April Wine Club - Tier 1 Cellar Rat

Natural wine starts with a simple idea: grow the grapes well, get out of the way, and wait to taste what happens. It is less a strict category and more a shared attitude, one that tends to attract growers who are as interested in the vineyard and its ecosystem as they are in what ends up in the bottle.

In practice that means farming organically or biodynamically, fermenting with the yeasts already present on the grapes or in the winery, and keeping intervention in the winery to a minimum. The use of additives is avoided as much as possible, especially sulfites, which are commonly used in conventional winemaking to preserve freshness and prevent oxidation. Some natural winemakers will occasionally use a very small amount of sulfites at bottling, others none at all, but the intention is always the same. To let the wine speak for itself rather than prop it up.

The results are often surprising and full of character. Natural wines reflect their vintage and their place in ways that more conventional wines often don't, and they come in every style; white, red, rosé, and skin-contact “orange” wines. Part of the adventure of natural wine is that you never quite know what you're going to get.

Pinning down a precise definition for this term a bit trickier. There is no official certification, and different producers and regions interpret the term in their own ways. Some hold to strict standards, others to a broader set of principles. The looseness is, for many people, part of the point.

Natural wine has little interest in consistency for its own sake. Conventional winemaking leans on technology and additives to deliver a predictable product, and there is nothing wrong with that. In many ways it is exactly what is needed, making wine accessible and reliable for people everywhere, regardless of region, budget, or how much they want to think about what is in their glass. Natural wine simply takes a different view, treating variation as something worth celebrating rather than correcting. Natural Wine is not for every palate, as the wines can be funky, unpredictable, and sometimes polarizing, but for those who enjoy them, that is very much the appeal.

Important Terminology

Organic - Organic farming is where most natural wine producers start, and for many it forms the non-negotiable foundation of everything else. In the vineyard, it means working without synthetic pesticides, herbicides, or fertilizers, relying instead on compost, cover crops, and hands-on attention to maintain vine health and encourage living soil. That last part matters more than it might sound. Soil teeming with microorganisms and organic matter is soil that communicates with the vine, helping it access nutrients and reflect its specific place in ways that chemically managed land simply cannot.

Organic certification exists and carries real meaning, but plenty of natural wine producers farm organically without ever pursuing the paperwork. The reasons vary, costs, bureaucracy, a general suspicion of labels, but the practice tends to be the same. In the world of natural wine, what happens in the field is usually more telling than what appears on the label.

Biodynamic - Biodynamic farming takes the organic foundation and builds something more expansive on top of it. Rooted in the agricultural philosophy of Rudolf Steiner, it treats the vineyard as a self-sustaining ecosystem with its own rhythms, one that extends beyond the farm itself to include lunar cycles, seasonal patterns, and the broader natural world. In practice this means specific herbal and mineral preparations applied to the soil, planting and harvesting timed to natural calendars, and a general commitment to the farm as a living whole rather than a collection of inputs and outputs.

Like organic farming, biodynamic certification exists but is not universal. The most well known is Demeter, and carrying that stamp signals a serious commitment. But again, plenty of producers follow biodynamic principles without the official designation. Whether or not you find the philosophy convincing, the results tend to speak for themselves. Biodynamic vineyards are often among the most vibrant and expressive you will encounter.

Vin Méthode Nature - Natural wine has always resisted official definition, but that may slowly be changing. Vin Méthode Nature, introduced in France in 2020 and recognized by INAO (Institut national de l'origine et de la qualité or French National Institute of Origin and Quality), is the most concrete attempt yet to put the philosophy into writing. To carry the designation, a producer must farm organically, ferment with only native yeasts, avoid filtration and other heavy-handed cellar techniques, and keep sulfites below 30 mg/L. Two separate labels distinguish wines made with no added sulfites from those where a small amount was used at bottling, offering drinkers a rare and genuine level of transparency.

For now it remains largely a French story, which is why it was not discussed during the in-store tasting or in the tasting email. Adoption is still extremely limited even within France, and whether other countries follow or adopt the certification is an open question. Different regions may arrive at their own definitions, or may decide that formal certification misses the point altogether. But as natural wine continues to grow, the question of what it actually means to make one is only going to get louder. Vin Méthode Nature certification is simply the first response. It probably will not be the last.

