I was reading and thinking about why natural wines taste different to conventional ones. It is difficult to say because there is such a great diversity of natural wines out there. Anyway, I have tried to draw some general conclusions, and at the same time evaluate my own approach in the matter.
All fine natural wines are vibrant and full of emotion. They have a broader spectrum of flavours and are usually wines of great purity, often without too much extraction. Some growers often refer to the fermentation process as an infusion. I make my Demencia in small quantities – around 1,000 liters – and we are not add commercial yeast or other products. We are only do ‘pigeage’ without pumping over. As we have a small volume, and we don’t want to use any cooling/ refrigeration machinery. Also, in order to stay true to our philosophy, we try to do everything by hand, that way we keep our electricity consumption down. As a result, sometimes the must reaches 27ºC, and the extraction and colour with Mencía grapes is natural and fine, but we cannot speak about infusion in our method.
Natural wines also tend to have a lovely, ‘salty’ minerality, because of the 
conditions the vines are grown in. Vines from organic agriculture usually have deep roots that engage with the bedrock, this means that natural wines will display a far greater array of textures, different tactile sensations, which means that you can almost eat them. Growers give the wine time to stabilize and settle. We gave our wines plenty of time from the very first vintage; we have been introducing Organic Agriculture methods year after year, and we soon realized that in Demencia 2009 we achieved a minerality and complexity which makes the wine almost magical.
But maybe, the most important difference between natural and conventional wines is what the French call wine’s digestibilité. People in the wine trade often forget that primary function of a wine is to be drunk, and it’s true that all good natural wines are extremely drinkable, they have a mouth-watering quality that makes the palate cry out for more. This is why we are selling ‘old wines’ with considerable time spent ageing in cellar, not only in barrels also in bottle.
Finally, it is proven that natural wines are subtly variable and live much, much longer once opened. This is something I usually control in my wines after the fermentation, during ageing, and before bottling; later on, with the wine bottled you can check it too. The time of the wine after opening a bottle is a measure of how long the wine will continue to evolve well in the bottle.