Natural wine: the ‘magical’ unknown booming in popularity

Natural wine is a new type of drink at the forefront of a new gastronomic cultural revolution taking place across Barcelona and Catalonia. Or possibly counter-cultural revolution, as it remains a minority in the world of wine, but nevertheless, a strong movement is being built around this modern trend. 

Fluid in Poble Sec, Amateur in Poblenou, and PetNat in Born are just a few of the locales offering a new type of night for patrons, all based around natural wine, that have opened in recent years.

But what is natural wine, and what’s behind the drink’s current boom in popularity? 

“People love to know who is behind the thing that they are consuming,” Rafa Camps, from the La Natural brand, tells Catalan News. “When I think of natural wines, I think of this way of consuming, to understand the personality of the wine maker.”

What is natural wine?

Natural wine, organic wine, vegan wine, 00 wine… the wine market has been flooded with new terminology and styles in recent years. But what do all these terms mean?

A clue is in the name – it’s fermented grape juice, yes, but it’s slightly different from the conventional type of wine we all know. 

Traditional wine typically contains sulfites, concentrates, added sugar, along with other additives that are not listed on the bottle. 

The big difference in natural wine is that there are no additives, no filtering, no cultured yeasts, no chemicals, and either no added or limited added sulfites – not to be confused with natural sulfites, which all wines have. Fermentation occurs spontaneously with native yeast. Natural wines can be filtered or left unfiltered, giving the liquid a cloudy consistency. 

Organic wine: All natural wines are organic, but not all organic wines are considered ‘natural’. Some organic wine cellar regulations permit the use of additives and fining agents that are against the spirit of natural winemaking.

Vegan wine: Traditional fining agents, which often contain egg whites, help remove sediment that can’t be removed by filtration. This is what typically makes a wine unsuitable for vegans. Vegan wines aren’t always natural.

00 wines: This term does not mean that the wine is alcohol free, but instead it’s a subset of natural wines, asserting that zero was added and zero was taken out of the wine before bottling. It’s a more extreme version of natural wine, which reduces intervention to the maximum. No added sulfites or other additives, no fining, no filtering. 

Biodynamic wines are similar to organic but seen as the next level up, and are produced using a holistic approach to nature and the planet, taking account of farming practices that are best for the land. 

History of natural wine

Benji Sher is a sommelier, specializing in natural wine, originally from Canada but now based in Barcelona, who, along with Ida Mogren, runs Suc Suc, a natural wine educational hub and consulting agency for professionals in the industry. Benji explains to Catalan News that ‘natural wine’, though not a legal category in Catalonia, has its roots in France in the mid-20th century, when winemakers started to respond “to the gross misconduct of chemical use in the field.” 

“So many insecticides, pesticides, fungicides, left the fields barren, the crops were so weak because of all this chemical dependency,” he says. This led to a “drastic reduction” in the chemicals used in the vineyard, which was by a realisation that not as many chemicals were needed in the cellar, as the grapes were arriving “more hearty.”

The practice moved south to Catalonia in the late 1990s, and Benji says there are “multiple Catalan winemakers who have 20+ years of winemaking under their belt without any kind of additive.”

Press play below to listen to our Filling the Sink podcast on the natural wine boom, or subscribe on Apple Podcasts, YouTube or Spotify. 

Current boom

Trends don’t take root overnight. Despite the fact that there have been Catalan winemakers producing natural wine for decades, the post-pandemic landscape has seen natural wine explode in popularity, as seen in the number of establishments now serving it and even dedicating themselves primarily to the drink. 

So what’s behind the current boom? Ida Mogren of Suc Suc believes that the natural wine world has managed to “capture a new drinker that the wine industry hasn't been able to capture before.” She says this is a “younger public that does not want ‘Gran Reserva’ type wine with a steak in a sit-down dinner, but wants to be in Fluid at 1 am drinking something high acidity, fun, vibrant.” Fluid is a queer and trans-forward natural wine bar that is run by Benji Sher, located in Poble Sec in Barcelona. 

Mogren also points to the “aesthetic” of the wines that captivate a younger market, with a creative design that draws people in. 

Natural wine restaurants also typically come with “a more rounded out mid-century soft lighting,” Benji Sher explains, with “colorful hard plastic tables or stainless steel, very clean, crisp, but colorful graphic and geometric” designs, adding up to surroundings that offer a “modern 2025 aesthetic.” 

Amateur is one such natural wine bar and restaurant, located in the Poblenou area of Barcelona, that is leading this gastronomic movement. Owner Marco Bollati says that his priority is for the staff and customers alike to have fun. A relative newcomer to the world of natural wine, he was quick to get on board with it when deciding what type of establishment he wanted to open. 

