Natural Wines with age - a tasting (Leroy, Anglore, Ganevat, Lapierre,...)

[Keith_Levenberg]

If you will take my magic carpet ride for just a moment, as a style, Lapierre is structured much like a conventional Morgon. If no one told you, you would not likely suddenly say, “ya know, I bet this is one of them done dair natural wines everyone in tarnation is jabbering on about”.

Yeah, but mostly because so much Morgon purposely reflects the influence of Lapierre. Don’t think you’d have much trouble pinning the tail on the natural wine as between Lapierre and, say, DuBoeuf.

[Thomas_De_Waen]

Pretty much all of them! It just wasn’t the thing people were fixated on. I think the main issue is that the people who first developed and championed these wines were trying to distinguish themselves from overly processed/treated wines - they weren’t trying to out-natural each other. So the focus was on eliminating things like pesticides from the vineyard and designer yeasts, enzymes, and (later) concentrating machines and other high-tech thingamajigs from the winery. Now that all of that stuff is taken as a given, it sort of prompted the question, “How much further can we go?”

The answer was, “Too far.”

Which ones are you thinking of? The ones I really like have been trying hard to eliminate sulfites for a very long period of time. Lapierre, Ganevat, l’anglore, Overnoy, Richard Leroy, Le Puy,… all following the same lineage to Jules Chauvet who started experimenting with sulfites-free wines in the 1970s and 1980s. If you read the foundational books on those growers (good one would be “Chez Marcel Lapierre”, published 2004 or “les ignorants”, published 2011,…) the issue of sulfites was already front and center of the conversation. Maybe it was more of a French thing than American thing at the time?

[Keith_Levenberg]

No doubt many unsulfured wines were sold mainly at home because importers were afraid of dealing with them, and yes Overnoy has been unsulfured forever. Lapierre of course made both the S and N cuvees - it’s only recently the latter goes into the supply chain here in any quantity; it used to be the only way to get it was to pick it up by hand at Kermit Lynch’s shop. But the Dressner portfolio was the gold standard for natural wine before other importers got in the game in a big way and most of the signature producers there (CRB, Rougeard, Baudry, Pepiere) were sulfured (Overnoy an exception, naturally, for which Joe D received some infamous grief). There are others I have no idea whether they were sulfured or not which is a good indication that even the ones playing around with going unsulfured weren’t wearing it on their sleeves the way so many are doing now.

[Thomas_De_Waen]

No doubt many unsulfured wines were sold mainly at home because importers were afraid of dealing with them, and yes Overnoy has been unsulfured forever. Lapierre of course made both the S and N cuvees - it’s only recently the latter goes into the supply chain here in any quantity; it used to be the only way to get it was to pick it up by hand at Kermit Lynch’s shop. But the Dressner portfolio was the gold standard for natural wine before other importers got in the game in a big way and most of the signature producers there (CRB, Rougeard, Baudry, Pepiere) were sulfured (Overnoy an exception, naturally, for which Joe D received some infamous grief). There are others I have no idea whether they were sulfured or not which is a good indication that even the ones playing around with going unsulfured weren’t wearing it on their sleeves the way so many are doing now.

Interesting. Shows how perspectives and definitions are country dependent. Don’t think anyone in France would view Rougeard, Baudry or Pepiere as part of the natural wine movement in any meaningful way. Also shows that winemaker intent and the reality of distribution are different things: Lapierre wanted to make sulfur free wines but was often pushed by distributors against it (UK importer refused to bring in the N version of the Morgon, for example).

To be clear, I am not saying you’re wrong: just that natural wine means different things to different people and that, ultimately, distributors tend to set the narrative (not the winemakers themselves).