Chapoutier pours scorn on natural winemakers

This is amaizing to read such comment from a winemaker as Mr Chapoutier who is supposed to know well what it is talking about.
Today all Bordeaux wines are done in the same way : get good appraisal from Mr Parker; This means wood, extraction and other technics very sophisticated. The result? All of them have the same tast (Margaux, Pauillac, St Emilion.. who is able to make the difference?).
In other areas
When the vintage is too hot, this is acidification, too cold sugar, and on top of that hugh quantity of SO2.
This is a real challenge to find some different and well done wines. The "natural" wines offer you such alternative. But what are they ? To get natural wines well done you need :
- Concentration
- Alcool
- Balance between richness and acidity.
How can you achieve this?
- Low yield
- Good maturity and then expect the last moment to harvest;
- No chimic in the ground to get acidity especially for the whites.
As a consequence you produce few quantity and benefits for the winemaker are lower. But the result for the drinker can be exceptional!!
Do you think Mr Bonneau, Ganevat, Mrs Leroy, Mr Allemand, Chave, are keen to put plenty of SO2, sugar or acid in their wine? Those wines are outstanding, guess why?... If there is SO2 this is for the lowest quantity possible and most of the time because this is used to clean the Barrels.
I'm not quasi religious or fanatic, I just want alternative in my life and for wines or any type of foof it is becoming incredbly difficult to find natural products. Chimic is the standard, these are the one's pushing not the other way around.
JB

Coca Cola is also precisely predictable and absent of variation or regard for the processes of nature... completely devoid of any relation to agriculture... as I suppose Mr. Chapoutier believes wines should be.

The argument that compares stinky Epoisses cheese and cloudy apple juice with "natural wine" is flawed. Epoisses' stinkiness is its trademark, and the cloudiness in apple juice does not stop it from tasting like, well, apple juice. Whereas "non intervention" in wine can sometimes lead to decidedly off-flavours and smells that are NOT the trademark of those wines. What´s worse, in a relatively short period of time, they can acquire the smell and taste of an altogether different product: vinegar.

All respect to the advocacy of minimal intervention; both intervened wine and natural wine can coexist. What worries me is the quasi-religious, blind eye that the fervent devotees of the natural wine idea can turn to what are blatantly bad sheep in their herd.

I enjoy my red wine but find that i plug up so bad that i spend the night trying to breath. I have just experienced some organic wines, Cono Sur and Do;maine de l livette. As fas as taste goes i am just happy not to plug up and get a small high.

If the wine you are enjoying with friends, is honest and tastes good, and all of us happily survive to the experience, who cares if it is 'organic' or 'high tech', assuming that these words imply no meaning affecting our lives ? Try different options, as in the choice of your couple. In my case, a woman ...

I do agree with Mr Chapoutier. Why would anyone want to create vinegar and call it wine? What a complete rip off for the consumer. I agree that these decisions should be market-driven, but foisting swill on people driven with a Big White Lie about how vinegary fluid made from grapes is better than grape juice with sulphur additives should keep an ethical person up at night.

Andy Whiteman,

How long have you worked with natural wines? Your statement "They are also generally very unstable, do not keep or travel well at all." tells me you have some experience working with natural wine?

I have been selling both "conventional" & "natural" wines for over 6 years now, and your statement Is only your opinion based on what you have read and certainly not on actual personal experience.
Statements like these give people the wrong ideas. A good wine is much more stable than a bad wine - natural or not.

So Malcolm Royal, do you always pass judgement after only one experience? With food? people? Wine?

Should someone try red wine for the first time and say never again? Who knows what they tasted? Who knows what you tasted?
There are good wines and there are bad wines. There are good wines made without added sulfites and there are bad wines made without sulfites added. You most likely tasted the latter.
Try again before saying "never"

Here we go again, new regulations and supervision needed claims.

