So here’s a question for you, Larry. I’ve heard some people say that brett is more prevalent in some grape varieties, Mourvèdre being one of those. What’s your feeling on that?
Well there’s the above common-sensical response, then we have the UC Davis team quoted by Wine Spectator:
’ “I think that ultimately we will understand enough about this yeast to be able to use it with confidence and control its activity in the winery," said Bisson… "I liken it to the malolactic fermentation, which was considered a spoilage fermentation 60 years ago.”’
Zelma Long 25 years ago was fairly forward-looking… ![[swoon.gif]](/uploads/db3686/original/2X/f/f425e8dac3e7344bee264da02e55428971be23a9.gif "swoon"){kind=small}
Can I get my brett on the side? I would add it to all my wine.
Speaking of which - I had a 2004 Tablas Creek Mourvedre that was incredible. It was served blind and it was a dead ringer for old-world Rhone. Yes, there was a good deal of Brett but it was only on the nose and didn’t invade the palate at all. (and even blew off after 30-45 minutes). Raspberry coulis, game meat, indian spices, earth, cinnamon. Lovely weight on the palate with great acidity and texture. Lots of funk but a total steal for the $30-40 it cost if you’re tolerant of Brett.
Others may disagree, but I believe that the UCDavis POV has been that ANYTHING can be considered an attribute as long as it is balance with the other components to be found in the wine. This would include VA, Brett character, wood influences, etc.
The issue with Brett, as others point out, is control… its metabolism is not yet well understood, and so controlling its growth in wine (and as importantly, the consequences of its presence) is not yet possible. In time, perhaps…
What is undeniable, though, is that Brett character has been integral to some very great wines.
Would '55 La Mission Haut Brion have been a better wine without Brettanomyces?.. the question kinda misses the point, doesn’t it?
I believe the mid 80’s BR Cohn cabs were inoculated with brett by Helen Turley.
Dan Berger did a story on this topic 10 or 15 years ago. He had a handful of winemakers who admitted, off the record, to adding brett. The only one he named was Chalk Hill but that was with a different owner and winemaker than today.
Sidenote-Remember Pepsi Clear? Pepsie added Brett to that to “improve” the flavor. Maybe that is why it failed.
Brett…what a big topic…
Some things I’ve seen or heard over the years:
A leading wine critic who maintained that European Brett was different than American Brett (he liked the French wines that had it, hated the American ones). (Likely some grain of truth here as there are undoubtedly different strains of the yeast.)
One reason to avoid it in wines is that in addition to the off (or on, depending on how you feel about Brett!) flavors and aromas, such yeasts produce biogenic amines (I think I remember that is the term). Histamines are among these, which we can all react to unfavorably. Frankly, that’s one big reason we try to eradicate it at our winery.
Different cultivars do have different susceptibility to Brett. (In my limited experience.) Tempranillo seems to love it. Zinfandel seems to resist it. Alcohol levels? pH levels? Certainly pH matters as Brett doesn’t thrive at lower ph’s. That’s probably why you rarely see it in whites - they tend to have lower ph’s.
Can someone weigh in and let us know how the old world regions view Brett now? I have found it in at least half of Bordeaux, near half of Burgundy (red), most of the Rhone and almost all the Languedoc wines I’ve had.
Peter Rosback
Sineann
That’s right Beau, my friend Chad Stock of Minimus Wines made a Brett fermented Viognier (using some brewers brett strains) in a pétillant naturel style that he will be releasing for the summer. I think that the most interesting thing is that it is a white wine low in phenolics so the food source for the brett will be at a minimum. It’s interesting to see that most negative comments come when brett is associated with red wine. I’m not sure how its going to turn out but I am excited to try it.
Since the brett inoculation was intentional would you consider that wine flawed? I know its difficult to say without trying it first but I am just interested to see what everyone’s thoughts are.
Peter, do you mean that all those wines smelled or tasted like they were Brett-y, or you actually plated for it and confirmed its presence?
I’ve never had the wine, but would be happy to open some of yours.
But ignorance of the specific wine does not deter me from answering your questions without hesitation: Yes, and no. For me – important qualifier – brett is always, always, always a flaw. No wine is ever better off with brett. Ever.
Hmm, I love brett in beer, but so far not in wine.
