Agree, but marking grape variety on a back label can help introduce those people to the wine. A simplification of the classification system would help them in the next step, identifying origin. Having to learn AOC, soon AOCE, VdP, VdT, VQPRD, DOC, DOCG, IGT, QmP, DO and many more is just ridiculous. Many AOCs are not worth the paper they print the labels with. A coordinated European leabelling system would make sense. This could go hand in hand with the american AVA system.
Somehow though the message must be sent, that appreciating wine by grape variety is like appreciating music according to the instrumenbts used. There is a little more to it than that. Sometimes.
Actually, listing ingredients would not be sufficient for wine, as many items could be conveniently left out. You would want to know what goes into the process. The list would be rather scary. Bout it would be nice to have a method to see how "pure" the wine is.
I think that Nicolas Joly's method of grading wines would be more informative than any list of ingredients. The top tier would be wines organically grown, with no chaptalization, no acidification, no enzymes added, no selected yeasts added, little filtering, no fining, no other chemical treatments.
We have a lot of examples that meet this criteria in California and now extending to biodynamic farming. Unfortunately these are not necessarily the most drinkable wines.
And that's the rub. If you insist on so called "natural" wines, you won't be drinking as well as the rest of us.
If believed that wines made thusly were better - or even that it was _possible_ to make better wines while utilizing those airy-fairy tree-hugger methods - I'd be doing so now.
The fact is, there's an _army_ of spoilage organisms, both out there in the field _and_ in the winery. Solution? Sulfur and sulfite (in judicious quantities). Too much tannin masking that really nice fruit? A little fining with egg whites or gelatin. Good fruit, but with a propensity to fermentation by not-so-good native yeast strains? Inoculate with a known strain isolated from one of the world's top wine regions, and in such numbers that the bad strain can't compete.
This is *art*, Mike (et al). It's _not_ chemical engineering, and it's only partly science.
I am not saying that I drink ONLY these kinds of wines. I am not saying these wines are all good, some are indeed not very drinkable, but the ones I have chosen to drink are in fact by far more drinkable than high-tech wines. And I am not saying that one should NOT use sulphur and sulfite (in judicious quantities) and copper. I do say that filtering, fining, yeasting and adding enzymes takes away something from the wine. I am not talking about airy fairy tree huggers, I am talking about top flight wineries. Wine is a craft, and you can chose to practice it with a light hand, I just happen to like that, if the results are good, and they often are.
I agree that filtration is something to be avoided - not necessarily because of what it takes away from the wine, but because it involves extra _handling_ of the wine.
OTOH, I'm a strong proponent of fining (which for some reason gets lumped together with filtration). Before committing a wine to a fining regimen, however, I _always_ run bench trials, and only then choose a fining that improves the flavor of the wine in question. Sometimes the effect can be quite dramatic. Incidentally, fining is not mostly about achieving clarity, although that's usually a side benefit (as is bottled stability). Yes, fining removes something from wine, but it's typically something you wouldn't want in there anyway.
As for cultured strains of yeast, I don't see what your objection is - unless it's about purity of indigenous terroir. All yeast fermentations are _natural_ - whether from yeast in the field or added as a pure strain. Selecting a strain with known, good properties for a fermentation is a safe, prudent thing to do and doesn't take anything _away_ from the wine. I sleep a lot easier knowing that at least in that regard I'm not relying on the vagaries of Nature, believe me!
Enzymes are useful in that they enable the winemaker to get _more_ from the fruit: better extraction of flavor, color and juice. They don't add anything themselves to the flavor because they are used in very minute quantities. A typical dosage is 10 ml per 1000 Kg of fruit.
Correct, the same as the use of pumps, anything can "bruise" a wine...
You mean protein material, other nasty things that can send your wine haywire. Nevertheless, the natural decanting of wine is usually sufficient, you might experience that in your area most of the time...
You are right, it is in part about terroir. Most winemakers use cultured yeasts to obtain a specific result, one that might be required by marketing for example. I realize that these are natural cultures, but I cannot see using them in a wine that pretends to express terroir, these cultures have very specific effects on the aromas of the wine... And I have already mentioned that most areas do not experience any difficulty with indigenous yeasts, quite often these are much hardier and get stuck less often than some of the special cultures. Baianus did very poorly in last summer's tropical conditions...
