A WineWork Orange Orange Wine ViBlanc (10%; Frmtn in Amphora for 40 days; www.Sicus.Cat; No chemical or thermal treatments; Cartoixà/Cartoixà Marino/Malvasia/Macabeo varieties; JosePastorSlctns; LlauradorWines/Fairfax/CA) Sicus Massis/Borastre/Tarragona NV (L-2019): Rather orange/near rose some cloudy color; rather earthy/dusty/OV rather herbal some phenolic/resiny/VM slight natty/funky slight orangey rather strange/interesting nose; quite soft bit tangy/metallic strong resiny/VM/phenolic fairly earthy/dusty/OV precious little fruit slight orangey fairly tannic slight funky/natty flavor w/ light tannic bite; long soft bit tangy/metallic strong phenolic/VM/resiny slight orangey very little fruit somewhat austere slight natty finish w/ some tannic bite; pretty strong VM/phenolic some tannic character w/ precious little fruit; may develop into something interesting but a bit of a gamble; not a lot of pleasure in this wine right now. $31.00 (KK)
Cochonnet Melon WW VinDeFrance (12%; Melon de Bourgogne grape; MFW Wine Slctns; T.Elenteny Imprts/NY) Earl Stephane Orieux/Vallet 2019: Deep gold/burnished bronze color; rather orangey/honeyed light VM/phenolic/resiny slight floral/carnations bit earthy pleasant nose; quite tart/tangy/bit metallic light phenolic/resiny/VM/skin-contact lightly floral/carnations/Melon slight spicy/cardamon/floral quite pleasant flavor; med. light phenolic/VM/resiny lightly floral/carnations slight earthy/stony finish; a rather pleasant skin-contact white w/ good balance of phenolic & low-key Melon fruit. $22.50 (KK)
UBE Bodegas Cota 45 Ube de Uberrima Miraflores/Andalucia Lentejuelas, Lustrilles y Tusc-Cerrabao (12%; Listan/Palomino grapes; Llaurador Wines/Fairfax/CA; Jose Pastor Slctns) Purtico de Bajo Guia/Espana 2020: Med.dark gold color; rather earthy slightly natty/funky slight phenolic/VM/skin-contact slight floral/fruit nose; bit soft light metallic/tangy light natty/funky light phenolic/VM/resiny very slight fruit fairly earthy flavor; soft slight metallic/tangy bit unclean/natty/funky light VM/phenolic/skin-contact bit oxidative finish w/ unpleasant wet dog fur aftertaste; a rather unclean/natty/low fruit bit phenolic/VM rather unattractive white; overnight develops a dreadful wet dog fur aftertaste that wells up in your mouth; 20 min later when I did a slight belch, the wet dog fur welled up in my mouth; pretty much undrinkable because of the wet dog fur aftertaste; way overpriced at $31.00 (KK)
A wee BloodyPulpit & Rant:
We I go down to SantaFe on Thurs or Fri afternoon, I usually stop into Kokomans to find out what’s new I might want to try. I always ask Mark what’s new from Paul & Martha that I should avoid, being as they specialize in natural wines. He is usually pretty good about steering me away from the super-natty wines and towards something that might be “interesting”. If I want something good to drink w/ Susan, I have plenty of my own that I can rely upon. But Koko probably has the largest selection of natural wines of any shop in NM & apparently there is a market for some of these wines that he caters to.
Not a good showing for the JosePastor natural wines. There have been more & more of these showing up here in NM. Most of them are not very good, to my taste. When I was up at the Taos Winter Wine Festival, I visited a bit with the JosePastor national marketing director & commented that I’m seeing more & more of the Jose Pastor natural wines here in NM. He then proceeded to enlighten me that Jose Pastor pioneered the natural wine movement in Spain, a claim of which I’m a bit skeptical. I related to Chris that I find a lot of the JosePastor natural wines not very good. The UBE above is a good example of such…undrinkable. He then proceeded to scold me for loving to “hate” on wines. I explained to him that I love to “hate” on bad wines…wines that I can’t choke down or are undrinkable. He then countered that wines are all a matter of taste & that I should be a bit more open-minded on wines. I asked Chris if he’s ever had a “bad” wine that he found undrinkable & he just kinda shrugged his shoulders. I guess I need to work on my taste for drinking bad wines.
As mentioned in a recent TomWark blog post, there’s a newsletter published out of Paris by a Aaron Asycough that focuses on natural wines. Its title?? “Not Drinking Poison”. This newsletter highlights to me one of the big problems of the natural wine movement…the arrogance & sanctimonious attitude that so many of its adherents display, starting way back with our own Sweet Alice Feiring, one of the early proponents. A wine that is not natural, but is industrial, given that natural wine is not a well defined concept, is bad for you?? That it’s “poison”? I don’t think so. I’ve had wines that have had mega-purple added to them for color & have lived to tell about. I’ve had wines that were made with non-natural/commercial yeasts and have not croaked from them. The same people who drink only natural wines because it gives them a superior attitude towards all the rest of us are the same people who make a diet of boiled kale and steamed tofu. To each his own I guess.
I find most of the bad/undrinkable/flawed wines that I encounter are often natural wines, usually imported. But they don’t have to be flawed. There are plenty of natural wines that are great drinking & without flaws. I would cite the Broc and MarthaStoumann and MontOlivia and Clarine wines as some, though I don’t know exactly how natural they really are. But something like the recent Radikon Rosso natural wine…blech…there’s no need for these kind of wines in my wine world.
End of rant.
Tom
I think you’ve done enough due diligence now for all of the berserkers out there. You are free to never choke down a natty wine again. Send me your address and I will send you a fresh 30-pack of the only Natty anyone should ever drink — Natural Ice. All the flavor of natty light with just a touch of malt liquor goodness. You deserve it!
