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Natural Wines

On May 4, 2010, in Natural Wine, by ngorevic

Home Wine School is a site set up to educate people about all kinds of wine. But natural wine happens to be a personal passion of mine. And it's something I think everyone interested enough to take a class in wine should try. You might be shocked and dismayed by what you find in these often cloudy, confusing, and funky wines. But then again, you might just be shocked into a totally new way of thinking about wine. Curious? Then read on down below to learn about this relatively small area of winemaking that's taking France (and some other areas of the world) by storm.

Party at Domaine Lapierre

On August 13, 2010, in Blog, Natural Wine, by ngorevic

Picture this: Two giant tents in the middle of the vines, with a lovely lake just nearby. Then add 4 massive pigs on a rotisserie. Oh, and how about huge tanks of 2009 Morgon, so much that even a thousand natural wine guzzlers couldn't polish it all off? Ok, then add on top two great rock bands, a set-break with a Villié-Morgon-populated, 40 person drum band, and a crowd of dancing onlookers. How much would you pay for this natural wine festival? 50 bucks? More? How's free sound? That's right, Marcel Lapierre is so generous he throws this party every year around Bastille day for free!

In an earlier post, I tried to describe the spirit and joie de vivre involved in working the harvest with the Lapierres. This is something that doesn't really communicate itself when you open a bottle of their flowery-scripted, wax-topped, fancy-looking wine. But next time you pop open a bottle, I hope maybe this article will put a different spin on it for you. Because this wine really is meant to celebrate with friends, and heck, even total strangers.

First, let me start by introducing the lovely and talented Kristin Sazama, pictured above. Here's a little video of Kristina and I made to give you the flavor of what was going on at this bash:

So the big tank was being used to fill the little kegs, which were placed at each table for easy access. Plenty of glasses were on hand, and whenever you wanted you could just head over and fill up in a couple seconds. The wine had a little bit of spritz to it, because its yet to be bottled, and as I've explained before, natural winemakers often like to keep a blanket of CO2 in the tank to help protect the wine from oxygen. Some people, including me, like the taste and feel of that spritz. Others, like Phil Sareil of Kermit Lynch fame, prefer to use another special technique to get the spritz out:

Ever wonder what it looks like when 4 cooked pigs get butchered?

These chefs made short work of these beasts. I've been lucky enough to have a few whole roasted pigs in my time, but this was the only one I had in France, and I have to say that the style really showcased the flavor of the pig itself, in a simple, one might say natural, way. It was seasoned perfectly with plenty of salt, but there weren't a lot of herbs or spices to get in the way of that beautiful piggy flavor. They had been smoked all day over coals inside a box-like contraption that had a rotisserie spit inside it, but there was just the subtlest hint of smoky flavor going on here, nothing compared to the firepower of American BBQ. The meat was just wonderfully tender and juicy, a perfect compliment to the copious quantities of 09 Morgon flowing all around us.

How about some music?
Looks like a rock concert right? Between set breaks, the local drum band (what, Villié Morgon, a teensy weensy country town has a whole drum band 40 people large?) played a killer set that had everyone up and dancing.

In fact if you look closely, you might spot the two Lapierre children, Mathieu and Camille, banging away. Here's a little taste (for those who are wondering, yes the smiling blond woman to the left is Marie Lapierre, Marcel's husband):

Well, maybe it all sounds a bit cacophonous on the video, but I assure you, live, it was amazing and remarkably well coordinated, even though it seemed to be 100 percent improvisational.

The party was also a who's who of natural winemakers--Philippe Bornard, Thierry Puzelat, Pierre Overnoy, Jean Foillard, Yves Métras-- you name it, they were there. And everyone was really really friendly. This isn't normal for France. But in the natural wine scene, it is pretty normal. The party started around 3 in the afternoon, and stretched on and on, throughout and after dinner, until the wee hours of the morning.

Why does Marcel do this, you might ask? I can't even begin to fathom what it might cost to put on a party like this. Is it some kind of marketing strategy? Does he use it to wine and dine important clients? Definitely not. Most of the people there were just locals stopping by to party. I think he does it because he's just a really nice guy, who likes to have fun with his friends. This is pretty typical of most of the natural winemakers I've met. You really feel welcome there, which is really saying something when you're in France.

Thanks Marcel!

Down with your Dogma!

On June 28, 2010, in Blog, Natural Wine, by ngorevic

Here's a post of mine that's also being run as day 9 in Cory Cartwright's 32 days of natural wine series. You can read it here or there, but make sure you read every other day on saignée, there's some really thought-provoking stuff going on there.

dogma |?dôgm?|
a principle or set of principles laid down by an authority as incontrovertibly true

Lately, natural wine lovers have been accused of being overly dogmatic. If you say your wine is natural, you're implying that other wines are less natural, and therefore inferior. Traditional wine fans bristle at this comparison, and assert that their wines are the best in the world, and they have a lot of books and articles on their side to back that up. But isn't that just dogma of another color? In my opinion, if we natural wine fans are being dogmatic, it's only in response to an overbearing dogma that's been the order of things for quite some time. The old school dogma is one that needs a bit of toppling, and the insane prices of the "top" wines of this world are proof enough of that for me.

