Winemaking Natural? Not on Your Life. This doesn’t happen that often, so I’m warning you now. Jeremy Oliver is about to get philosophical. The cause for what you might perceive as a significant, if temporary, change of speed, is a conversation I recently shared with David Wollan and Robert Paul from Wine Network Australia, the country’s leading group of wine industry technical consultants. Wollan, as one might expect, does rather a lot of thinking about the role of technology in winemaking, but his view isn’t necessarily that which you might have imagined. Like me, Wollan is sick to death of winemaking being described by those who write about it or practise it as a ‘natural process’. The truth is rather different, for a drinkable wine is the very least likely outcome if a bucket of grapes is left to nature’s own devices. The inevitable result is vinegar. Accept that reality and all winemaking becomes interventionist. It’s actually all about carefully managing a natural spoilage process! So, when discussing the issue of ‘non-interventionist’ winemaking versus so-called ‘industrialised’ winemaking, where do you draw the line? ‘Is it to be 10% or 15% intervention before a wine is labelled as ‘industrial’, poses Wollan, himself a qualified and experienced winemaker with a clear technical understanding of the processes involved. But he takes it one step further. ‘The traditionalists are trying to defend the indefensible,’ he poses, ‘for they surely admit there’s a point at which technology becomes acceptable. But technology changes so fast it forces us to re-evaluate the rules on a daily basis. So what, then, is ‘natural winemaking’?’ In last December’s Wine Spectator, columnist Matt Kramer revealed a healthy Luddite streak by decrying the use of reverse osmosis to remove excesses in wine of such things as alcohol and volatile acidity, questioning whether wines made using this technique are actually ‘real’. Suggesting that they make wines ‘reconfigured out of all recognition from the original’ and using Michael Jackson’s plastic surgery as an example, he declares that ‘the importance of the natural should not be overstated’. I just hope Mr Kramer enjoys his vinegar. I share Kramer’s concern that reverse osmosis could help makers create over-ripe wines that they are then able to bottle without the effects of excessive alcohol. His view is however a simplistic one, since it suggests that alcohol is the only concern. Once you get genuinely over-ripe flavours in wine, the qualities and flavours that relate to the wine’s terroir and individuality are immediately compromised. The technology and its use are not to blame in these cases. The real cause for concern is the misguided attitude that over-ripe flavours are true flavours and should be encouraged in the vineyard. Besides, you would have thought that any established maker of classic regional wines would think twice before substantially altering their winemaking and viticultural approach in this way. Sulphur dioxide is a vicious chemical that I have experienced at very close and hazardous quarters in the wine industry. It has been used to clean wine containers since the ancient Egyptians and in 1487 was admitted in Germany as a legally acceptable preservative. While a few wines are made in a ‘no preservative’ style for those of us allergic to sulphur dioxide, and another small number is made by wineries seeking to take the non-interventionist approach to an extreme, its use is virtually universal today. Does that make it natural? One might also ask how ‘natural’ it is to take wine out of their fermentation vessels and insert them for up to two years and more inside brand-new oak casks whose staves have been specifically treated to impart as much extract and flavour as possible. Or how ‘natural’ it is when in Europe cane sugar is added to grape juice in order to compensate for a vineyard’s inability to ripen its grapes sufficiently to produce a balanced wine. Or when refrigeration means that you can actually capture delicate flavour aromatics in wines made in hot regions. Or when must is pasteurised to kill off microbiological activity or to denature oxidative enzymes, as has been carried out in traditional Europe for nearly a century. Or when yeast species are carefully selected, cultivated and introduced to grape must in order that the yeast species indigenous to the vineyard and winery are excluded from playing an active role in the wine’s fermentation. Pasteur was a winemaking interventionist; make no mistake about that. How many people would contend that as far as religion is concerned everyone more religious than them is a fanatic; anyone less is a heathen? It’s no different with winemakers and their views towards intervention, whatever their stance on the issue. The wine industry has never really managed to separate its reality from the ‘artisan’ image it so carefully uses to sell its wine, argues David Wollan, who reckons that in doing so it has made a ‘Faustian pact’ with the devil. ‘It adapts and uses technology in a responsible, safe and reliable way that makes a more consistent and healthy product for the consumer, but it continues to sell itself as never having moved on from its artisan origins’, he says. The Next Philosophical Hurdle Recent years have entertained us with a misleading argument over the issue of filtration, a process abhorred by those who refuse to consider wine to be anything other than a cottage-scale industry. Each wine is supposed to be hand-made by its proprietor, and their loyal customers are then meant to treat the not uncommon failings of such wines with a forgiving shrug of the shoulders, before lining up again the following year with cheque-book open wide. The truth is that however romantic and occasionally wonderful it and its wines may be, winemaking of this type is nothing more than a marginal segment of the modern wine industry, most of which is dedicated to producing respectable, honest