White & Orange Wines

Bodegas Aroa - Overview

Long before "natural wine" became a byword for downtown bottle shops and weekend farmers' markets, Bodegas Aroa was doing the quiet, unglamorous work of bringing biodynamic viticulture back to a valley that had nearly forgotten it had vines at all.

The story begins in 1998, in the Valle de Deierri: a fold of land in Navarra's Tierra Estella sub-zone, crossed by the ancient Camino de Santiago and bordered by the limestone flanks of the Urbasa and Andía mountain ranges. For centuries, the farmhouses of this valley pressed their own wine. By the 1970s and 80s, most of those vines had been ripped out to make way for cereal crops. Aroa was founded explicitly to reverse that erasure and reclaim the winemaking identity of Deierri before it was lost entirely.

The actual winery would only come to fruition in 2008, when Aroa constructed a purpose-built facility on a hilltop plot in Zurukoain with sweeping views of the mountains. It was designed from the outset around ecological principles: two underground floors provide natural temperature regulation for fermentation tanks and barrel cellars, while grapes enter through the roof and descend by gravity, eliminating the mechanical stress of pumping. By the time the Riojan group Vintae acquired a majority stake in 2013, bringing with it additional vineyard holdings and resources, Aroa had already made its name as a pioneer in organic and biodynamic viticulture within the D.O. Navarra.

Today the estate farms around 25 hectares of its own vines on the distinctive clay-limestone soils of the Yerri Valley, one of the highest and coolest growing areas in the denomination (D.O.). The altitude is bracing, the winters harsh, the summers dry and hot: a diurnal range that keeps acidity fresh and aromatics precise. Garnacha, in both its red and white forms, is the heart of the portfolio. Plots are sited close to the winery to minimise transport stress, and the oldest vines (some believed to date to around 1920) are farmed at high density, their roots competing for nutrition in ways that concentrate flavour without any need for intervention.

That word, intervention, is perhaps the key to understanding Aroa's philosophy. All wines carry organic certification and the V-Label vegan seal. The flagship Le Naturel range takes non-intervention a step further still, adding no sulphites at any stage of the production. These are wines that demand careful handling in the supply chain, but reward drinkers with a directness of fruit that is genuinely difficult to achieve by other means. The red Le Naturel, built on Garnacha and produced in quantities of around 100,000 bottles, has become something of a benchmark for the category across Spain.

Aroa holds one of the rarest certifications in Spanish wine: the Wineries for Climate Protection certificate, awarded by the Spanish Wine Federation to producers who demonstrate continuous improvement across emissions reduction, water management, waste, and energy efficiency. It is the only winery in Navarra to have achieved it, a distinction that feels earned rather than marketed, coming from a producer whose ecological commitments predate the industry's current enthusiasm for sustainability credentials by two decades.

In an appellation more often associated with its proximity to Rioja than with any identity of its own, Bodegas Aroa has spent a quarter-century making the argument that Navarra's Tierra Estella deserves to be taken on its own terms. The wines, increasingly, are making that argument for themselves.

Meinklang - Overview

The name says it all, if you speak German. "Mein" means "my." "Klang" means "sound." Meinklang is the sound of the land: wine not as a manufactured product but as an expression of a place that has been listened to, tended, and trusted.

The Michlits family farm sits in Pamhagen, on the flat eastern edge of Austria where the country meets Hungary across a border that history has repeatedly redrawn. The estate lies within the UNESCO World Heritage Site of National Park Neusiedlersee, a vast, shallow-laked wetland and one of central Europe's most significant ecological zones. It is, in other words, an unusual address for a winery. It is also a deeply revealing one.

Werner and Angela Michlits run the operation today alongside Werner's brothers Hannes and Lucas, and managing director Niklas Peltzer. Angela handles winemaking; Werner is the public face and the philosophical engine. Their parents began converting the then-60-hectare farm to organic agriculture in the late 1980s, at a time when, as Werner has put it, the neighbours were laughing. Biodynamic farming followed in 2001, with full Demeter certification achieved in 2003. What accelerated everything was the fall of the Iron Curtain: when Hungary opened its borders in 1989, land that had been inaccessible for decades became available for purchase. The Michlits family bought, and bought, and bought. Today the estate spans 2,500 hectares on both sides of the border, with 80 hectares under vine on the Austrian side.

