"Natural Wines"

[gamble]

https://www.theguardian.com/news/2018/may/15/has-wine-gone-bad-organic-biodynamic-natural-wine

Interesting but long(!) read. Basically "lets throw away thousands of years of learning to make something cloudy,sour and trendy"

 

[Scooter68]

Yeah, kinda hard to get very excited about something that the tongue wants to reject at first taste - even with some 'experience' in tasting that 'wine.'

As to leaving everything in... sorry but that just makes no sense. After all we aren't making a 'health-food' beverage so those bits and pieces don't add to the enjoyable flavor. Especially in light of what we know about seeds and other parts of the grape or fruit.

It almost sounds like the idea of "If it tastes nasty, it must be good for you" medicine.

 

[JohnT]

This is too funny!!!

"But almost more remarkable than the dish itself was the drink that accompanied it: a glass of cloudy, noticeably sour white wine from a virtually unknown vineyard in France’s Loire Valley, which was available at the time for about £8 a bottle" .... This was a so-called natural wine – made without any pesticides, chemicals or preservatives – the product of a movement that has triggered the biggest conflict in the world of wine for a generation.

This type of thing always reminds me of the old story "The Emperor's New Clothes".

Here they start off saying it is cloudy and sour. But hey, look the other way... it is natural.

The plague, forest fires, hurricanes, hoards of locust are also natural. It doesn't mean that they are good things.

 

[user 36973]

Sounds like there is at least a market of idiots if a batch of wine goes south.

 

[bkisel]

Thanks guys... After reading your replies I've decided not to waste my time reading the article.

 

[stickman]

There are so many factors involved. I think natural wine has its place, but making it taste good requires a winemaker with a high degree of skill and knowledge. If you don't know what you are doing, a natural wine with all of the microbial activity, will end up with more chemical contaminants than the wine made with sulfites.

 

[Ajmassa]

Thanks guys... After reading your replies I've decided not to waste my time reading the article.

It still a good read. Well written and very detailed. But like mostly everyone else who read it, i probably said to myself “you gotta be effing kidding me?!” multiple times throughout.
One of which was this,
[David Harvey, of the London importer Raeburn Fine Wines, recalled that “many wine professionals and writers pooh-poohed the whole thing early on. They assumed because they knew conventional wines, they knew it all.”]. Yea I guess evaluating bitter cloudy garage wine is a new requirement for them!
Smh
The emperor’s new clothes is a perfect analogy btw.

 

[Scooter68]

Let's see, Take a bunch of grapes, mash them up, put them in a bottle with an airlock and comeback in 6 months and bottle it. Sounds about like the basic process.

No equipment, no preservatives, no worries........ yeah right.

 

[JohnT]

just one more view point. This is embraced return to 6,000 year old winemaking techniques.

While we are at it, why not return to 6,000 year old government, or 6,000 year old food, or 6,000 year old medicine?

The good old days were not so good!

 

[sour_grapes]

My friend has this same approach (although his wines clear well enough through aging). As you know, this year was my first crush, so we are making wine from the same grapes. We agreed he would do it au naturel, while I use all the adjuncts and chemicals I please, and we will compare them later!

 

[Ajmassa]

My friend has this same approach (although his wines clear well enough through aging). As you know, this year was my first crush, so we are making wine from the same grapes. We agreed he would do it au naturel, while I use all the adjuncts and chemicals I please, and we will compare them later!

Just how natural did he go?
Natural yeast- no nutrients- no So2 - no nothing???
I think I know who’s wine will be better. Oh wait never mind. According to that article “better” is subjective and any beatnik can deem the natural one better. But to the rest of us in reality I’m looking forward to hear about the final results.

 

[sour_grapes]

Yup, he is not adding or changing a thing. Nothing. (And this was a high brix batch!)

 

[Scooter68]

Is he racking at all or just leaving in the original fermentation vessel. Does he intend to bottle all the sediment as well or is he doing some sort of racking/filtering.

