recommended by natural born wines

We’re a tiny team of two based in south-east London: Sam is a former journalist and Oli is a former TV writer. We both fell in love with natural wine through travelling around Italy and meeting producers who opened our senses to the endlessly exciting flavours, smells, colours and stories of wine made the natural way.

At first, we started out as a weekly farmers market stall to get people thinking about wine as an agricultural product, one that’s best without synthetic additives, dyes, flavourings or preservatives. A few years on and we still have our weekly market stall at Victoria Park Market in east London, but we now also supply some of the most exciting restaurants and bars in the country, while also having our own little online natural wine shop which delivers all over the UK.

As former writers, we can’t help but want to tell the story behind each of our wines. So, from the very beginning, every Natural Born Wine comes with its own tale, written by us, celebrating the producers, not just for their tasty wines but for the environmental and holistic choices they’ve made in creating them. We’ve put together a little collection of these wines and their stories below – these are our picks for what to drink right now…

Macerato 2019, Cantina Furlani (Trentino, Italy) | Sparkling orange

A puff of smoke rises from the bottle and into your glass goes one of nature’s most beautiful hues, with all the crisp fruit and subtle herbaceous notes of the alpine hills that overlook the city of Trento. No herbicides, pesticides or fungicides are used at Cantina Furlani; there’s no added sulphur in this bottle, and the vineyard is biodynamic to boot. If you ever wondered what a sunset taste like – or indeed, what Pinot Grigio is capable of when it’s left to express itself naturally, this is that wine.

Rosso 2019, Cantina Furlani (Trentino, Italy) | Sparkling red

As always with Matteo’s sparkling wines, this bubbly red was made with wild yeast and no added sulphur or dosage (added sugar) to capture the most of an incredible field blend of indigenous grapes. Fresh and bright as a summer’s morning in the mountains of Trentino but with enough warmth, texture and succulent fruit to carry us through until Christmas, too.

Nucleo 2 2019, Dinamo (Umbria, Italy) | Still white

To encapsulate this aim, the Nofrini family and Danilo chose the name Dinamo in honour of Italian physicist Antonio Pacinotti who, in 1860, invented a direct-current generator that he called the ‘Dynamo’. Using a simple mechanism it became an early form of renewable energy. With all the brightness and citrus of a fruit salad and the scent of an Italian garden freshly mowed, this white is certainly an energy-giver, it’s also the taste of summer year-round.

Confine 2019, I Cangianti by Stoppini (Tuscany, Italy) | Still orange

The grapes weren’t harvested until late October, which is very late in comparison to the other wines in our portfolio. This gives the Confine 2019 the full warmth of a long Tuscan summer. That’s not to say this wine is just a fruit bomb – the ten days grape skin-contact it has, lend a light tannin and chewy texture to create a perfectly balanced orange wine that we went wild for when we tasted it fresh from the tank during our visit a few months before its release.

Rosso 2018, Conestabile della Staffa (Umbria, Italy) | Still red

A chance tasting of a natural wine made by his parents’ neighbour Vittorio Mattioli began what Danilo describes as a ‘radical change’ in his life and within a week of drinking the amber coloured white, he joined Vittorio for what would become the first of many collaborations with the masters of natural winemaking across Italy. More than 12 hectares of vines were in need of some love when Danilo took the reins at Conestabile but by 2015 he was able to release the estate’s first vintage in 60 years, featuring native grapes and natural processes, with no added sulphur – for Danilo, it is Mother Nature who determines the wine. ‘Magnetic drinking,’ he says of this juicy Rosso, ‘and easy to finish a bottle in five minutes’.

Some unrelated ideas to consume…