Although she's herself partial to wines that fall in the "natural" camp, my wife has grown frustrated and wary of the term. Robert Parker's opinion may not be the most reliable on the subject, given that he's spent most of his career lauding huge, unctuous, oaky Napa wines, but it's true that there's very little in terms of concrete boundaries for what constitutes "natural wine." And some of the practices the natural crowd wants to jettison, like adding sulfur, are essential to creating balanced, pleasant wines, and have been used for centuries. As one of our distributor friends said, "the first duty of wine is to taste good."
During a recent bottling we found ourselves forced into an interesting high-vs-low intervention experiment. My wife felt her Sauvignon Blanc was too cloudy, so we were trying to filter it as it was bottled. We made it through about 50 cases' worth, but the filters kept clogging as we bottled, which was stretching out the bottling time and threatening to cost us a bunch of money. So, for the remaining cases we bottled without the filter. For the first month or two in bottle the unfiltered wine was definitely a bit "funky" and a lot more volatile on the nose than the filtered. But now, although it's still quite a bit more cloudy, we both prefer the unfiltered Sauv Blanc.
During a recent bottling we found ourselves forced into an interesting high-vs-low intervention experiment. My wife felt her Sauvignon Blanc was too cloudy, so we were trying to filter it as it was bottled. We made it through about 50 cases' worth, but the filters kept clogging as we bottled, which was stretching out the bottling time and threatening to cost us a bunch of money. So, for the remaining cases we bottled without the filter. For the first month or two in bottle the unfiltered wine was definitely a bit "funky" and a lot more volatile on the nose than the filtered. But now, although it's still quite a bit more cloudy, we both prefer the unfiltered Sauv Blanc.