Is natural wine the way forward for wine lovers? If you enjoy a glass of wine with your favourite meal or perhaps enjoy a glass in the evening but want to avoid the morning aftereffects of the alcohol, a switch to natural wine may be your next route. With other health benefits, less chemicals and better taste, let’s compare this to the conventional wine on the market.
Properties of Natural Wine
Natural wines tend to be harvested in a more simplistic way, where grapes are handpicked and fermented with natural yeast and minimal interruption of chemicals and added additives. Typically, there are around 72 legal additives allowed in wines, which are most inserted into conventional wines. These are added to improve colour, aroma and wine texture.
Natural wines have a variety of benefits, which include:
- Less additives, leaving it to digest much easier
- Lower alcohol levels, making it a better alternative to high alcohol percentages
- Grapes used are grown without pesticides and other chemicals
Organic
Organic typically means that no pesticides have been used during their growth and throughout production. This implies no harmful pesticides and herbicides have been used on the plant, avoiding its occurrence when transferred to a bottle.
There are wineries that are situated in areas including Italy, South Africa and Spain. Workers themselves are involved on the farms, with practices performed by hand and run an ecosystem within the field. In comparison to largely owned wine grounds, which consist of machine harvesting and stages of additives with heavy filtration.
Sugar Free
With natural wine having no added sugar content, this could also suggest a reduction in hangover effects after drinking. Thus, resulting in you feeling better after a night of drinking natural one compared to consuming conventional wine with added additives.
What Does Conventional Wine Contain?
Typically, most conventional wines are made with chemical intervention, indicating the use of pesticides and herbicides throughout the vineyards, as well as 60 FDA permitted additives before racing the shelves. Compared to the content of natural wines, some conventional wines can have 10 times as many sulphites than natural wine.
To note, if you’re vegan or a vegetarian, it is important to look at the wine content as some methods used to stabilise wine bacteria levels are derived from animal sources. As wine often has a cloudy appearance once fermented, suppliers wish for a clear and cloudless liquid, which results in the use of so-called ‘fishing agents’, acting as a magnet to remove the molecules that create the cloudy appearance. These animal-based products could be milk, egg or fish oil.
Price
As with most products that are made from more research, time and better-quality ingredients, natural wines do sit at a higher price than other conventional wines. Saying this, the cost of natural wines isn’t a massive comparison and there are affordable natural wines on the market.
So, What’s The Verdict?
If you’re searching for a wine with better health benefits and are conscious of the effects involved in additives in conventional wine, opting for a natural wine may be beneficial to you. Also, if you’re after fine quality, trying a natural wine will offer just that. Plus, with the price difference not being that drastic, there are plenty of reasons to experiment with a natural wine, with the reduced risk of waking up feeling the alcohol side effects.
