Here in the wine corner, we have real admiration for winemakers who do things the old-fashioned way, who work with traditional materials and methods, who eschew needless interventions with the aim of making a more honest, authentic product.
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 honest, we face a dilemma when we have to deal with manipulation (another shorthand term) 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 should we be so down on it?
The truth is that as long as wine has been made winemakers have seen in raw wine 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 inevitable.
Eager to deploy our ingenuity, we assumed that there were things that could be done to make wine more delicious, alcoholic, and generally interesting. Some efforts gave results so satisfying that they’ve become part of the canon of practice, responsible, in some cases, for entirely new categories of wine. Ports, sherries and Champagne-method sparkling wines will be among the most familiar exemplars.
Of course, manipulation has a dark side, obvious when used to accelerate natural processes 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 or displace her.
Manipulation continues to be a not-so-nice word in some quarters. What follows are my top picks for historic interventions we should be awfully glad we made.
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 Ur-intervention; everything starts here.
Maturation. Storing wine securely had known benefits, 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 evolved into a kind of prime of life. It’s true that only natural processes are involved, but growing old gracefully isn’t something wine does without help.
Raisining. 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 outdoors for a period of time, effectively dehydrating them and concentrating their sugars. The process — known as the passito method — is still widely employed in the making of higher-alcohol, potently sweet dessert wines, such as vin santo.
Oak influence. Another surprise: The material wine is in contact with as it matures makes a contribution not just to its character, but to its flavor. 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 in detail in an agricultural manual of 1600. Today, coopers go a step further by charring, or toasting the interiors of oak barrels over an open flame. Skilled vintners use them to season their wine as cooks would a sauce.
Lees contact. Yeasts are the great unpaid labor force responsible for the 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 the 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 boost the effect.
Encouraging 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, bone 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).
Intentional oxidation. The relationship between wine and oxygen is extremely complicated — on the one hand O2 is necessary for wine’s development; under some circumstances, an agent of decay. The phenols (pigments and 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 measured amounts of oxygen take on deeper colors (gold, amber, pumpkin) and exhibit flavors that push fruit into the background in favor of savory, nutty, earthy notes. Examples include long barrel-aged Rioja whites, oxidatively-aged sherry styles such as amonillado and oloroso, and some skin-macerated whites (so-called orange wines). Oxidatively made wines can be astonishingly durable.
Application of 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 torrid conditions would deliver the hoped-for character. In Banyuls, vin doux naturel may be finished in glass demijohns set outdoors and exposed to the high summer temperatures of the French Mediterranean coast in a technique that’s called ‘shocking’ (seen in the photo at top).
Fortification. The upper limit of wine’s alcohol potential is directly proportional to the grape sugars at harvest — normally something between 10 and 15 percent by volume. A dollop of distilled, neutral grape spirits can be used to pump up or standardize alcohol levels. Both ports and (some) sherries derive their gratifyingly higher octane and enhanced stability 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.
We understand what naturalist winemakers and their fanbase mean when they speak in derogatory terms of manipulation, but we have a hard time taking a sweepingly 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.