+1
As I noted in another thread: Parker’s ability to tolerate huge amounts of Brett is well documented. On Prodigy I once challenged him to name any California wine, any vintage, any producer, where he tried the wine and found too much Brett. He first named a 57 Rhone. When I replied that was not the question and again asked him for any California wine, he ducked, threw insults and finally admitted he had never had one!
He gave me permission to “gloat” (Gosh thanks Mr Parker) I replied I was not trying to go one up on him I was trying to show him the limits of his palate. And you know what? Gosh what a surprise he didn’t get it.
My last bottle went dry a few decades back.
Just curious: Do you find yourself very sensitive to Brett, Neal?.. do you often pick it up when others do not?
Can someone weigh in and let us know how the old world regions view Brett now? I have found it in at least half of Bordeaux, near half of Burgundy (red), most of the Rhone and almost all the Languedoc wines I’ve had.
And don’t stop there. Many, if not most wines from Spain, Italy and elsewhere had plenty of brett that gets associated with their “terroir” or “traditional styles”. I don’t think it’s particularly more or less likely to associate with a specific grape either. I think it’s more likely to be associated with winemaking practices and temperatures that may be associated with said grapes. For example, Monastrell gets tarred with being a brett factory but Monastrell that’s made with careful attention to controlling brett is a far different beast. It can make good wine either way, but Monastrell can have a subtle blueberry note that few other grapes show and that’s lost with too much brett. In fact one thing brett is known for is masking varietal character.
Regarding differing effects of brett on wine - that’s true. Mostly it has to do with concentrations but it may also have to do with strains. I don’t think anyone really knows enough about different strains at this point though.
It’s not exclusively an “old world” issue either. First of all, brett is all around and it’s very happy to live off or in oak, especially toasted oak because the caramelization makes compounds that are very satisfying to little hungry brett organisms.
With a little oxygen and a few nutrients, brettanomyces of some strain or another can grow using the alcohol in the wine as a source of carbon, some amino acids in the wine for nitrogen, and some of the sugars in the wood of the barrels, particularly the toasted woods. If the winery isn’t clean, there’s a good chance it will have bretty wines, as well as wines with other problems, and this was characteristic of many French, Spanish, and Italian and old-world wines for many years.
When they identified brett in 1904, people didn’t understand it. Still don’t really, but more recent research in the 1990s by guys like Pascal Chatonnet and others in France, CA, Australia and elsewhere has done much to increase people’s understanding of brett. Chatonnet especially has done a lot of research into the issue. He worked first on his own Bordeaux properties but now does consulting for other chateaux, mostly in Bordeaux. None of the chateaux actually want brett in their wines. The issue is that it’s mostly impossible to remove it. Some chateaux are kind of identified with it at this point though, as are many other places in France and elsewhere. That’s not quite fair however, because it’s not really unique to those regions or to “dirty” wineries.
As wineries in Europe got cleaned up in the 1980s and 1990s, that helped, but changes in wine making have brought about their own issues. Places like CdP for example, may have cleaned up but then they also amped up the wines. Even with a clean winery, you can have brett problems because of your wine making. For example, the higher the pH (meaning the lower the acidity), the more congenial the environment for brett. The more residual sugar, the happier the brett. Aging on the lees? The happier the brett. Cloudy unfiltered wine? The happier the brett.
Brett especially loves wine with low or no SO2 because SO2 prevents it from reproducing. But even SO2 can trick you. Say you add a little bit and then try to develop a culture for examination. You don’t see much brett and you’re happy. But unfortunately, after adding SO2 brett may just go dormant for a while. That’s called VBNC - Viable but Not Culturable. Even worse, SO2 is fungistatic, not fungicidal. That means it can stop the growth, but it doesn’t kill the brett.
So you have to test the metabolic activity of the brett because you might think there’s no brett. So you think you’re safe and you bottle and the SO2 acts as an anti-oxidant and anti-microbial agent but after some time, it’s working on those other problems and it gets used up and suddenly the brett re-emerges and your customer is screwed.
So you can filter but depending on the membrane pores, you can still let some smaller brett cells go through - they’re not all the same size after all but the little guys are equally damaging. Finally, brett grows faster at warmer temps.
According to Chatonnet and others, the most critical stages of winemaking are the cold soak before fermentation and at the end of fermentation just before malolactic fermentation. That’s when you need to use temperature to control brett by keeping things cold. There are other organisms, particularly Saccharomyces, that can compete with brett, and that’s one reason you don’t need to worry so much during fermentation itself, but at those other times the Saccharomyces either hasn’t developed yet or it’s spent and consequently the concentration is low. At the beginning there’s a lot of sugar and at both ends there’s not a lot of CO2 from the fermentation, and there’s not a lot of SO2 either.