My training in wine began at the Wine Spirit Educational Trust (WSET), a British-based organization that is almost universally accepted as the most professional and widely available wine training out there today. I'm going to be a bit critical of the WSET here, but let me first say I think it is a fantastic place to start from. You can't beat the palate training you get there, and it gives you a very solid command of the basics of how wine works all over the world. The problem I have with it is that it's not a truly objective view of what wines are good.

You see, there's an established order of the top wines of the world. This includes the top growths of Bordeaux, the best parcels of Burgundy, Barolos of Piedmont and such other similar fine-wine producing areas of the world. And the WSET teaches this established order. The WSET education is full of ideas like, "Chardonnay reaches its fullest expression in Burgundy, France" (not a direct quote, I'm paraphrasing from memory here.) Now doesn't that sound like dogma to you? Anyone out there prefer the chardonnays being made in the Jura right now? Not to mention everyone out there who loves a tropical oaky chard from California much better than a steely minerally one from chablis. They also make it sound like you can't make good wine without sulfur, and that indigenous yeasts are unpredictable and dangerous. You could argue that they're just teaching about the bulk of wines, and don't have time to cover a very small minority of wines being made in different ways. But in my opinion, that skips out on some of the most interesting and complex wines being made today. The further I've gotten into learning about natural wines and meeting with the winemakers, the more I've had to discount most of what I learned about winemaking at the WSET. Seems like a pretty big omission to me.

As someone who worked in retail, the point where this old school dogma really falls apart for me comes when we start to talk about price. Of course there are some very fine chardonnays being turned out in Burgundy. But they cost 2-3 times as much as the natural stuff from other areas. Even if the prices of Burgundies somehow magically came down to equal the other wines, I would still prefer some of the crazy, funked out, natural wines I've tried. Now, of course, as with everything, some of this does come down to personal preference. I don't think Kermit Lynch, for example, would always agree with me. I like crazy funky wines. I like them a lot. I think he probably prefers wines that are a little more "normal" than I do. Others prefer their burgundies oaked to the max. And that's ok, there's room for all our palates at the table. But if it's a question of personal preference, why all the dogma?

So imagine you're someone like me who prefers the crazy wines. In fact, you think they're your favorite wines in the whole world to drink. You like them so much you decide to start making some of your own. Maybe even your father made wines like this, and your grandfather before him, and you see yourself just continuing their work the way it's always been done. Then you have all these people saying that the way you make wines isn't the best way, that theirs is instead. Don't you think it would be natural for you to get some friends together and start talking about how your way is better instead?

So what we have here are two competing dogmas. According to the definition of the word, both of them can't be right. In fact, I don't think either of them are right, for everyone. It just depends on what you like. But I think you can understand why it happens on either side. People like to categorize and rank things. They like to make top 10 lists, and they to disagree with other people's lists perhaps even more. It's just the way we work.

Truthfully, in my experience over here in France, if you ask most winemakers if they make natural wine-- even if you're talking to them at a natural wine tasting-- they usually won't say yes. They might even belong to the AVN (Association des Vins Naturels). They're not particularly dogmatic people. They tend to be people that like to do their own thing and don't follow along with existing trends just because lots of other people out there are. They resist pigeonholing and stratification. It's really mostly the writers, bloggers, critics, and fans that come up with all this anti-dogma dogma.

Natural wine as a term certainly is full of flaws. You can't pin down exactly what it is, and it's ripe for big commercial business to come in and pluck for their own nefarious marketing plans. But you could say the same thing about any other wine marketing term out there. How about Grand Cru? Does that mean it's the best wine? Even the WSET wouldn't argue that. So does natural mean good? Absolutely not. How do I know when a wine is natural? I can tell when I taste it. Or I buy it from someone who I trust to know what natural wine taste like. Simple. No need for dogma. Just drink it and see if you like it.

Tagged with: 32 days of natural wine • cory cartwright • Natural Wine • natural wine dogma • natural winemaking • vin naturel

Reading Natural Wine Labels

On May 5, 2010, in Blog, Natural Wine, by ngorevic

French wine labeling laws are one of the things people who work in wine spend a significant amount of time studying in wine class. Everything is legislated for what were originally very good reasons. Even more complicated than the laws behind the labels though, is the complex systems of appellations that the label expresses. It's one of the biggest complaints non-wine professionals have about French wine. If you don't know the appellation, you just don't know much about the wine. For example, most people know if they see Bourgogne somewhere on a label, that means it comes from Burgundy. But what if it says Chorey-les-Beaune (also Burgundy), or Condrieu (the Rhone Valley), or how about Saint-Emilion (Bordeaux). None of these, or the thousands of other appellations you could see on a bottle, even gets close to telling you what the grape is inside that bottle. Sigh.

