Natural wine with Jaume Jordá

We chat with Jaume Jordá, a passionate expert in natural wines, who has spent more than five years discovering, selecting and distributing wines that tell a story, the story of the people who produce them.

SUPER What is natural wine?

JAUME An easy and complex question at the same time. For me, natural wine is wine, i.e. fermented grapes. What makes it natural is the way it is made in the most natural way possible, from working the land in the vineyard to accompanying its transformation in the winery.

S And what is this natural wine process like?

J To explain it, I like to compare wine with people.

You can educate a person (a child, for example) in a concrete and behavioural way, modelling them in order to educate them in certain values, knowing what you expect from them and doing everything possible to achieve it. This would be like making a conventional wine, in which we know what qualities we want it to have, we have a marked direction and we want to preserve a regularity.

Or you can educate a person in a freer way, accompanying and empowering them in their own ideas. For me, this would be like making a natural wine, from which we do not expect specific characteristics. This is done with spontaneous fermentation, without additives (or adding a minimum dose), without filtering or fining. In this way we obtain wines with less make-up, stripped of artifice and which are an absolute reflection of the grape, the land, the climate and the people who make them.

S What are the main differences that consumers of natural wine will notice?

J On the one hand, more variety and more surprises. Natural wines reveal new aromatic and taste sensations that can surprise us. They smell and taste different from what we are used to.

So new flavours, new aromas and also new sensations. In the after taste happens what I call the intangible. When you have drunk a natural wine, after half a minute you notice a sensation that is no longer mouth-nose, it is now oesophagus, stomach and your whole body.

In addition, natural wine leads us to make two reflections. One about the world we want to live in and what kind of agriculture we want to define it. And the other about what we want to put in our bodies. The less additives, the healthier, the better we will feel.

In fact, one of the first things consumers will notice is that a natural wine (as long as you hydrate yourself with water) does not leave you with a hangover 😉.

S Are all organic wines natural wines?

J No. Organic wines are those that have a label certifying that their practices in the vineyard and in the winery are more environmentally friendly. But this does not mean that they are natural wines. These wines can have added yeasts or modifiers (an organic wine can have up to 150 mg per litre of sulphites).

On the other hand, a natural wine may not be certified organic, but by its very nature it is, since it is made with living, healthy soil and this implies organic cultivation and practices.

Not all ‘organic’ wines are natural, but surely all natural wines are organic.

Wine should always be organic. But the industry has pushed for more quantity, more kilos and more degrees… And that leads to practices against ecology.

S What should we look for when choosing a natural wine?

J It’s difficult because with natural wines we don’t have labels and denominations of origin to serve as a reference.

My recommendation is to consult our trusted shop like SUPER, where we know that people have taken care to select a quality product. By tasting, the consumer empowers himself, compares and decides what his tastes in natural wine are.

S Would you recommend three natural wines from the SUPER website?

J Yes, here are three natural wines that you can find in SUPER and I love them:

La Figa, which has opened a gap to show that natural wines can have this easy to understand, sweet and energetic balance.

Pequeños y Salvajes is a project that I love, they are wines that express a territory, it is an ultra-clean wine and a project with a great future.

And from Amor per la terra to the land Lo Far Oest, delicate, with a light profile that people feel very comfortable with.