Preach! Though Eric has answered the question. There are some very famous wine regions that are essentially not viable viticultural areas without the use of some fungicides. Elemental sulfur, which is a product of oil and gas refining, is seen as the most acceptable one. I have no moral qualms with this, but elemental sulfur residues can have huge impacts on the sensory character of a wine. For that reason, I do not understand why terroir purists are cool with it.
There are grape varieties and areas that are less prone to fungal issues. Some people make the argument that all vines should be dry farmed if one is to truly express terroir. I think it is possible to make a similarly coherent argument against the use of fungicides
The industry can get their heads out of their asses and promote exciting, ready to drink non-flawed low-intervention wines at reasonable prices. Basically, what some of the natural wine proponents claim will save the wine industry, but without the high flaw rate that will always keep natural wines as a niche. Pour what I describe for a wine novice and it excites them. Restaurants that carry such wines at reasonable prices end up with a much higher percentage of customers drinking wine - from their list. It works, but it’s so far from the norm. There are just so many roadblocks to normal people being able to taste such wines then follow up and easily buy them regularly and easily, unless they are very very lucky.
In the Santa Cruz Mountains, where the main issues is powdery mildew, sulfur was the traditional treatment. That’s really transformed, with many growers using no sulfur. Or, at least, none most years. They use a variety of organic products, with timing of which product for what purpose being key. That includes horticultural oils, and I’m not sure all what. So, it’s an art progressively through the season for what to use when. The downside is applications need to be done more often and cost more. But, if the wines are better for it…
That was a key point of debate in the old natural wine discussions a decade + ago. When we’d delve into specifics, the lauded wines tended to have allowances by necessity. (And the winemakers knew their craft in respect to their individual circumstances.) The logical conclusion was that by any fair equivalency, most minimal intervention wines could be considered natural wines, if they don’t use new oak, making the category maybe 20 times or more the size. We’ve since seen moves within the natural wine movement to create more exclusive categories like zero-zero wines, as different groups, shops and events have their standards of what they’ll call natural wines.
Stylett oil for the first two sprays is common, and we switch to an extract of Japanese knotweed called Regalia (organic) after bloom, with Cinnerate (cinnamon oil and also organic) if mildew pressure rises. It limits us to only a few sulfur sprays at most.
Both elemental Sulfur and the knotweed extract are irritants that the plant reacts to by thickening the skin of the fruit, which in turn keeps the mildew at bay…and 100% changes the aspect of the wines made from that fruit. But with sulfur being a part of nearly every organically grown wine grape, it’s a nearly universal alteration.
It’s extremely important to recognize that we in the Willamette Valley currently only deal with powdery mildew and botrytis. I absolutely side with Eric that the situation has to dictate your choices. And when conditions are extreme, you do what you have to (as we treated our 2020s with a whole slew of remediation choices I would never consider in a normal year).
While I definitely have come to believe that “natural wines” and the questions they raise in both directions are a good thing for wine growing and producing, there are still shortcomings to every conversation and dogma in wine. None of them, not organic or biodynamic or natural or conventional factor in experience, talent, skill, or simply working harder than other people. They’re check lists, and I do check some of the boxes, but they’ll never be what makes our wines unique.
Clos Rougeard is probably natural wine now too, but Clos Rougeard became great because of the talent and experience of the Foucault brothers.
The photos above are my nights and mornings for the next month, we’ll switch to punchdowns in a few days but there will be new ferments to tread and punchdowns are their own particular art and one of the few truly interactive times a winemaker has with the fermentations.
Anyone can make wine, and there is no dogma on the path to great wine and no reward for storyin the cellar. Natural/low intervention/conventional whatever. I’m perfectly happy saying that natural wine practices don’t impede that, as well as saying that a good percentage of natural winemakers are only what Otto would call natty winemakers.
Fun thread, and hopefully everyone drinks what they enjoy most tonight. Though I probably wish I was drinking what @Greg_K is drinking
Both of these bio-fongicides are NOT allowed for certified organic growing in Europe.
Many plant extracts or essential oils show very high antiseptic action, and we noticed a weakening action of sweet orange essential oil on yeasts in the mid 2010s that lead us to lower its use against powdery mildiou. Maybe our native yeasts are used to sulfur and not to this essential oil.