Fine, but there are other ways to obtain the same result.
Another subject of interest is the use of clonal selections in the vine, and the recent return to mass selections. The greater diversity afforded by mass selection seems to yield wines that have more character, perhaps in part due to the lower productiveness of the vines thus selected.
How do you manage these selections, do you try to use a certain number of clones of each variety?
Sangiovesi and what else and in what porportion? N. Rhone is Syrah and what else? The S. Rhones are all over the place in terms of varietals and blends. Bi!!
With respect to natural yeasts and their relationship to terroir, are natural yeasts for a given location always the same from year to year? Or can they be affected by natural causes? [Heavy rain/hail, heat/drought, tornados, locusts/cicadas, ... :-) ] And what do you do if your natural yeasts tend to make really lousy wine?
-- Regards,
- Roy
=*=*Always do right. This will gratify some people and astonish the rest. - Mark Twain The truth is rarely pure, and never simple. - Oscar Wilde
I've heard the term "bruising" applied to wine before, but what that generally translates to is "oxidation", or perhaps a degree of heating. There are pumping methods that mitigate or even obviate those effects. Diaphragm pumps are cheap and quite gentle e.g., and inert gas counterpressure racking is even better than gravity racking.
I'm not sure what you mean by "natural decanting". If you mean allowing a young wine to rest in a tank until it falls clear due to gravity, that can take quite a long time. Also, that will not render a wine heat stable. It takes bentonite fining to accomplish that. OTOH, maybe you mean decanting wine away from a deposit it has thrown in the bottle because it wasn't heat stabilized. It can take _months_ to settle out a protein haze in that case since that type of sediment is nearly colloidal and close to neutrally buoyant. Decanting from it is tricky and requires a very steady hand. Even so, there tends to be more loss from the process than when decanting, say, vintage port. Better that the wine should be bottled protein stable in the first place, as bentonite is quite neutral with respect to affecting flavor and aroma - at least in low doses.
But other fining materials are used for different types of problems, e.g. egg whites, isinglass or gelatin - all of which are used to remove harsh tannins and round out the mouth feel. True, age can often accomplish a similar effect, but in some cases the tannins are so overwhelming that by the time they resolve themselves through aging much or all of the fruit will have been lost.
So you see, fining is about fine tuning the balance and harmony of a wine in such a way that it presents itself to best effect over most of its lifetime. You wouldn't want to play (or hear) an instrument that hadn't been properly tuned, would you? The art of fining is akin to "tuning" wine.
I think you're mistaken about the influence of the marketing people on winemakers' decisions. Winemakers tend to make wines that please their _own_ taste, and don't really care what the people in sales think or say. If a marketing geek came into the winery and started directing how the enologist should make wine he'd probably get tossed into a vat! ;^D IOW, in order to change winemaking styles, it's easier to hire a new winemaker than redirect the existing one.
I realize that these are natural
At first, the differences are readily apparent. However, over the course of aging the apparent differences among the same wine made with different yeast strains tend to fade. After a couple of years the differences have pretty much disappeared.
Interesting. Are you referring to Prise de Mousse?
Sure. Cold soaking has become very popular for reds - especially Pinot Noir - here in California. Actually, I've been cold soaking my Chardonnay for a day before pressing for the past 20 years. I like the result very much.
I don't do any of that, Mike, and I'm not current on that technology because I'm not a farmer. I just buy fruit and barrels from the best sources I can and go from there.
Aside from the difficulty of turning around a winery in response to market (like doing a U-turn in a large oil tanker in the St Lawrence river...), people do react to PArker and make the wines he is most likely to score 95. If you do not follow that trend, more power to you, but not everyone has the courage to stick to their guns.
No, and I meant 2001, sorry, a very good hot year with extremely high potential alcohol at harvest. Some people used baianus in order to try to get all that sugar fermented, and ended up with fermentation stuck at 15.
Ah, you are what we call a negociant-vinificateur. Do you have a web site?
I don't have a commercial site up yet, as I have not released my 2002 Chardonnay yet. I will soon though, at which time I'll have to take down my amateur site (which is kind of a cobweb anyway) because I don't wish to be sued by Alanis Morissette, Matt Groening and Mike Judge. (The background sound on the index page is a composite of the first two.) The URL is:
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