Do Nothing Winemaking

The haters love to point out that a lot of organic & natural wines are technically faulted. Yeah, okay, fair enough. I heard the same complaints about Organic fruit & vegetables when they first went mainstream. I remember one farmer saying "In my time, organic vegetables were the ones that fell off the truck & looked like shit." Pretty funny actually, but in retrospect it sounds outdated. After awhile, those complaints went away, whether because quality improved or because the reactionary kickback from the mainstream dissipated. The cynic in me wonders if it's because the mainstream invested in organic & brought it into the fold.

This same thing will happen and is already happening with Organic & natural wine. The really bad stuff won't survive. The quality stuff will. Some mainstream wineries will invest in Organic & natural wine, & we'll get some really boring but reliable versions. A few talented winemakers will keep producing Organic & natural wines with serious soul & artistry. And meanwhile, the mainstream will keep doing their thing. We'll all learn to play along together, & there will be a niche for everyone.

I'm already bored with that side of the debate. The more interesting side of the debate are the deeper issues that only a true wine geek would want to read about. So if you've made it this far, & are still interested, here are my deep dives for us wines geeks:

Is a fault a fault?

Jolie Laide is the French term that translates as "ugly pretty" but refers to things which are classically ugly but unconventionally beautiful, perhaps in fact beautiful because of their faults. There's a rather famous wine brand named after this phrase, perhaps because of the poetry of this idea, and its clear metaphor with wine (I'll ask the Owner, Scott Schulz, if I meet him and get the chance). In any case, the meaning of this French phrase and its relevance to natural wine raises for me the question of what makes for a "beautiful" wine: Baywatch jogging down the beach or a Mona Lisa smile glimpsed in passing?

Is bleu cheese faulted but mozzarella cheese perfection just because bleu cheese is not to everyone's taste? Or somewhere in between, perhaps a nice Camembert? A little funk is good but too much is an issue?

Is it a matter of context? Bleu cheese is great with honey & nuts but probably won't work on a pizza?

Is it a matter of intent? Bleu cheese is great if done intentionally and well, but not all moldy cheese is actually bleu cheese (especially if you were trying to make mozzarella...)?

There is plenty of bleu cheese natural wine out there that I would qualify as the first two: a matter of taste, or a matter of context. Great wines just not for everyone or every situation.

There is also plenty of bleu cheese natural wine out there that is basically moldy American cheese masquerading as bleu cheese (mousy, band-aid, vinegary). That's mostly because a lot of amateurs with no serious winemaking craftsmanship skills or training jumped onto a trend. More power to them for trying, home winemakers trying new things and pushing boundaries and not being afraid to ask stupid questions, take wild risks and do things that "aren't done" is one of the life-bloods of this industry. Not all experiments work, it's just a shame that some of those failed experiments made it into the marketplace under the moniker of natural wine. Anyways, these spoiled wines are a side effect of a trend and not the core of organic/natural winemaking.

The Past & Future of natural wine

Done right, organic & natural winemaking is not a trend, it is in fact the original and historically most practiced form of grape-growing and winemaking known to man, what all winemakers did before we mined sulfur & purified bags of tartaric acid & animal by-products & toxic chemicals & a thousand other additives for farm & winery.

This age of agro-chemical farming & food production we live in is a microcosm, a blip on the radar of history, and the fools who say that adding crap on crap on crap to our farms & wines is "how it is done" and going back to a simpler way of doing things is a trend or revolutionary, those automatons suffer from a lack of sentient thought & historical perspective.

Furthermore, I believe that in 100 years our progeny will look back on this age of chemical agriculture as a dark age in human history (assuming quite optimistically that we don't turn Earth into a dystopian wasteland). Nature is infinitely complex, and to use chemicals to sterilize and control it is foolhardy in agriculture and human health. We are re-discovering how closely humans are linked to the ecosystems that surround us, whether the ecosystems on our farms or the ecosystems of microbes in our bodies. If you have no idea what I'm talking about I suggest you read this amazing article by Michael Pollan.

Yet I am not Masanobu Fukuoka and I believe that man must intervene, we must play our part to elevate nature & to save it (well, that actually is sort of what Mr. Fukuoka was saying but I don't want to go off on yet another tangent). Winemaking is intervention, living is intervention. The endpoint of winemaking with no intervention is not wine, it is vinegar. By definition winemaking is intervention. We intervene when we plant grapes, use grafted vines, decide when to pick, decide to pick by hand vs machine, decide when to press, decide what to age our wine in, decide when to bottle. The issue isn't whether we intervene, it's how we intervene. Everyone must make their choice, define their style by a line in the sand. For me, if I must intervene, I will do my best to pay honor and respect to nature, to preserve & express it, perhaps elevate it in my better moments & better vintages.