Of course, there's a good reason for all that complicated silliness. It's because French wine (and a lot of French things, like cheese) are based on a sense of place. People in France got to know products way back when based on where they were from. They know that the little village of Saint Marcellin makes a really nice creamy soft cows-milk cheese and that Gevrey Chambertin (another Burgundy) makes super prestigious wines. When people started making wines in the US, they didn't have any of that sense of place branding to build on, so they decided to go with grape names instead. That's why lots of people have an idea of what Chardonnay and Pinot Noir taste like. But in France you hardly ever see the grape on the label.

The French wine laws came about originally because some really shady people, desperate during the dearth of wine in the phylloxera epidemic, started making fake wine out of sugar and fruit juice and other weird things, passing them off with labels that said wine. The AOC system definitely worked to protect consumers against that nastiness. They set up all kinds of requirements like maximum yield restrictions, grape varieties allowed, and chaptalization standards for every appellation. They also set up tasting panels to test the wines, to make sure they are typical of what the appellation is supposed to be like.

Now that all sounds well and good, but it can become a problem when it gets to that tasting panel. Especially when the panel is made up of a bunch of people who taste an unusual natural wine, say it's not typical, and reject it from the appellation. Now this particular natural wine may indeed not be typical, but that doesn't change the fact that there are lots of consumers, sommeliers, and wine shop owners who think the wine is great, and think it should sell for $15 or even higher. But once the wine has been rejected, the winemaker is probably going to have to lower it down to the Vin de Table (VdT), or table wine level, like the one you see pictured up top of this post.

Vin de Table is supposed to be really cheap crap basically. They usually cost around a dollar or two per bottle, the grapes can come from anywhere in France, and they can be a blend of as many grapes as wanted. There are no rules against chaptalization, no yield maximums, and even different vintages can be blended, if you've got some really old juice lying around that you don't know what to do with. It's not permitted to even put a vintage on the bottle. Thus we end up with a label that looks like this:

This wine is made in the Macon area of Burgundy by Gilles and Catherine Vergé, and it goes for somewere over $25 a bottle. It's fantastically made, super duper funky, and most definitely not recommended for any new-comers to natural wine. You'll see it on the shelves on the best natural wine shops all over Paris. Notice how it says Lot 02 04 on the top? That means it was harvested in 2002 and bottled in 2004. How do I know that? Because the winemaker told me that's their "code" for showing the vintage. Lots of natural winemakers have come up with tricks like this to indicate a vintage and squeeze it by the laws that govern these things. If you look at the bottom it does say the postal code where it was made, but how many French zip codes have you memorized? So not only does this wine not say a grape variety, or a place it's from, it can't even really say when it was made. Needless to say, these wines are even harder for the average consumer to understand than the old-school ones.

This wine probably adhered to all those standards I mentioned required by the appellation. It's not made with any funky non-allowed grapes, and it certainly had a minuscule yield compared to most Macon wines. So why go VdT? Well, to get to the point where the tasting panel will test your wine, you of course have to pay a fee. Then you also have to make all the labels. Sometimes the tasting panel is made up of a bunch of old fuddy-duddies that don't enjoy a cloudy and funky natural wine, and the wine will get rejected. Then the winemaker will have to make all new VdT labels, and is out the fee plus the cost of all the labels. So a lot of these winemakers just elect to remain free of the system, and do what they want without worrying about the government. They could probably make more money and charge more per bottle if they had an AOC designation on the bottle, but a lot of them don't want the hassle and prefer to do their own thing instead.

Here's one the worst examples of a hard-to-understand wine label I've seen yet. In case you're wondering, it's a light and cheerful pineau d'aunis made by Pascal Simonutti from the Loire valley. I'm still not really sure what some of that scrawl towards the bottom says. It's almost like some of them don't even want you to know what their wine is. It's kind of similar to the speakeasy trend in bars going on in New York, places with no sign out front that you just have to be cool enough to know how to find. And it actually does seem to work that way.

So how do you read natural wine labels? You don't, unfortunately! You really just have to know the producer, or know who you are buying from and trust their advice. This puts the focus back on who is making this wine, which is really what natural wines are all about anyway. And a certain amount of mystery can be a good thing, as long as you have an open enough mind and palette to handle some experimentation.

