The Australian government has approved the addition of sodium carboxymethyl cellulose, which has “has long been prized by the medical world for its anti-bulking and laxative properties.” The cellulose gum prevents crystallization and cloudiness in white and sparkling wines.

Wines containing the additive will not be labeled as such. A spokesperson for the Wine Institute in California said, “I don’t think the levels that are approved for use in wine in the EU and Australia will give that laxative effect.”

Just in case, they’re now putting wine in cans.

Over on Twitter, wine Twitterati declared that “the bottom fell out of my world when I read that” and to being “down in the dumps” after hearing of the “sad tail.” Or, “Imagine a discreet Times hed: For Australian Wines, the Beginning of the End.”

The store manager says that the locals told her they were making jam. However, a court found otherwise, levying a $6,700 “suspended” fine for selling sugar to wine producers without recording their names as law requires.

Wine producers in certain zones of Northern Europe are allowed to add sugar to the grape juice (aka must) before or during fermentation, a process called chaptalization. The goal is not to have residual sugar in the wine, which would make it sweet. Rather, it is to boost the level of alcohol. Producers must declare the amount used and pay a tax of $17.50 per 220 lb of sugar added. The general impression has been that global warming has diminished the need for chaptalization as rising temperatures boost the natural sugar in grapes. During fermentation, yeasts chomp sugars to ferment into alcohol (and CO2). But one of the years in question was 2007, a cooler and rainer year than usual for the region.

Even though the authorities collect the taxes for chaptalization and other forms of enrichment, they are reluctant to divulge the figues to offer a window onto how widespread the practice is. Dismayed by the lack of official statistics, Benjamin Lewin estimates that 17 to 33% of French wine is chaptalized, depending on the heat of each vintage.

But instead of laying down weapons, some vintners appear to be ratcheting up technology as Mother Nature dealt them a third consecutive growing season that was relatively cool. Wines & Vines, a trade publication, ran a story last year on Flash-Détente, which roughly translates as “instant relaxation.” They report that by heating the grapes to 185ºF and then sending them to a vacuum chamber to be cooled, the the technology increases extraction from red grapes while minimizing bitter seed tannin and pyrazine (vegetal) odors. The finished wine also has a darker color. Because some of the water content of the grapes has been vaporized, the pre-fermented juice (called “must”) has a higher sugar content, which will result in higher alcohol or will be adjusted down in some way. Developed in France, the first Flash-Détente machines arrived in California in 2009.

Here endeth today’s Flash class on winemaking.

The NYT had a good story about Piero Lugano of Bisson who dunking his wine a couple of hundred feet under the Italian sea for a year’s aging called “Abissi.” Here’s his reasoning:

“It’s better than even the best underground cellar, especially for sparkling wine. The temperature is perfect, there’s no light, the water prevents even the slightest bit of air from getting in, and the constant counterpressure keeps the bubbles bubbly. Moreover, the underwater currents act like a crib, gently rocking the bottles and keeping the lees moving through the wine.”

It’s an interesting idea (even Cristal has tried it) that evokes all those amphorae strewn on the floor of the Mediterranean, even if they weren’t put there for that purpose. For wineries that would have to rely on climate-controlled cellars, this storage would be a greener option if they get their power from non-renewable sources.

I can’t help but wonder though…is it a marketing gimmick? It gives the wine a great story and wines with great stories generally fetch higher prices for wines. If you look at a video, the bottles are lowered into the sea in large cages–is it really possible that the ocean swells could rock those? The article doesn’t say which type of closure they used but if it was a crown cap, as is common for bottle fermentations, doesn’t that have an oxygen transmission pretty close to zero anyway? And I’m not sure what to make of the comment about atmospheric pressure on bubbles given that the undersea pressure is probably greater than that in the bottle of spumante. But anyway, it’s a fun story. If you have thoughts about the effectiveness of giving Neptune the keys to the cellar, hit the comments.

Last Thursday, I stopped by Hirsch Vineyards where Jasmine Hirsch told me that flowering was the second latest–and the latest was just last year. Given this year of wacky wine weather, I thought it was worth asking the question: What is flowering and how does a late flowering affect the finished wine?

