I have a good friend who has adverse reactions from drinking regular wine, but can drink sulfite free wine without problems. Can anyone recommend some good sulfite free wines?
Mark - good luck. Almost 100% of wines have sulfites because winemakers add sulfur to help “preserve” the wine.
You would have look to something like THeirry Alemand’s sulfur free bottling of Cornas (I think sans soufre, or something like that on the label).
Thanks Tony. He brought a bottle of Frey Zinfandel to dinner last night and liked it. He’s not much of a wine geek, but enjoys wine enough to seek some out.
Don’t let non-wine geeks anywhere near a sans soufre
those are for us! 
Mark - sulfites don’t only come from the sulfur added to the wine. They occur naturally. If the wine is measured and it contains less than 10ppm, they don’t have to put “contains sulfites” on the label.
Ask your friend if he eats raisins. Or offer him some dried apricots, etc. They contain far more sulfites than wine. Sulfites are also found in just about everything at most salad bars. If he can eat those, then his problem may not be sulfites, at least in wine.
He may very well have reactions to wine - I’m not questioning that because I don’t know him. But there is no medical evidence that I know of that sulfites in wine cause headaches or any other reactions.
Greg, I hear what you’re saying. I’m no doctor and don’t even play one on TV so can’t offer any medical or scientific solutions, but he has always felt like shit after drinking (even small amounts) of regular wine (red & white) and was overjoyed this a.m. after polishing off the bottle of Frey by himself last night and waking up feeling great. So, I’m just trying to get an idea of what’s out there, what’s palatable, etc.
Frey is probably the most readily available producer in America. The European ones are usually from niche producers that will be harder to find in most places and, at least from my experience, can be more variable than most novices would want. The Frey Zin has generally been the most consistent from vintage to vintage, though the CAb SAuv can do well some years; I would expect their 07 Cab Sauv to be fairly strong considering the quality of the overall vintage.
It can also help to have your friend do full decants on all his wines, even the cheap ones (actually, especially the cheap ones)as air time seems to help aleviate the impact of the sulphur used at bottling, which usually seems to aggravate those with sulphur sensitivity the most. Older wines can be used as well, especially if they have a tannin sensitivity. We have a customer that swears she can’t drink a wine unless it’s at least 4 years past vintage, otherwise she gets headaches. I’m sure there is some sort of placebo effect happening here, but she’s plowing through lots of 04 Spanish and BDX wines, so who am I to complain?
Matthew, thanks. I didn’t even think of the decanting solution, as I find a lot of the matchstick notes blow off with a good amount of time in a decanter.
I wouldn’t say it ‘cures’ it, but it definitely seems to help lower the impact.
I would also say that, in the realms of good value wines, sulphur problems seem to exist more with high volume grocery store wines than smaller producers. They seem to do a lot more filtration and clarifying, and sulphur stabilization seems to become a greater necessity to keep the wines clear and uniform. Smaller producers, especially European ones, seem to do less manipulation at all levels of the process and end up having less of a need to add sulphur at the end. If your friend is becomming more than just a casual drinker, a trip to a good local merchant would be very worthwhile.
You could also bring up the whole organic/biodynamic thing here as well, though I am not terribly versed in where sulphur does/does not fit with those practices, so input from a winemaker would be helpful.
I concur with Tony, Greg and Matthew. No wine is 100% sulfite-free. I had to do a bunch of research on the subject for a client last year.
A couple of generalizations:
- White wines are naturally higher in sulfites than reds.
- Younger wines are higher in sulfites than older ones. In other words, the sulfites dissipate over time.
Decanting might reduce the level of sulfites. It makes sense.
Hydrogen peroxide can be used to remove sulfites from wine.
I’m not a doctor, either, so I can’t really comment as to risks associated with this. Andy Waterhouse has suggested that an 80 ppm total SO2 wine would need 1 ml of 3% peroxide to remove the sulfites from one 750 ml bottle…of course, unless you can measure sulfites at home, it is difficult to say what the total SO2 is. 80 is a pretty good number for longer-barreled reds (Cab), maybe 60 for shorter-aged reds (Pinot, Zin). 100 would be a pretty good place to start for whites.
Peroxide also does not do great things to wine itself, being the oxidizer it is.
Might be worth experimenting, though, if he really believes sulfites are his problem…in fact, this would be a great way to tell for certain.
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Badger Mountain in Washington makes NSA wines.
I have a list of Certified Biodynamic wineries, at another computer. Will post that soon!
Coturri Winery, in Glen Ellen (Sonoma), makes what are probably the best no-sulfites-added wines I’ve ever tasted. They don’t make a big deal out of it but their labels do not say “contains sulfites” as they add none and the residuals are below the required levels. They just say they make their wine the old-fashioned way. Except for their Albarello red blend, the wines tend to be really big, fruity, and full bodied (probably to help stabilize them without the sulfites) but I’ve enjoyed them many times. Tony Coturri says he has cellared them for 10+ years and finds them still OK.
Most of what I’ve tasted in this category has not been very good to my palate.
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The only wine that I have had to which the winemaker added no sulphur at any point [to the grapes in the vineyard, at the crush, at any point in the fermentation and elevage or at bottling] is part of a special part [one third] of Marcel Lapierre’s Morgon, Cru Beaujolais production. This wine is also unfiltered and I believe it is or has been exported to the US. There are other top Beaujolais producers who produce unsulphured wines but Lapierre’s wine is the only one I have personally experienced. Currently still drinking the 2005 - simply great tasting stuff of real clarity.
However that needs to kept below 14oC at all times to avoid deterioration. The UK importer only brought it in and sold it from November onwards so my more usual buy is the same wine but another third of the production of the Morgon that the Lapierres finish with a little SO2 at bottling. The final third of the production was filtered and sulphured at bottling for those that required an even lower vulnerability to handling and storage conditions.
Cotturi wines CAN be good, but they have a reputation of being very inconsistent, especially when made available outside of California. Won’t say they’re as bad as Sierra Carche…
Oh, only worth 94 BigAssJay points?
Somewhere in that 49-94 range of acceptable error…
I read something, a while back, to the effect that Parker gets a relatively high level of argument when he rates Coturri wines for the exact reason you bring up. I guess it all points toward the reason that almost all winemakers add sulfites to their wine. When I was looking for no-sulfite-added wine for a few customers with asthma-related allergic reaction to sulfites, I spoke with winemaker after winemaker who said they just wouldn’t seriously consider not using sulfites at some level. From what little technical knowledge I have of winemaking it seems logical that wine requires something to stabilize it during transportation at the very least.
I CAN say, however, that Cotrurri makes a zin that tastes more like a late harvest zin than any other zin I’ve tasted. It’s wonderful… if you want a huge fruit bomb zin. I always sold his wines with my own tasting notes and with caveats… never by labeled varietal. Except for the Albarello, they were ‘love-em or -hate-em’ wines.
For me, as I said, they were the only no-sulfite-added wines I would sell or recommend.
I did a search here for Sierra Carche and choose not to comment as it’s obvious which side of the ‘love-em or hate-em’ scale you’re on.
