Cam is telling us how he first got into 'natural wine'. He'd worked a couple of vintages in his early twenties, and came back to Australia and started working at City Wine Shop.
"I had done two vintages, but as soon as I started working at The City Wine Shop, I realised I actually knew nothing at all about wine. And it was during that time where I started to read about organic, preservative-free wines, the mystery of that just blew me away, because everything that I had learned was that you must add sulfur dioxide at this point, and you must add acidity at this point. Filtration has to happen at this point. So to read about a product, say, from Frank Cornelissen in Mount Etna, grown in an extraordinary geographical place like that, and then made in that [organic, preservative-free] way, I just thought, This is the most exciting thing I've ever heard about.
So I decided I had to go back to Europe and keep learning from other people. In 2013, Charlotte and I worked with Claude Courtois [Claude is a biodynamic and organic winemaker to the utmost: no pesticides, herbicides, fungicides, chemical fertilisers, or synthetic chemicals of any kind are allowed on the vines or in the soil of the vineyards], and that for me was how all the pieces of the puzzle started to fall into place, because I had never seen fruit this healthy ever before.
Prior to this, in all the vintages that I'd ever done, fruit would come in, and either you're adding yeast to it, or it might take potentially days and days to start fermenting. But here… you're picking fruit, and two hours later, it's already fermenting in the basket press. When you farm something so beautifully and the fruit has enough concentration and integrity to start fermenting like that, it's going to look after itself, and you're just guiding it in the right direction. I thought, There's no mystery in the winery at all. This is just good farming. That's it.
From that moment, Charlotte and I knew that when we started importing wine, we would only ever import wines with nothing at all added to them."
What natural wine means, and where its boundaries sit, is contentious in industry discourse. Where many in the industry would maintain that the term denotes a philosophy of practice (wines made using organic/biodynamic grapes, with nothing added or taken away bar 30mg of sulfur), the market would suggest it's a style. 'Natty' became shorthand for any pet nat, orange or wines with the elusive character of 'funk'. The frivolous use of the term placed people in dogmatic camps of linguistic perspectivism or determinism. We came to Cam with a set of questions, hoping to settle which side of the edges of reason held true. In one fell swoop, Cam flips the conversation on its head.
"I actually use the term natural wine so infrequently. We almost never say it downstairs. It's different from one market, and one culture, and one country to another. So if I was having a conversation with someone in a wine bar in Paris, or a producer somewhere, I'd happily use the term natural wine. But here, whether it's in a professional context, or something more social, we are using a lot less. It's really important to be aware of the specifics.
When it comes to the definition of the term, I'd much rather not say it at all. If the world of natural wine can have any effect on the industry, the long-term effect, I would like it to be that more growers, vineyard owners, or young people just buying fruit has a shift away from chemical farming towards organics.”
If you've ever spoken to Cam, you'd know that he speaks with such immense passion, knowledge and eloquence that resembles a scripted conversion podcast. Following his lead, we ask, are all the wines here zero-zero? Some definitions of natural wine allow up to, say 30ppm of sulfur… And does that include spraying in the vineyard? Or just additions in the winery?
"So all the wines that we sell here have nothing added to them in the winery. But to have a wine that's had zero traces of any kind in the vineyard is actually very rare. Even some of the most strident organic and biodynamic producers will still have noteworthy levels of copper and sulfur in the vineyard. But in the context of what we're selling here, the only dogma that I would have is that nothing is added in the winery.
There are definitely wines that we sell here that have got a different shape, structure and aromatic focus, because of the sulfur use in the vineyard. And you can see it easily. It'll make your volatile compounds slightly more bound, purely because the sulfur dioxide settles on the fruit and is absorbed into it throughout the season. Changes the structure of the wine, especially when the wine's young. We've got two wines that we import, actually, both from 2022 from the Loire Valley, and one I tasted and there's clearly been more sulfur use in the vineyard.
Working with Claude at that time, with no additions in vineyard or winery, I thought he was the most dogmatic, singularly focused winemaker of anyone that I've met, but I realised if you scratch a bit more beneath the surface of French wine, there's a whole community of people that are actually even more dogmatic, more single-minded about how they work. I love working with people like that, and I'm really proud of how we work and the type of wines that we work with, but it doesn't mean that this person over here has to work the same way."
Cam describes how challenging it is to make wines without any additions, recounting how his first attempt to do so resulted in an acetic concoction that was no good. Plus, keeping fruit this healthy through small-scale farming was rarely a lucrative pursuit. Given how much it takes to maintain such a philosophy of practice, we ask Cam whether it bothers him that people have co-opted or used the aesthetics and cultural associations of 'natural' to sell a product.
"I certainly don't begrudge a company for using that type of language within their marketing if what that means is that a young person or potentially a new consumer is drinking wine instead of beer. Ultimately the wine industry at large wins.
You might have all the pressure in the world from the owner of the business saying, 'You've gotta meet your margins, and you can't have any wastage'. I totally understand that. Every business, every sommelier, every chef, every restaurant owner has got an obligation to do their best to have a sustainable business. And if a preservative-free wine, if you think of a preservative-free wine as gonna cost your business money. That's fine. But at least taste it. I think as a young professional you have an obligation to get better and better.
