Whose Nature? Whose Tradition?

“Natural” wine isn’t natural. It’s just the latest version of a long colonial tradition: aestheticising power, erasing labour, and selling fantasies.

There’s a bar in Dalston charging £80 for a bottle of French natural wine that tastes like neglected compost. I know, because I bought it. It was cloudy, volatile, acidic, with that unmistakable nose of someone insisting it’s supposed to be like that. Hey, I’m not afraid of a little fun. But this—this wasn’t fun. It was failure, disguised as authenticity.

Despite this terrible wine, the room was full of people nodding appreciatively, swirling their glasses like they were in on the secret, like members of a secret cult. Everyone dressed like a character from a rural Japanese coffee table book. Denim aprons. Raw linen. A curated shelf of cookbooks behind the bar. I wasn’t just drinking wine—I was drinking a lifestyle. The idea of something that should be/taste/look like that. Almost the simulacrum -referencing the French philosopher Jean Baudrillard here - of a lifestyle. Almost like the bar was screaming: “Here, you are not drinking wine, you’re showcasing the emoji of yourself.”

But let’s pause. What is natural wine, really? Wine is never natural. Not even the vineyard is natural. It’s agriculture, architecture, irrigation, bureaucracy. Try building a biodynamic calendar without a spreadsheet. There’s nothing inherently pure or untouched about it—it’s the result of labour, intention, intervention. Every bottle is a construction.

And yet, we sip, seduced by the idea that the closer we get to rot, the closer we get to truth. As if oxidation were a kind of absolution. As if “natural” meant moral. This is the scam of natural wine: not in the bottle, but in the aura. It’s the liquid embodiment of what German sociologist Georg Simmel (1858–1918) called the fashion mechanism: difference through conformity. Everyone is rebelling, exactly the same way.

Of course, many winemakers genuinely aim to make good wine with as little intervention as possible. They’re not always chasing fashion—they’re chasing flavour, integrity, and sustainability. But the simulacrum—the curated myth—often arrives later, layered on by customers, influencers, and marketers. It’s the aesthetic consumption of minimalism that turns the bottle into a symbol.

(very proud of this one. LOL)

But in order to understand the deeper contradictions behind this culture of “natural” consumption, we need to move beyond the glass. Let’s start in the colonial vineyard.

In the 19th and early 20th centuries, France planted vast swaths of vineyards across Algeria, then a French colony. These were not artisanal family plots—they were large-scale agricultural enterprises designed to satisfy metropolitan thirst. By the 1930s, Algeria had become one of the world’s largest wine producers. Much of this wine was shipped to France and discreetly blended into domestic bottles, propping up the French wine industry without ever acknowledging the labour or land it came from.

It was, in effect, colonial wine—fermented on expropriated soil, harvested by colonised hands, and consumed under the fiction of Frenchness. As historian Owen White notes in The Blood of the Colony, the French were drinking empire, often unknowingly. That anonymity, that erasure, was part of the system—baked into the bureaucratic machines of colonial rule.

Fast forward to today: we find ourselves paying a premium for wines marketed as “pure,” “natural,” or “authentic.” Not all wine is colonial, of course—but some of it carries colonial legacies deep in its vines. When such wines are consumed with moral smugness in minimalist bars—places where nature has been styled into a lifestyle—we are not far from the old fiction. Only now, instead of denying empire, we aestheticise “the natural.”

This isn’t just wine. It’s post-colonial amnesia in a glass.

Frantz Fanon, the Martiniquan-born psychiatrist and revolutionary thinker who fought against French colonialism in Algeria, might’ve raised an eyebrow at that cloudy bottle, asking whether decolonisation stops at the vineyard gate. The myth of “purity” is powerful—and dangerous. Purity forgets. Purity edits. Purity removes the labour, the struggle, the entangled histories of who planted, picked, and fermented.

British anthropologist Mary Douglas (1921–2007), best known for her work on symbolism and social order, once said that dirt is just “matter out of place.” Natural wine, in that sense, is both dirt and doctrine. It’s a chaotic performance of control: a messiness that must look a certain way, taste a certain way, cost a certain amount. If it didn’t taste like barnyard cider, would it even be real?

But maybe that’s the point. It’s not about the wine at all. It’s about what the wine lets us signal—that we’re discerning, progressive, part of the fermentation intelligentsia. That we read theory and swirl cloudy juice on a sunny Sunday in Hackney.

The illusion of natural wine persists because it flatters. It flatters our sense of taste, our politics, our pocket Instagram personas. We want to be that kind of person—the kind who understands terroir, who rejects big agri-business, who drinks from the margins while living in the centre.

But somewhere between the colonial vineyard and the biodynamic wine fair, we should pause and ask: whose earth is it, really? And who’s allowed to call it theirs?

Fanon wouldn’t drink it. He’d ask why you're paying £80 for the illusion of decolonisation.