It doesn't and shouldn't taste like vinegar. Same here regarding family wine production. Note families tend to share their wine among themselves, so there is some comparison. You can taste the difference if there is some additive or it is industry produced. It is just different.

Personally, I find the term "natural wine" kind of laughable (I hope) and a result of marketing. Techniques used in the industry are towards making wine more average and consistent over the years. Not sifting your juices and checking over the yeast, just means you won't know if your wine sucks till it's ready. Hence a significant portion of years will just taste bad, with a few of them being acceptable. You still need to intervene to get true gems (controlled environment etc), as the article implies. There is still a lot of oversight going on.

>> According to this view, natural wine is a cult intent on >> rolling back progress in favour of wine best suited to >> the tastes of Roman peasants. I think this hostile sentiment is unwarranted. Wine in general has gotten much better over the years (consistency and taste) as we know much more about the process. I can see why French winemakers want consistency, but I would argue they could label possibly inconsistent wines with a new term than branding them as "garbage".

Depends where the grapes are from, what species they are and of course also the winemaking the process. There was a joke going around about the difference between German wine and vinegar: the label.

In sunnier regions the grapes are sweet but don't get enough acidity and the winemakers have to compensate using tartaric (also citric or malic) acid or ideally more acidic grape juice (imported or from other grape species). In less sunnier regions the grapes don't get enough sugar and they become too acidic. Fermentation naturally stops at about 13% alcohol content but if it's warm in your cellar (>18°C) it can start again and exhaust all the sugar in the wine. When this happens, you can stop the fermentation by adding suplhur. A small amount of sugar is necessary to preserve the flavours in a wine if it's kept in barrels or stainless steel drums. Commercial wines are filtered, pasteurized and bottled after fermentation stops if they're not aged in wooden barrels. Once a bottle of regular (unaged) commercial wine is open, the flavour goes away if left overnight.