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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.

The Tongue Taste Map Does Not Exist!

On October 29, 2009, in Blog, wine geeks, by ngorevic

If you've ever taken a wine class, there a good chance you've seen this map of the tongue. Wine experts love to talk about which areas of the tongue can taste sweet, salty, bitter, and sour. But the truth is, the taste map is a total fallacy. Scientists have known the taste map is wrong for quite some time now, but for some reason the myth persists in the wine world. Wine people, it's time we woke up and kept up with science from the 1970's! Please, lets stop confusing people with all this useless pseudo-scientific dribble that doesn't even make sense when you try to demonstrate it.

For example, the taste map says that you can only taste sugar on the tip of your tongue. Iif you stick sugar on the back of your tongue without letting it touch the tip, how come you can still taste sweetness? When I took classes at the WSET certified International Wine Center, at that point they preached this stuff like it was the gospel (Just so you know, they don't teach it anymore because they do now know it's not true). We were supposed to feel a tingle on the tips of our tongue when we tasted the sugar, because supposedly all the taste buds that perceive sugar are concentrated there. When none of us really felt anything, we were told that was normal for Americans, because we eat so much sugar that our tongues are numb to the effect. Try it in Japan however, they told us, and people will freak out at the new-found tingling effect. Sounds pretty good right? I certainly bought it. I've heard veteran sommeliers discuss the map. And once I went to an American Sommelier Association presented cigar seminar at Davidoff of Geneva and they busted out the good old taste map. I always had a hard time sensing the different tastes in different areas, but I just chalked that up to my inexperienced palate at the time.

So where did this myth come from exactly? It seems that the original research was done by a German scientist named D.P. Hanig in 1901. He was trying to understand taste, so he designed an experiment to measure the sensitivities of tongue in certain areas to different tastes. He have his volunteers things to taste, and mapped out the areas of the tongue that responded the most to each taste. Then later, in 1942, a Harvard scientist named Edwin Boring used Hanig's research to plot a graph of these sensitivities. It seems that the tongue does have a very slight concentration of tastes in certain areas, so the tip of the tongue does sense slightly more sweetness than the rest. People saw this graph, and for some reason took it to mean that the tip was the only place that could sense sweetness, thus the taste map was born. Then in 1974, Virginia Collings came along and re-examined the data. She realized that while there were concentrations in some areas, all areas of the tongue could still taste each of the 4 primary tastes. The difference in sensitivity to sweetness in the tip of the tongue compared to the rest of the tongue is, in fact, negligible.

So if scientists have known this since 1974, what's taking us wine folks so long? I personally feel like wine snobs love having something complex and vague to hold over less knowledgeable folks heads to ensure their own superiority. But maybe that's being a bit conspiratorially minded of me. I guess wine people just aren't that into science. But we love to talk about the science of vinification, fermentation, and such things. It just seems like we've lagged behind on the science of taste. Apparently there are really 5 tastes, and possibly even 6, when you add Umami (the savory taste of glutamate, like in MSG) and perhaps the taste of fat. Ever see that in a wine text book? I bet not.

In the interest of science, I'm going to list a bunch of sources to prove that the taste map should be abolished from wine education. Spread the word, down with the taste map! Here's a wikipedia article talking generally about the taste map. I know, you're thinking Wikipedia, that's not an authoritative source! But it cites this article from livescience.com, and this one from Scientific American. Still not convinced? Well, maybe you should head on down to the library and look up Collings\' original research paper, titled Human taste response as a function of location of stimulation on the tongue and soft palate. In the meantime, here's a very sciencey document discussing the reasons for the persistance of the myth, to tide you over.

Tagged with: food and wine pairing • paris wine classes • paris wine courses • taste map • tongue map • wine and cheese pairing • wine classes • wine courses • wine education

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.