Aging no sulfite wines up to 50 years?

WINE TALK
1

Point and counter point from the RAWFair in London:

Be sure and read Clarke Smith’s comment after the main article.

2

70 mg/l isn’t too uncommon where I live. I didn’t know it was such a hard mark.

then again, I know nothing of natural wine making. But I do much of what lends protection.

3

I think it would be fun to taste a 50 year old “natural” wine, especially one that she feels is correct. I’d also love to have a time machine so I could go back and taste all these “amazing” wines from antiquity.

4

Yeah, time machine for purely vino purposes in order to taste massively tannic wines of antiquity.

5

Not to mention massively oxidized, I’d guess.

6

Do you guys really think that Thomas Jefferson spent money to send Margaux and Haut Brion to the colonies because it was crap? Or that everything George Sainstbury said about the wines of his time was fanciful nonsense?

7

But they were “natural”, and that’s all that matters… neener

8

I’m opening some of my 09’s on Friday, come by if you want to taste them. For reals.

9

Maybe after the month-long journey across the ocean in an unrefrigerated cask or bottle, those wines had softened, no?

10

I might stop by. Gotta go see John Grochau too.

11

Sulfur has been used as a preservative and disinfectant for a very long time, on paper via a Prussian royal decree in 1487. Dutch and English merchants burnt sulfur candles in barrels they used for transport. I have no idea if Margaux and Haut Brion were burning sulfured wood chips in their barrels or their merchants were doing such with their own barrels [edit is what follows:] during the time Jefferson would have been a buyer [cheers.gif]

12

I don’t and haven’t disputed that, just the seemingly prevailing notions that most wine sucked until the 20th century which seems prevalent here.

13

Sorry misread your response given the subject of the thread. I think we are/were in agreement

14

If you’ve ever had a pristine bottle of Vatan Pinot Noir, followed by a bacterially-spoilaged bottle of Vatan Pinot Noir, then you can appreciate both the non-sulfite point of view and the sulfite point of view.

When non-sulfite wines are on, they’re the greatest things since sliced bread.

But once the bacteria start growing…

15

I think you’re taking our earlier responses (and yourself) too seriously…It’s all in fun. I think all wine lovers would readily acknowledge that what we today call great wine has been made for thousands of years. Whether it was by accident or not is always fun to think about though.

16

No one said the wines sucked, or were crap, except Roberto. Just a little time machine fun my friend.

17

People have expressed just that in other threads. Some idiot put out a wine history book fairly recently that said that, too.

18

And I was referring to Todd’s references to the great wines of “antiquity.” The 18th Century is not antiquity.

19

I don’t think it’s anything like that long a tradition. There were terrible problems with spoilage, so most wine was drunk very young.

20

Confused a bit about the terminology. Ms. Legeron mentions that it is feasible that wine without sulphites (added, I assume) can age 50 years…and then says she’s had 50-year old natural wines that are still going strong. So it appears she is differentiating between without sulphites and natural wines. Later in the piece, perhaps unrelated, it says that producers must use less that 70mg/l of sulphites to enter and that wineries have been kicked out before for exceeding that. I assume that means they are testing SO2 levels (total I assume? With levels naturally occurring around 10-12ppm…could you add 70 and end up with 82 and still be okay? You certainly could add a lot more prior to fermentation and it would never show). Honestly, I’ve got plenty of wines that have tested out below 70 total…certainly with our use of screwcaps.

Anybody have any insight? I probably should look up the standards on the RAW site.

Adam Lee
Siduri Wines