Natural Wine Has Changed How the World Drinks

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(Bloomberg) — In a Brooklyn warehouse in early November, the 2025 New York Raw Wine fair was buzzing with drinkers hunting the latest in natural wine. Casually clad vignerons and importers poured for an enthusiastic crowd sporting beards, wool beanies (it was cold), fleece vests, worn jeans, scuffed boots — long the natural wine uniform.

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The vibe was more subdued than the tribal exuberance at the first Raw Wine fair in London in 2012. Back then natural wine was a small-group rebellion against conventional winemaking, with charters and manifestos declaring the organic viticulture and no-additive principles they stood for. Drinking the wines marked aficionados as the anti-authority “cool kids” who valued transparency, authenticity, nature, the environment and tiny iconoclastic producers with a romantic story over corporate wine titans. The wines came with countercultural, not-your-parents’-vino appeal.

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Today natural wine is no longer niche. A look at Raw’s 2025 itinerary shows its current reach: Besides its New York event, the fair made stops in Berlin, Copenhagen, Montreal, Paris, Shanghai, Tokyo and Verona, Italy. This spring it will add Shenzhen. Bottles of fizzy pét-nat, savory orange wine and minimal intervention appear on Michelin-starred restaurant lists, and hardcore no-sulfur-added examples and wine bars are touted in Vogue.

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It’s easier than ever to find them. The number of global spots offering natural wine increased 60% from 2021 to 2024, according to French app Raisin’s latest report.

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Paris is still the world capital, with almost 600 venues in 2024, while Italy has seen a 35-fold increase in spots since 2016. The app lists 3,870 bars and 3,428 wine shops, in 2,313 cities in 35 countries where at least 30% of the wine selections meet the criteria for Vin Méthode Nature, a formal voluntary charter under the French Ministry of Agriculture. Isabelle Legeron, the founder of Raw Wine, says the scene is fizzing in Montreal and Tokyo. 

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All of which illustrates how this major 21st century wine movement has gone beyond fad status. According to research firm IWSR Drinks Market Analysis, though overall wine consumption is declining, demand for natural, organic and other alternative wines is rising. Who’s drinking them? Generation Z and especially millennials. 

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Across all markets surveyed by IWSR, 31% of regular wine drinkers were aware of natural wine in 2024, up from 26% in 2021. In the US, specifically, 18% had sought to purchase it in the previous six months; in the UK, 11%.

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A September 2025 report from DataIntelo Consulting Pvt Ltd. projected the global natural wine market would reach $3.66 billion by 2033, up from $1.48 billion in 2024. 

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“Natural wine is becoming wine, it’s past trendy,” says Alice Feiring, author of two books and a Substack on the topic. It has influenced how grapes are grown, how mainstream wine is made and how we think about wine. The line between the naturalistas and other high-end artisanal producers is getting blurrier. Some hardcore proponents aren’t that happy about the big-tent approach.  

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What natural wine has changed

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First of all, natural wine has helped reawaken and shift demand to lighter, fresher wines with more purity, zing, energy and personality as opposed to the once-popular oaky and powerful alcoholic ones. 

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In viticulture, organic and biodynamic farming resonate with both today’s health and environmentally conscious drinkers and an ever-increasing number of winemakers worried about climate change. The global organic wine market, of which natural wine is a subset, is expected to triple in value by 2030, to $25.1 billion, with a compound annual growth rate of 11.3%, according to a recent report by InsightAce Analytic Pvt Ltd.