I completely agree! Such a difficult question to understand the true intention behind when we hear it. I think the hardest part for me is figuring out if that person honestly cares about the low intervention, low additive nature of the wine or is looking for a taste and aroma profile that is more typical of “natural” (with all the funk to match). Maybe overly optimistic of me but I hope that there are consumers that use the term on both sides of that and it’s so hard to delicately probe to figure out which they are!
Yeah I haven’t quite figured out what the best way to ask them to clarify is without it sounding like I’m challenging what they know. Maybe it IS just a simple, “what kinds of natural wines are you looking for?” Or “what natural wines have you enjoyed in the past?” Which might be a good way to suss out what they are looking for.
I think your description in this post is just about the same long winded way I'd answer and customer at the table asking about natural wine! I always talk about the difference between sustainable, organic, and biodynamic wine. I also explain why "natural wine" is still just a very broad blanket term and I offer examples of the other ways to define what you're looking for and how to identify what you enjoy. 💗
I know no other way than to be long winded 😅 I'm glad to hear you're taking the time at the table with customers to give them some more information. How is it usually received? Do they usually have any follow up questions?
After hosting a pop-up wine by in Paris for 28 days earlier this year I learned a lot about what the average wine consumer knows and doesn't know about this topic. One of my customers asked me to only serve her organic wine and to NOT serve her Demter/biodynamic wine because the SO2 gave her headaches. I quickly explained how unique her allergy was : ) and she was grateful. But in general, we split the wines by low intervention and conventional and this comparison seemed to work since the terms themselves carry clear, understood definitions.
That’s interesting that they didn’t want biodynamic wine but did want organic wine. I was under the impression that in order to be certified biodynamic you first had to be certified organic (perhaps that’s only in the U.S. though?) which would mean that the SO2 levels in BD wines is the same (if not lower) than those in Organic wines, which can be upwards of 100mg/L in the U.S.
Yes, correct. She likely was getting headaches from drinking too much. Less than 1% of the world population is allergic to SO2. I asked her if she got headaches from french fries, and she didn’t—fries have 10x more SO2 than wine. 😉
I completely agree! Such a difficult question to understand the true intention behind when we hear it. I think the hardest part for me is figuring out if that person honestly cares about the low intervention, low additive nature of the wine or is looking for a taste and aroma profile that is more typical of “natural” (with all the funk to match). Maybe overly optimistic of me but I hope that there are consumers that use the term on both sides of that and it’s so hard to delicately probe to figure out which they are!
Yeah I haven’t quite figured out what the best way to ask them to clarify is without it sounding like I’m challenging what they know. Maybe it IS just a simple, “what kinds of natural wines are you looking for?” Or “what natural wines have you enjoyed in the past?” Which might be a good way to suss out what they are looking for.
I think your description in this post is just about the same long winded way I'd answer and customer at the table asking about natural wine! I always talk about the difference between sustainable, organic, and biodynamic wine. I also explain why "natural wine" is still just a very broad blanket term and I offer examples of the other ways to define what you're looking for and how to identify what you enjoy. 💗
I know no other way than to be long winded 😅 I'm glad to hear you're taking the time at the table with customers to give them some more information. How is it usually received? Do they usually have any follow up questions?
After hosting a pop-up wine by in Paris for 28 days earlier this year I learned a lot about what the average wine consumer knows and doesn't know about this topic. One of my customers asked me to only serve her organic wine and to NOT serve her Demter/biodynamic wine because the SO2 gave her headaches. I quickly explained how unique her allergy was : ) and she was grateful. But in general, we split the wines by low intervention and conventional and this comparison seemed to work since the terms themselves carry clear, understood definitions.
That’s interesting that they didn’t want biodynamic wine but did want organic wine. I was under the impression that in order to be certified biodynamic you first had to be certified organic (perhaps that’s only in the U.S. though?) which would mean that the SO2 levels in BD wines is the same (if not lower) than those in Organic wines, which can be upwards of 100mg/L in the U.S.
Yes, correct. She likely was getting headaches from drinking too much. Less than 1% of the world population is allergic to SO2. I asked her if she got headaches from french fries, and she didn’t—fries have 10x more SO2 than wine. 😉
Oh yeah for sure, I just wonder what gave her the initial impression that BD wines were worse than Organic, usually the believe is the opposite