Tagged with: AOC • Chaptalization • Natural Wine • natural wine labels • natural winemaking • natural wines

How Natural Wine is Made

On May 4, 2010, in Blog, Fermentation, Making Red Wine, Making White Wine, Natural Wine, Other Adjustments, Use of Sulphur Dioxide, Winemaking, wine geeks, by ngorevic

Natural wine is different as far as the wine making process is concerned, mainly because of it's exclusion of sulfur. Sulfur is used in the production of 99% of wine in the world today because it has a preservative effect. It protects the wine from the effects of oxygen and can kill off some nasty bacterias that live in the vineyard and threaten the flavor of wine. It's also used to kill off the wild yeasts living in the vineyard, so cultured yeast can be added in its place. A little sulfur is also used at bottling (even by quite a few natural winemakers) to help protect the wine during it's trip to where ever it's going.

Natural winemakers would rather take the risk of letting some of these bacterias in. That's because they prefer to use the wild yeasts, saying they add another essential element of terroir that makes each of their wines unique and different. I've also been told by a natural wine maker, who I consider quite extreme in his natural-ness, that I would be able to tell the difference in flavor if I tasted the same wine, one sulfured and bottling, and one not. I can't really say whether or not that's true, because I've never been able to carry out that experiment. But I can say the winemakers here in France that use zero sulfur make some of my most favorite natural wines.

So if most of the wine world thinks you have to have sulfur in there to keep the wine safe, how do the natural guys do it? The first and probably most popular technique in use today is Carbonic Maceration. Whether it was Jules Chauvet, or Jacques Néauport who made this method popular for natural winemaking, it doesn't really matter. In carbonic maceration, the winemaker tosses the whole bunches of grapes in the tank, rather than destemming and pressing them for their juice. The tank is sealed on top, and the grapes just sit there. The weight of the grapes starts to crush some of the grapes on the bottom, and fermentation starts naturally. The tank is sealed, so as carbon dioxide is produced, pressure is exerted on the remaining grapes, which pops any skins still not crushed. The resulting wine is usually quite fruity, light in tannins, and easy-drinking.

So, how does carbonic maceration help the winemaker avoid using sulfur? The answer is that the carbon dioxide gas released acts as an alternative protection against the evil forces of oxygen, by forming a protective blanket over the juice. The winemaker leaves the tank sealed until it's time to bottle, and then will usually let the gas escape right before putting it in the bottle. Sometimes they will even leave a little of the gas in the wine, to act as an additional preservative while the wine travels to its final destination. That's why sometimes you'll feel a little prickle for the first few sips of a natural wine.

Sounds simple, right? The thing is, as always with wine, it's not quite that simple. There are those winemakers who do strict carbonic maceration, but then there are also those who something called semi-carbonic maceration. These winemakers do the traditional fermentation I've described, but then they let the skins soak in the juice for a while longer to extract more tannin and structure, making a heavier, perhaps more serious, and age-worthy wine. They're still working under the cloud of protective gas, but then they're adding another layer of more traditional wine making on top, to make a very different style of wine.

And of course, it's not so simple as those two methods. There's really a whole continuum of people in between. Some will de-stem the bunches of grapes and then do a carbonic maceration style fermentation. And some will do a completely normal fermentation with a pressing, but then just leave the tank sealed to keep in the protective gas. So, for a wine professional who's trying to understand why a wine tastes a certain way, it can be pretty complicated. Basically, these winemakers do what they feel like and what they think will make the style they're looking for, with total disregard to all the established rules of winemaking you read about in books, and that's what makes it interesting. Basically you could say there are as many natural winemaking techniques as there are different natural winemakers. But what most of them do have in common is this use of carbon dioxide as an anti-oxidant, instead of sulfur.

Tagged with: carbonic maceration • jacque neauport • jules chauvet • natural winemakers • natural winemaking • natural wines

What is Natural Wine?

On February 9, 2010, in Blog, Natural Wine, by ngorevic

At it's essence, natural wine is an attempt to return to a more traditional way of winemaking. But just how traditional do you need to get to be natural? There are some winemakers going back to fermenting their grapes in Amphora, large ceramic jars buried underground, like they used to do in Ancient Greece. Do we have to eschew all technology to make good wine? If that were true I bet the Amish would be pumping out some really good stuff!

Unfortunately, when it comes down to it, natural wine is just another marketing term. The people who make and enjoy these wines would like more people to know about them, so they feel the need to differentiate it somehow from the rest of wine. And along with that comes a certain amount of propaganda too. Natural winemakers become champions of nature and traditional ways, and big businesses using pesticides and synthetic yeasts become anti-terroir oppressors. Just like every other marketing term applied to wine, you can punch it full of holes pretty quickly.

For example, the French Appellation Origine Controllé (AOC) system was set up to tell consumers which wines were better. A Grand Cru is better than Premier, which is better than Vin de Table, and so on. But does it work out that way? No way! There are plenty of Grand Crus resting on their AOC designation making average wine, and there are plenty of crazy talented winemakers doing their own thing in the Vin de Table AOC making amazing juice. And there's no difference with natural wine. It would be great if you could come up with a definition, slap it on the label, and then you'd know you were getting a beautifully cloudy, original wine with real terroir. But alas, that's not the case. People can't even agree on what the term means in the first place.

