There is an interesting excerpt from Arianna Occhipinti and Wine Spectator’s Sicily feature “but in recent vintages, she has started to use more sulfites to inhibit the vinegary, volatile acidity and off flavors that plagued some of her earlier efforts.”
Will this infuriate the “natural” winers (as one of their credo is little or no added sulfites) or will they simply turn the cheek… ![[swearing.gif]](/uploads/db3686/original/2X/8/8a0d3f3461d40641d294442fc2be78039bf94d19.gif "[swearing.gif]"){kind=small}
She needed to do this. My last btl a couple years ago was VA.
I don’t expect anyone will be infuriated. Some may be disappointed, others won’t care, and still others will commend it. I fall into the third group. Many fans of natural wine find the shrill protestations of some of the anti-sulfur camp irritating and foolish, and reject any implication that categorical opposition to sulfur is some sort of shibboleth of the natural wine movement.
Ideally, I’d prefer wine without added sulfur, but I can’t control the wines from the producer’s cellar to my own, and would rather have sound wine with sulfur than damaged wine without. I expect that Occhipinti will be judicious, and commend her for acknowledging a problem and addressing it.
I have no issues with it.
I found this an interesting development. I don’t claim to make “natural” wine but I do use very simple methods, but I use sulfur and sometimes it’s funny how people respond. For me, sulfur is like wiping the lens of your camera, so you can capture what’s there more accurately, in detail and with some longevity. No SO2 wines can be great, but they don’t necessarily travel well for my tastes and I often find that I’ll like a wine but think if like it more of a bit of sulfur had been used. I’m curious to see how things go for Occhipinti. Love her wines. Have sometimes wished she used (more) sulfur. So it’s an interesting development.
good. I have found too much evidence of spoilage microbes in her wines in the past. Hopefully that will change. Those who will inevitably complain can have fun drinking wines where brett and VA obscure true terroir.
if Arianna thinks this will improve her wine, who am i to argue? i’ll absolutely still buy them.
For me it’s good. I thought her wines sucked in the past. Now I’ll give them a try again.
As far as being out of the club, I don’t think so. The idea is to use “minimal” sulfites, which is so meaningless it can allow whatever she wants. So all she has to do is say that she’s using the minimum necessary. As others have pointed out, I’m drinking them in the US - they’ve been on a truck, on a dock, in a container, on a ship, on another dock, in more trucks, and in various temperature swings before they make it to a store. So doing something to help the wine survive is the only compassionate thing to do.
Can someone give me a quick primer on why sulfur is frowned upon?
It’s not. A couple years ago there was a group of bloggers, writers, and critics who started carrying on about “natural” wine. Of course, nobody knew what that was, so they came up with a definition of sorts. Joe Dressner had it on his website and several wine writers started to champion those principles, which among other things included using “natural” yeast, “minimal” or no sulfur, neutral oak, and non-interventionist techniques.
Putting aside the obvious point that all wine making is interventionist, from cloning, grafting, planting, trellising, green harvesting, leaf plucking, picking, sorting, crushing, fermenting, etc., it always seemed a bit weird to pick on sulfur and yeast as the big factors.
It is a rather unfair argument as well, because it’s not like there are two camps or anything - there is no camp that I know of that advocates adding truckloads of sulfur. It’s a very ill-defined line. The idea is that adding too much sulfur is artificial, adding just enough is natural, and adding none is also natural.
The amounts added tend to be very small and you can ruin a wine by adding just a small amount too much, so how can anyone decide what “minimal” is? Nobody deliberately wants to ruin their wine with too much.
In addition, not adding any at all, which in principle is perfectly OK with me and I suppose everyone, means you run the risk of your wine crapping out when you ship. So there are winemakers in say France, who may not add for the domestic market but who will add if they’re shipping. And again, it’s not like they’re adding it by the ton.
Since Roman times people burned sulfur to clean barrels because it destroys microbes. When wine was stored in those barrels and shipped, it ended up lasting better than wine sent in new barrels. Finally in something like the 1490s the Germans ruled that sulfur could be added to wine.
If you ever go to a health food store and see dried apricots that are unsulfured, they tend to be brown. The ones you buy in a supermarket tend to be nice and orange. Why? (BTW - the apricots also contain a lot more sulfur than most wine.)
The reason is that oxygen serves two functions - it is an anti-microbe, destroying stray yeast cells and bacteria, which people had figured out in ancient times even though they didn’t know about microbes, but it is also an anti-oxidant, mopping up excess oxygen in the wine and preserving it. That’s why your apricots don’t turn brown.
Occhipinti had the first problem - she had bacteria and other things that created volatile acidity in her wine. I never had any aged, but I would assume it would be oxidized.
