Our story
Welcome to Wingnut Wines! The brain baby of Charlie (of Vin Natuur) who, confined to the gilded cage of writing about natural wine on social media wanted the chance to share some of his favourite wines in person. However, being bad at maths/spelling/reaching the wines on the top shelf he knew, if he wanted to breathe life into Wingnut Wines he would need help. He found it in the red-headed form of his old mate Eleanor (these two have been friends for 20 years, they’re much, much older than they look).
Our mission; To showcase underrepresented natural wines and give people the opportunity to try stuff they wouldn’t be readily able to find elsewhere.
As Charlie says, ‘There is so, so much out there to try but sometimes you just see the same stuff all over the place, as well as well-known natural wines I really want to get people to try something they might not have come across before. I believe that a bottle of great wine doesn’t create a good time on its own, because so much of the drinking experience depends on when, where and who you drink a wine with. The best bottles turn a good time into a great one by making everything seem a bit brighter. This is what all of the wines that we bring to the markets have done for us at one time or another, that’s what makes sharing them special.’
What is natural wine?
Natural wine, which is perhaps better called low-intervention wine, is an approach to farming and winemaking that favours natural methods over any chemical intervention.
In the vineyard this means avoiding chemical sprays such as fungicides, herbicides and pesticides and relying on natural fertilisers, ranging from horse manure to nettle infusions.
It also means improving biodiversity and a flourishing ecosystem as a way to improve soil health. This means promoting wild fauna and flora to inhabit the vines, based on the maxim that low intervention farming should actually improve the health of the ecosystem in and surrounding the vineyard. In the cellar the attitude is ‘nothing added nothing taken away’. This means no use of flavour enhancers, colour enhancers, wood chips, limited filtering and fining and minimal sulphate use.
The result is a wine that expresses where it is from and what variety it is made from clearly. The winemaker’s role is to guide it to the bottle with as lightest touch as possible.
Natural winemaking is a philosophy of farming and winemaking, it is not a flavour. Even though there are some notes that might not appear in conventional winemaking, such as cider and certain exotic fruits, natural wine behaves in much the same way as conventional wine, it can age just as long as conventional wine it can be heavy or light in body and can be made in appellation. Some natural wines can appear clear or cloudy in the glass, whilst other don’t.