The term is frought with ambiguity and misunderstanding, but that's just like everything else in wine, so might as well make an attempt. Alice Feiring, one of the most outspoken natural wine proponents, has proposed one here. The idea for her is that the winemaker should make as little intervention as possible into what nature does. And, I must say, in every wine class I took, and every accepted wine book I've read, this conforms to how they say a wine of terroir should be made. It's not the winemaker's job to impose flavors or techniques to make it taste a certain way. The winemaker is supposed to step out of the way to let nature express itself through the wine.

Having said that, when you really look at it, the winemaker has to impose some control. If he (or she) was really non-interventionist, he would just let the grapes grow like crazy, come back in the fall, pick them and let them sit in a barrel until they were ready. The fact is vines don't make good wine left to their own devices. The best wine comes when vines are stressed just enough. They have to think they're dying, so they pour all the energy into their fruit, and thrust their roots deep into the ground, pulling out the complex nutrients and minerals that make just a few potent grapes, which make complex wines. The moment the winemaker decides to prune to reduce the amount of fruit produced, he's intervened.

The person who is usually credited with starting the natural wine movement is Jules Chauvet, a biochemist and négociant who worked in Beaujolais. The chauvet method, as it's been called, is to vinify using carbonic maceration, with dry ice on top of the grapes during fermentation. Dry ice, which is really just carbon dioxide in solid form, is a natural by product of fermentation, so it would be there anyway eventually. The layer of dry ice acts as protection from bacteria, and allows the winemaker to avoid the use of sulfur. There's nothing harmful about it, but does this sound natural and non-interventionist to you? Nevertheless, many natural wines (some of my favorites) are made this way .

Unfortunately, like with everything else in wine, the term natural wine pretty much becomes useless when we try to examine it closely. So if you want to find good wines that express terroir, how do you do it? My answer is, find a good retailer! Or read a lot. Or turn the bottle around and buy by importer. In spite of all the confusion, when you find a person that dedicates themselves to tasting lots of wines and presenting what they think is the best to you, you'll end up tasting some amazingly made wines, each more individual than the next.

Tagged with: Natural Wine • natural wine courses • natural wine education • natural wine history • natural wine making • vin naturel • wine and food pairing • wine courses paris • wine education

The Natural Wine Controversy

On February 8, 2010, in Blog, Natural Wine, by ngorevic

What if there was a vast, big-business conspiracy in wine, a dirty little secret that no one wanted to talk about? What if the wine you'd been drinking your whole life and thought of as a natural product was actually made in a laboratory full of test tubes, centrifuges, and other nefarious industrial devices?

If you're the kind of person who cares about eating organic fruits and vegetables, who is concerned about the proliferation of genetically modified food and beef injected with hormones, you might want to know if this conspiracy existed. Most people I talk to have no idea that such a controversy could exist in the wine world. People drink wine they like, and they don't think too much about how it was made, and there's nothing wrong with that. On the other hand there is also a very small niche of the wine world that talks about "spoofulated" mass market wines that all taste the same and don't display any real terroir. So who's right?

My answer to this question basically is, it depends. It's not a simple question, so naturally the answer won't be simple.

Let's start by laying out a few basics of winemaking. First of all, you should know that most wine in the world today is made with the use of sulfur during the winemaking process. If you took grapes right from a vineyard and let them sit in a vat, the natural yeasts living on the skins from the vineyard would start to eat the sugar inside the grapes, converting it into alcohol--fermentation. But the modern method of making wine is to put some sulfur in the vat, which kills off those natural yeasts. The winemaker then adds a synthetically produced strain of yeast to the vat and lets it do the job of fermentation.

The key question at this point is: why? If you talk to the majority of winemakers today, they'll tell you it's because synthetic yeasts are predictable and controllable. In fact, there are many many different synthetic yeasts developed for this purpose, each one subtly changing the flavor of the resulting wine. It used to be quite popular for Beaujolais nouveau winemakers to use a certain strain that gave the wine flavors of bubble gum and bananas, for example. Modern winemakers say that using natural yeasts can be dangerous. Sometimes, the yeasts will be weak and they'll die before all the sugar has been fermented, leaving a sweet wine no one wants to drink. Other times, fermentation might take months to finish, or maybe it'll never finish at all. If you use a synthetic yeast, you can be quite sure fermentation will happen in x number of days, every time.

If you talk to most natural winemakers and enthusiasts though, they'll tell you that making wine is not a science, it's really an art, and the winemaker needs to be willing to step out of the way and let nature do its thing, to make some really amazing wine with special terroir. They say the natural yeasts add another element of individuality and terroir to the wine. Sometimes their wines might turn out a little funky in a bad year if they\'re made this way, but other times they might produce something totally amazing. Either way, they say, each wine will taste a lot more different than the way it did the year before, and each vineyard will produce it's own unique flavors, satisfying palettes yearning for uniqueness.

