This. Many times over. I see it from within and
In Oregon and Portland especially inexperienced and/or poor winemaking combined with oddball varieties/lower grade Pinot Noir fruit are oft times being celebrated as natural winemaking or out of the box winemaking. It’s missing the point of things but in the harder core circles the ability to sell one’s self as idiosyncratic is huge.
I would never include any of those producers as “Natural” because they predate this ambiguous term.
And +1 what Jim said, there’s a slew of swill in Oregon right know that is downright flawed. I’m embarrassed for them. They are the folks who sprint the first few miles of a marathon.
I’m racking wine for assemblage as I type this. Racking about 440 gallons of Balcombe Vineyard, Block 1B. We farm this vineyard. We have farmed it organically for about 10 years. When the fruit came in I added 50 grams/ton SO2. The wine was mostly whole cluster and fermented with indigenous yeast. It never had an SO2 addition during elevage and I just added 100 grams of SO2 to the tank (30 ppm free SO2 which may get adjusted after settling depending on how the wine holds on to the SO2 but any further addition would be around 10-15 grams). The wine will be bottled unfined and unfiltered. My point is not to read you my resume or tell you how virtuous the winemaking is. In fact, the opposite. It is to describe how, amongst the few folks i actually know and whom are discussed regularly here, utterly common this is in well made Oregon Pinot Noir production.
Drops the mic…
Good stuff Jim but as far as how many grams of SO2 is “enough”, do you think any wine writer actually has an idea, based on the specific fermentation in question?
in the harder core circles the ability to sell one’s self as idiosyncratic is huge.
Absolutely. I once was in Mendoza having lunch at a vineyard. We imported the wine. Off in the distance I saw a plume of what I thought was some crazy spray. I asked the winemaker and owner if that’s what it was. No, they replied, we don’t use any sprays for disease or pests. Those are dangerous and expensive and it’s so dry up here that we don’t have any real disease to worry about that spraying would cure.
"So your wine is “natural”? I asked. They looked at each other. “Probably,” they replied, “what does that mean?” So I talked a little about it and they nodded their heads. “I didn’t know that, why don’t we say that on the bottle?”
They looked at me like I was a little nutty. “Why?” they asked. “Who cares about the way the wine is made? Who buys wine that way?”
We didn’t get very far but months later I was at a wine store in NYC showing the wine. The owner is a friend so I won’t mention who, but they’re big on “natural” wine. He tasted the wine, wrinkled his nose, and announced that it was made with commercial yeast. He had no interest in industrial wine. Meantime, he had never been to the bodega, never talked to the winemaker, never seen the grapes or the facilities. We remain friends but I was quite disappointed.
Enough is in the eye of the beholder. There are charts that synch up pH levels with the “necessary” amount of SO2. I think they’re bunk and I don’t use them (although,certainly, lower pH wines can, in theory, be stable with very low SO2 additions). It’s experience with one fruit and resulting wines and the desire, in my case anyway, to have the wines as pure as is possible while still preserving them in a manner that allows them to express what they do over the course of time. So, good old fashioned learning I guess.
Off topic but since you brought it up, I’m curious - is this when you usually harvest or has the heat changed the harvest date? Also - isn’t it like 100 degrees up there? Assuming that’s not typical, how is that affecting harvest, etc? Those are Mendoza temps, but I guess I always assumed it was a little cooler up your way.
Well, I guess we do harvest about now these days. New normal. Hopefully we are still at least 3 weeks out as my last bottling day is September 21st! Probably no such luck. I am going to visit a couple of vineyards this afternoon but they are both just Pinot and I know I will pick Chardonnay in advance of them. Will look at that on Monday.
It will likely be highs around 100 for the next 5 days or so. That also seems to be the new normal. However, in Oregon 100 is not an all day event. When I got to the winery today at around 7:30 it was 58. At around noon it’s not yet 80. No, this is far from ideal but it is not unmanageable. The 15s out of Oregon from the better producers are terrific and that was a more torrid year than even this.
I would add Weygandt Metzler to that importer list as well.