I din’t have to use sulfur in the wineyard in 2019, 2022 or 2023, and no one noticed a drastic change in the aromatic or structure profile of the resulting wines so far.
Using sulfur as a substantive designator of both elemental sulfur and sulfur dioxyde is extremely misleading : one is very common in nature (sulfur has been around and used in agriculture way before the oil industry…), the other one a highly toxic and dangerous product available mostly from the chemical industry, unless produce by sulfur combustion which makes it very difficult to integrate in any food or beverage.
Was in Boston last night and had some time to kill before a client dinner. Hit up natural wine bar Rebel Rebel and thoroughly enjoyed a Martinshof Grüner from liter that was crisp, refreshing and enjoyable, if I had to quibble it was lacking a little Grüner like pepper. I also loved a Baden Pinot from Shelter that was super juicy and light but absolutely screamed Pinot. The bill was $24 for two glasses. Both were absolutely 100% clean with zero flaws! AND the place was packed inside and out with mostly patrons in their 20s.
Went to dinner at a highend place almost no one was drinking wine…
I agree with you that the use of the word “sulfur” is misleading because it can mean many things. However, you are mischaracterizing the differences between them in terms of how “natural” they are and how they are sourced.
Both elemental sulfur and sulfur dioxide are common, naturally occurring compounds that are produced at volcanoes. But close to 100% of current global supplies of both elemental sulfur and sulfur dioxide come from oil and gas refining. This is simply a matter of logistics: sulfur is common in oil and gas and must be removed, so there is a natural outlet for it in various forms, including elemental sulfur and sulfur dioxide. Characterizing elemental sulfur as a natural product but sulfur dioxide as a product of the chemical industry is just incorrect.
I will agree with you on the materials handling side of things - concentrated sulfur dioxide is more dangerous than elemental sulfur, but there are ways of getting around this too. I am extremely respiratorily sensitive to sulfur dioxide (I can’t be in a barrel room while barrels are being sulfured with 6% SO2), but I can work with potassium metabisulfite without any problems.
Sulfur dioxide is an irritant. Breathing it in will cause severe problems if the concentration is high enough, but even at low levels it’s no fun.
Additions to wine are both low level, and not inhaled. At which point your use of the word toxic without designating the difference is misleading.
And one would certainly expect your vineyard yeasts to be organisms tolerant of the use of both sulfur and copper (heavy metal) in the vineyard. The use of copper and sulfur for decades if not centuries would clear out the micro-organisms intolerant of sulfur and leave the field open for those that are tolerant, specifically saccharomyces.
Most producers I know who add sulfur at processing do so because saccharomyces is more tolerant of both elemental and sulfur dioxide.
Why is cinnamon oil not usable in Europe but elemental sulfur is?
Last, I’d also like to know if you wear a respirator or mask while you are spraying elemental sulfur in the vineyard?
The characterization of elemental sulfur as different from KMBS doesn’t wash with me. When you mix sulfur into the spray tank and vaporize it, it’s a heck of an irritant as well and not something anyone should be breathing in. The vineyard application is far more scattershot than in the cellar, kilos rather than grams and used in its vapor form to be an irritant. In the cellar it’s added in ppm as a liquid.
Every time I get to being ok with natural wines, I run into the blatant reality that this is no different than low intervention marketing was, where interventions are what other people do, and the speaker doesn’t…unless they have to.
As a coda to this discussion, I once asked a natural wine drinker why Clos du Chateau de Ducs couldn’t be natural if Lafarge used eggs from the chickens in the clos for fining. The answer wasn’t entirely satisfactory (I got yelled at for not knowing that eggs obviously couldn’t be used in natural wine). But, as the joke at Chez Lafarge goes, they are the only Domaine that can make a 1er cru omelette, so who cares.
Maybe because natural wines are usually bottled unfined and unfiltered. If you want to make wine with minimal or no inputs, why would you put eggs into your wine?
To knock back microbial populations that make your wines taste off or poorly in the most natural way…egg white contain lysozyme which is effective against a range of bacterial issues.
