Sympathy for the devil. A few words on behalf of sulphur dioxide.

Louis Pasteur - the increasingly forgotten
man of the modern wine industry

"And the devil that deceived them was cast into the lake of fire and brimstone, where the beast and the false prophet are, and shall be tormented day and night for ever and ever."

King James Bible (Cambridge Ed.)

"And the devil, who deceived them, was thrown into the lake of burning sulfur, where the beast and the false prophet had been thrown. They will be tormented day and night for ever and ever."

New International Version (©2011)

I am indebted to biblehub.com for providing these two versions of Revelations 20:10. They are very similar - apart from the notable replacement of "fire and brimstone" with "sulfur". It may be coincidental, but the use of the chemical rather than the poetic name quite vividly illustrates the way that sulphur (to use the English spelling) has been increasingly demonised in recent years. 

For a very distinguished Spaniard I met a few weeks ago, sulphur dioxide was responsible for what he evidently believed to be the recent decline of Spanish wine. Until 1978, he said, no-one in Spain used the chemical. 

Answering him felt a little like telling a sophisticated adult that the world was not, in fact, flat. Sulphur dioxide has been used by winemakers for a very long time. The Romans burned sulphor to clean the interiors of their amphora and as a preventative against the bacteria that would turn wine to vinegar. That practice almost certainly continued over the centuries, and it was given the royal seal of approval in 1487 by the King of Prussia around 125 years before the publication of the King James Bible.

In 1864 Louis Pasteur proved that micro-organisms were responsible for both fermentation and a wide range of spoilage. Dairies across the globe learned valuable lessons from Pasteur about desirable and undesirable micro-organisms, and brewers learned how to get positive results for particular beer styles by careful management of potentially negative organisms such as Enteric bacteria, Kloeckera apiculata, Lactic acid bacteria and Brettanomyces.

But the message took a long time to penetrate much of the wine industry. Over the years, I have visited wineries in which hygiene was quite obviously a very foreign concept. When the "flying winemakers" first went into European wineries on behalf of UK and US buyers, they often said that much of what they had to do involved simply focusing on cleanliness and grape ripeness. These were the "good old days" before "industrial" winemaking allegedly introduced "blandness" to European wine. 

I can look back at that time without the use of rose-tinted glasses. I remember cooperatives scheduling harvest delivery dates on the basis of their members' names. Alberto Aranjuez would pick his grapes on September 1st while his neighbour  Ziggy Zenovia would have to wait until the 14th. Irrespective of the maturity of either of their crops. Growers who arrived with their grapes at noon would see them oxidize in the midday sun as the winery downed tools for lunch. Work also stopped at weekends. One flying winemaker reported having to break into the bodega where he was overseeing the fermentation of wine for a British supermarket. "They wouldn't give me a key and I wasn't going to leave my vats to their own devices for 48 hours".

Cleanliness was often rudimentary. I met another Australian who was working at a cooperative in south west France during a particularly tricky harvest. Relations with the directeur were not good, he explained. There had been an argument over the need to rinse the hoses, with the co-op boss claiming that "the wine washes them; there's no need to do it with water". To prove his point, the Aussie had found a dead rat ("there were plenty of those") and quietly stuffed it into the end of one of the hoses just before leaving the winery for the night. Next morning, he persuaded the directeur to check the hoses with him and, naturally, "when he picked one up, the rat fell out, straight onto his face".

Most wineries now are far more conscious of the need for hygiene, but the science still seems to be fairly rudimentary, at least when set against other beverages. It is not so long ago that I was given a French Syrah to taste by its producer. What do you think of it? he asked. It's good, but a bit reduced, I responded. Affronted, the grower, said "Non! Il renarde un peu, c'est tout", If you're not familiar with the French verb renarder, nor was I because it fails to feature in my dictionary. I think it means "to fox" or "be like a fox". I know about winery cats, but I 'm still unclear over how foxes fit into Gallic vinification methodology.

Most winemakers seem to know far less about brettanomyces than their beer-making counterparts and, given the nonsense that is talked about the irreplaceability of natural corks, remarkably few appear to be aware that modern closures - Nomacorc, Diam and screwcaps - all now offer controlled versions of the uncontrollable oxygen ingress traditionally associated with bits of cork bark. Wine professionals bang on about "minerality" but as this Wine-Searcher piece illustrates, there is little scientific support for the term having anything to do with the soil in which the grapes are grown. Jamie Goode revealed in a fascinating blog post that the smoky/gunflint "pierre-à-fusil aromas positively associated with some French wines is actually caused by the presence of a sulphur compound called benzenemethanethiol

Which brings me back to that old devil, sulphur - and the drive towards producing wine with little or no SO2. My comments about "natural" wines in previous posts and elsewhere has - quite reasonably, if not entirely accurately - given me a reputation as something of an enemy of that movement, and a sulphorphile. My argument is actually against the term "natural", the holier-than-thou attitude of too many of its supporters, and, most firmly, the sheer amateurishness of much of the winemaking, and the faults that this unsurprisingly engenders.

Believe it or not, I actually welcome the reduction of additives in wine - and would be delighted to see ingredient labelling, as pioneered by the Co-Op chain in the UK and by Ridge Vineyards in the US. Having been very impressed by the quality and reliability of Gerard Bertrand's Naturae range of Zero-SO2 wines, I'm even looking at producing an unsulphured version of our Greener Planet wine this year.

Like Bertrand, and some of the best Zero-SO2 "organic" producers in the US, we're not, however, going to do that without taking a very careful look at how we are going to end up with a wine that is stable and reliable. Like Betrand too, we'll print a "best-before" date on the label, allowing two years or so of cellaring. 