Wherever you are, you’re going to get brett anyway since it’s all over the place. The key is to control it as much as possible because you have no idea what it’s going to do if you let it go. People who make juicier, fruitier, riper wines that age in new oak can be just as much at risk as people who have dirty cellars because their winemaking creates a hospital environment for brett.
As far as different strains of brett - that’s possibly true. There are three main compounds that have been identified as the main “problems” and those are the ones that some people like in small doses. Presumably in the future people will be able to breed strains of brett that produce a little of those compounds and then die out. Then of course, you’ll have a whole other discussion as to whether the resulting wine is “natural” or not, which gets us into that BS quagmire.
But as of right now, I guess you can think of brett like salt in cooking. A little can help but you don’t want to dump it in by the truckload. Salt however, doesn’t reproduce by itself. Consequently, you can control the amount that you use. As of right now, that’s not possible with brett. Moreover, even if you were to control it through scrupulous care, you don’t know what happens after the bottle leaves the winery. So for my two cents, the deliberate and absolutely unnecessary introduction of brett is astonishingly stupid. Of course, others may disagree.
Cheers all!
BTW, good question as to how it’s viewed in Europe. I only know a handful of winemakers.
Denis Dubourdieu, who has written some papers with Chatonnet, says Brett is a fault.
‘Without a doubt, Brett is seen as a flaw by Bordeaux winemakers. It is a matter of great concern to us, as we pick riper berries than ever.
We have to age wines with lower acidity more carefully to keep the genuine fruit complexity. All the classified growths work with selected yeasts in the alcoholic and malolactic fermentations and sulfur their wines better – especially before summer. Or they have a steam machine to clean the barrels."
Winemakers in Spain that I’ve talked to say the same. In Valencia and Alicante, where there is a lot of Monastrell, they are not trying to cultivate brett in their wines. Some of the wineries are clean as hospitals. Those winemakers have told me that their intent is to focus on the fruit and the land and things like brett or other bacteria only interfere. Same in Rioja. The old time mushroomy qualities may or may not be from brett, but they emerge with years of bottle age even in “modern” Rioja, so I think it’s a character of Tempranillo more than anything.
Same with the few winemakers in the Languedoc and in Beaujolais I’ve talked to about it. Even those who claim to be non-interventionist want the wine to be what they made, not what randomly appears at some later date. That’s obviously all anecdotal though.
Nicely put Greg and what I write below is intended as complementary [and complimentary] as well as looking at some of your main points simply from a slightly different but entirely supportive angle.
Brett is a wild yeast which certainly seems to be everywhere and certainly does not require an unhygienic winery or cellar to find its way into wine. However wood, which contains its own form of sugar among other factors like the sugar levels in grapes and low SO2 usage, is its friend so wooden structures including containers like barrels and tanks are readily inhabited and can also become transmission vectors e.g. through the transfer and use of second-hand barrels.
There are some winemakers [and this is controversial] who believe that the vineyard is a natural source of Brett alongside the multitude of other yeasts that exist there [although, like Saccharomyces it is not easily detected on grapes] the conventional wisdom is that it originates in the winery. IMO the vineyard seems a more logical origin even though the winery readily becomes a host since Brett is a wild yeast and a winery is, well, man-made – and therefore it seems likely that Brett had to originate somewhere else. However let’s avoid the ‘where it comes from’ argument and remain with your comprehensive account.
IMO Brett [shorthand for the products of the Brettanomyces.bruxellensis yeast since that is what is sensed in wine] has become a larger issue, even if producers have learned how to contain it, because directionally, more winemakers are harvesting riper grapes with concomitantly lower acidities and higher sugars.
That means, as you mention, that Brett has more to feast on [sugars in particular although other substrates exist] when it gets its chance but also the likelihood that higher alcohol levels from those higher sugars will stall fermentations as Saccharomyces.cerevisiae struggles in that increasingly alcoholic environment – which is when the widely present Brettanomyces bruxellensis can step in. Unless of course SO2 has been used appropriately.
However if a malolactic fermentation is desired SO2 is withheld at that point even if used earlier so that the desirable bacteria can survive to do their work. Perhaps more importantly SO2 is also less effective in the higher pH/lower acidity environments provided by riper grapes.