Now pick a wine like SQN. I don’t know a damned thing about the wine making for that wine but the wine is big, ripe, sweet, high-alcohol. In fact, the low pH and ripeness are great breeding grounds for some bacteria and yeasts. With no sulfur, that wine might have problems. If you’re a wine writer who champions “natural” and you hate that SQN wine, you demonize it. You accuse the winemaker of using spinning cones, micro-oxygenation, lots of sulfur, and other “interventionist” things. Basically you dump SQN, Two Buck Chuck, Apothic, Yellow Tail, Mondavi Reserve, Chateau Lafite, and pretty much any other wine into the same bucket - “industrial”, “interventionist” or whatever. Doesn’t matter whether it’s a peasant producing a few barrels or a large corporation - if they use sulfur or “commercial” yeast, they’re not natural.
IMHO, “natural” is great but it also is an excuse for a lot of flaws. Every once in a while Bob Parker will tie one on and tweet out a rampage about such wines. Frankly that’s just as bad as demonizing anyone who dares to add some sulfur, because surely there’s an entire universe of wine between “no sulfur added” and “overwrought crap”.
So it’s not like sulfur is necessarily frowned upon by most people. My hunch is that most people would really prefer not to use it. But even more, they would prefer not to have their wines spoiled or oxidized and it turns out that a little sulfur is one of the least objectionable ways of ensuring that.
If you ever get to taste freshly-bottled wine, you’ll likely pick up some raw sulfur. It’s one of several reasons you want to let the wine sit for a bit.
I’ve had very recent vintages, and have liked them - nothing to jump up and down about (not that I do that anyway), but pleasant with some cold cuts, and very reasonably priced (nb., a friend is the official importer here).
I don’t really bother finding out how a wine is made. I just drink the stuff.
Best,
N
Thanks for the thoughtful response, Greg. If I were to ask a “natural wine” advocate, what would s/he say about why sulfur is bad? Do they believe it alters taste? Or is this just an ideological stand?
Not Greg (great response), but what I have seen argued is that unsulfured wines show more vibrant fruit flavors and aromatics. Of course, those wines are often fragile, and very subject to the vagaries of shipping, and so many people who passionately jumped into the business of that kind of wine soon realized that many people would return the less successful versions, so ideology sometimes went by the wayside a little for practical purposes.
This is not to say that winemakers and importers who eschewed sulfur suddenly began gassing their wines to death, but a little sulfur helps a lot.
I like recent Occhipinti wines a lot (I sell a few - ITB disclaimer), and I am toying with a few of Frank Cornelissen’s wines. So far, so good with the latter.
Thanks for your helpful reply, J. Why the issues with shipping? Increased unwanted microbe exposure?
Vagaries of heat, more fragile wines, potential for oxidation, and yes, happier environments for microbes.
The discovery of SO2’s preservative effects on wine were, On the whole, a good thing for wine as a business and for people who wanted to cellar wines and let them improve.
Don’t know if the person would say it’s necessarily 100 percent bad, which is why they often say “minimal”, which is meaningless. Near as I can tell, there are several reasons for thinking it’s “bad”:
As far as diminishing the flavors - that’s not really clear and some suggest that if you let the wine sit for a few minutes, it will be just fine - the wine is “closed” straight from the bottle but will wake up with some oxygen. When you ship the wine, you shake the hell out of it. I’ve had young wine that was full of sulfur and one way to help dissipate that is to shake the bottle vigorously to incorporate as much air as possible. instead of the wine resting quietly, you’re incorporating as much air as possible by that shaking, and that’s one reason people sulfur wines for shipping.
Jcoley has the crux of the matter nailed - if you’re a wine maker, and your wine is crapping out, do you want the customer to think that’s what you actually wanted him to get and to write you off forever? So you add a bit of sulfur, which people were doing over a thousand years ago.
On a personal note, I believe in a lot of the “natural” things - I compost all my table scraps, don’t use spray aerosols, etc. And I put down some horrifically toxic poison for termites.
Honestly I think most of it comes down to ideology. When people talk about being anti-sulfur, they often throw in MegaPurple, spinning cones, powdered tannins, etc., attempting to create an equivalence by association. There’s an importer I like a lot - Jenny and Francois, but take a look at their Web site. It’s a perfect example. And they even put a disclaimer at the end for the “pedants”. Much as I like them, I dislike that kind of argument - it’s like our political world these days where everything is binary. If you ever talk to a partisan, ask them about sulfur, and pay attention to whether they bring up everything else and kind of hedge about sulfur.
Out of curiosity, what would the ‘happier environment for microbes’ be?
I’m a big fan of moderate use of SO2, I have had numerous problems with very low levels of SO2. We test wines fairly frequently to check, too.
Kyle, if you want to find out for yourself, you can choose a producer who makes the same wine with and without sulfur and compare. Marcel Lapierre’s Morgon comes in a standard and an “N” designation, which I believe to be the non-sulfured version.
I don’t see that wine in my market, but I’d like to compare.
Greg,
I understand your beef with people picking on sulfur - you state it very articulately.
But I don’t understand why you think it is weird to pick on yeast. It has always been my understanding that “natural” winemakers and plenty of others believe that wines made with natural yeasts are truer to their terroirs and are “better” than are wines made with commercial yeasts. Whether this is correct or not I am sure a lot of people could debate from here to eternity. But I would expect this to be something important to “natural” winemakers. Why do find this one weird?