Whether you're in a sunlit, open–shelf lined shop full of people in hats you suspect are fashionable, or you're hovering around a bar so dimly lit that it's hard to read small text, selecting the best natural wine can be very stressful.
What doesn't help is that the labels often tout lesser-known grapes and regions, as if the esoteric wine knowledge you'd memorized went to a Summer of Love concert. People throw around phrases like "carbonic maceration" and "Ella, that's not a sample." And natural wine — like veganism, or nihilism — is most often defined by what it is not. It's not full of additives. It's not full of chemicals, like vineyard pesticides. It's not wine that's sustained heavy interference (lab-grown yeast and the like) during the fermentation process. But what exactly is natural wine and how is it different from organic or conventional wine?