 

[Slappy]

80 year old Italian neighbor of mine does wild ferments on grenache/shiraz blends and 90 days from pressing he bottles his wine only racking it off the sediment. I've drank a few of them some very average but a couple have been quite drinkable in their own way. He'd never change how he does things.
When I racked my grenache last week I had a stray gallon or so that I bottled as it was pretty clear 8 weeks after pressing. Don't know what it will be like in 6 months but it's clean and fruity right now so I'll have a bottle every week til it's gone. I used a proper yeast though so guess it's not truly 'natural'. The rest is on oak and got a dose of sulfite though. Maybe I'll save one of the unadulterated bottles for a year just to see what it's like.

 

[cmason1957]

Natural wines, what an odd term. They use yeast, just not specialized yeast. They end up with sulfites in the wine, you can't avoid them, they are a natural byproduct of fermentation.

They don't filter, meh, who cares that just makes your wine shine.

I am surprised that folks think this is good, when it is noticeably sub-par to what you can get with minimal interventions. But each to his own.

 

[Scooter68]

Certainly agree cmason - Why would you set out to make a poorer wine just so you can do it the "Old Natural way?"

It's like going to the doc to get shoulder surgery and saying - Yeah doc, I know you can do this shoulder surgery laparoscopically, but really, I'd rather you just cut me all around the shoulder and give me a nice big scar along with a longer recovery time.

 

[sour_grapes]

Is he racking at all or just leaving in the original fermentation vessel. Does he intend to bottle all the sediment as well or is he doing some sort of racking/filtering.

Good point. He racks off the gross lees and then the fine lees as needed as the wine clears.

 

[BernardSmith]

I make "country wines" and meads and don't make wines from grapes so my opinion here (as always) is quite contrarian. I think we are missing the point that is being made by those wine makers who have adopted a less industrialized /engineered approach. Their thing is to bring out the flavors and the aromas of the grapes themselves rather than to produce the flavors and aromas that are expected of those wines. So, it is not going back to the past to ask a doctor to be bled or to have the butcher do the surgery. This is about a group of people who want to focus on the flavor the fruit has and not in "manufacturing" flavors that come from labs (see also Bianca Bosker's Cork Dork, Penguin 2017)

 

[Scooter68]

In all honesty Bernard I think that most of us are on the same page. We hobbyist wine makers are looking for more control of our wines, to craft them our way.
My point in my comments is more along the line of taking advantage of modern day methods to the extent we choose along with modifying quantities of fruit, targeting the ABV to our liking and Still coming up with a wine that is generally, outwardly indistinguishable from commercial wines.

What I saw in that article were several points about cloudy wines with sediment and 'unusual' flavors and aromas. If those things are considered advantages to some, so be it, but: but to many of us I think we just want to have more control over the wine and a wine that is still attractive in the glass.

I guess one way would be to say that to some extent the article painted a picture of those natural wines being almost like that first health drink I was first given - tasted a bit nasty even though it was supposed to be good for me. I agree that some beverages today bear only a slight resemblance to the fruit name on that label. I will even admit to drinking the occasional 'wine coolers' that claim to be one berry or another or some fruit and yet seem to be more of that old DOW Chemical Company line - "Better living through Chemicals" (Or was that through Science) ( That line always came to me when I was desperate for something hot and resorted to making a cup of instant coffee with non-dairy creamer powder and an artificial sweetener)

At the risk of rambling - I recall taking trips to historic villages and tasting food prepared in the same way as it was 'back in the day.' Perhaps, that's what the natural wine movement is about. I just think that like that historic village food offering, If it has a good flavor great, but if it has some strange flavors or looks, maybe that isn't a great thing to bring back.

 

[BernardSmith]

Right, No disagreement but my sense is that those wine makers are not creating "strange flavors" or strange "looks" , they are simply focusing on the fruit they have and the indigenous yeasts and experimenting with the results in much the same way that say, a woman who has worn "makeup" all her life chooses to forgo the chemicals and colors and scents and enter the world au naturale. Acquaintances may be surprised and may not recognize her but those who really know her may admit that her natural beauty by far is better than any manufactured "beauty" that comes from a factory controlled by chemists and engineers. This is not an attempt to go back in time or to play make believe. It is, I would argue an attempt to strip away the artifice and the manufactured nature of what could be a delicious wine absent the engineered manipulations of folk in lab coats creating more and more chemicals to allow vintners to manufacture their wines.