A natural quandry - what would Alice say?

Rosé is the thorn in our side these days.  Our first year we seemingly quite easily made a stellar rosé, naturally. It had about 3 grams of residual sugar, barely detectable but it gave it a luscious mouthfeel that many people said reminded them of a top Tavel.  Then came 2006, it fermented along just fine and then started slowing down, 22 grams of sugar, 17 grams, 15 grams, until it completely stopped at 7 grams.  That's still a fair amount of sugar, but that's not all, it was at 14.8 alcohol.  Hmm rosé at 15 degrees?? Too hot, undrinkable in fact.  There were probably things we could have done to change the results, first and foremost would have been to harvest the grapes for the rosé in mid-August.   Many people told us that we should have added water!  Completely illegal here in France, but it seems it's more common than one would think.  Another thing that is illegal here is reverse osmosis, so that was pretty much the end of our rosé in 2006.  If we only had high yields and some other varietals like cinsault or carignan, that might help too.

So here we are in 2007, thinking we were going to be sure to make a great rosé, the first grapes we brought in were used to make it, all grenache, then we added the mourvèdre to it.  It seemed to be going well with the sugars dropping, we even put some fermenting red into it to give it a kick start, then boom, it stops  - nothing,  it's not happy.  Still clinging to the idea of a rosé fermented on it's natural yeasts we waited a few days, but nothing.  So in the end we had to inoculate it with commercial yeast, something I truly didn't want to do, but in the end we had no choice.

I find this really frustrating though, over here, many many wineries don't use commercial yeasts, it's not a question of organic, biodynamic or even "natural" winemaking, it's just a question of philosophy in winemaking.  It makes me nuts that some people are able to do it and we haven't been for the past two years!  Just go have a look at Alice Feiring's wonderful blog.  She's really been on  a roll lately, writing some great posts on people who make "natural" wines.  When I met her last spring in Bordeaux, one of my burning questions for her was to know her definition of  "natural" wines.  Here in France the "natural" wine movement tends to mean that there is no SO2 added, but isn't at all a guarantee that the wines are organic, or even fermented naturally without the addition of yeasts, enzymes or other additives to help the juice ferment properly.  Alice told me that her definition of a natural wine is one that is farmed organically or biodynamically, fermented with the naturally occuring yeasts, without the addition of any "extras" and finally with low amounts of,  if any SO2.  She explained that,  of course, if there was a problem,  it would be foolish to let the wine spoil, and that the winemaker must do what is necessary to save it.  Sounds like exactly the category I would like to fit into!!! Unfortunately for our rosé, that isn't the case this year.  Thankfully we had no troubles with the reds, they happily fermented to dryness and then did their malo-lactic fermentation right away!  We are going to some of it into our old double barrels to experiment with wood, hoping that the slight oxygen exchange will soften up the tannins and round it out a bit.  We'll see what happens.

It's funny, I've been following a couple of wine blogs written by Americans, and the idea of not using commercial yeast seems to be completely unheard of.  Blogger after blogger seem to talk about their "recipes" for winemaking and for this year's wine.  Pictures of them proudly adding yeast and enzymes to the grape juice.  I found those pictures almost shocking since I, myself felt like I should hide the package of yeast and not tell anyone! Does anyone in the US use the natural yeasts?  Or all they all graduates of some big-name enology program?  Am I from Mars?  or just being completely irresponsible in their minds?  I would imagine that they would think so.

Comments

[paul]

Ridge, one of the best wineries in America, only uses naturally occurring yeast, unless more is needed to finish fermentation (exactly the same as your situation, right?). It seems no conundrum to me at all, you must do what you must do to make your wine. You make choices to have your finished wine as close as possible to your stylistic/artistic/economic goals, whether that goal is natural, highly-crafted/manipulated, or commodity juice. just started reading, really enjoy the blog, thanks!