Best Natural Wine Restaurants Worldwide

From a Beaujolais cellar to a Michelin star

In 2023 the Michelin Guide gave a star to a wine bar in Williamsburg. The Four Horsemen, opened in 2015 by LCD Soundsystem's James Murphy and the late wine director Justin Chearno, is a natural wine list with a kitchen attached — chef Nick Curtola cooks small, seasonal, North Atlantic plates to a cellar of low-sulphur, native-yeast bottles from growers most diners have never heard of. That a natural wine room could hold a Michelin star and a James Beard Award for its wine programme would have been unthinkable a generation ago, when natural wine meant sulphur-free gamay made by a handful of Beaujolais farmers and sold out of a van.

The arc is one of the fastest in modern drinking. Natural wine — wine farmed organically or biodynamically, fermented with wild yeast, and bottled with little or no added sulphur and nothing else — moved from a fringe French cellar movement in the 1980s to the defining wine of a global restaurant generation in the 2020s. The Paris wine bars carried it first; Copenhagen's Noma diaspora made it a Nordic religion; New York, London, Melbourne and Tokyo built scenes deep enough to rival the source. The by-the-glass list at almost every ambitious young restaurant now leans natural, and the grower's name on the label has become the mark of a serious cellar.

This guide treats the natural wine restaurant as a cuisine in its own right — a room where the list, not the menu, is the headline, and the kitchen cooks to the wine. The best of them are reviewed here the way a tasting-menu room would be: on the rigour of the buying, the honesty of the farming behind the bottles, the pairing of plate to glass, and whether the funk on the list is texture and life or simply fault.

The four signals of a serious natural wine list

A natural wine list reveals itself fast, and the tests below are the ones a Paris caviste applies before ordering a second glass.

1. The farming is organic or biodynamic, and the list says so. Natural wine begins in the vineyard, not the cellar. A serious list works only with growers farming organically or biodynamically — no synthetic herbicides or pesticides, often certified by Ecocert or Demeter — and a good room can tell you which. A list padded with conventionally-farmed bottles dressed up as "low-intervention" is the first tell of a programme chasing the label rather than the practice. Ask the staff who farms the wine; the answer separates a real natural list from a marketing one.

2. The wines are native-yeast and low- or no-sulphur. The cellar markers are spontaneous fermentation with wild yeast rather than inoculated commercial strains, and little or no added sulphur dioxide at bottling — typically under 30mg/L total, often zero. This is what gives natural wine both its living, unfiltered character and its risk. A list that understands the trade-off curates for clean expression; one that does not hides faults behind the word "natural." The serious room knows which of its low-sulphur bottles are stable and which to pour young and fast.

3. The grower is named, and the list is built on relationships. On a natural wine list the producer is the point — the wines come from small estates making a few thousand bottles, and the room buys them through direct relationships and trusted importers rather than off a distributor's catalogue. A serious list names the grower, the region and often the cuvée, and the staff have met the people who made the wine. A list organised only by grape or country, with no growers named, is a conventional list wearing natural clothing.

4. The by-the-glass selection is adventurous and well-kept. The glass pour is where a natural wine room shows its hand and its confidence. A serious list pours something unexpected by the glass — a chilled glou-glou red, a skin-contact white, a pét-nat — kept fresh under good cellar conditions, because low-sulphur wine punishes careless storage. A timid by-the-glass list of safe, conventional pours behind a "natural" sign is a room that has read the trend without committing to it. The glass list is the honest measure of the cellar.

Lineage: Chauvet to the Gang of Four to the world

The modern natural wine movement has a clear genealogy. Its theorist was Jules Chauvet, a Beaujolais négociant and trained chemist who, from the 1950s through the 1980s, argued that great wine came from healthy grapes fermented with their own yeasts and protected with as little sulphur as possible. Chauvet wrote and experimented more than he preached; his ideas needed practitioners.

They arrived in Morgon, in Beaujolais, as the Gang of Four — Marcel Lapierre, Jean Foillard, Guy Breton and Jean-Paul Thévenet — who from the early 1980s made sulphur-free, native-yeast gamay by carbonic maceration and proved Chauvet's theory could be bottled and sold. Lapierre in particular became the movement's patron saint; the importer Kermit Lynch carried the wines to America, and a generation of growers apprenticed on the idea.

From Beaujolais the movement spread along France's edges. The Loire became a natural heartland through growers like Marc Pesnot, Olivier Cousin and Richard Leroy; the Jura produced its own saint in Pierre Overnoy, whose oxidative and ouillé savagins set a benchmark; the Auvergne and the Languedoc-Roussillon filled in the south. In Italy, Josko Gravner and Stanko Radikon in Friuli revived skin-contact orange wine as serious fine wine, reaching back to the qvevri tradition of Georgia, the world's oldest continuous winemaking culture.

The restaurants came last and made the movement global. The Paris wine bars of the 2000s — Le Verre Volé, then a wave of bars à vin — put natural wine on tables; Copenhagen's restaurants, led by the Noma orbit, made it the default Nordic pour; and New York, London and Melbourne built lists deep enough that the centre of gravity is now as much in the world's restaurant cities as in the French cellars where it began.

The Paris canon

Paris is the city that turned natural wine from a grower's movement into a way of eating out, and it remains the deepest scene in the world. The required rooms:

Septime in the 11th (Bertrand Grébaut's Michelin-starred room, the kitchen that made seasonal, vegetable-forward cooking and a natural list the template for a generation) and its wine bar Clamato next door (the no-reservations seafood-and-natural-wine annexe). Le Chateaubriand in the 11th (Iñaki Aizpitarte's bistronomy landmark, long on the World's 50 Best list, with one of the city's boldest natural lists). Le Verre Volé by the Canal Saint-Martin (Cyril Bordarier's bar-à-vin, the original natural wine shop-and-table that pointed the way in 2000).