While diammonium phosphate [DAP] can be used to re-establish or sustain a higher alcohol fermentation the ‘natural movement’ would generally eschew such products and DAP is of course not only food for the Saccharomyces fermentation yeast but also, eventually, for any Brettanomyces.bruxellensis that is able to gatecrash the party. So perhaps the trend to ‘natural winemaking’, which generally seeks lower SO2 levels and avoids filtration and chemical interventions such as DAP and Velcorin, another powerful sterilant, adds to the control issues and the extent to which Brett can potentially intrude.
As regards the grape Monastrell [in its Spanish homeland] or Mourvedre in France or Mataro in California or Australia, its association with Brett is probably substantially connected in many minds to its use in Chateauneuf du Pape generally and Beaucastel in particular [where Brett has certainly been in evidence in the past] and possibly also partly due to the distinctive odour and taste of the grape itself.
However in Australia and California where Brett is generally taboo, Mataro is made without exhibiting any Brett, presumably because all necessary steps including SO2 and Velcorin [dimethyl dicarbamate/DMDC] along with filtration and close attention to or exclusion of wooden containers et al are used to exclude it.
As for Beaucastel it appears to have ‘dealt with’ its Brett primarily by removing a key source – its old wooden vessels. In addition to which the Perrins have suggested that the Mourvedre grape may contain more of Brett’s natural precursors which might also partly account for the linking of Brett and Mourvedre.
Finally if minimal intervention is the chosen method, with Velcorin and/or filtration excluded and SO2 minimised, and live Brett cells are in the wine when bottled then it is definitely possible for Brett to again work its wicked way producing prime Brett products like 4-ethyl phenol, 4-ethyl guaiacol and isovaleric acid among many others. This process will be aided by elevated storage temperatures, any residual sugars present or a hangover from any DAP that might have been used earlier to prevent or deal with a stalled fermentation.
Finally Brett is mainly a red wine issue although not unknown in white wines and general, directional differences in the content of the must and the way the wines are made such as usually higher acidities, directionally lower alcohols, more SO2 in turn made more effective by acidity etc etc provide a rationale for the general observation. Put simply many of the things that might promote the production of Brett are usually less available in the making of white wine and those that are used to control it are usually more evident.
Nice summary Nigel, and good to see you again!
What you wrote corresponds to the little bit I know. The issue with white wines is very likely for exactly the reasons you said. In addition, if you add SO2 before fermentation, it prevents browning of the juice and also inhibits malolactic fermentation. Wines made like usually don’t get barrel aged and they generally have pretty high acidity. I would think that if you’re making wine that’s going to go through malolactic fermentation and barrel aging, you probably have a little more concern and you want to add more SO2. But I’d defer to someone who does this for a living.
Going back to the original post though, I can’t imagine that anyone would deliberately introduce brett, given that it’s both unnecessary and uncontrollable. Even with a clean winery, as you say, it’s lurking around somewhere, including the wood that constitutes much of the material around many wineries.
Maybe with beer one wouldn’t care so much because one can always dump the batch and get a new one going. It’s faster to make beer and the grains are essentially commodities. With grapes however, if your experiment doesn’t turn out, you need to wait for the next harvest. Moreover, the customer has no clue what is going to occur. We typically don’t age beer for several years but that’s not uncommon with wine. To me, deliberately introducing brett into a wine is a bit like releasing software and intentionally including viruses and trojan horses. Not quite fair to the customer.
Well written, Greg and Nigel!
A couple things I would add: pH’s are at their lowest at crush, so for those of us in Oregon and New Zealand, brett before primary is not, generally, an issue. Along with Nigel, I suspect that brett comes in with grapes as a vineyard is such an uncontrolled environment. That, and the first brett we had at our old place showed up with the same vineyard’s fruit every year!
ETS (a very good lab) did some work with brett and barrel aging and found that temperature matters a lot and that by far the biggest populations of brett in barrels was down in the lees.
Peter Rosback
Sineann
Excellent posts, Nigel and Greg. As I had hoped/suspected, this thread is evolving most interestingly. Good education for me, anyway.
Regarding your last paragraph, Nigel, Dan and Beau above mentioned two winemakers at Minimus Wines in, I believe, Oregon (haven’t Googled yet, just going by their posts). They variously mentioned work being done to ferment with brettanomyces for both riesling and viognier. So is what they are doing with whites more challenging than whatever others are doing with reds, or possibly more easily controllable?