(GQ) - There’s a lot of hype around natural wines: They’re experimental, funky, genre-breaking, and hangover-headache-preventing. And some of this is even true!

Natural wine is a very real “thing” right now. (You could call it the new rosé, except it sometimes is rosé.) There are wine bars in New York and San Francisco given over entirely to the movement. There are shops with natural-wine sections as expansive as the fiefdoms dedicated to France. There are sommeliers who preach its deliciousness with missionary zeal.

It's minimally interventionist, wine nerds say. It's gentler on the earth, a man mansplains, holding his glass up to the light. I've heard it doesn't cause hangovers, your friend stage-whispers. In chorus, their voices rise: It's the only wine worth drinking!
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And those claims aren't completely overblown. Natural wine defies the usual, assembly-line process, putting fewer steps between the vine and your tongue. Natural wine is the closest you'll get to that mythical unicorn of wine tasting, terroir, and it results in some genuinely mind-blowing bottles. It's just that natural wine can also be really freaking confusing.

Despite all the hard-line evangelism, the term is mushy. Usually “natural wine” means using only natural yeast to ferment grapes. Sometimes it means the winemaker doesn't artificially remove yeast. It often means no added sulfites—chemical preservatives and the bogeymen in the legend of hangover-free wines.

Some people are sensitive to sulfites. If you're one, then sulfite-lite natural wines might make you feel less like trash. But alcohol—not a bunch of sulfurous compounds—is the reason your body feels like a Superfund site the morning after a bender.

The vino artisans who make natural wine aren't doing this to protect you from a Sunday of Advil and Gatorade, anyway. Cranking the sulfites down to zero (or close) allows the wine to change in the bottle, sometimes in weird, wonderful ways. Take a sip of a particularly funky Sicilian rosé called Susucaru and the hairs on your neck stand up—it calls to mind a lambic beer, all sharp fruit and bitter finish. Some natural wines take on a whiff of rotten eggs or a hint of tart Parmesan. This is what happens when you let wine do what it wants to do, you know, naturally—age, break down, evolve.