"Biodynamic farming is the only cultivation method which gives back more to our environment than it takes away from it."

What makes Meinklang genuinely distinctive is that wine is only one thread in a much larger organism. Werner's brother tends a herd of around 300 Angus and Aubrac cattle whose composted manure fertilises the vineyards, closing the nutrient loop that biodynamic philosophy requires. Sheep, pigs, chickens and goats add further layers of biodiversity across the estate. Ancient grain varieties, Einkorn and Emmer, are cultivated and malted into a Demeter-certified beer. Fruit orchards run alongside the vines. This is not a winery that also happens to have some animals. It is a farm, in the oldest and most complete sense of the word, that also makes wine.

The vineyards themselves offer a study in contrast. Sandy loam and rocky topsoil around Lake Neusiedl give the whites a particular lift and salinity. Some Grauburgunder vines are left entirely unpruned, a practice the family calls "Graupert": the vines climb freely, stressing themselves into producing smaller, more concentrated berries. In the cellar, spontaneous fermentation with indigenous yeasts is standard. Meinklang built their own concrete egg-shaped vessels for aging, which promote a gentle, natural lees contact and an aromatic precision that stainless steel alone can not replicate. Nothing is fined or filtered. Sulphite additions are kept to a bare minimum.

The range splits into two broad registers. The classic wines, typified by the Grüner Veltliner and the red Burgenland blend of Zweigelt, Blaufränkisch and St. Laurent, are approachable, honest, and remarkably priced for what they offer. The experimental tier pushes further: orange wines, pet-nats, skin-contact blends, and single-vineyard projects that reflect whatever the farm and the vintage choose to say. Some grapes are even sourced from across the border in Hungary's Somló region, a dormant volcano with ash-rich soils that lend a mineral strangeness to the wines produced from them.

What is perhaps most striking about Meinklang, for those familiar with the natural wine world, is the scale at which it operates without compromising its principles. Demeter certification at 2,500 hectares is not a small achievement. The wines remain affordable. The quality is consistent. Werner Michlits is philosophical about the early years of scepticism from neighbours who are now admirers: "The ones who were laughing about biodynamics then are now saying, oh, Meinklang, the big ones.

"The land, it turns out, was worth listening to.

Red & Rosé Wines

Ovum Wines - Overview

There is a particular kind of bold confidence required to build a white wine label in Oregon based on Riesling and Ksenija Kostic House and John House have been making that argument since 2011 through their flagship Big Salt, and with each vintage they release, it gets harder to disagree with them.

Ovum was founded by the husband-and-wife team after years spent working together at Chehalem, one of the Willamette Valley's most established estates. What they took from that experience was not a template but a question: what would Oregon's many terroirs look like if you ran Riesling through all of them, and then got out of the way? The project they launched in answer to that question is based in Newberg but looks across the entire state, sourcing fruit from vineyards in the Columbia Gorge, Eola-Amity Hills, Elkton Oregon, Ribbon Ridge, the Rogue Valley and the Applegate Valley. Each site brings something different: blustery Pacific winds in some areas, extreme diurnal swings in others, volcanic soils and old own-rooted vines elsewhere.

"Fruit comes first. Our top priority is finding farmers that share our beliefs, and then getting out of the way so their hard work can be tasted."

The name Ovum, Latin for egg, nods to the Nomblot concrete eggs in which much of the winemaking takes place, though the range also sees neutral acacia and oak barrels and Austrian casks. What the wine does not see is much else. The protocol at Ovum is deliberately, almost stubbornly, uniform across the entire range: native yeast fermentation, no additions and no subtractions save for a small amount of sulphur added shortly before bottling, and an extended lees contact of eight to nine months for textural depth. Wines are bottled unfined and unfiltered. This consistency is the point. If two wines made the same way in the same cellar smell and taste entirely different, then the difference is the vineyard's to claim, not the winemaker's.

