Real vino becomes a trend

Italy’s national values may be staunchly conservative and traditional but the reaction to the reactionary is never far away, and never fails to find enough support to become a voice, even if it is initially underground. Curiously, Italy is also the country which performs the miracle of merging the reactionary with the progressive. In this case, its seemingly innate sense of tradition and conservatism has become the basis of one of Italy’s, and possibly the world’s, most innovative trends: the production of ‘natural wine’.

Natural wine, of course, doesn’t exist. To paraphrase the late Maynard A Amerine, America’s most famous...