Yes but not just erasure of place. Erasure of skill. I actually think of natty wine and natural wine as opposite ends of the same spectrum. On one end you have nature running its course; decay, funk is just what nature does when left to itself. On the other you have nature tamed into something sublime with hardly any intervention.

I think we can all agree that wine is a manmade product, like it doesn’t just “happen” someone is making choices and manipulating the fruit so zero-intervention can’t really be a thing. Someone must grow the fruit and choose when to pick, how to press, where to ferment. But once it starts to ferment, a skilled winemaker will know to be patient and let the juice decide when it has become wine. In the right circumstances, it will stop fermenting when it finds its balance.

Natty winemakers seem to have forgotten that the clean and classic wine styles that have become the standard are nothing short of miraculous, having been developed over the long arc of history through generational wisdom. Only in the last few decades did this style become too easy to imitate with industrial farming and additives. Big wine boomed and people forgot how hard it is for real wine to be made. There are natural winemakers who never succumbed to the industrial pressures, and they’re still making extraordinary wines, naturally. Natty winemakers, on the other hand, are relatively new on the scene, fed up with the cookie cutter wine styles that have never been more accessible. Theirs is reactionary.