It is a philosophy that requires real conviction in the sourcing. Ksenija and John spend considerable time finding growers whose practices in the vineyard match their own ambitions for what ends up in the glass. Sustainable and organic farming is the expectation. The varieties that interest them, Riesling above all but also Gewürztraminer and Early Muscat, are not the fashionable choices in a state whose reputation was built on Pinot Noir and Chardonnay. They are, however, the varieties that have historically produced the world's most compelling aromatic whites, and in Oregon's cooler, higher-altitude sites they find conditions that suit them very well indeed.

The wines that result from all of this are not showy. They are textured, mineral-driven, and underscored by an acidity that gives them genuine cellaring potential, which is unusual for American white wines at their price point. The salinity that runs through much of the range, most legibly in Big Salt but present as a thread across the single-site bottlings too, speaks to something about Oregon's coastal influence that is rarely articulated this clearly in a bottle.

Ovum also operates Les Caves PDX, a wine bar in Portland's Alberta Arts District where a selection of the wines can be tasted throughout the year. It is, in the best sense, an extension of the project: a place to drink carefully made, honestly labelled wine without ceremony, in the company of people who care about what is in the glass.

Oregon's white wine conversation is slowly, steadily widening beyond Chardonnay. Ovum is one of the leading producers expanding the discussion.

Domaine Franck Balthazar - Overview

A quiet man on steep slopes, making wine the way his grandfather would recognise

The wine in your glass is an entry point into the world of one of the Northern Rhône's most quietly revered producers: a third-generation vigneron who left a factory job to farm his grandfather's land by horse, and never looked back.

Franck Balthazar grew up around greatness. His grandfather Casimir established the family domaine in Cornas in 1931. His father René farmed the same steep granite slopes and, following the lead of local icons Auguste Clape and Noël Verset, began bottling his own wine in the 1970s. Noël Verset, as it happens, was also Franck's uncle. When Verset retired, he passed some of his most prized parcels, including vines planted as far back as 1914, directly to Franck. Few producers anywhere inherit that kind of viticultural legacy.

In 2002, Franck was working in a textile factory in nearby Valence. Cornas, despite its extraordinary terroir, was still undervalued, its terraced hillsides demanding punishing physical labour for prices that barely rewarded the effort. Many of the region's young people had already left for easier work. Franck went the other way. He took over the family estate, put down the factory job, and picked up the tools his father and grandfather had used before him.

"Every time we visit his small cave, we are struck by his contentment with a life spent working on Cornas' steep slopes."

What followed was not a reinvention but a deepening. Franck adopted and extended his father's methods: working the steepest parcels by horse, farming without herbicides, pesticides or synthetic fertilisers from the moment he arrived, and achieving official organic certification in 2013. In the cellar, he ferments with whole clusters and native yeasts in concrete vats, ages in old 600-litre demi-muids, and keeps sulphur additions to the barest minimum. He does everything himself. The entire domaine produces around 8,000 bottles a year.

His Cornas wines, from old vines in some of the appellation's most celebrated sites, are the ones that attract the critical attention and the collector waiting lists. But Balthazar has always understood that a domaine needs wines at every level, and his Côtes-du-Rhône, made from a friend's organically farmed Syrah and Grenache near Vinsobres, carries the same fingerprints as everything else he makes: honest fruit, minimal intervention, and the unmistakable character of a man who thinks carefully about everything that goes into the bottle and very little about what goes onto the label.

What is worth sitting with, as you taste this wine, is the lineage behind it. The same hands that tend 110-year-old vines on some of France's most demanding granite slopes also made this bottle. The same philosophy of non-intervention, respect for the farmer, and patience with the fruit applies here as it does to the rarest cuvées. For Balthazar, there is no second tier in terms of attention. There is only the work.

Visitors to his small cave behind the church in Cornas remark, almost without exception, on the same thing: the quietness of the man. He does not perform conviction the way some people do, with gestures or declarations. Instead, he lives it. His quiet presence, steady choices, and unwavering focus all speak of a belief that is deeply rooted and entirely his own.

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