About five years ago I started to be alarmed by the number of “designer” wines that I was tasting. These were wines that were being made to fit what market research said consumers were looking for.

Basically, winemakers would start with what they wanted for an end product and try to push the wines in that direction through a variety of technologies. What you end up with is the supermarket tomatoes of the wine world. Wines that are colorful and look pretty, but are lacking in flavor and completely soulless.

Can you remember your first experience biting into a perfectly ripened tomato handpicked from the garden? It’s this type of profound, yet simple experience that draws us out into the farmers’ markets and back into our kitchens this time of year. Fortunately, this same type of illuminating experience can still be found in the world of wine, if you know where to look.

Today’s most innovative and compelling winemakers all seem to have one thing in common–they are redefining what it means to call a wine natural. Admittedly, the term means something different to everyone. It covers the range from sustainable, organic, and biodynamic growing methods to natural techniques of fermentation to blatant (and often baseless) green marketing propaganda.

Forgetting about rules and regulations I think we all know what natural is when we taste it. It’s the difference between a supermarket tomato and the one from the farmer’s market–there’s just more there.

A wine that is gently crafted, rather than manipulated, allows the personality of the grapes, the region, and that growing season to shine through. These wines have the ability to transport you in one sip to the hillsides where they were grown, just like a summer ripe blueberry takes me camping in New Hampshire and a briny oyster sends me to Cape Cod.

Natural wines are often made in tiny quantities and aren’t supported by flashy advertising campaigns, so you might not be familiar with the labels or perhaps even the grape varietal or the region, but they are definitely discoveries worth seeking out.

Read about Kerri Platt and The Wine Bottega

Photo: http://www.flickr.com/photos/12919459@N08/ / CC BY 2.0