ABSTRACT
Natural, or low-intervention, wines are wines that reject many of the standard approaches to winemaking, such as filtering to remove cloudiness, or using a commercial yeast blend to control the fermentation process and give predictable results. At the heart of the natural wine movement lies an intriguing, yet seemingly unacknowledged paradox. Such wines are based on a desire to make a ‘real’ wine, one that challenges the official conceptions of terroir – the taste of place. The producers of natural wine aim to reposition wine away from its perceived role as commercial, chemical product that is increasingly identical to others, to something that truly reflects terroir. In this chapter, I explore natural wines through the lens of a utopian quest for terroir. In doing so, I examine their relationship to not only conventionally produced wines, but also the regulatory apparatus that officially defines terroir. Drawing on Thomas More’s original concept of Utopia, and fieldwork among low-intervention winemakers in Austria, I highlight the ways in which natural wines challenge the declared boundaries of terroir. In charting this relationship, and the reasons winemakers pursue low-intervention methods, I conclude by suggesting that rather than a particular destination, the utopia of natural winemaking is best understood as a subversive, on-going journey of exploration.
