filth.
Sulfur isn’t the villain it’s made out to be. It’s been used since Roman times, in tiny, controlled amounts, to protect wine from oxidation and spoilage. The greatest producers in Burgundy and Barolo use it judiciously — not to erase character, but to preserve it. It’s like seasoning in food: the right pinch brings harmony, too much kills it, but none at all can leave things unfinished, unstable, half-alive and half-dead.
And yes, in case you didn’t know: sulfur is natural.
Well, how much sulfur contents your wine? Can we compare it to dried fruit content, for example? And how much is too much? How much wine wine should you drink to overdose your sulfur consumption?
Answering these questions we’ll see how overblown the sulfur panic really is. Let’s break it down like a sober chemist (with a full glass).
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How much sulfur is actually in wine? Sulfur dioxide (SO₂) is used in wine-making as a preservative — to protect against oxidation and spoilage. Its total amount in wine is tiny, but it depends on the style:
