All Natural Wine

WINE TALK
21

OK, you got me intrigued now. Do tell just who does 400ppm? Names, please. At least one.

And also, ever checked how many wines these days actually exceed 40ppm? This has been covered ad nauseam for years now, most of the market is below 40ppm for a very, very long time (IIRC, “organic” wine rule is at or below 40ppm, so have no idea what the 50ppm for “natural” means in reality when it exceeds the norm for almost all “UNnatural”). If yours is “natural”, then by extension others are UNnatural, right? Nice and subtle marketing gimmick that seems to escape most. How many consumers even know what the S02 norms are these days and simply buy into outrageous claims nat winemakers make on their say so? I have nothing against “marketing” and self-promotion, as long as it is not at the expense of making unfounded claims against “others”, making outrageous claims that have no basis in reality is just not going to win you much in the end. Most wineries bottle in mid 30s free SO2, some even less, do you even know that?

Promote YOUR wines and what YOU put in the bottle, on their own merit, and ABSTAIN from pointing fingers at others while making wild claims. That’s your best marketing approach at successful sales. Marketing 101.

I always wonder just where does fruit for nat wines come from? Is it some stand-alone vineyard in a middle of nowhere where other nearby vineyards do not spray, and no soil transmission takes place? How do you know your wines are not affected by nearby chem use, if its actually in use next door, or even adjoining block? Do you guys actually test your wines prior to bottling before making claims in regard to chem exclusion? Or simply bottle and sell via “because I say so”? People you pan usually test everything they make, at least ready to bottle/blended lot by lot as a normal pre-bottling routine and pre-caution. Seems someone should buy a bunch of nat wines and run panels. And in your own estimate, what are the odds that claims made by nat winemakers do not reflect reality? How many would fail and show above zero amounts of chems when run through a panel? Just curious.

I am absolutely fine with the idea of making wine according to “traditions”, to each his/her own. I also hope that you actually make wine onsite (at the vineyard), and do not use ANY modern conveniences. You know, trucking fruit to a winery miles away. Forklifts. Tanks. Press. Using electricity at the winery. HOT WATER, for cleanliness. How about those water lines and water hoses that didn’t really exist 6,000 years ago. They didn’t have bottles 6,000 years ago as well, why do you guys use bottles to sell your juice? CORKS? LABELS? Foils? I am willing to bet fruit you buy comes from a vineyard that has irrigation built-in, did that also exist 6,000 years ago? Wait, just how do you deliver wine to accounts/customers? Do tell. I am sorry, but had I owned a wine shop and someone walked in to sell me “6,000 year old tradition wine”, the first thing I’d be doing would be walking out the door to check for the horse cart that brought you to my doorstep. Provided horse carts even existed 6,000 years ago to begin with (I study ancient history, but I’ll cut some slack here). Maybe I am a traditionalist, after all.

So, where does one draw the line on “6,000 year old tradition”? Where does “tradition” stop and “its OK to do this” begin? Except for the sales pitch, of course.

I do not begrudge anyone making nat wines, your decision and your life, but I seriously take offense when modern CLEAN and SAFE winemaking is derided by the lot and used as promotional material. Make it, sell it, no issue. Absolutely none. Just do not make statements at the expense of others to promote your own wine when your statements are borderline defamatory. PLEASE.

And, yes, I still want to know who does 400ppm. Seriously. Talk is cheap.

22

Greg:

To confirm, when you say “most of the market is below 40ppm for a very, very long time” you’re talking about free SO2s?

23

From my point of view that sounds really weird, since organic wines have been The Thing here in the northern part of Europe for more than a decade and their market share seems to grow year by year, whereas there are only a small handful of organic beers here available.

Furthermore, the definition for an “organic” wine in the USA feels rather odd to me - wasn’t it that a wine was supposed to be less than 10 ppm in total SO2 in order to be labeled as “organic”, nevermind where the sulfites actually came from? I can imagine it can be rather hard to make an organic wine with that kind of criterion, since some rogue yeasts can create more than 10 ppm of sulfites during the alcoholic fermentation.

24

In the USA no sulphite additions are allowed for “organic wine”. They have no specially low limits on “natural” SO2.

10ppm is the SO2 limit above which the label must have a “contains sulphites” warning. Also applies in the EU.

25

In Georgia, people still ferment and age wine in clay pots the same as they have for centuries, if not millennia. The 8,000 yo pots are somewhat different to what are used now, but IIRC modern-style pots have been found in Georgia dating back to the iron age. And a lot of this wine is not bottled BTW, but of course such wine is not delivered abroad.

I don’t really see why wine made like this should taste different from how it did millennia ago. But you are right that modern conventional wine would be very different, and a lot of modern natural wine would be too

26

Is it so? Because I remember having read from several sources that organic wines should have no added sulphites and the naturrally occurring ones should be within the 10 ppm range. This

I couldn’t find any official sources to say anything concrete on the matter, but the wording here seems to suggest so: eCFR :: 21 CFR 130.9 -- Sulfites in standardized food.

Furthermore, at least these sources seem to confirm what I wrote: “USDA Organic No Sulfites Added Wines may contain language on the label such as “Contains No Detectable Sulfites,” or “May Contain Naturally Occurring Sulfites” when the overall amount of naturally occurring sulfites is under 10ppm.” (No Sulfites Added Wine - Natural Merchants Organic Wine)

“In the United States, both “organic wine” and wine “made with organic grapes” are made from grapes only from certified organic vineyards and are produced in certified wineries. But the former have less than 10 parts per million of sulfites, accounting for those that may occur naturally during the fermentation process” (https://www.winespectator.com/articles/us-and-europe-have-different-definitions-of-organic-wine-46432)

27

Agree, wine of higher quality is not a “natural” but a “cultural” thing - if you let a vine grow as it likes there will be very long shoots, only few grapes and low quality, and if you let fermentation totally on its own it will be unclean and sour -
minimal intervention ok, but no intervention is impossible.

28

I always wonder what is “natural” about making wine. There are no wild vineyards. Most of the plant material is grafted onto swamp vines and the human decides every facet of the plant, fruit and wines evolution. When exactly does the “natural” part occur?

29

Yes, I think so

Sorry, but I don’t understand the relevance of this link. It is about labelling sulphite content; not about what is allowable as an “organic wine”. And it all applies to “standardised foods”, whatever they are.

Yes, that is correct, but it does not suggest that an organic wine MUST contain less than 10ppm. It just says that WHEN (if) it contains less than 10ppm it can have on the label “Contains No Detectable Sulfites”, or “May Contain Naturally Occurring Sulfites”.

Now this quote certainly supports what you say, but it is written by a journalist - not the body responsible for certifying organic wine. The author seems to think that without added sulphites wine must contain less than 10 ppm SO2, which is patently false, and based on that premise she says organic wine must contain less than 10 ppm.

Another quote supporting your point is more blunt (though again not from an official body): “In wines labeled as “Organic Wine” no added sulfites are allowed and naturally occurring sulfite levels must be under 10 parts per million (ppm).”

Maybe they have been reading the Wine Spectator article?

All I can do is refer to a USDA document that does not mention a 10 ppm limit for organic wines, but does mention a 100 ppm limit for “wines made with organic grapes”

OK, the 10 ppm limit may be buried somewhere in the regs. But if it does exist it is rather important, as it would rule out many wines. I will also add that if grapes happen to produce more than 10 ppm during fermentation, it seems to be rather ridiculous not to allow the wine to be called organic. What is a winemaker to do? Add chemicals to remove the SO2?

30

I am not sure why natural wines are singled out for semantic pedantry. What is so organic about organic wines? Why are red wines often purple, and white wines never white but usually a shade of yellow? And what does the word “biodynamic” usefully tell us?

Not a dig at you particularly, Todd - you just happened to be there :slight_smile:

31

It’s a shitty term.

32

I can answer the other questions though. :wink:

33

BTW we poured a 2008 Biggio Hamina Syrah the other night. Delicious stuff. Should be up on that list above. One of the best Syrahs from California. Except it’s not from California.

I don’t really see why wine made like this should taste different from how it did millennia ago.

Steve - I don’t know about the wine in those clay pots. I know they’re using them in Georgia and the pots have become kind of trendy now, as the Georgians try to reclaim some lost history. But as far as tasting different from the way it did millenia ago - that’s interesting.

The wines I’ve had from eastern Europe back in 1990 and 91, etc., right after the collapse of the Soviet empire, were not what we’d want to drink today. The wines were natural and beyond, as Greg P suggests above. Keep in mind that the entire point was alcohol, so the higher alcohol the better. The counter to that was the fact that they would worry about losing fruit to birds and animals and frost, so it was a balancing act. Picking was done as it would have been done ages ago. No chemical analysis whatsoever, just pick when Grampa said to.

There were absolutely no sorting tables. And you didn’t waste fruit. You got as much as you could and fermented it. There was a lot of green fruit and a lot of bad fruit and nobody was gentle with the grapes. They were stomped mercilessly. I saw people beating them with shovels. And then, after the grapes were pressed, they beat the hell out of the skins and seeds after adding a little sugar and they fermented that into a potent alcoholic brandy. No waste.

As for sulfur - forget it. Nobody could afford it. Most of the wines were oxidized. They kept the wine as cool as they could, either in the ground or in a cellar or best of all, in a cave carved into a hill. If they had the latter, that’s also where they liked to drink the wine. On winter evenings, the deeper caves were warmer than the outside and you didn’t need to throw coal into the stove to keep the house warm if you weren’t going to be in the house anyway. The guys would get together on winter evenings and smoke and drink and stumble home drunk.

Nobody had heard of temperature-controlled fermentation. Fertilizer wasn’t used, not because there were any moral or artistic objections, but because it was another expense. The farther east you went, outside of central Europe and into what we call eastern Europe, the more likely you were to see carts and horses outside of the major cities. The manure from the animals was the fertilizer. That may not be a bad thing, but it gave a certain pungent quality to the air.

But it was worse if you were actually a big operation. Those were usually owned and run by the state. And contrary to what some of our politicians believe, the government does not do a good job of running things. Those vineyards and wine making facilities were operated for maximum yield and were laid out to accommodate Soviet tractors. That kind of wine making is what the “natural” wine people object to, but they should have been protesting back in the days of the Soviet Union.

I don’t know much about the grapes they used in Georgia. It seems that Saperavi is indigenous to Georgia, but other grapes may not be. Rkatsiteli is popular and Konstantin Frank makes it in upstate NY, but there’s some thinking that it may have been introduced by the Romans. In Armenia they have found Areni growing wild all over the hills where they found the old pots and they have been able to match the DNA of that grape with the remnants and seeds of the grapes from the ancient site, so they’re fairly certain that the grape has been around for many thousands of years, particularly as it’s own-root and breeds true. In other countries we don’t know.

The Georgians today aren’t dumb and they have a lot of westerners helping them. Any wine that would be exported has at least some semblance of what we would drink today. But the wines made in the countryside are probably closest to what people were making centuries ago and those wines don’t travel well and they really don’t drink that well either. Nonetheless, they truly are worth studying before they all disappear because they give us some understanding of what wine was like before the 1900s.

34

Some people don’t like the ambiguity of the term.
Others just dislike the whole concept of natural wine.

For them (and others), it’s just easier to attack the term on a semantic level.
While I agree that people newly introduced to the idea of natural wine should be informed of the definitional… fuzziness… I’m not sure the same argument needs to be prosecuted over and over and over again on these boards where just about everyone inclined to join the conversation understands these problems.

The likely result is that the conversation will move elsewhere.
As it has.

Cheers,

35

Yes.

36

Thanks for the response, Greg.
So, if, as you say, “most wineries bottle in mid 30s free SO2” I’m guessing that the totals would be at least in the 80 - 100 ppm range.
Far better than it was a generation ago, to be sure. It’s still a bit higher than the amounts being discussed and employed by those trying to make wine often described as nur*l. For them, 40 ppm total seems to be the upper limit.
Interestingly, the Raw Wine Fair website says that their limit is 70 ppm total, as combined added and naturally occuring sulfites. Higher than I would have imagined, and certainly within a range accessible to those making modern, low intervention yet not quite nu*al wines.

37

Hi Greg(T)

Just a few comments, developing a bit on what you said…

Some Georgian winemakers are indeed “reclaiming a lost history”, but others never lost it - with families making qvevri wines for generations. I think it is largely the “amphora” winemakers of Italy and Slovenia that are doing the reclaiming.

My experience of drinking “homemade” wine in Georgia is very limited, but what I had was perfectly acceptable to drink, and a lot more interesting than the cheap commercial wines made there. I don’t doubt there is a lot of awful stuff too, but on the whole I think Georgians are discerning drinkers and know what is good and bad. That is not to say they are all connoisseurs in the sense we might use the term, but they know good and bad wine like we might know good and bad meat for example.

Winemaking as we know/knew it in the West was introduced to Georgia in the 19th century, and they are certainly still getting influences from the West, with the younger generation of winemakers travelling to learn, but I am not sure to what extent they are getting “a lot of help” from the West.

Protesting in the Soviet Union? Each person would only get to openly protest once, and quiet subversion was more the thing. Have you seen the Georgian film “Fallen Leaves” from 1966? It takes a bit of concentration to follow, but tells the story of an idealistic young man starting work in a Soviet “wine factory”. You can get it on youtube - YouTube where you probably want to turn on English subtitles by clicking on the video’s Setting icon.

I don’t know about the USA, but in the UK we get quite a broad range of Georgian wine. From stuff that is made pretty much the same as we are used to - though wines made in qvevri but on a large commercial scale - to natural qvevri wines that are made on a very small scale. The last type are basically like the better homemade wines, but bottled. In my experience some of those offer a very fine drinking experience, and some are frankly crap. But I don’t think ability to travel is the problem, as I have had good and poor wines in Georgia too.

38

A famous wine critic once said to me about natural wines… “why not just say you don’t know how to make wine”?

39

A couple of months ago, of wines in this “natural wine” database, around 20% of the total S02 levels were above 40ppm

40

From horse’s mouth: Organic 101: Organic Wine | USDA

RE: “… Finally, sulfites may be added to wines that carry the “made with organic grapes” label—up to 100 parts per million…”

Used to be 40ppm for organic, IIRC, but last I checked was 13-14 years ago? That came up in a similar thread, SO2 in organic wines, back in eBob days. Seems USDA has bumped it up to 100ppm since, not sure why they’d do that. That is a crazy high number and I have no idea who does that, that will surely suppress aromatics and color, big time.

Still want to know who does 400ppm SO2 adds. And just how one makes such a claim and assumes it will fly (with non-millennials).