I love the wines of Elisabetta Foradori. I had this regular Teroldego '21 about a week ago and it was classic Foradori… a beautiful expression of Teroldego… loads of fruit & very structured.
Elisabetta is a natural winemaker… and all that entails… including near zero, if not zero, SO2 additions. I never encounter natty or funky character in her wines.
I left this ‘21 Teroldego sitting out on my counter, unstoppered, for well over a week. Before I poured it down the drain, I poured a glass & tried it. Holy $hit… it had an incredible level of EA/VA/acetic acid. It burnt my nostrils and, when I slammed down a swallow, it burnt my throat and I had to spit it out.
I had never seen that before. I can leave a Ridge Zin out on my counter for over a week & only get a diminished fruit but no VA. And they use minimal SO2 additions.
So… maybe that Louis Pasteur guy knew what he was talking about in the use of SO2 in wine. Most wineries use minimal/low SO2 additions. But perhaps zero SO2 additions is not to be recommended. At least if you want it to survive out on the counter!!!
That’s my story & I’m stickin’ to it.
Tom
Ridge uses a pretty normal amount of SO2, compared to artisan producers. What they are careful about is not adding too much at one time. Paul experimented extensively on this, and found regular small adds yielded the most complex wine. A bigger add will kill off too many microbes. Too little invited problems. The happy medium allows the little buggers to play without getting our of control.
Indeed!!! And a lot of the cool zero zero newcomers don’t.
Gotta love the man who said: “le vin est le breuvage le plus sain et le plus hygiénique qui soit”. 
This. IIRC Ridge uses something like 45-80 mg/l, depending on the wine and the vintage. Pretty in line with most producers but way below the permitted amount, which is a few hundred mg/l.
Foradori is probably in the ballpark of 10-30 mg/l. While no-SO2, it’s still a completely different game.
“Minimal amount of effective SO2” can mean so different things to different producers.
Ok, but if the main difference is how the wine shows 9 days after opening, doesn’t seem to be all that important. (And I say that as someone who does not enjoy the fierce natty notes present on day 1, a time frame that is much more important to me!)
Not such an unexpected outcome 
Many not so great wines give up within 24h.
Most better wines (unless with a lot of age) keeps going and sometimes improve from +1-3 days, a few holds for a few days more. Thereafter a very low percentage shows any improvements or keeps going. Regardless of by which day the decline comes it can be very dramatic or gradual.
Applies to red wines left out on the counter following many trials and observations. Basically one of my standard assessment steps of wine quality
Did you just call Foradori’s Teroldego a “not so great wine”?
Quoting a friend of a friend: are you wanna die?
hehehe. Was not my point at all…
Tom:
"I had this regular Teroldego '21 about a week ago and it was classic Foradori… a beautiful expression of Teroldego… loads of fruit & very structured.
Elisabetta is a natural winemaker… and all that entails… including near zero, if not zero, SO2 additions. I never encounter natty or funky character in her wines.
I left this ‘21 Teroldego sitting out on my counter, unstoppered, for well over a week.”
The whole point was that after more than a week, hardly any (red) wine, regardless of greatness will be drinkable. That’s why I mentioned “not such an unexpected outcome”… And note, Tom loved the wine - just not after it’s been out in the open for more than a week.
Ps. Why no banana flies reported in the taste profile - that’s maybe the most surprising part.
You’re right, Rahsaan. It is not that important. Most people wouldn’t do that to their wine.
Tom
The whole point of this post: I often leave wine out on the counter, open/unprotected, for over a week. In almost all cases, it just simply loses fruit, becomes dumber, and becomes much more tannic on the palate.
This is the first wine that was sound/great when opened and then, left unprotected for over a week. The btl was half gone. I tried it several times within days of leaving it open & it was still sound.
But this was the first (that I can recall) that developed a raging volatility, VA/EA/Acetic, in over a week’s time.
Was it because of the zero or near-zero SO2 addition of a Natural wine?? How the heck would I know??
I plan to repeat this experiment w/ another Foradori (and maybe another Natural wine). I will, of course, report back here.
Tom
And even when first opened, before there’s any obvious VA, they often show a lot of mousiness. Bleccch!
BTW, I doubt any of my wines would survive a whole week opened on my or any counter…
This is the precise reason why I started to use bagnums for my entry level wines.
As a side note, a single acetobacter carrying fruit fly landing in a glass of wine can cause an acetic smell very quickly. Very sensitive people claim to smell it immediately. They can carry a big dose and it blooms on the surface. Anyway, something like a titty fly getting into any bottle and given a week is going to make it vinegary.
What a Bagnum?
This is true and I have experienced it firsthand several times. The first time was in a tasting where a person next to me said that a fly just landed in her glass and the wine is ruined, was there any wine left for a re-pour. I thought it sounded silly so I asked if I could smell her glass and truly, the nose was ruined! It isn’t really a vinegary smell, but an odd, slightly sweet, weirdly musky smell. I guess flies can release some distress chemicals when they land in alcohol, because that’s how it smells like. The acetic notes from acetobacter come later on when the bacteria convert alcohol into acetic acid.
Btw, that fly thingy happened again to me only a week or two ago! I was drinking a Cremant du Jura when a fruit fly zoomed right in front of my face into my wine glass and BAM. The wine smelled of a fly.
This. It sounds like acetobacter got in the wine. Pretty much any wine could have that reaction. The amount of free SO2 in a red wine left unstoppered on the counter after a week would be pretty ineffective at stopping an acetobacter bloom regardless of its starting point. And many very fine and not at all SO2-phobic red wine producers are going to bottle with 50 ppm total and 15 ppm free, which won’t get you very far in an aerobic environment anyway.
I know you’re talking about red wine, but this calls to mind my attempt back in the '80s to make vinegar from a batch of leftover California chardonnays and the wine simply wouldn’t turn, even after weeks, even with some live vinegar starter. I assumed this was because of the sulfur levels. I never had a problem making vinegar from any European wines.
A 1.5 Liter bag in box.
Wow! That’s not a pretty fly for a wine guy! 