Natural wine - a Copenhagen trend

“Wine is not supposed to be consistent—it changes with every harvest and that’s the beauty of it.”

With natural wine, there’s no messing around with pesticides, sulphites, chemical yeasts or anything remotely like that. At its heart, the natural wine movement is about letting nature decide how wine tastes. So natural wines are products that very closely reflect the climate and ecology of individual vineyards. Sometimes it tastes funky; sometimes it tastes just like the Chardonnay, you know. But the definition is loose and often mixed up.

“Wine can, for example, very well be biodynamic or organic without being natural, if other, non-natural, interferences occur at some point during the production.”

Alongside the basic definition, a culture of drinking natural wine has recently emerged that includes several other principles. One of them is to have fun drinking wine - that enjoying wine shouldn’t be about reeling off facts about grapes and the various vintages, but more about asking yourself, “Do I enjoy this wine?” or “How does it make me feel?” or, perhaps, “What does this remind me of?”. There’s a loose approach to understanding and describing wine, which also makes it accessible and inclusive.

“But why Copenhagen?!” you might ask. It seems odd that a country with such a flat terrain and lack of vineyards should become the unofficial heart of the natural wine movement.

As with most new developments in Copenhagen’s food scene, the natural wine prevalence can be traced back to Restaurant noma.

When noma first opened, the head sommelier at the time, Pontus Elofsson, realised that natural wine was the perfect match for the dishes that René Redzepi was creating. Dishes that used sustainable ingredients based on the same principles as natural wine: with intentions to highlight the brilliance of nature, rather than masking it. Pontus enlisted Sune Rosforth, who was, back then, one of the only natural wine importers in Copenhagen as noma’s primary supplier.

“At the time, there were only a few restaurants in Copenhagen serving natural wine, but other chefs soon followed suit and, pretty soon, wine importers, wine bars and bottle shops began to spring up all over the place.”

Today, wherever you are in Copenhagen, you won’t be far away from natural wine.

• Natural wine is: organic or biodynamic and has no added pesticides, sulphites or chemical yeasts. 
• First natural wine importer in Copenhagen: Rosforth & Rosforth that opened in 1994.
• Neighbourhood with the highest density of natural wine bars: Nørrebro.
• Since 2003: praised Restaurant noma shaped the popularity of natural wine in Copenhagen.