There are some dangers in hardcore dogma. As soon as you tell someone, 'You shouldn't be doing that,' that style of communication is actually just going to turn that person against you. People can really alienate themselves as opposed to celebrating or spreading the joy of the message, 'Here's this wonderful organic preservative-free product that, in my personal opinion, tastes better and will make you not feel as bad the next day.' Instead of promoting the positivity of that message, all you've done is create division. What we really need is for the whole industry to rise up together."
We've all tasted those natural wines that drink like nail polish or apple cider vinegar. Moira questions whether these wines can still speak of terroir, or if these common 'faults' (namely volatile acidity and brettanomyces) can override the nuance of place.
"I really want to taste soil, and I want to see season – everything that's gone into producing that wine, I want to taste. Because for me, as soon as you start adding sulfur dioxide to the wine, and especially filtering the wine, irrigating the wine, having very high yields, you're not going to taste terroir anyway. It'll be just as lost as if the wine had some volatility. But it'll also be a lot less digestible, and a lot less delicious. I agree that noticeable volatility is going to mask your wine. But if we go to the park and it's a hot day, and that wine's got a little bit of volatility and it's totally within balance, and I'm having a conversation with the kids and we're kicking a football, I'm not going to object to drinking that. It still wouldn't be my personal first choice of something that I want to drink. Again, it comes down to personal preference.
If you put a wine in front of me that has no perceivable faults, so to speak, but with perceivable sulfur dioxide, I'm never going to drink that wine. I would not drink that with pleasure at all. Like, for me, that's a much bigger fault than having something where you can see a tiny bit of bacterial influence, or a tiny bit of volatility that's in balance.
We have to understand when we're talking about faults, we're talking about the industry expectation. Every single person and palate and level of experience is different. I think there's a slight danger in our system of educating young sommeliers and front-of-house staff and wine team members, that the very first thing that you need to look for is a fault, as opposed to saying, 'How much do you personally enjoy this wine, and what can you see in it? Can you see terroir? Can you not see terroir? If we're tasting this wine blind, tell me what sort of soil it might be growing in.'
I would like to see a world where we're teaching young people more about chemistry to start with, as opposed to saying that you have to agree with everyone who's come before you. And wine faults fall into that. I see it happening all the time, where the first thing young staff are being taught is to look for a fault in natural wine. I would rather say, 'Let's just talk about chemistry and how this wine gets to this stage. You don't have to like it.'
I was the beneficiary. My first introduction to the world was just as compartmentalised. I was told that is bad and that is good. It was purely because of meeting people in France and then the reading that I did, and then I— I can't explain why I was drawn to wines that were made in this way. For me, giving young people the opportunity to make their own choices and understand that it is so fine to drink and like the most chemically farmed wine with a lot of sulfur dioxide and a lot of filtration."
It's about 5pm, and we've moved downstairs. Public is open and there's a handful of people in the venue, snacking, drinking, chatting. We've just asked Cam about soil. We both worked around a lot of good wine at Blackhearts, and became passably adept at picking up on stylistic traits of different varieties and regions. However, we're telling Cam that we've never really picked up the knack for distinguishing what kind of soil a wine was grown in. We ask if the way it comes through is about the fullness of fruit flavour due to drainage of different soil types. Cam explains it's a little simpler than that.
"What's in the vineyard, what's in the ground, that goes straight into the grapes."
He starts recounting a story about how another winemaker, Belinda Thompson of Crawford River, had just finished racking a wine when she noticed something interesting. At the bottom of the tank is a layer of white powder. She calls Cam.
"She says to me, 'I feel like you're going to want to know about this – I've never seen this before in all my years making wine. I've just racked off a bunch of riesling, and there's about an inch of chalk at the bottom of the vat. Pure chalk.' This wine was grown in chalky soil, and the calcium carbonate had made its way up through the grapevines and into the fruit, ending up in the fermented wine itself.
So when you taste minerals in a wine, you're tasting actual minerals."
The wines at Public aren't cheap. We name the tension between wine, access and class.
"For operations like ours, where we don't sell anything that's cheap, like, we just don't import and we don't buy products that you could retail for less than $20 a bottle. We just don't operate in that field at all because to make the products like this, and for anything to be high quality and concentrated and ultimately as delicious as possible, there's gotta be a cost to that.
I don't put it down to cultural expectations now. I don't suggest that we're in a time and place in Australia where people want everything to be cheap. Especially with a generational shift, young people are informed and young people do want to consume good things. They know that it's probably better to eat the organic mango as opposed to the chemically farmed mango. But, at the moment, people really have so much less money, less disposable income. People have to make those choices — it's not that they don't want to.
I think it's a pretty privileged thing for someone like me to say, 'Everyone needs to be organic,' because you can travel to so many countries around the world with people where this conversation is literally the last thing on their mind when they are just thinking about putting food on the table.
But I think once you're into it and you wanna drink wine a few times a week, once you start to taste the difference between something that is genuinely well farmed and well made, it's very difficult to revert back to drinking something that's not."
It's true. We've experienced the same. We might be drinking less wine without our Blackhearts staff discount, but our conversation with Cam reminds us why we fell into the rabbit hole of wine in the first place. Something back then piqued our interest, and perhaps trying to answer this question is far less relevant than bringing the joy of discovery back into the frame.