I won’t get into the whole natural natural wine thing, but the Not Drinking Poison in Paris blog was quite useful to find interesting small neighborhood restaurants in Paris. At least it was a few years back.
Well, Eric… I must admit I didn’t look at it very closely because I was so turned off by its title.
Tom
Fair enough, i have actually never seen their Chingao bottles, which surprised me, so I stand corrected on those 
The Benje are almost always the most ‘volcanic’ to me, reductive, volcanic, same same maybe.
(I sell them)
I love the Palo Blanco from Envinate. Been going through my stash of 2016’s and 2019’s lately. It ages well, and the 2016’s reductive notes blows off after less than 30 mins now. Such a unique wine that is probably an either love or hate wine. But faulty or over ‘natty’, as you like to say, it is not.
I think it is amazing Tom keeps going through these wines as he dislikes them most of the time.
I am only sad to see that people mention “natural wines” (no sulfites added must be a requirement here), as one big faulty mess. There are so many good wines out there in this category (and a lot of crap!). Some of my favorite white wines have been in this category (Ganevat, Overnoy, Labet, some Marnes Blanches… jura stuff!).
It’s almost as if Tom is deliberately choosing wines to disappoint. I sell ‘natural’ wines and haven’t heard of a great many he picks. If one chooses badly one will be disappointed. Just as if I go and buy a random €20 Bordeaux in the supermarket.
These threads then often go on to remind me of fake news on social media.
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For those of us who are sensitive to microbial problems, the vast majority of natural wines are disgusting. That includes many of the producers who are championed by the natural wine crowd. But there’s probably a little-known Chateau Musar or Eric Texier out there (to name a couple of producers I really like), maybe quite a few. I get the sense that Tom enjoys trying lots of new wines and genuinely wants to like them, but also that he won’t mince words when he doesn’t. Maybe just a bit of ![[stirthepothal.gif]](/uploads/db3686/original/2X/f/f40faec63ca1018898a40805efbf9f0066a3d205.gif "[stirthepothal.gif]"){kind=small}
is warranted given what still passes for marketable wine in a lot of places. I don’t think there’s anything misleading at all about there being more misses than hits. That was very much my experience as a retail wine buyer, when I was subjected to many, many wines that literally left such a horrible taste in my mouth that I had to immediately reach for my water or taste a sound wine. Plus I get the sense that Tom is more forgiving of microbial faults than I am, based on some of his notes.
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That is a gross overgeneralization. And I say that as someone is seems to be extremely sensitive to mousiness. Yes, buying natural wines can be a crap shoot, but there are lots of perfectly clean ones.
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Majority seems overstated. I have tasted a LOT of no-sulfites-added wines. And i often pick up mousey issues before those next to me, so i am rather sensitive. I think my mouse hit rate is probably 1-in-3, which is a huge issue! But it also means that there is a lot of good bottles out there.
But expand that to ‘small amounts of sulphite added’ and what’s your hit rate?
We sell more wines with around 20-30mg/l added sulphur than zero added.
‘Natural’ doesn’t mean zero added sulphur in my book.
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Then my hit rate is very different. I actually search for wines with 20-40 mg/l added. That is why producers like Wasenhaus, and similar, are often my favorites.
But that is also the problem with the ‘natural wines’ term. In Copenhagen (where i live), the concensus is mostly that the term natural wines also means zero sulfites. Zero additives. Else it becomes too difficult to know what is what.
I’ve tasted a lot too. Hundreds easily, maybe close to a thousand over the past 12-15 years. I’ve been to more than a couple of trade tastings of importers and distributors who specialize in such wines. I do not think I exaggerated, at least not for people who are as sensitive as I am. I should have stated that part more clearly.
I’m not only talking about mousiness, although that is the worst offender to my taste, the one that literally triggers a mild gag reflex when it’s strong enough. There are also other bacterial problems, brettanomyces, and VA/ethyl acetate (also related to bacteria, but sort of their own things). I’m including all of that. These are problems that can be minimized or avoided when one is not dogmatic about winemaking.
Yes, there are lots of natural wines that I like, but not a whole lot of reds I would consider “perfectly clean”, especially when considering multiple vintages (Lapierre, for example, makes wines that often taste totally clean, but I’ve seen significant problems with certain vintages). Maybe we have different definitions of that, John. When tasting at the store, I would know over 90% of the time when a wine was unfiltered with very low or no SO2 addition, before I was told, with reds. That’s not true with whites, and it doesn’t mean I didn’t like any of those reds. Are you talking mainly about whites that are perfectly clean? I guess there are a lot of those, although lots of train wrecks as well.
I could name quite a few other producers who fit this mold whose wines I generally do like, some that I like a lot. So I agree that there are lots of good ones out there, and I also think, for me, those are a significant minority, at least in my experience. Hopefully I’ve qualified that better this time.
Okay then it makes more sense to me. If we involve brett and VA, then it is a different conversation. I don’t think of them as faults, it can actually be a positive for me as long as i find it balanced, and i have a rather high threshold for both.
FWIW, I don’t see much (if any) similarity between expression of volcanic terroir and reductive aromas. For example, there are many excellent wines from Etna (both red and white) that express volcanic terroir and aren’t mega reductive.
Aaron Ayscough aka Not Drinking Poison still around? Still writing about wine and food??? Jesus… I remember trying to read a couple of his posts when he first started blogging, what was it, ten years ago or more… Tough sledding.
This is what I thought for the longest time as well, but I’ve now had a handful of wines over the tears that have been so ridiculously mousy that they’ve actually had mousiness in the nose and the mousy taste has appeared the moment the wine hits your tongue. The aftertaste is, naturally, several magnitudes worse than what you’d have in a “normally mousy” wine, further increasing in intensity over time and remaining for several minutes on the palate. Horrid stuff.
However, I want to emphasize that these have been very rare instances, probably a total of 5 or so wines have been as described above - compared to probably hundreds of mousy wines I’ve tasted. And yes, the aroma and the flavor has most certainly been mousiness aka THP, not eg. bretty funk, volatile acidity, oxidation, TCA or any of those. I guess this might be because most mousy wines and beers develop “only” a few mg’s (or even less) of ATHP/ETHP and in these instances the mousiness appears “normally”, ie. only in the aftertaste when the pH rises due to saliva. However, in a some instances the amount of ATHP/ETHP can probably get 10 to 100 times the normal, and in these wines you can actually smell and taste mousiness right from the start - there’s enough of the stuff that some of it turns volatile when you simply pour the wine into your glass.
And of course in some wines there are some tell-tale signs from which you can deduce that in all likelihood the wine is going to be mousy (for example a certain combination of acetic VA + brett makes me immediately wary of mousiness) but this is different as well.
Seems like a very tricky balancing act to claim to be very sensitive to microbial problems while professing a love for Musar.
Though I do applaud the fact that you’ve avoided giving in to the hobgoblins that threaten us all.
Criticisms and comments are always welcome, even when they’re kinda not.
But providing to excess, either in quantity or tone, may make the comments/criticisms seem less well considered opinion and more proselytizing.
Me, I prefer reasoned commentary over fiery sermons from the pulpit.
Cheers,