Natural Wine

Natural wine skips most of the usual winemaking toolkit. Wild yeast instead of a lab strain, next to no added sulphur, often no filtering at all. Expect a wine that looks and tastes a little different from one vintage to the next.

Most of what's here comes from small BC producers, spread across the Okanagan and Similkameen valleys, with a real share coming from Ontario too.

You won't find much of this on an LCBO shelf. Bottles come straight from the producer who made them. No waitlist, no mailing list, just add it to your cart.
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What makes a wine natural

Winemakers here skip lab yeast, added sugar and most other cellar additives. Fermentation runs on whatever wild yeast is already on the grape skins, and many bottles carry little or no added sulphur. The trade-off is consistency, not fault. Two vintages of the same wine can taste noticeably different from each other.

Orange wine, pét-nat and vin gris

This collection covers more than one style. Orange wine leaves white grapes on their skins like a red, coming out amber with a tannic, tea-like grip. Pét-nat finishes its fermentation inside the bottle, giving it a soft, cloudy fizz, a rougher cousin of anything on our sparkling wine shelf. Vin gris is a pale, dry rosé made the same hands-off way. Organic wine asks a different question, about farming rather than cellar technique. Compare it in our organic wine collection.

What it costs, and how some of it fizzes

Prices mostly land in the $30 to $40 range, a little higher than some of the site's other collections. Small-batch, hand-worked wine costs more to make. Close to a third of the bottles here dip under $30 if you'd rather start cheap. One of the sparkling bottles here, from the Okanagan, is made by the ancestral method. That means finishing its fizz the old way, no added yeast or sugar, no shortcut tank.

Is a cloudy or fizzy bottle a sign something's wrong?

No. Minimal filtering is why some of these wines look a little hazy. A light natural fizz can happen too, when a trace of fermentation is still working in the bottle. Neither means the wine has gone off.

What's the actual difference between natural and organic wine?

Organic is about how the grapes were farmed. Natural is about what happens after, in the cellar. One bottle in this collection is Certified Organic too, which means an independent body audited the farming.

Which style should I try first?

If you like a crisp white, start with a pét-nat or a vin gris. Want something more challenging? Orange wine is the one to try, made from white grapes given a red wine's skin contact.