Natural Wine and the Rock & Roll Index
How much adventure waits in your glass?
Why an Index?
Natural wine, or low intervention wine, is a movement to go back to the origins of winemaking with low-intervention methods. Natural wine is made of organically farmed grapes, using no pesticides on the grapes or herbicides on the soil. It is fermented with natural indigenous yeasts, produced with no additives, and usually is unfiltered. Some studies have documented similarity to traditional wine making techniques still used in Georgia today.
The scale of the difference is like in music moving from Chopin, to Frank Sinatra to Brian Eno. Natural wines show a remarkable diversity in aromas, flavours, textures, in how they express the terroir.
In the natural wine bars of Paris, and specialist shop dedicated to the movement, you often hear people discussing how “rock & roll” a natural wine is. This index is informally used to decode and describe how much adventure waits in the bottle for the wine-seeker, who hasn’t yet had the opportunity to taste - yet.
I originally planned to write this article comparing different Rock & Roll Scales…. but in fact I couldn’t find competing indexes. So this is my attempt to document the Rock and Rock Index I see in use today in 2025.
Go Deeper
Video Interview: The Origins of Natural Wine: A Conversation with Camille Lapierre and Jean Foillard - Grapecollective.com
Journal Article: The Natural Wine Phenomenon and the Promise of Sustainability, by Pablo Alonso González and Eva Parga-Dans
Image Source: Public domain image from 1907, Revolt of the Winemakers, Français : Montpellier 9 juin 1907 duel entre le vin du Midi et le sucre du Nord, from https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:1907_Vigne_vs_Sucre.jpg, accessed 15 March 2025.
