Natural wine
NATURAL AND BIODYNAMIC WINES
Organic wines are not what 
they seem. A certified “organic wine” only guarantees you organically grown grapes; the winemaker may add flavours (such as wood chips or caramel), stabilisers (such as sulphur dioxide), and preservatives during the wine making production. This is how mass produced cheap supermarket wines can be created.
Natural wines are wines created with minimal intervention from the wine maker. Natural wine making requires the artisan to carefully attend to all steps of the growing, fermenting, and blending processes, knowing that additives cannot be used to correct the imperfections of nature. This makes natural wines commercially unviable on a mass, low cost scale. Vintages can vary significantly from year to year based on climate conditions, and personal attention means very low yielding vineyards. We think you’ll taste this difference.
The big deal about sulphites
A key differentiating factor of natural wines is the significantly lower – sometimes non-existent – use of added sulphur dioxide (SO2). SO2 is the most widely used and controversial additive in winemaking. It is used to inhibit or kill unwanted yeasts and bacteria, and to protect wine from oxidation. For humans, it’s the main cause of a headache when ‘hung-over’ and can cause potentially fatal allergic reactions.
Sulphites occur naturally in all living things and are present in small quantities even in unsulphured wines. Some natural winemakers add small doses of sulphites to stabilise a wine at the end of the wine making process. These small doses do little or no damage to the flavour of the wine and can help to protect it from being mishandled. Commercial wines may have around four times the amount of SO2 as a natural wine of a similar style.