Much of the natural wine I rave about on this blog is arguably the result of vignerons' efforts to recall - under whatever banner, organic or natural or biodynamic - preindustrial viticultural traditions: practices whose logic was necessarily dictated less by market demand for a consistent recognizable product, than by local tastes, and the particularities of the regional environment.
That wines made with these ideals in mind often show so exciting and fresh and new - that they occasion strange scaremongering newspaper articles in nations so close, at least geographically, as England - is testament not to their actual newness, but to how drastically the product we call wine has changed since it encountered the global marketplace.
At 19ème natural wine bistro Quedubon's recent "Vivent les Vins" tasting, I was pretty enthralled by the bracing Mâcon wines of Julien Guillot of Domaine des Vignes du Maynes, whose oddity "Cuvée 910" bottling in particular seems to demonstrate the potential - both for quality, and for surprise - of the old ways.