The supporting tier any serious drinker should add: Vivant in the 10th (the tiled former birdshop turned natural wine room); Aux Deux Amis on Rue Oberkampf (the standing-room natural bar); La Cave du Paul Bert and the Bistrot Paul Bert orbit in the 11th; and Septime La Cave, Grébaut's bottle shop where you can drink the list standing up. A Paris natural wine evening is built around the 10th and 11th arrondissements, where the movement put down its first roots.

Global picks by city

Natural wine travelled on relationships — importers, sommeliers and chefs who knew the growers personally — and the cities below have built lists that rival Paris for depth.

New York and the US East Coast

The Four Horsemen in Williamsburg (Michelin star, James Beard Award wine programme, the global reference for a natural-wine room with a serious kitchen). Wildair on the Lower East Side (Fabián von Hauske and Jeremiah Stone's small-plates-and-natural-wine room). Frenchette in Tribeca (Riad Nasr and Lee Hanson's brasserie with a landmark natural and biodynamic list). Ruffian in the East Village and June in Cobble Hill anchor the wine-bar tier.

London and the UK

Noble Rot (the Lamb's Conduit Street and Soho rooms, born from the wine magazine, with a list that bridges classic and natural). P. Franco in Lower Clapton (the counter-only natural wine room that trained half of London's wine talent). Sager + Wilde in Hackney and Brawn on Columbia Road (Ed Wilson's natural bistro) complete the London core. The city's natural scene is the deepest outside Paris and New York.

Copenhagen and the Nordics

The Noma diaspora made Copenhagen a natural wine capital. Pompette (the natural wine bar and bistro from the Pompette team), Ved Stranden 10 (the canal-side list that helped define the Nordic natural canon) and Den Vandrette (the harbourside natural cellar) lead. The Copenhagen model — a tightly seasonal kitchen behind a radically natural list — set the tone for Nordic dining.

Melbourne, Sydney and Tokyo

Melbourne is the natural wine capital of the southern hemisphere — Marion, Bar Liberty and the Andrew McConnell orbit pour deep natural lists, and Australian growers supply the world. In Tokyo, the natural wine scene is unexpectedly serious: Ahiru Store in Shibuya (the tiny bakery-and-natural-wine standing bar that started the Tokyo movement) and Winestand Waltz in Ebisu are the reference rooms. The Japanese palate for low-intervention, low-alcohol wine made the city an early adopter.

What's not natural wine

Natural wine has no single legal definition in most markets, which has made the term the most abused on the modern wine list. The following wear the label or sit near it without earning it.

Conventional industrial wine is not natural wine, however it is marketed. Most of the world's wine is made with inoculated commercial yeast, adjusted for acidity and sugar, fined and filtered clear, and dosed with sulphur and any of dozens of permitted additives and processing aids. Some of it is excellent; none of it is natural wine. A label reading "sustainable," "small batch" or "winemaker's selection" signals nothing about intervention; those are marketing words, not the practice.

Organic wine alone is not natural wine. Organic certification governs only the farming — no synthetic chemicals in the vineyard — and an organic wine can still be inoculated, acidified, fined, filtered and heavily sulphured in the cellar. The same is true of "vegan wine," which only means no animal-derived fining agents were used. Natural wine requires both organic or biodynamic farming and a minimal cellar; the farming certification is necessary but nowhere near sufficient.

A faulty wine is not a natural wine, and the "flaws are character" excuse is the category's worst habit. With little sulphur to protect them, careless natural wines develop real faults — mousiness (a fermentation flaw that tastes of rodent cage), excessive volatile acidity (nail polish and vinegar), or a wild re-fermentation in bottle. These are defects, not terroir. A serious natural wine list curates them out; a lazy one pours them and calls the buyer unsophisticated for noticing. The best natural wine is clean, alive and precise — funk is texture, not fault.

An "orange wine" novelty pour is not, by itself, a natural wine. Skin-contact whites have become a trend item, and plenty of conventionally-farmed, additive-heavy orange wines now appear on lists riding the aesthetic. Orange describes a technique — fermenting white grapes on their skins — not a philosophy of farming and cellar work. A serious skin-contact wine is naturally made; a supermarket orange wine is a colour, not a category.

The natural wine vocabulary

Natural wine — wine from organically or biodynamically farmed grapes, fermented with native yeast and bottled with little or no added sulphur and no other additives.

Pét-nat — pétillant naturel; lightly sparkling wine made by the méthode ancestrale, bottled before the first fermentation finishes.

Orange wine — white wine fermented on its grape skins for colour, tannin and texture; traditional in Georgia, revived in Friuli.

Skin contact — macerating white juice on its skins, the technique behind orange wine; days for light texture, months for full grip.

Biodynamics — a holistic organic farming system following Steiner's principles; certified by Demeter, stricter than organic.

Native yeast — the wild yeasts on the grapes and in the cellar, used for spontaneous fermentation rather than inoculated commercial yeast.

SO2 (sulphur dioxide) — the preservative added to most wine; natural wine adds little or none, which defines the category and its risks.

Fining and filtration — cellar processes that clarify wine; natural wine typically skips both, leaving it cloudier and more textured.

Glou-glou — French slang for an easy, gulpable, low-tannin red made to drink young and often chilled; the house style of the natural bar.

Carbonic maceration — fermenting whole grapes in a carbon-dioxide-rich vessel; the Beaujolais technique behind bright, low-tannin gamay.

Qvevri — the buried clay vessel used for fermentation in Georgia, the ancestral home of skin-contact winemaking.

Méthode ancestrale — the oldest sparkling method, a single fermentation finished in bottle, used for pét-nat.