The story of natural wine sounds so innocent, so harmless on paper, that it’s hard at first to understand why it still gets so many otherwise calm and reasonable people so very, very cross. It goes a little like this. Disillusioned by what they saw as the increasing industrialisation of modern winemaking, a disparate group of small-scale wine producers, mainly French and Italian, set out to see if they could do things differently. This was back in the 1980s, but word spread and they were soon joined by fellow travellers across Europe and the New World.

Most of them were already working chemical-free in their vineyards; many of them had converted to the buried cow horns, homeopathic teas and lunar and astral tweaks of biodynamic farming. But they wanted to apply the same principles they used in the vineyard to their work in the cellar after the grapes were harvested. They believed the wine industry had become too reliant on the battery of dozens of legal additives, from tartaric acid and sulfur dioxide, to powdered tannin and fish bladders (isinglass), permitted in wine production. They reckoned that these were being used too freely as props to correct deficiencies in the grapes. So they began to see if they could do without them.

They had no set rules. Working experimentally and independently they wouldn’t have described themselves as part of a movement. But slowly a kind of consensus began to emerge, a set of practices and inclinations to which the “natural wine” tag was unofficially attached (there is still no legal definition). Wine writer Andrew Jefford has a pithy definition: natural wines are those made from grapes grown in organic or biodynamic vineyards “with few or no chemical additions in an artisanal manner, sometimes involving historical techniques such as amphora-fermentation”.

So far, so uncontroversial: natural wines seem to fit in with any number of modern attempts at ethical food and drink production. Though the movement’s critics often caricature natural wines as cloudy in the glass, most exponents are working from a core principle to which very few would object: transparency. They feel that wine should come as close to its dictionary definition “fermented grape juice” as possible, and they have a justified sense that many consumers would be horrified at the average wine bottle’s ingredients list if producers were ever obliged to print one. So why are so many people – including the Observer’s Jay Rayner, who described natural wines as “brutal, unstructured, with the foul back taste of farmyard” – so down on them?

In part, of course, it is just a matter of taste. Although the natural wine flavour spectrum is wide, running from wines that are barely distinguishable from the conventionally made to those that fit the stereotype of cloudy, fecal cider, the majority share a certain taste or feeling: there is a wildness to them, coupled with earthy and gamey flavours that immediately identify them as “natural”.

Some people simply cannot tolerate those flavours at any concentration; they see them as faults. I wouldn’t tolerate them either, if they were all a wine offered. But while there are many natural wines where I can’t see beyond the bacterial murk, there are many more where you do get something new and precious: a difference in texture and vivacity, and a range of non-fruit flavours that you don’t often find in conventional wines.

I suspect that it’s not so much taste in wine as distaste for ideology that informs the more rabid critics of natural wine. They are reacting to the sanctimonious tone of some in the natural movement, who, in their rush for the moral high ground, and with their fanciful claims that natural wines offer a more “emotional” as well as ethical (I’ve also heard “spiritual”) experience, tend to ignore the fact that when natural wines fail they fail badly.

But away from all the claims, counter-claims and all the hair-splitting debates about the legitimacy of the use of the term “natural” (as Rayner pointed out, as a natural phenomenon, isn’t everything humankind does, by definition, natural?), I get the impression the wine world is finally moving on from for or against. In years to come, I reckon we’ll see the early years of natural wine as the industry’s punk moment: a bracing anti-establishment corrective to the over-produced excesses that came before. Not everything that came out of the movement will stand the test of time: there are many vinous Sham 69s. But its spirit, and many of its techniques and ideas are already informing producers in what nobody is yet calling the post-natural scene.

Six of the best natural wines

Rogue Vine Grand Itata Blanco (£15.75, Bottle Apostle)
The cool-climate Itata region is home to some of Chile’s most exciting experimental winemaking, and this low-sulphur white is gorgeously textured, fresh but complex, matching fragrant floral notes with pithy citrus.

Mas Coutelou Classe, Languedoc 2013 (£16.95, Roberson)
For the natural wine-sceptic, it’s hard to think of a better place to start than the wines of Jeff Coutelou: full of vivid, finger-staining blackberry fruit, this carignan is explosively juicy and succulent: pure pleasure.

Marc Angeli La Lune, Loire, France 2012 (£19.95, Yapp)
Along with Beaujolais, the Loire Valley is one of the epicentres of the French natural wine scene, and Marc Angeli is one of its standout producers: a chenin blanc that positively resonates with tarte tatin and nutty flavours.

Dard & Ribo Crozes Hermitage, France 2011 (£24.22, Solent Cellar)
There’s nothing to upset the anti-naturalistas in this classic northern Rhône syrah from natural stars Dard et Ribo, just stacks of crunchy black fruit, smoky bacon and black pepper flavour and the smoothest most graceful texture.

Domaine Matassa Rouge Côtes Catalanes 2012 (£27.75, Joseph Barnes)
Suave of tannin and with a deliciously moreish freshness, this southern French red makes the most of its old carignan vines offering a meaty, leathery intensity and wild woody herbiness to go with its dusky blackberry fruit.

Radikon Ribolla, Collio, Italy 2007 (£29, Buonvino)
The traditional art of leaving white grapes in contact with their skins during fermentation to produce orange wines is difficult to master but utterly beguiling when it works: Radikon’s is herbal, spicy, and zesty with a touch of red wine-like tannin.