Modern winemakers also like to fine and/or filter their wines. They pass the wine through very fine metal mesh, or they might also add a soluble material like egg whites, which collect solid bits and help to clarify the color of the wine. This makes for clear wine that looks nice in the glass. Natural winemakers often don't filter their wines at all, and you'll find the wine quite cloudy, with a fair amount of gunk sitting in the bottom of the bottle. They say the filtering removes another level of unique flavor from the wine.

Then you have lots of other modern techniques, which modern winemakers hail as the benefits of scientific advancement, and natural wine fans declare chemical and artificial. There's micro-oxygenation, in which little bubbles of air are slowly introduced to a young wine, to speed up the aging process and soften harsh tannins. And there's reverse-osmosis, where wine is put into a huge centrifuge, where alcohol or tannins can be removed if there's too much.

And on the natural side, you have biodynamic winemakers burying cow horns filled with manure, talking about the importance spiritual frequencies, and deciding when to harvest based on the cycles of the moon.

Modern winemakers say there's nothing wrong with any of these new advances. They point to the stainless steel tank, which many natural winemakers use, as a scientific advancement that everyone is ok with, and say fear of the other techniques is just fear of change and advancement. And the biodynamicists say that while some their stuff sounds a little crazy, it actually has some scientific basis. That cow horn is mostly calcium, which is a natural pH balancer and fertilizer, so it helps the soil when they grind it up and spread it all over the vineyard.

So who's right here? Well, in my opinion, they're both right, in their own world. I've tasted a fair amount of natural wines, and they can be very different and unique. Sometimes they're not my taste, and sometimes I absolutely love them. But they're usually interesting. I've also tasted a fair amount of wines that weren't made naturally that displayed a remarkable amount of terroir. And there are plenty of wines that claim to be made naturally, with organic grapes, but for a variety of reasons, they're just impostors and they're not that interesting.

I tend to prefer natural wines, but having worked in retail I can tell you for sure that some people just don't like a lot of them. I don't really believe there's any intentional conspiracy to cover up the natural wines' existence, but I also don't think anyone is being very open about all the processes they use to change their wine, because they're afraid of what people might think if they found out. And there's definitely a niche of foodie people out there that wouldn't like what they heard, if they knew all this stuff was being done to their wine. Is it as bad the semi-secret Confined Animal Feeding Operations (CAFO's) that may be responsible for creating e-coli? No, definitely not. But does it remove some terroir and uniqueness from the wines? Yes, I believe it probably does.

I think the answer here, is that you just have to go taste some and see what you think. If you're like me, and you're the kind of person who gets sick of something pretty quickly, even if it's really good, you might really love natural wines. Other people love to find a good bottle, buy it again and again, and never get tired of it. They might not like the craziness of some natural wines. There's just no accounting for the difference in taste, and I think there's room for all kinds of palettes in this world.

But until you try them, you won't know where your palette lies. And to be fair, you should probably try a bunch to give it a fair shot until you're sure you don't like them. Because one huge benefit about natural wines is they tend to be really cheap! There are a few cult natural winemakers out there that command high prices, but even those are nothing compared to the Premier Crus of Bordeaux. The mainstream, critic driven wine world really hasn't grabbed onto this natural wine thing yet, and they're the ones that often bring the outrageous prices. That explains why you may have never ever heard they existed yet. So if you like them, you can have wines with a lot of complexity that won't break your budget. It's one of the few bargains for really high quality out there in the wine world right now.

So now, you're probably wondering how to find these wines right? Well, I don't have time to discuss it now, but stay tuned and I'll be writing more on that soon!

Tagged with: biodynamic wine • food and wine pairing • Natural Wine • natural wine courses • natural winemaking • natural winemaking history • natural yeasts • synthetic yeasts • vin naturel

Domaine LaPierre

On October 13, 2009, in Blog, Natural Wine, by ngorevic

Domaine LaPierre was a place full of natural wine wonders sometimes difficult to access. When I was there the Domaine was in the thick of Harvesting and the start of winemaking, so things were a bit hectic. Marcel himself was a flurry of constant motion. Wine, and I mean amazing wine, flowed like water. The food was stunning. And the partying was some of the most intense I've ever witnessed. But in the end it was all a bit daunting for someone whose French was just ok.

As soon I met Marcel, he whisked me off on a whirlwind tour of whatever he was doing. This involved driving quickly out to a vineyard to look at some grapes for about 7 seconds, tasting half fermented wine straight from the vat, picking up some harvesters from other fields, inspecting wine samples with a biologist, and tasting some aged wine in the cave (you really have to pronounce that the french way, like cahhhv, much cooler).

