Two glasses from one volcano#
I like to open a tasting with two glasses of Nerello Mascalese from Mount Etna, in Sicily, Italy, poured side by side with the labels hidden. One comes from Frank Cornelissen’s parcels above Solicchiata on the north slope, where the wine sees no wood and no treatment that can be avoided. The other comes from Benanti, the classic estate in Viagrande that revived its family vines in 1988 and works in steel and oak. Same grape, same black volcanic sand, same late harvest. One glass is pale, high-toned, saline, a little wild. The other is polished, exact, and built to sit in a cellar for years.
Guests almost always prefer one, and they are rarely unanimous. That moment is the point, not the labels. After more than a decade in wine, and years in restaurant kitchens before that, I have stopped asking which camp is right. I ask what the winemaker chose, why, and what it did to the glass. This article is what that habit has taught me, with Etna and Georgia’s Kakheti as the two places where the contrast is sharpest.
What the words mean#
I say classic rather than conventional, because conventional sounds like an accusation. Classic winemaking, as it has been taught for two generations, means clean fruit, temperature-controlled fermentation, usually a selected yeast strain, sulfur dioxide added at the crusher and at bottling within legal limits, fining and filtration for stability, and oak or steel by choice. The goal is a wine that tastes the same in every bottle and arrives at a table in Brno the way it left the cellar.
Natural wine has no legal definition in most countries. France recognised a vin méthode nature charter in 2020, Italy has the ViniVeri and VinNatur charters, and Georgia’s Natural Wine Association, founded in Tbilisi in February 2017, has its own rules. They agree on the outline: organic or biodynamic farming, hand harvest, fermentation on the yeasts that arrive on the grapes, nothing added and nothing taken out, and no or very little sulfur. Many bottles go unfined and unfiltered, so a haze is normal. I go into the detail in natural wine explained.
Between the two sits a wide middle that arguments tend to skip. The village qvevri cellar in Imereti that never heard the word organic and never bought a packet of yeast. The Barolo estate that farms without herbicides and then makes an entirely classic wine. The large Kakheti company with a qvevri line beside its steel tanks. Much of what I pour lives in that middle, and I tag it traditional on this site because neither label fits.
What natural wine does well, and where it fails#
When it works, natural wine has a texture I do not find anywhere else. Skin-contact Rkatsiteli from a qvevri has the grip of strong tea and a dried-apricot bitterness that makes a walnut sauce taste sweeter. A red made without sulfur is often lighter in the mouth than its colour suggests, and on Etna it carries the iron and salt of the lava rather than the vanilla of a barrel. The aromatic range is wider too: dried herbs, orange peel, bruised apple, the notes that a selected yeast and an early dose of sulfur tend to narrow.
The failures are just as specific. Mousiness, a stale-cracker taste that arrives on the finish and builds with every sip, is a fault and not a style, and it is far more common when there is no sulfur to prevent it. Volatile acidity can tip from lift into nail varnish. A bottle can start fermenting again in a warm room. Two bottles from the same case can be two different wines. None of this is a reason to dismiss the category. It is a reason to buy from people who taste their own wines honestly, keep the bottles cool, and drink them young.
What classic wine does well, and where it fails#
Classic winemaking delivers precision. A Carricante from Milo made in steel tastes of lemon, herbs and smoke in a straight line, and it will taste that way in every bottle for years. Sulfur protects the aromatics on the road from Sicily to a Moravian table. A selected yeast finishes the job in a cold cellar when a wild one would stall with sugar left over. The rules of Barolo or Mukuzani give you a known shape before the cork is out, which is a comfort when you are ordering for ten people.
The failures are quieter. A wine can be faultless and have nothing to say. Heavy new oak and long extraction, fashionable for a generation, can make a Nebbiolo and a Saperavi taste like cousins. A generous dose of sulfur at bottling can shut a young white down for a year. And a spotless cellar can hide tired farming: the wine tells you nothing about the soil because nobody asked the soil anything.
The three questions I ask instead#
The back label tells me less than three questions I can answer with a glass and a short walk.
Is the vineyard alive? Cover crops, insects, old vines on their own roots, a grower who knows every row. This matters more than the yeast decision, and it cuts across both camps.
Does the wine taste of its grape and its place before it tastes of its method? A Saperavi should taste of Saperavi, not of a barrel and not of a fermentation fault. Method should be the frame, not the picture.
Would I want a second glass with food? This is the tiebreaker, and it is where my kitchen years earn their keep. A wine that impresses in a tasting line-up and dies next to a plate of khinkali has failed at its only real job.
Food decides more than ideology#
Most of the argument dissolves at a table, because food does not read charters. Tannin from six months on skins wants fat and salt: an amber Kisi with walnut pkhali or a cheese khachapuri is the pairing Kakhetian families make without thinking, and it is one of the best I know. A classic dry Saperavi aged in oak wants the char of mtsvadi grilled over vine cuttings. Swap them and both wines look worse than they are.
On Etna the same logic holds. A steel-fermented Etna Bianco cuts through grilled swordfish and the ricotta salata on pasta alla Norma. A pale, low-sulfur Nerello, served a few degrees cooler than you would serve a Barolo, is the right thing beside salsiccia and porcini from the north slope, where a heavier, oakier red would sit on top of the plate.
Temperature does a lot of the work. I serve natural reds at cellar temperature, around 14 to 15 °C, because warmth exaggerates their volatile edge. I serve young classic whites a little warmer than most restaurants do, so the sulfur does not read as a hard edge. Small adjustments like these change more minds than any argument about yeast.
Three cellars that taught me the most#
The two Etna estates from the opening are the cleanest lesson I know. At Frank Cornelissen’s cellar in Solicchiata, Nerello Mascalese from parcels between 600 and 1,000 metres ferments and ages in epoxy-lined tanks and buried terracotta, with no wood at all, and the approach is revised every year. On the south-east slope at Benanti in Viagrande, whites go into steel, reds into oak, and the Riservas wait sixty months before release. Neither is a caricature of its camp, which is exactly why they teach so well. The Etna guide has the geography.
In Georgia I use Pheasant’s Tears, whose cellar in Tibaani ferments Rkatsiteli, Kisi and Saperavi in buried qvevri on wild yeasts, without fining or filtration, with skin contact from a single day to six months. The classic counterweight is Château Mukhrani in Kartli, where local grapes such as Goruli Mtsvane and Shavkapito are made in stainless steel and French oak, Bordeaux methods on Kartli fruit. Put a Pheasant’s Tears Kisi and a Mukhrani Goruli Mtsvane next to a plate of Imeretian cheese and the room divides in seconds. The Kakheti guide explains the qvevri side of that table.
What I pour on tour#
Both, on the same table, from the same region, usually the same grape. On the Etna tour that means a contrada red from a classic cellar and a natural one from a neighbour in the same flight, and I say which is which only after the group has argued. In Kakheti the table leans towards qvevri and low intervention because that is what the region does best, and I bring in a classic Saperavi so nobody leaves thinking Georgia is one thing. A private tour can lean as far in either direction as you like.
I do not pour faults. A mousy bottle goes back in the box, and so does a Nebbiolo that tastes of a lumber yard. What stays on the table is whatever passes the three questions, and my job is to explain the choice behind each glass without telling you which to prefer.
A decade of pouring both taught me one thing above all. The interesting winemakers on either side are asking the same question, how to get this hillside into a bottle without lying about it. They only answer it with different tools.
