"Nothing in, Nothing out": The Dutch Winemakers Championing Natural Wine

© Sarah Stierch

The natural wine trend continues to grow. If you visit a trendy bar anywhere from Amsterdam to New York, you are bound to encounter a glass of the 'orange stuff'. While the Netherlands is admittedly better known for its beer, a small number of wine producers are focusing on minimal intervention and experimental flavors. The Glass Room spoke to one of these producers, as well as a local business owner who is bringing natural wine to the North. 

Due to its lack of official certification, what makes a wine ‘natural’ can vary greatly. The term generally refers to wine that is made with minimal additives and preservatives. It is oftentimes organic and its taste can vary significantly from standard wine bottles. Many natural winemakers refer to the process as ‘nothing added, nothing removed’. Grapes are picked, stomped, and left to ferment with native yeasts, allowing natural sugars to convert into alcohol without added interventions, before being aged and bottled with minimal sulfites and no filtration. 

Despite its lack of certification, the ‘alternative wine market’ has grown exponentially within the past 10 years. According to market research by Grand View Research, the global market for organic, natural and low-intervention wines was valued at 10.80 billion Dollars, and it is only predicted to grow. 

Ron Lavengard is one of the founders of the natural winery Dassemus Vineyards nestled in the southern village of Chaam. He started his vineyard in 2012 producing organic wine, before he decided to bring the same minimal intervention methods into the cellar. Dassemus are now the biggest producers of natural wine in the Netherlands, with six hectares of vineyards and an average production of “15,000 to 18,000 bottles a year.” For a closer look at natural wine production hotspots, see our interactive map below.

For Lavengard, natural wine  is a chance to “give more expression from what we do outside, also in the wine.” He told The Glass Room that he “just found that making natural wine delivered a more interesting wine from our grapes than making a conventional wine.” When it comes to convincing people about his product, Lavengard says there are still quite a lot of misconceptions. For example, that it tastes like “nail polish remover, vinegar or mousiness” (a wine term for bacterial spoilage during fermentation). 

The wines produced by Dassemus are, according to him, “clean, fruity, light, and fresh”, to match Dutch tastes, as well as to offer consumers who are wary of chemicals a more natural alternative. “For supermarket wines or industrial wines, you are allowed to add maybe 100 different substances to wine. So it's logical that some people don't like these wines,” he said. 

© Lena R. Brinkmann

Further North in Groningen, Vincent Steinmetz expresses similar disdain for the misconceptions surrounding natural wine. One of them being that natural wine has a shorter shelf life, because it contains fewer preservatives than a regular bottle. “If the winemaker works really clean, really precise, you can just leave it on the shelf as long as a conventional wine,” he told The Glass Room.  “It might even have more development inside of it, potentially.”

Steinmetz is the founder of a natural wine bar and shop in Groningen called Vin Natuur. He founded the locale after living in Spain and being inspired by the low-intervention methods he saw being implemented by winemakers there. Too often, he saw conventional wineries adding chemicals in order to create “an idea of what Chardonnay should taste like in a commercial sense.” With natural wine, “it can be very different every time.”