The Making of Natural Wine in Spain (Routledge Food Studies)

This book explains how “natural wine” was made and not discovered by Spanish lawmakers, chemists, merchants, and theologians, showing how Spain consolidated a legal construct that normalized specific technical interventions while preserving the label natural.

The book argues that wine labeled as “natural” was not the preservation of a traditional product but the product of a legal fiction that allowed wines with additives to be normalized and protected under law. In doing so, the book explores the emergence and changing meanings of natural wine. Rather than providing a fixed definition, it analyzes how the boundaries of “natural” shifted from period to period. It shows how natural wine ended up being used in the historical– legal sense that crystallized in late nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century Spain and culminated in 1932. Through detailed archival research, the book explores debates around adulteration, chemistry, purity, and authenticity, using historical food studies and legal analysis as its framework. It introduces the Spanish case as a significant but overlooked moment in the broader European shift toward legally codified standards of food authenticity and quality. Drawing primarily on the work of Alessandro Stanziani and influenced by Bruno Latour’s perspective on scientific authority and socio-technical networks, the book bridges the fields of legal history, enology, and cultural politics. This historical analysis sheds light on contemporary controversies surrounding wine regulation, appellation systems, and the global natural wine movement.

The book will be of great interest to students and scholars of food and wine studies, legal and economic history, anthropology, science and technology studies, and European agrarian history.

Pablo Alonso González is Senior Researcher at the Spanish National Research Council (IPNA-CSIC), where he leads the Social Sciences, Heritage and Food Research Group (SOCIALPAT). He specializes in wine history, food regulation, and cultural heritage, and is the author of Uncorked: Negotiating Science and Belief in the Natural Wine Movement (2025). He has been awarded a prestigious Consolidator Grant by the European Research Council and is a member of the Spanish Young Academy (AJE).