Organic, Biodynamic, and Natural Wine: What's the Actual Difference?

This is the first in an occasional series, Over the Counter, where I answer the questions we get asked most often in the shop. This one comes up nearly every week, so it seemed a good place to start.

Organic wine is a legal standard that covers the vineyard and the winery, though most people only think of the farming half. Biodynamic goes further still, adding its own certified farming philosophy on top of an organic baseline. Natural wine is different again: a broader approach that usually starts with the same organic or biodynamic farming, then goes further than any certified standard requires, stripping the winemaking back as far as it will go. They get lumped together constantly, but two are checkboxes you can certify, and the third has no ceiling on how far it can go.

What does organic wine mean?

Organic covers more than the vineyard. In the vineyard it means no synthetic pesticides, herbicides, or fertilisers, checked and audited like any other certified food label (look for the EU organic logo). Since 2012, EU rules also reach into the winery: organic wine is capped at lower sulfite limits than conventional wine, and techniques like heavy filtration or heat treatment are restricted. It isn't a free pass once the grapes arrive at the winery, but it's also not as strict as natural winemaking. A defined list of additives is still permitted, and an organic producer can still use commercial yeast or fine the wine, just within tighter rules than a conventional one.

Not every producer who farms organically chooses to certify it, though, and that's worth knowing before you rule a bottle out. Certification costs money and paperwork every year, and some growers simply object to being told how to farm land they've worked the same way for generations. Increasingly, though, it's also a hedge against the weather. Organic rules limit which treatments a grower can fall back on if a difficult, wet season brings serious mildew pressure, and a bad enough year can mean losing most of the crop rather than risk it. Some producers choose to stay uncertified so they keep that option in reserve, even if they rarely need to use it. If a producer or a shop tells you a wine is farmed organically without a certification logo on the bottle, that isn't a red flag. It usually just means they've kept a safety net for the years the weather doesn't cooperate.

What makes a wine biodynamic?

Biodynamic starts from the same organic baseline, then adds a farming philosophy of its own. Rooted in ideas the philosopher Rudolf Steiner set out in 1924, it treats the vineyard as a single, self-sustaining organism, timing vineyard work to a lunar and seasonal calendar and using specific herbal and mineral preparations to build soil health. Certification, look for the Demeter logo, is stricter than organic in several respects, including lower limits on copper use and, in most cases, a requirement to ferment with natural yeast. Every biodynamic wine is organic by definition. Not every organic wine goes anywhere near biodynamic, and this is usually the answer when people ask whether biodynamic wine is simply organic wine with extra steps.

What is natural wine, and does it have a legal definition?

Natural wine has no legal definition at all, which is exactly why it causes arguments. Broadly, it means organically or biodynamically farmed grapes, fermented with wild yeast rather than a commercial strain, and bottled with little or no intervention: often unfiltered, sometimes with a small amount of sulfites added, sometimes none. Because there's no certifying body, calling a wine "natural" is really a promise from the producer, not a guarantee.

A customer asked us this recently while holding two bottles from the same region, confused about why one looked cloudy and the other didn't. That's usually your fastest visual clue. Natural wines are more likely to be hazy, funky, or a little unpredictable bottle to bottle, because nothing's been added to smooth that out. Organic wines can look and taste entirely conventional, because in the cellar, mostly, they are.

Organic vs natural wine: which one should you choose?

If you want a reliable, food friendly bottle, reach for organic. If you're in the mood for something a bit wilder and don't mind some bottle variation, ask us to point you toward a natural one. We taste through a lot of bottles before any natural wine earns a place on the shelf, and we rotate the selection regularly so there's usually something new to try. Natural wine drinkers tend to want exactly that: a reason to come back and see what's changed.

If you're ordering online, our website lets you search wines by type of farming, letting the filter do the work a label can't.

Sila, Blenheim Vintners