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WINEMAKING no fining, no filtration and surely nothing remotely resembling reverse osmosis. As she makes her rounds in France, Spain, Ita- ly and California, she discovers that all her heroes have, at one time or another, added something or taken something away—at least in a pinch. When fermentations refuse to ferment, a commercial yeast might save the day; some admitted to using sulfites with rot-prone fruit, and some used low levels of sulfites routinely. Feiring is told more than once that "there is no recipe." Alongside her travels, Feiring's book has a second plot line in which she plays a role in making an actual wine, a 2008 Sagranti- no from grapes grown by Ridgely Evers in Dry Creek, Calif., and eventually bottled under his DaVero label. Feiring doesn't re- ally make the wine—veteran Sonoma wine- maker Kevin Hamel does—but her input comes in the form of using whole clusters, crushing them with her own foot-stomp- ing over several days and letting a long, slow, spontaneous fermentation take place on its own. She agonizes over the prospect of adding water to reduce the potential al- cohol, a step Hamel eventually takes. Not mentioned in the book but included in the winemaker's notes on the DaVero website are a "touch of sulfur" for stabilization after the fermentation was complete and an eventual fining with "two organic egg whites from our very own chickens." The Sagrantino presumably fits into a new category Feiring herself offers: "nat- ural enough." The flexibility and open- mindedness implied in "natural enough" makes for a much more inclusive outlook, but at the same time knocks advocacy of "natural wine" down from the moral high ground it often tries to occupy. As Goode and Harrop observe more than once, hard- line zealotry about strict versions of natu- ral winemaking only makes conventional winemakers less and less interested in hearing about it. VintersSupply_acciai_Dec10.qxp 11/10/10 10:38 AM Page 1 Natural potential Right now, the volume of "natural" wines produced by self-consciously "natural" winemakers around the world is roughly the same volume that Gallo or The Wine Group pull for lab samples every year. Nearly all the producers—international and domestic—are tiny, making a few hun- dred or at most a few thousand cases per year. A somewhat larger amount of wine, especially in Europe, is made "like my Grandfather made wine": following many of the natural wine tenets, but without any philosophical overlay. These wines, how- ever, are rarely marketed as "natural" or aimed at the same high-end, wine-savvy customers as the nouveau naturalists. There are several reasons to doubt that self-consciously natural winemaking will ever become a major factor in the wine industry. The first obstacle is scale: Imple- menting fully hands-off winemaking in large operations would be incredibly risky. It is one thing to lose a single barrel to Brettanomyces through a slip-up in a no- sulfite regime; it is quite another to lose 10,000 gallons. It is highly unlikely that large or even medium-sized producers will ever go whole hog for "letting grapes do what comes naturally." There is also a very real limit on how broad a consumer base natural wines can develop because of hedonic, organoleptic issues and expectations. As many propo- nents of natural wine readily admit, some- times even with pride, these wines are "not for everyone." Some fabulous wines get made in this category, but more than a few carry a somewhat elevated level of volatile acidity, show less than crystal clarity, of- fer lots of flavors other than primary fruit, show some signs of oxidation or may not be entirely stable under less-than-careful 20 Years Experience in Stainless Steel Manufacturing • Cross-flow Systems • Sheet Filters • Lenticular Filter Housings • Cartridge Filter Housings & Micro-filtration Plants • Lees Press Filters • Combination Filters • Pressure Leaf Filters • Tank Washers • Catwalks and Stairs VINTNERS SUPPLY COMPANY™ P.O. BOX 153 ST. HELENA, CA 94574-0153 TOLL FREE: 800-366-6809 • FAX: 707-584-7902 www.vintnerssupply.com 42 Wines & Vines DeCeMBeR 201 1