But Natural Winemaking has no definition...

Yeah, and that's an issue. I am passionate about transparency in labeling, which is why unlike most wineries I list all ingredients on my labels, so the consumer knows exactly what is going in their bodies.

I don't like rules or laws on a craft or creative art. I hate dogma. I could never make the controlled & regulated recipe wines or France or German beer by the purity laws. Those laws came into place to stop adulteration but have led to a stifling of creativity. A good recipe can make a great dish but I prefer to innovate and create new dishes, and for that reason I'm drawn to and inspired by the lack of dogma or formal regulations in the natural wine world.

So where do I stand, where's my line in the sand? It boils down to why. Why I make wine the way I do, is to make my wine as healthy, good for the environment, and high quality as possible. Which explains some of my deviations from Natural Wine dogma.

I eschew additives because I want to make soulful & distinct wines, not sterile consistent wines. And because I doubt that synthetic additives make wine healthier. But I will sometimes (mostly in my non-organic but still sustainable Lucid wines) use cultured yeast to re-create a diverse micro-biota in a wine fermentation. I do this by adding 5-10 strains of yeast, usually a mixture including "wild" (non-saccharomyces) yeast strains that are found on grapes, along with beer yeast, lactic acid bacteria, probiotic bacteria (similar to kombucha), and maybe a few strains of mainstream wine yeast. I do this in part because it makes a super delicious and complex wine. I do this also because, as any winemaker who has even the most basic knowledge of wine science can tell you, a supposedly "wild" fermentation (without intentional inoculation) is only truly wild for a few days or percent alcohol of fermentation, after which a single strain of cultured yeast will take over, even if you don't add any (they exist in the air & colonize rapidly). So, sometimes I'll hedge the bets of my inoculated-wild ferments in favor of the "wild" yeast, which counter-intuitively I do by adding yeast. I've also experimented with a "pied de cuve," a way to build a strain of yeast derived from the vineyard but concentrated in advance so that the wild yeast strain dominates your fermentation.

I age some of my wines on wood (oak or other woods) when it will result in a wine of higher quality and will accentuate natural elements of the wine. The tannins in these woods that extract into the wine act as strong antioxidants and are known to be good for human health, so I count them as a win from a health perspective. But that's just a bonus and not why I do it. I use wood to age my wine because subtle use of wood can add layers and depth to wines that accentuate and bring out latent flavors in a wine. It is a traditional, ancient technique that is as natural as they come, wood straight from nature to age with your wine and add to the flavor. If you take offense at this because you don't think it's natural or traditional, go tell a brewer that adding hops to beer isn't natural. Or read the work of the world's foremost alcohol archeologist Patrick McGovern, who has shown that the earliest wines were aged in clay vessels lined with pine resins and combined with hawthorn fruit wine, rice beer, and honey mead. Trying to make a case that "natural" or "ancient" style wines should be grapes and nothing else fails the history test. Again, to me it's a matter of why. If your why is to make ancient wine, then co-ferment hawthorn, grapes, rice & honey in a pine-resin lined clay jar & serve it around a camp-fire. Honestly, I'd drink it out of curiosity.

I filter most of my wine because I am obsessed with quality. I have tasted and conducted hundreds of side by side comparisons of filtered versus unfiltered wine. The filtered wine is almost unanimously better. When it comes to natural & organic wine, which due to the lack of strong preservatives is prone to spoilage, it is obvious to me that filtered natural wine creates consistently higher quality.

A chef must choose what to do with raw ingredients. Leave them raw, just serve a plate of apples & lettuce & raw ingredients? Is an apple better than apple pie? Is an apple pie not natural? I love a good apple but bakers shouldn't be criticized for making pies, and saying that apple pies are not natural just sounds ridiculous. Raw salads are great and have a place but a 7-course dinner is delicious.

I'm just trying to make a delicious 7-course vegan meal with a few raw courses & a lot of superfoods & some wild foraged stuff and probably a few ingredients you've never even heard of before. So feel free to denigrate me as hipster but don't try to claim you're more natural than me or that natural wine is terrible. You ain't artsier than me.

-Kevin Luther, Owner & Winemaker, Voluptuary Wine & Lucid Wine