What does half fermented wine taste like, you might be wondering? Really sweet. But delicious. While I harvested, I had snacked on grapes that tasted a lot like that juice, so it was a pretty familiar flavor to me. You wouldn't really want to drink this stuff on a regular basis because the acidity was through the roof (we spit it out) but it was really interesting to taste. We then took some of the wine back to the lab, where Marcel's friend's wife, a biochemist specializing in wine, could examine the samples under a microscope. Here I got to see what indigenous yeasts look like (a lot of little clear stationary oval shaped things). She was checking for bacteria that might be a problem. When you make natural wine without sulfur, you have to be super careful that there are no bad bacterias that might ruin the wine. Cleanliness is paramount.

The picture up at the top of the post is Marcel's cave. It's a big room full of barrels, and as you can see they use one of the barrels as a bar. Marcel fetched a couple different bottles for us to drink. One was a 2004 Marcel LaPierre, and the other was his special cuvée from 2006, which actually is made with sulfur (and, if you're curious, is not exported to the United States). I got a brief peek into the room where Marcel cellars all these bottles, and I noticed he had a lot of Saucisson Sec hanging in there too. I wish my cellar had that! So yes, Cru Beaujolais can age, and it ages really really well. The 2004 still had the quintessential Beaujolais fruit driven flavor, with an extra dash of leathery aged wine taste that I found completely bewitching. The 2006 cuvée is a very concentrated wine, undoubtedly a careful selection of the best grapes. But it was somewhat lacking in that natural wine floral department, which I would think is due to the use of sulfur.

Ok, now that the wine geekery is out of the way, here's an interesting tidbit about French politesse. They don't introduce themselves like we Americans do. Marcel and I tasted these wines with the biologist, another portly French guy with a huge curling mustache who gesticulated wildy when he talked, and another guy wearing shorts who looked to have just emerged from the fields. I have no idea really who any of these people were, because they never introduced themselves. That doesn't mean we didn't shake hands though. That happened right when someone entered the room. People do everything else the same-- you talk about why you're here or who you are, but it's quite possible you never get the person's name. I later learned from Guy that the portly guy was the biologist's husband, and that he worked off the grid, so to speak, making charcuterie and selling whatever goods he could get his hands on. These were the kinds of characters you could expect to run into at Domaine LaPierre.

After we tasted a drank a heck of a lot of the beautiful Marcel LaPierre wines in the cave, it was time to eat. Dinner could not have been more different from Chateau Cambon. At Chateau Cambon we mostly drank Beaujolais Nouveau, and Rosé, and we were only given 6 or so bottles for 20 people. At Domaine LaPierre, case after case of the LaPierre cuvée sat ready to be opened. And open them they did. This is a wine that costs about $23 in the States. I have 12 bottles of it sitting in my cellar, and I'm planning to savor them for special occasions over the next several years as I watch them age gracefully. At Domaine LaPierre, they chugged them down like water.

The food was delicious, and plentiful. At Chateau Cambon, the kitchen was behind closed doors, and the bosses ate behind those doors. The "chef" would emerge to plop down a tin pan full of the latest industrialized reheated creation. At Domaine LaPierre, the kitchen was open, and I saw the cooks emerge on several occasions to dance with Marie LaPierre (Marcel's wife). Marcel, his wife, son, daughter and friends all ate in the same room with all the harvesters. An 8 year old boy ocassionally wandered in banging loudly on a drum, accompanied by a slightly older boy blaring notes out of a trombone, to cackles of laughter by the crowd.

The crowd of harvesters was also different. At Chateau Cambon, almost everyone was between the ages of 17 and 21. At Domaine LaPierre, I talked to one man who was 70 years old. He said it was something like his 20th year of harvesting at Domaine LaPierre, and his 35 year old son was with him. By the way, they didn't make him cut grapes, he drove the truck to take the grapes back to be vinified. His son was cutting grapes in the field.

The harvesting was also different at Domaine LaPierre. A few of my fellow vendangeurs from Cambon had switched over to Domaine LaPierre, and I asked them what the field work was like. They said the work was much slower, because they were actually selecting individual grapes from each bunch to use. This was the careful picking I had heard Marcel was renowned for. The quality control in these fields was unbelievable. They threw about half the grapes they cut right onto the ground, just because they weren't good enough.

