Plenty of wine calls itself natural. VinNatur is the group of growers who decided the word should mean something you can check in a lab. Here’s who they are, what they test for, and why some of our bottles carry their name.
An association of natural winemakers, founded in 2006 by Angiolino Maule of La Biancara in Gambellara, in the hills between Vicenza and Verona. It started with a few dozen growers. It now has more than 300 members in 12 countries, and it’s still run from Gambellara.
Since 2007, every member’s wines have gone to a lab each year to be screened for pesticide residues — the panel now covers 388 of them — and for total sulphur dioxide. Saying your wine is clean isn’t enough to stay in. It has to come back clean.
A charter adopted in 2016 sets out what members can and can’t do in the vineyard and in the cellar, and it asks a lot more than organic certification does. The current regulations were voted in online by the members themselves in 2020.
Maule has never had much time for natural wine as an excuse for faults. “It’s about making natural wine without defects,” he’s said. “That’s the first goal.” So as well as testing, VinNatur pays for research, working with universities on soil life, biodiversity between the vines, and ways of using less copper and sulphur — the two sprays organic growers still rely on.
Once a year the growers all pour in one place. VinNatur Tasting reached its 21st edition in April 2026, with 180 producers from Italy and six other European countries in Gambellara, on Maule’s home turf. For years it was held at Villa Favorita, an eighteenth-century villa in Sarego, timed to catch the trade on its way to Vinitaly in Verona.
Two of the names on our list are members. Filippo Gambato’s Alla Costiera, in the Colli Euganei near Padua, and our own Vino Da Merenda, which Filippo makes for us. Look for the Vinnatur tag in the shop.