and reliable wine for affordable, immediate and daily consumption. As such, the overwhelming amount of wine made today is made by large to medium-sized businesses for which quality control and large-scale production techniques are day-to-day realities. This is not written in a derogatory way about either approach; it is simply a statement of fact. While the filtration issue will probably never go away – and for what it’s worth I believe that whatever the circumstances you still need a very good reason not to filter wine to at least some extent – the next issue likely to raise a debate of similar emotional intensity is micro-oxygenation. There has been a great deal of rubbish written and said about micro-oxygenation, its role and its effect on wine. It is a comparatively recent technique that enhances what would traditionally be regarded as the ‘elevage’ or ‘raising’ (in a developmental sense) of the wine. It is able to enhance a wine’s colour, the perception of its depth and structure, its longevity, balance and generosity. It can also play a remedial role in helping to remove reductive or herbaceous aspects of wine’s flavour profile. Contrary to much contemporary opinion, its greatest usefulness will probably occur at the top end of the market, where an increasing number of makers, including Chateau Pichon-Longueville (Baron) in Pauillac, are discovering that it can make a fine addition to the suite of techniques they deploy in their cellars to maximise the quality of their product. The sort of wines that might have shown immediate benefit from micro-oxygenation include many cool-climate pinot noirs which otherwise go into bottle carrying an excess of leafy herbaceous characters; cool-climate cabernets or blends which suffer from excessive leanness and thinness on the middle palate; and most red wines made in South Australia in the year 1997. The reasons for the latter observation are that most of these wines are affected to some degree by the greenish characters inevitably present when grapes are made to ripen far more quickly with respect to sugar than flavour, which regularly occurs in seasons like this. Watch out for a similar issue with many vintage 2000 Australian reds. Another consequence of fruit forced to ripen at this pace includes a lack of stuffing in the middle palate, plus a lack of length. Both of these deficiencies can be addressed to some degree by micro-oxygenation. It’s important to make the point that David Wollan’s consultancy is instrumental in the introduction of micro-oxygenation techniques to Australia. Neither he nor other proponents deny that nobody completely understands what is happening at the molecular level with the process, for as he agrees, nobody knows what a ripe tannin or a green tannin actually looks like. ‘We don’t know why it works, but it does’, he says. Overcoming the Fear of Technology At time of writing, only Southcorp amongst the major Australian producers list micro-oxygenation as part of their standard winemaking techniques. Several other makers regularly aerate wine in conjunction with an addition of tannins, using the tannin as a buffer against oxidation. The wines can also benefit to some degree through a slow accumulation of integrated phenolic extract in this way. Plenty of good wine has been made before micro-oxygenation, and plenty more will be made in the future without it. However it will be fascinating to watch how the wine world ultimately views the process. How many Australian winemakers will favourably consider it as another means of capturing and/or retaining their competitive edge in the world market? Will there emerge an anti-micro-oxygenation lobby to rival the anti-filtration movement? Will the winemaking zealots view it, along with other innovations, as a competitive technique that threatens their ideals of winemaking purity? Will others adopt it as a complementary approach to what they are already doing? How long will it take before the technophobes in the English wine media – most of whom decry all innovation in wine unless it was introduced sometime before the First World War or thereabouts – run a scare campaign against it? To digress for a moment, many of these guys might do well to remember that wine has only been sealed with corks for around two and a half centuries, a mere fraction of the time it has been commercially made and traded. At the time they were introduced, each of oak, cork, tannins and refrigeration were considered to be major technological advances. Just like micro-oxygenation is today. Technology doesn’t have to be threatening to those who choose not to use it, although it’s a strange phenomenon that most of my friends who swore they’d never get a computer now have e-mail addresses. The French wine industry is currently pointing the finger at the technology used in wine’s ‘New World’, with the hypocritical message that countries like Australia only produce ‘industrial’ and ‘unnatural’ wines, lacking in soul or character. This is nothing more than a poor excuse to assist the parts of France that have shunned winemaking development to cling onto their declining markets. Actually, France boasts many of the most technologically advanced wineries in the world, and micro-oxygenation was invented in France, by a Frenchman. It doesn’t stand to reason that because a process might be a new one, its use signifies a lack of respect for those that preceded it. As I’ve said, there is no such thing as a genuinely non-interventionist winemaker. Even at its smallest scale, winemaking is a controlled redirection of a natural process. Without in any way suggesting that the only valid way of making wine is to adopt whatever the technology of the day is to the fullest extent, the science of winemaking remains the foundation upon which the artisans are able to express themselves. Never is this more apparent than when nature itself turns the tables on the winemaker in the winemaking process.