Oh yeah, and the parties? As I mentioned before, at Chateau Cambon I thought it was a stretch to stay up talking and drinking until midnight when we had to get up at 6:30 in the morning. At Domaine LaPierre, they didn't stop partying until 5 AM. Now some of those people partying didn't have to get up early, but I'm pretty sure some of them did. I went up to sleep at around midnight, when there were already a few others asleep, and the sounds of the partying continued at a fevered pitch, despite the fact that people were trying to sleep just one floor up. And when I say fevered pitch, I mean that people were laughing and screaming at the top of their lungs non-stop until 5 in the morning. On more than a few occasions several of the partyers would barge into the sleeping room, still yelling and laughing, at full-voice. They'd turn on all the lights, come in for a few minutes to chat (not whispering, again in a full voice) and then leave. On one occasion someone had apparently drunkenly fallen out of their bed, and several partygoers came in to laugh and point at him sleeping on the floor, again with the lights on. Needless to say, I didn't get very much sleep that night. I guess the only way to really sleep there was to drink yourself into a stupor so deep you wouldn't even notice you were suddenly on the floor instead of in your bed.

When I woke up the next day, after 8 days of harvesting, copious wine drinking, and very little sleep, I realized I had to get out of there. I spoke with Marcel, and he told me winemaking wouldn't really begin in earnest until the harvest was complete anyway. He said if I returned in a week, I'd really be able to learn some thing. So I packed my bags and ran back to quiet and comfortable Paris.

Tagged with: courses wine • food and wine pairing • pairing food and wine • wine and cheese pairing • wine cheese pairing • wine courses • wine on line • wine tasting class • wine tasting course

Marcel LaPierre

On October 9, 2009, in Blog, Natural Wine, Working the Harvest, by ngorevic

Ahh, yes the promised land, Domaine LaPierre. It's been a while, so you might have forgotten that originally I wanted to end up at Domaine LaPierre, but had to settle for his second vineyard, Chateau Cambon. Domaine LaPierre sits in the Cru vineyards of Morgon, while Chateau Cambon is just normal old Beaujolais. But Marcel makes both the wines, so Cambon was a great place to work with natural grapes.

But Marcel LaPierre lives at his Domaine, not at Chateau Cambon. I saw him from a distance while we were in the Cambon fields, but never got to talk to him. I'd met the man in New York, but I had a feeling he didn't remember me. As you can guess from the title of this post and the picture above, I did finally make it to Domaine LaPierre, and I did manage to hang out with the man who practically invented natural winemaking. How? Well, keep reading and you'll find out!

After the party at the end of harvesting, I met a funny character, named Guy. Guy was the maintenance guy at Chateau Cambon and he fixed everything at the winery, including the complicated machinery like the vinification tanks and pumps, all the way down to broken windows on tractors. We got to talking and after I told him I was certified as a sommelier, and a student of wine, he realized I needed to ask a lot of questions to Mr. Marcel directly. So from that point on, Guy made it his personal mission to get me everything I could possibly need.

The next day, Guy insisted on taking me to see all of Beaujolais in his little white compact French car. We drove the entire length, which is really only about 15 miles long, so definitely feasible in an afternoon. He showed me the mountain of Brouilly (where the Cote de Brouilly Cru appellation gets it's name), the Cote du Puy, and this pretty Church in Chiroubles. Now keep in mind that the end of the harvest party was the night before, and Vendangeurs really know how to party. I think I finally went to bed at 4 am, and Guy had instructed me to get up promptly at 8 am so we could get started. As we zipped along Beaujolais country roads in the tiny french subcompact, my stomach barely satiated with the traditional French breakfast, and a pretty severe gueule de bois (direct translation-face of wood aka hangover), I began to feel a little nauseous. When we returned to the winery, I confessed to Guy that I couldn't eat and had to lie down. I expected him to be shocked, thinking what a silly American I was who didn't want to eat lunch like a normal French person. But instead, Guy quickly brought me to his bedroom, tucked me under the covers, and gave me some strange French medicine disguised as paté de fruit (fruit paté) to settle my stomach. Did I mention that Guy was the nicest guy on the planet? At this point he had spent 4 hours with me, having only met me 8 hours before that, and now he had given me his bed. I don't know if this is just the typical Beaujolais country hospitality in action, the vendange esprit de corps, or if he's just the nicest guy in France.

After I awoke from my nap, much refreshed and healed, Guy and I continued on with our plan to go to Domaine LaPierre and find the man with the answers. We drove over there, and to my dismay, we were told that Marcel was out in the fields, and was not to be found at the Domaine. Guy decided to give me a little tour, and we ran across Marcel's son, Mathieu, who I had actually emailed with briefly before. Mathieu was very busy loading freshly picked grapes into giant wooden foudres (the french term for really large old wooden barrels) for fermentation so we didn't want to disturb him with too much chatter. Guy and I were getting ready to leave, when I turned around, and voilà! There he was, the great white whale himself, Marcel LaPierre.

Mr. LaPierre walked right up to me and shook my hand firmly. Guy explained that I was a student of wine, and wanted to learn about Vinification. Marcel insisted that I stay and have dinner with them that night. At last, the fabled food of Domaine LaPierre would be mine! The secrets of natural winemaking would open themselves up to me! Or so I thought. That all deserves its own post, so you'll have to tune in next week to read the rest.