The young Argentine entrepreneur also emphasizes the relaxed atmosphere, without pretension, that defines Amateur. “We are honest in the moment of explaining a wine, that means we let customers know the price, let them taste it before buying, if they don’t like a wine, we can change it,” Bollati tells Catalan News. “Here we try to explain the wines not in a fancy way, but honestly and simply.”

Rafa Camps, a wine maker under the brand La Natural, views this growth in popularity as hand-in-hand with consumer trends of eating healthier and more pure ingredients. “There is a trend to connect more with the producers behind the things that we eat, that we wear,” he tells Catalan News. “I don't know if it's a massive trend, but I think if you talk in the street with everybody, everybody is feeling that we have been doing something wrong with the industrialization of everything in our lives.” 

Visitors to Amateur won’t be able to miss one of the key features of the floor – a full DJ booth, a strong sound system, surrounded by dozens of vinyl records. “Sometimes we go to the shops to buy vinyls all together. Most of the team really enjoy the music and the vinyls,” Bollati says. 

Another key aspect of many natural wine bars like Amateur is the food offering. Often referred to as ‘small plates’, the menu does away with concepts of starters and main courses, and instead offers a tapas-like selection, but generally unique dishes that reflect the personality of the restaurant and chefs, as opposed to classic plates one would assume with traditional Catalan or Spanish cooking. 

Head chef Tomas Esmoris says that he brings his experience from his native Argentina and lessons from working in an Indian restaurant, and combines them with the ingredients and fresh produce available in Catalonia, to create the Amateur menu. “We cook it in a way that has nothing to do with Catalan food, nothing to do with Argentinian food, it's like a mix of cultures.”

In their fusion-based menu with a heavy emphasis on seasonal ingredients available, Esmoris says they are “not trying to change the game, we’re just trying to make good food with the product that we have available here, with a little twist.”

Production

Natural wine regions are no different from regular wine regions. The grapes are grown in the same place, with organic practices. 

That means that the areas of Penedès, Alt Empordà, Conca de Barberà, Terra Alta and Priorat are known for their natural wines as well as their conventional ones. 

At Suc Suc, Benji and Ida’s main activity are the natural wine classes and courses they offer to professionals and enthusiasts, but they also make their own wine, also under the brand name Suc Suc. As such, they know first-hand the stresses that are involved in production. 

They say there’s a lot of “anxiety” around the production, especially as natural wine tends to be made in smaller batches, meaning if anything goes wrong, it will affect proportionally more of the winemaker’s production. Additionally, complications can come from the method of spontaneous fermentation, as “that means that you crush the grapes and you're letting it ferment, ideally on its own, with a natural ambient yeast in the atmosphere.” 

Dealing with the elements opens the door to greater variation in the final product: a natural wine, following the same recipe, could turn out significantly different from one year to the next. “Having to think on your feet is a big part of making natural wine,” says Ida. “You're much more susceptible to climate change, because there's no correcting to be made, which puts a lot of pressure on winemakers.”

Rafa Camps, from La Natural, points out that there’s intuition and technique, two distinct outlooks that winemakers have when it comes to production. 

“There are some vineyards that are more technical; they try to stick to the script, and others work with intuition. They know the way, but they don't know really how they know that.” Camps’ La Natural wine brand, located in the Empordà area of northern Catalonia, produce around 40-50,000 bottles per year, and have grown from revenues of €100,000 per year in 2021 to now around €1 million.

“I love these second ones,” Camps says, referring to his preference of intuition over technique. “If you try some wines, you can tell the intuitive ones and the technical ones, and I think that it's gorgeous too.”

Naturally, the difficult climate provides huge challenges. “This wine starts and finishes in the vineyard, so what happens in the vineyard is the most important thing. During extreme heat, Camps says it’s more difficult to preserve wines without added sulfites. 

The effects of the historic drought that Catalonia has seen in recent years have only been heightened for natural wine makers, too, as for some of Camps’ bottles, annual production has dropped from 800 to 100 bottles. “Then for recuperating the vineyard, you have to plant more, and so you have some years to go again before producing grapes.” 

More recently, Camps has opened a natural wine store in the Barcelona neighbourhood of Gràcia, where he is originally from, but he points out that La Natural is more than just a place to buy wine. 

“This is a place to make some kind of community,” he says. “So sometimes there are people who play some music inside, or put on some vinyls, and we have a wine tasting as well for people who want to get closer to this world of natural wine. We don't like to think of it as only a store.”