Manipulation is not a four-letter word

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Demijohns expose wine to the sun and heat of a Mediterranean summer in a technique known as shocking.  Banyuls-sur-Mer, France.

CENTRAL BOTTLE HAS a real commitment to winemakers who do things the old-fashioned way, who work with traditional materials and methods, who make honest, authentic wine, who shrink from excessive manipulations in the cellar.

The shorthand term we use to describe wines like this is ‘natural’, and it’s a useful term  .  .   .   except when it isn’t.  While we can always argue about what it means for a wine to be traditional or authentic or honestwe face a dilemma when we have to deal with the manipulation bit, especially when we encounter wines that can only be what they because of some pretty serious interventions.  In winemaking, natural processes typically require human attention to initiate and maintain them.  So why are we so down on ‘intervention’?

The truth is that as long as wine has been made winemakers have seen in fermented musts a kind of blank canvas on which to exercise their creativity.  It’s never been enough to simply crush grapes, ferment their juice, and drink up the result.  This approach might have done for the days when we were still living as transient bands of hunter-gatherers, but as soon as we had containers all kinds of manipulations became not only possible but, it seems, inevitable.

Our eagerness to deploy our ingenuity along these lines suggests that from the beginning we assumed that there were things that could be done to improve wine by making it more delicious, alcoholic, and generally interesting.  Some interventions gave results so satisfying that they’ve become part of the technique canon, responsible in some cases for entirely new categories of wine — like Ports and sherries.

Of course manipulation has a dark side, obvious when it’s deployed to accelerate a natural process by artificial means, or when taken up for no better reason than to make a cheaper, but manifestly inferior product. Successful interventions midwife Nature, they don’t supplant her.

Manipulation continues to be a dirty word in some quarters. What follows are my top picks for historic interventions we should be awfully glad we made.

1.  Containerization. By nature wine is ephemeral, transient, a stop along the road from ripe fruit to vinegar. Only when we learned to stop it up in airtight or nearly-airtight fired pottery jars could wine become a civilized accompaniment to meals eaten throughout the year rather than fuel for a once-yearly, post-harvest, blow-out binge.  Containment is the proto-intervention; everything starts here.

2.  Aging.  Storing wine securely had known benefits (per item 1), but produced some surprises, too. Wine that wasn’t drunk immediately turned out to have a lifecycle. Mature wine assumed flavors, aromas, and a refinement of temperament that proved pleasing.  The quality improvement was sufficient to motivate discerning consumers to pay more for wine that had entered into its prime of life.  It’s true that only natural processes are involved, but growing old gracefully isn’t something wine does without help.

3.  Raisining.  It’s undeniable that a good deal of the primal appeal of wine is the hit of ethanol it delivers. Distillation as a means of raising the concentration of alcoholic beverages wasn’t developed until the Middle Ages, so earlier wine lovers eager for more of a kick resorted to the technique of leaving ripe, picked grapes in the sun for a period of time, effectively dehydrating them and concentrating the sugars in what juice remained to be pressed.   The process – known as the passito method – is still widely employed in the making of high-alcohol, potently sweet dessert wines, such as vin santo.

3. Wood.  Another surprise: The material wine is in contact with as it matures makes a contribution to its character.  A classic example are the aromas and flavors provided by oak barrels. The technique had been well-understood for hundreds of years before they were expertly described by Olivier de Serres in his Le Theatre d’Agriculture et Mesnage des Champs published in 1600. Today, coopers fine tune wine barrels by charring, or toasting the interiors with open flame and winemakers make judicious use of this admittedly expensive refinement.

 Successful interventions midwife Nature, they don’t supplant her.

4. Lees.  Yeasts are the great unpaid labor force responsible for process we call fermentation – and we ought to be grateful since they give their lives in the effort.  Once their work is done, their tiny bodies sink to the bottom of the fermenting vat creating a creamy white layer known as the lees. In most cases, wine is racked off  (removed from) its lees more or less immediately, but leaving wine in contact with his yeasty debris can add complexity and interest.  In Muscadet, lees give what would otherwise be a neutral and rather simple wine both body and character. In Burgundy, the standard treatment for more expensive chardonnay almost always involves aging on lees that are intermittently stirred up (it’s called battonage) to enhance the effect.

5.  Flor.  In some few places (notably the sherry country of southern Spain) airborne microflora are such that they will, under the right conditions, settle on the surface of freshly-made wine and produce a frothy white bloom that covers it entirely. Left undisturbed except for an occasional refresh with new wine (flor eats alcohol and needs a steady supply to thrive) it protects wine from oxygen so that it can sustain very long barrel aging.  Wine produced under flor takes on a yeasty, tangy, tactile character that’s hard to describe but which is the glory of the light dry sherries known as fino and manzanilla.  In the Jura region of France a similar process takes place under the influence of a yeasty film known as le voile (the veil).

6.  Oxidation.  The relationship between wine and oxygen is extremely complicated – on the one hand necessary for its proper development, on the other hand responsible for its premature demise.  The phenols (pigments, tannins) present in red wine offer some protection from its ravages, but whites are almost entirely at its mercy – just think how quickly a cut apple will turn brown in the presence of air and lose its fresh, snappy fruit.  But if you don’t need a fresh, snappy style of white wine oxygen can be an asset.  White wines that are allowed to develop in the presence of oxygen taken on deeper colors (gold, amber, even pumpkin) and exhibit flavors that push fruit in the background in favor of savory, nutty, earthy notes.  Examples include long barrel-aged Rioja whites and most orange wines.

7.  Heat.  Contemporary wines are all about freshness, fruit, and low-temperature fermentations, so it might seem strange to learn that there are wine regions where it is traditional to expose wines to high temperature environments until they take on a cooked quality experts refer to as rancio.  Old-fashioned Madeira is the very definition of the style, barrels of it being put aboard ship as ballast for a trip through tropic latitudes where the intense heat would provide the hoped-for character.  In Banyuls, vin doux naturel may be finished in glass demijohns exposed outdoors to the torrid summer temperatures of the French Mediterranean coast (it’s called ‘shocking’).  One effect of heat is to encourage oxidation.

8.  Fortification.  The upper limit of wine’s alcohol potential is directly proportional to the grape sugars at harvest – normally something between 12 and 15 percent by volume.  One can always concentrate sugars by the passito or similar methods, but if alcohol levels become too high in a fermenting must, yeasts die.  To pump up the alcohol one can add a dollop of distilled grape spirits. Both ports and (some) sherries derive their gratifyingly higher alcohol content from this trick, but it’s only something that’s been possible since we learned the art of alcoholic distillation from the Arabs sometime in the 12th century.

I think I know what naturalist winemakers and their fanbase mean when they speak in derogatory terms of manipulation,  but I have a hard time taking a negative view when the techniques in question are hallowed by long use, local custom, and historically pleasing results.

Nature may give us everything we need, but it’s never been known to give us everything we want.

Reach me at stephenmeuse@icloud.com   [follow_me]