Natural wine is wine made from organically farmed grapes, fermented with wild indigenous yeasts, and bottled with nothing added and nothing taken away. No commercial yeasts, no fining agents, no added sulphites beyond trace amounts at bottling, no acidification, no concentration. Just grapes, fermentation, and time. Where did natural wine come from? The natural wine movement has its roots in France — specifically Beaujolais and the Loire Valley — where producers in the 1980s and 1990s like Marcel Lapierre and Nicolas Joly began questioning the industrialisation of winemaking. They started farming organically and fermenting with wild yeasts instead of commercial...

A bottle of Domaine de Montille Volnay and a bottle of L’Anglore Tavel sit next to each other on your table. One is certified biodynamic. The other calls itself natural. Both are made by producers who farm obsessively well. But the labels mean different things, and one of them means nothing—legally speaking. Here’s what each term actually controls, what it ignores, and why it matters when you’re choosing a bottle. Organic Wine: The Regulated Baseline Organic wine has a legal definition in both the EU and the US, though the two differ. The EU version (since 2012) regulates both the...