Some of the Pastor wines are fantastic, and I also agree that the natural wines from his portfolio are disappointing. The Envinate wines are all over the place for me. The baseline Albahra is delicious but their ‘Benji’ series are crazy reductive (as in, reductive aromas that don’t blow off) due to the zero sulphur approach. I almost wish Pastor would have some sort of label designation for the natural wines so I know to avoid them. The rest of the portfolio is so damn good.
Yup… agree, Greg. In general, I like the JosePastor wines. But the natural part of their portfolio leaves me cold.
Fortunately, it’s easy for me… their natural wines come thru a different distributor.
The Llaurador Slctns may be the clue to their natural wines… don’t know.
Tom
In contradiciton to the Jose Pastor marketing guy, Tom has much greater tolerance for wines that others find unpleasant than anyone else I know. When he says a wine is bad . . . well, it’s really bad. The only exception to that observation that I would make is that he’s unusually sensitive to what he describes as mousiness and “hantavirus.” Others in our tasting group aren’t as picky about those two characteristics.
Well, Doug… I used to try the Broc wines more often because of the KenZinns connection.
But I’ve not tried any in the last yr or two. Will make a point to this weekend & report back.
Tom
I haven’t tried the Cota 45 Natural wines (I’m not a fan of the style) but while in Spain we had a bottle of Cota 45 Pandorga. It’s Pedro Ximenez dried on mats, basically an unfortified PX Sherry. It was absolutely delicious. I have not been able to find it in the US but I would love to find a few bottles.
I don’t remember the exact number. But a rather large amount of people cannot detect “mousiness”, I think it is around 10%. That explains why some people don’t find a lot of these wines faulty. I am rather sensitive too it, and like Tom, then i cannot get through a glass of wine if it starts appearing, even in small amounts.
I see Envinate is mentioned here, which i think is a bit off? Yes they can be very reductive, but they do actually use small amounts of sulfites to preserve the wines. I never had a faulty bottle of Envinate, and i have tasted atleast 10+, both red and white.
Well, John… I think both mousiness & wet dog fur are products of oxidation, though I find them distinctly different.
My benchmark for mousiness is from tearing down a stack of old firewood and coming across an old mouse nest filled w/ stale mouse pee & mouse $hit. It has a distinct smell to it.
That’s the condition where you can pick up hantavirus.
My benchmark for wet dog fur goes back to when I was backpacking up in the SanJuans NE of Durango. We were camping out at an altitude
of around 12,000 ft & it started to rain. We climbed into our tent to bed down for the night. My partner, Jay, brought his soaking wet cocker spaniel, Charlie, to bed down
snuggled up between us. That smell of wet cocker spaniel fur is ingrained into my memory. A most miserable night it was.
You have to have been there to relate to these experiences.
But I think they’re both the product of oxidation.
Tom
The distinctive thing about mousiness is that you can’t detect it sniffing a wine – you can only perceive it retronasally after the wine is in your mouth, as Jamie Goode explains:
"… [A]t wine pH (low: quite acidic), the compounds responsible aren’t aromatic, but once the wine is in the mouth, after a while they become aromatic and we can detect them. Another complicating factor is that people show a wide range of sensitivities to these compounds, so some people don’t seem to get mousiness at all, while others are very sensitive.
Moreover, there are wide variations in sensitivity, and he says in his “Flawless” book that something like 30% of the population can’t perceive it at all.
Oxygen may be a factor, he says in the article linked to above:
The compounds involved?
They are known as N-heterocycle bases, and there are three of them. The first is 2-acetyltetrahydropyridine (ATHP), the second is 2-ethyltetrahydropyridine (ETHP) and the third is 2-acetyl-1-pyrroline (APY). To get mousiness, you need two of them to co-occur, and it seems that the least important of these is ETHP. They are made by certain strains of lactic acid bacteria (the microbes that carry out malolactic fermentation), especially the subset of these bacteria known as heterofermentative strains. They are also made by Brettanomyces, the spoilage yeast that’s fairly common in red wines and which at high levels makes them smell of animal sheds. No one is completely sure of why, when brett and lactic acid bacteria are present in many wines, that it’s only some wines that develop mousiness. But > it’s thought that the presence of oxygen is important> , as well as the precursors L-lysine, L-orthinine, ethanol, acetaldehyde and metal ions. These are all usually present in wine.
Wet dog fur of Charlie was something I could definitely smell. But I usually get that character in a wine not so much from the smell as I do more
commonly in the aftertaste, and it has a definite sourness to it. So probably retro-nasally is correct I would guess.
Again, mousiness I don’t get so much in the nose of the wine as just a generally uncleaness to it, funky/natty. But I mostly get it in the flavor,
so probably retro-nasally is correct.
Tom
Some years ago, while in Barcelona, I tried the Bodegas Cota 45 ‘Agostado’, a non-fortified Palo Cortado. It was delicious and certainly not made in a “Natural” style.
The ‘Chingao’ bottlings from Envinate are zero sulfite. There’s a Chingao Albahra, for example. All I know is I had the 2020 Benji blanco and it was reductive to the point of being unpleasant. When those reductive aromas never blow off, even after 1-2 days of air, to me that’s a flaw. But I love their wines when they are on!
Never experience “mousiness” and I’ve tasted a fair share of those called “natural wines”, so I might be part of that 10%
I’ve tried the 2020 Benje Blanco back in September and I found it both, reductive and volcanic, but the reductive aspect (burnt rubber) blew off after 45 minutes, while the volcanic, which for me is something you should expect from a wine from Tenerife, persisted throughout the night.