On the other hand, would I consider omitting the brimstone from a premium wine that might benefit from a decade or so of patience before being opened? No way. The finest wines I have ever drunk have all owed their survival over decades to SO2. When I raised the issue of longevity with "natural" wine fan Alice Feiring, she replied "who cares" and directed me to old bottles of Chateau Musar. Having just sampled a cloudy, volatile 2000 Musar, all I'll say is that I can think of a long list of other 2000s I'd rather drink.

But 2000 is a long time ago. As Doug Wregg, director of sales and marketing, of UK distributor Les Caves de Pyrene, and one of the strongest leaders of the "natural" movement was quoted as saying in the drinks business. "60-80% of natural wine should be drunk within the first year, after that they fall apart... Most of the wines are light, pale, fizzy and fun. They’re meant for wine bars rather than cellars... It’s a miracle when something lovely happens in the bottle a few years down the line, but I wouldn’t bet my house on it”. Neither his, nor mine.

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For anyone interested in knowing what we will be looking to avoid in our unsulphured wine may be interested in this, from an article in Wynboer by Heidi Schoeman of SunBio, Institute for Wine Biotechnology, Stellenbosch University

Uncontrolled microbial growth during and after the fermentation of wine can change the chemical composition and ultimately the quality of the end-product. Strains of lactic acid and acetic acid bacteria are usually involved in wine spoilage and can lead to ropiness, volatile acidity, acrolein formation and bitterness, tartaric acid degradation and geranium off-flavour (Du Toit and Pretorius, 2000). Certain strains of lactic acid bacteria (LAB) can also produce biogenic amines and ethyl carbamate precursors. Despite the significance of LAB in malolactic fermentation, it is important to control the presence of naturally occurring LAB in a winemaking environment. 

Paul Draper - Making great wine "naturally"

Paul Draper, the genius behind Ridge
Photo by Lily-Elaine Hawk Wakawaka

Over the last few weeks I seem to have spent a lot more time than I should - or would have liked - thinking, writing and talking about "natural" wines.

I really have very little more to say about it, but I'd like to use this post to allow Paul Draper of Ridge Vineyards, one of my winemaking heroes, to make a number of my points for me. Draper, apart from being one of the greatest and most experienced winemakers in the world, really ought to be a hero for the naturalistas. In November 2012 in the Hawk Wakawaka Wine Reviews,  July 2010 in The Feiring Line,  and May 2011 in the (z)infandel, he has given his views about about "natural wines". In the (z)infandel piece he quotes Jancis Robinson's assertion that 90% of modern wines are "industrial" and proudly setting Ridge's efforts in the 10% he would class as "pre-industrial."

He goes on to say that "At Ridge, we felt from the beginning that these modern, increasingly industrial, wines lacked the complexity, the sense of place, and the ability to age and develop that the pre-industrial wines demonstrated. So we looked back to the 19th Century—to techniques used in the finest California wineries such as La Cuesta, and in the Bordeaux châteaux of that era. In a synthesis of past and present, we have taken the pre-industrial techniques and applied them in conjunction with the best, least intrusive modern equipment. "

He goes on to say that "we use cover crops, integrated pest management techniques, mechanical weed removal, and composted grape pomace in place of pesticides, herbicides and synthetic fertilizers... We pick when the grapes are ripe, but not overripe. All our grapes (estate or purchased) are hand-picked, which allows for sorting in the vineyard.

"Our winemaking philosophy includes fermenting entirely with native yeasts from the vineyard, rather than cultured yeast strains; extracting color, flavor, and tannins from the grapes without use of commercial enzymes; determining—by tasting for tannin extraction during fermentation—how long to continue pump-overs; allowing malolactic fermentation to occur naturally, without inoculation; achieving wine clarity through settling and racking; making major winemaking decisions, including blending, based on tasting rather than a pre-determined recipe". Stated simply, he avoids mechanical or chemical intervention, and believes that wines made with them don’t age as well.

What could be more natural than that? Unfortunately, however, Draper might seem to fail a number of "natural" tests. Wines are "occasionally" gently fined with egg whites "if we have a wine lot (or an entire, assembled wine) with excessive tannin". He avoids membrane sterile filtration, "a process which—to a minor but noticeable degree—affects flavor and complexity" but uses pad filtration to remove "any trace of egg white" from wines that have been fined.

 Sometimes Draper adds a little water - 1.4% in the case of the 2011 Paso Robles, as the label (wholly unnecessarily) reveals. In an interview with INSIDESCOOP, Draper explains that a small amount of H2O was added to three of eight fermentors to adjust slightly overripe grapes, in the hope of keeping the alcohol closer to 14%. 

Water addition probably gets the thumbs down from the naturalistas, as quite certainly does the tartaric acid that Draper's label acknowledges as having been added to the 2011 Three Valleys which needed some "fine tuning".

Finally of course, there's the always vexed issue of SO2. And here, Draper and I seem to be singing precisely the same song. “When we don’t use the minimum effective level of SO2, the wine goes off differently every year. It can be fine. Or, it can be off. But we’ve found, what you get is simply not a consistent sense of character from the place it came.” That is, the overall quality and presentation the wine gives you might be pleasurable, but what it isn’t offering is that reliable experience of terroir coming from the vineyard site itself.”

I really neither know nor care where Ridge and Draper fit within the "natural" canon. What I do know is that they're my kinds of wines and Draper is my kind of winemaker. On the one hand, he really does want to produce wines as naturally as reasonably possible, with a sense of the place where they were made; on the other, he cares about the consistency and quality of my experience as the person who's shelling out real money for his bottles.