La Remise

La Remise is a trade winetasting  that groups together 30 or so wineries in the south of France (and one from Spain) who are all into "natural winemaking".  Matt and I went to the annual event last Monday with our friend Serge to check out what these wineries are up to.  What, you may ask is the definition of natural winemaking?  Well, I asked the same question to many of the vignerons/winemakers present.  The answers were varied, most seemed to be organic, but the main thread that ties them all together is that they use no sulfur during vinification and little or none at bottling.  This year's poster featured a vigneron walking a tight-rope, which is very apropos to this sort of winemaking.  I have to admit it's something that intrigues me, and something that we may just well toy with one day, but you have to be careful, because one can get burned.  So far, sulfur dioxide is the only preservative that has been proven effective in winemaking. It's anti-bacterial as well as anti-oxidative; meaning that it helps protect the wine against little creatures that want to turn it into something else!  My biggest problem with the use of SO2 is that most of what is available in the market is actually a petroleum byproduct that is collected in the smoke stacks of oil refineries and converted to liquid form.  You can imagine how stupid I felt when I read this for the first time on Alice Feiring's blog.  How could we be using something like this in our "natural wine"???  It turns out that we can get natural SO2, but there's no source for it in France.  It's supposedly available from someone in Italy but his production hasn't been approved for importation into France.  I've heard that you can get it in Germany too, so we're going to put our German importers on the trail so that we can try and get some here at La Gramière.

Anyway, back to the tasting...We tasted some wines that were great.  You would never know that they weren't made conventionally. We tasted some that were definitely at the limit of what would be considered drinkable, but it was all very interesting.  The atmosphere was a bit like a Harley rider get together. Several of the winemakers seemed to be as on the edge as their wines.  It sort of seemed like you needed to be part of the "club" to belong there.  I didn't take any pictures for you, since I already felt like we didn't quite fit in.  Unfortunately, we went late in the day when things were starting to wind down. People were itching to relax and have a few drinks themselves.  I think from now on I'll go to tastings like that first thing in the morning, when there may be less people. All in all, it was a good experience, but I didn't leave there feeling like we just "have" to stop using SO2 at all. We already use very small amounts.  It's definitely a viable way to make wine, I'm just not sure I'm willing to take those kinds of risks... My balance isn't that great anyway. I might just fall of that tight rope into the abyss, and that would not be good!

Comments

[Steven Lanum]

Yikes--I always assumed SO2 came from mined sulphur; it never occurred to me that it was a by-product of petroleum. That's unfortunately the problem with being a 21st century wine drinker--every time you look there seems to be an unattractive little something crawling around. I think the wine industry needs its own voluntary 'Reinheitsgebot,' the German purity law that applies to the making of beer. Wineries adhering to such a standard could affix a symbol to their labels. I'd certainly make the effort to look for such wines.