Issue link: http://winesandvines.uberflip.com/i/62522
WINEMAKING producers use ozone for at least part of their sanitizing, as well as steam, hot wa- ter, Peroxy Clean and similar antimicro- bials, citric acid, metabisulfite and rinse after rinse. Temperature control is important in the cellar, but the same holds true for wine af- ter it goes into the bottle. Coturri, for ex- ample, makes sure its shippers and retail wine shops keep the wine at or under 55ºF for long-term stability; they simply don't ship to the East Coast, where they have a large presence, in the summer. The wineries do varying amounts and types of lab work to keep on top of what is happening as their wines progress. Coturri and Arnot-Roberts rely mainly on basic juice and wine parameters; Donkey and Goat will sometimes make use of ETS Laboratories' Scorpion tests for certain situations; Edmunds will send samples to a service lab to find out the levels of poten- tially troublesome critters before deciding on filtration and the timing of filtration. Most of these producers have made some sort of attempt to identify the yeast strains at work in their wineries, but without any conclusive results. Nobody uses enzymes, nutrients or ad- ditives, and their rates of stuck fermenta- tions are lower than most wineries. Yeast happens. In the "winemaking manifesto" on the A Donkey and Goat website, in fact, Tracey Brandt says the only stuck fer- mentations they ever suffered were from commercial yeast trials. Steve Edmunds says that every now and then, some par- ticular batch refuses to take off, and so after a few days he relents and inoculates to avoid the buildup of ethyl acetate and other negative aromatics. There are some differences among them in sulfite protocols. Coturri just says no; the others use very small amounts at vari- ous points—at the crusher, after malolac- tic, before bottling—depending on the state of the fruit and wines. None of them comes close in total additions to the levels prevalent in the industry. The light bulb went off for me as I was talking to Steve Edmunds. If there is a lot of bird damage, he'll use more sulfites at the crusher. If the fermentation just won't ferment, he'll buy some yeast. If the wine hasn't reached clarity, or the bad microbe count is too high before bottling, he'll fil- ter the wine or wait a year for it to work things through. And so on. In other words, the natural winemaker as pragmatist, not zealot. There are no recipes. If the wine comes out fine year af- ter year without a smorgasbord of pack- aged additives, why bother? When trouble hits—no more often than it does with con- ventional winemaking—either fix it or, if it's a small enough batch, dump it. But if it ain't broke… Going this far "natural" may be too much of a stretch for most wineries. But the fact that these techniques can work, and demonstrably work well, should at least be food—and I don't mean DAP— for thought. These examples might pro- vide a good occasion for more conven- tional wineries to review what they do, especially those things they do on auto- pilot just since they've been on the checklist for 10 years, and make sure there's a good reason for doing it. It's entirely possible that a winery could save itself a lot of time, trouble and money—and become more "natural" in the process. Tim Patterson is the author of "Home Wine- making for Dummies." He writes about wine and makes his own in Berkeley, Calif. Years of experience as a journalist, combined with a con- trarian streak, make him interested in getting to the bottom of wine stories, casting a critical eye on conventional wisdom in the process. Wines & Vines DeCeMBeR 2011 45