Why should anyone be concenred! The consumeer is the final judge of what they want to drink. Let the market decide what they want to buy and drink. All this nonsense about what is right or wrong is a test tube study leaving the consumer out completely,

I don't agree with Mr Chapoutier

While yes, I agree that fermenting with indigenous yeasts is like playing a risky hand at poker; I beg to differ when it comes to adding sulfites. They occur naturally during the fermentation process of wine. Thus, adding additional sulfites does nothing to ensure the presence of lovely aromas and flavours, it just renders the wine seemingly "dead" and abusively labeled as stable. Great flavour comes from the grape itself. Was it treated with pesticides or harvested at the appropriate time? Then for sulfite-free wines it becomes a matter of scientifically understanding the processes that the wine is undertaking, and not looking to the sky for a miracle! In addition, rigorous cleaning habits and regular microbiological surveillance are a must in the cellar. Sulfite free wines are generally filtered in accordance to microbiological analyses taken directly before bottling to ensure wine stability. Like any wine, if it is shipped without refrigeration or left in direct sunlight of course it is most likely going to go bad! While there may be some that have not yet perfected the technique, or that have taken on making a cuvée or two of sulfite free wine for kicks there are several masters. I invite you to sample some sulfite-free wines from producers such as: Frey Vineyards, Domaine de Costes-Cirgues (who won a silver medal this past year from Decanter with their Château Costes-Cirgues 2008), and Stellar Organic Winery. Let's hear what you have to say about these wines. Otherwise, If you enjoy a nice burn in the month and headache in the morning than by all means keep on in your merry ways.

Santé!

Tried a bottle of ZERO sulphides once.
NEVER AGAIN.

Vincent makes a good point, I would have thought there would be some sort of certification/symbol of which proper natural wines can show on the label? similar to that of organic wines?
Equals less consumer confusion and could make the production of natural wine to increase???

The implication that all natural wine is spoiled or spoiling, just doesn't stand up to scrutiny. There are spoiled natural wines, just as there are spoiled "technological" wines. One wine at a time! Producers who go the natural route take risks to do something they perceive is better. They should be applauded by consumers as well as their peers. It is not a good idea to denigrate ideas you have spurned unless you have tried, failed and documented! Let the market and economics sort out the winners and let's all promote wine innovation and diversity!

Mr Chapoutier is right, some people live in a different world than his. I know I do.
Peace...

My take is use of sulfites is pretty much necessary to making a wine of good quality. When thye are used and the environment of the winery are also important. Too often many wineries go to the extreme in sterility and the wine pretty much show it in being simple fruit conveyors with alcohol. Might as well be drinking a mixed drink with addition of spirits. The goal of fine winemaking should be to maximize compound production before during and after fermentaion. I believe both sides have a point, but both sides in general may be missing the point. Often the best path is a middle road to making better wines.

The comments about sulfites are valid, though I disagree that wine cannot age great without adding sulfites. The old Musar's are classic examples. Serge Hochar may add sulfites but when he made great wines like 1972, it was without anything added, not even sulfites.

But Chapoutier's comments are also ridiculous. Since we can genetically modify human beings, should we do that just because we can, so that everyone is perfect according to one person's point of view?

His desire to make perfect wine is in the eye of the beholder. The old analogy, about beauty contests, which can apply to wine,do you want to go to a beauty contest and then hang out with the most beautiful girl, or do you want to spend more time with someone who isn't perfect but has more character? Perfect wine can be so boring.

Absolutely agree - as far as I'm concerned it's a cynical marketing ruse to sell crap wines at inflated prices. I have tasted quite a few of these "natural" wines and found most faulty and not nice.
They are also generally very unstable, do not keep or travel well at all.

So-called 'natural winemaking' is described in Traite D'OEnologie Vol 2 as an example of "le mythe naturiste".

People are confusing "natural" wines and wines without sulfites.

Natural wines are wines fermented from endogenous yeasts only. This is similar to Epoisse or any real cheese made from "natural" fermentation (yeast from the milk). This gives much more complex aromas than using just a couple of selected yeasts.

Note that 95% of grands crus from Bordeaux are not "natural" wheareas about 50% of Burgundy wines are.

"Without sulfite" is silly for everone knows about wine making but less sulfite as possible during fermentation
is a target for good winemakers.
One cannot design a wine that ages well without sulfite.
People can do without much sulfite for using cold prefermentations for instance.
This technique is used for Beaujolais but is no good
for Burgundy.
There have been the pox problem with white Burgundy wines due to the restricted use of sulfites...

I agree with mr chapoutier