There's a Cider in My Wine
Have you heard the criticism that all natural wine tastes like cider? Well, it's not true that this speaks for all natural wines but it can be and the issue is, you got a problem with that? I assigned this story to La Garagista's Deirdre Heekin. She attacked the issue in a fabulous three-part series for The Feiring Line. It begins like this.
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On a gray, bone-cold day at the end of October when the apples in our orchard were still hanging red, golden, and heavy on our trees, Alice F. asked me what I thought about when people say a natural wine tastes like cider, and they aren’t being complimentary. Of course, I had heard this correlation before, sometimes in relation to my own wine. But my experiences had largely been positive, and the wines received responses more of amazement and intrigue rather than derision.
I grow wine grapes in the northern clime of Vermont. I also grow cider, the more historically traditional fermentation of New England. This year when we began to harvest our apples in late November, biting into fruit that had been frozen then thawed by rain and warmer temperatures, the juice floral sweet and heady, I found myself thinking about this question more and started looking up articles online using the search words “natural wine” and “cider” and “bad.” I was soon plunked in a pool of bald statements.
A Newsweek article by Bruce Palling was entitled “Why ‘Natural’ Wine Tastes Worse Than Putrid Cider”. Occasionally, journalists or critics wrote in acceptance of the comparison, as in the June 2017 article in The Skinny, “WTF is natural wine?…And why are so many millennials buying it?” written by Tom Ingham in which wine buyer Katy Saide of the café Trove in Manchester, England says, “Some natural wines have a more fermented taste, a bit like cider, others don’t taste much different than commercial wines.”