Natural wine as a cultural field: Consumers, professionals and symbolic struggles over authenticity and regulation

Despite the lack of an official and widely agreed definition, “natural wine” has given rise to a transnational movement and a distinctive market segment. Drawing on Bourdieu’s notion of cultural fields, recent research has conceptualized natural wine as an emerging field shaped by producers and cultural intermediaries; however, the role of consumers in these symbolic struggles remains underexplored. This article asks how symbolic valuations of natural wine differ between consumers and wine professionals, and which sociocultural factors contribute to these differences. We draw on a face-to-face survey of 415 attendees at the longest-standing natural wine fair in Spain, combining free word associations with measures of wine involvement, dietary and lifestyle habits, and attitudes towards natural wine and its potential certification. Our findings show that consumers and professionals share several symbolic associations with natural wine, but weight them differently. Consumers more often frame natural wine through legibility-oriented cues such as organic production and the absence of sulphites or additives, whereas professionals more often emphasise minimal intervention and production practices, while also expressing stronger scepticism towards formal certification. The clearest divide, however, concerns preferred modes of legitimation: consumers are more likely to favour regulatory and labelling devices that stabilise the category, while producers and distributors more often resist formal certification as a threat to autonomy. The natural wine fair thus appears as a key arena where competing symbolic valuations are negotiated at the interface between supply and demand, showing how disputes over authenticity and regulation are articulated across different positions within the emerging natural wine field in consumer culture.