So do tears, by the way, which is how I have fined a number of natural wines I’ve drunk…
(though there are now a reasonable list of natural producers I enjoy)
Also, again. Inputs start in the vineyard. Almost every really good winemaker I met years ago would say that great wine is made in the vineyard. It’s difficult for me to buy that a cultivated vineyard is not an input and egg white fining is. Hedging is not an input but filtration is. (I generally don’t like fining at all, and we have done it once in the last 15-20 years) I also don’t see how a neutral barrel or amphora isn’t an input but egg white fining is? (Oh wait…if they don’t have a fermentation vessel they don’t have a wine…so we can’t pay attention to that.)
Too much of this is about a created dogma that sounds good but just doesn’t really hold up to close examination. Which isn’t to say that people shouldn’t make or choose to drink natural wines, but just that we should also own the realities that there are no truly “no input wines”. Anselme Selosse has the right of it, in my opinion.
But again, aspiring to less is a good thing, it’s just the self-righteous and often wrong logic that now accompanies the category that bugs me.
Why would you age wine in oak, which is a (non-neutral) input? Why are eggs from chickens which are literally raised in the same vineyard as the grapes (in the same biome) less natural than oak barrels from a different part of the world?
It’s just about aesthetics.
It’s starting to sound like you’ve confused several things quite badly.
First of all, natural wine hasn’t really anything to do with something being “natural”. The term is a rather poor translation of the French word vin naturel which translates to something like “plain wine” or “naked wine”. As in somebody who wears a lot of makeup might have their “natural look” when they have no makeup. The whole thing begin as a counter-movement when winemakers thought all the producers were making wines with all kinds of chemical inputs and whatnot, resulting in industrially made fermented grape juice - something that was far removed from the traditional wine. They took that approach to the other extreme, so there would be no inputs at all - the wine would be just grape juice, nothing else, fermented into wine the way a winemaker would see best.
So according to this logic, egg whites are both an input (you add something to the wine) and something taken away (they remove something from the wine). This is why natural wine producers normally don’t fine or filter wines. It has nothing to do with eggs being natural or from the same estate or anything like that.
Secondly, natural wine producers shun away from new oak! They see it as a non-neutral input, which is why I can’t think of any natural wine producer that would use new oak for the most part.
However, as oak barrels are very widespread all over the world and easy to use in small, cramped wine cellars, they are very handy when making wine. That’s why so many natural wine producers employ old, neutral oak barrels that don’t impart any overt oak influence into the wine.
However, for a long time many natural wine producers have moved away from oak usage. Many producers use large concrete tanks, Clayver eggs, earthenware kvevri etc. I know even one producer who vinifies his wines in pits that are dug into granite!
Met Lauren Friel years ago and have stopped by Rebel Rebel when in town. She’s such a hard worker and down to earth human. Has done a great job making wine accessible.
This is where I think the movement have done a lot of good things for the direction a lot of winemakers are taking these days. I also think it inspires a lot of young winemakers. There are probably some of them that wouldn’t have taken the path of winemaking without it.
Through its popularity it has also helped push an awareness and popularity of less chemicals and less additives in wine.
It is by no means perfect, and there are a lot of things that will make you lift an eyebrow and shake your head, but overall it has created an important difference (from my perspective) which wouldn’t have happened as fast without the category. That is also why I don’t like the notion of “natural wine” just being an aesthetic. For me it is so much more.
Hopefully we can move away from the term at some point and talk about the wines in the category on their own merit.
Agree with that. I have heard friends who, before, would barely read a label, discuss the farming choices of a winer maker (viticulture). Strictly bc they somehow got interested in a natural wine. That is awesome to me.
No, Otto, I’m not confused by anything, you just missed the point (again). Oak is as much of an extraneous input as eggs. Your definition of natural wine has absolutely no issue with oak despite it being an obvious extraneous input. At some point, different people in natural wine made aesthetic decisions about some inputs being acceptable and some not and continue to do so. I’ve had this same discussion for a decade now, and it’s mostly due to a number of people in the natural movement being rather confused about the difference between the internal logic of a movement and external persectives. You’re in common company.