To further reproduction, the vines burst flowers that become bunches of grapes. The period between flowering and the arrival of the grapes (called “fruit set”) is a tenuous time when severe weather can damage the emerging berries, so the shorter the period between bloom and set, the lower the risk to the harvest’s quality and quantity. Jasmine said that in 2005, they had an early bloom and a late set with heavy rains in between, which reduced the yields to a half a ton per acre, or 20% of the normal yield. By contrast, even though last year was their latest bloom, the fruit set relatively fast and the window of potential peril closed quickly. (And the wines in the barrel appear to be evolving well–more on that later.) Whether that will be the case again this year, nobody knows. But the late bloom did at least avert the storms of late May and early June that may have caused “shatter” in some other, warmer Northern California areas that had already had bloom. However, a late set may mean a late harvest, with its attendant risks. Mother Nature is capricious and, despite the efforts of vineyard owners like the Hirsches, ultimately runs the show.

The photo below is from a row of grapevines that have not yet flowered while the above photo is just across the row and shows that flowering has started in Block 8 pinot (pommard, planted in 1993) at Hirsch.

The winemaker at Zind-Humbrecht in Alsace who makes 40 different wines a year commented in New York last week that the petrol note can be symptomatic of three things. The first is harvesting under-ripe grapes. Riesling needs 110 to 120 days to ripen, he says, and harvesting the grapes too early can lead to an undesirable aroma. Similarly, he says that machine harvesting can lead to off-aromas in the wine, generally called “petrol.”

Second, Riesling is prone to reduction, a condition devoid of fruit aromas, and this can be mistaken as “petrol.” Instead, it is simply not desirable. Winemaking decisions such as making the wine in airtight environments such as stainless steel or even old oak can, poor use of sulfur, or leaving the wine on the lees can make it prone to reduction. A good winemaker should be able to see these problems arising and take steps to mitigate them.

Third, there is a desirable form of “petrol” in mature Riesling but Olivier says the term is “ill-chosen.” Given the choice, he would describe an earthy character as truffle instead of mold, as it’s a more desirable to choose term. Similarly, he prefers to think of mature Riesling as having a character of wet stones, minerals, sea air, or iodine, all of which are more pleasurable than the bottom of a diesel tank.

“I hope to God that nobody would think that young Rieslings smell like petrol!” Wine drinkers should trust their gut instinct and if the wine’s aromas are off-putting, then it is bad. Another way to tell if it is reduction: drop a copper penny into the wine (or swirl a copper wire) and see if the off-aromas disappear and fruit reemerges. Or try decanting it.

His Stellenbosch vineyards, four miles from the ocean, are planted 50% to Chenin Blanc, also known as Steen locally to people other than Ken (he finds the local name too confusing.) In his opinion, the best Chenin needs cool and sunshine, which may sound like a paradox. But Ken says that’s what happens in the best years in the Loire, which is often cool, and in South Africa, which has abundant sunshine and a few cooler vineyard sites.

When I saw him at a Wines of South Africa tasting in New York City on Wednesday, I asked him if Chenin blanc was a difficult grape. He said that it is like a cat: when you call it cat, it looks at you quizzically, then an hour later he’s there rubbing your leg with a look saying, “you called”? Same with Chenin: you put it in barrel and taste it and it doesn’t taste like much right away. But when you come back in six months, it has transformed, leaving you wondering, “Gee, where did that come from?”

I tasted his 2000 Chenin Blanc, a $14 wine with ten years age on it. The primary fruit had fallen away, leaving an interesting, if somewhat linear, wine dominated by an a stony version of unsweetened honey.

The FMC 2008 (about $65), comes from unirrigated, low-yield, 42-year-old bush vines, grown organically (but uncertified since 2002 because of onerous fees, Ken says). Fermentation uses native yeasts and the wine is aged in 400-liter barrels. It’s a big version of chenin, rich but stylish, silk-pillowy, with honey drizzled on top. (For the tech specs, it has 14% alc, Tartaric Acidity 6.8 g/l, and 12 g/l residual sugar.)

Here are the top four thing Ken would do if he were “boss of the world”!

1. Prohibit corks.
2. Prohibit that hard plastic wrap on consumer goods that you need a pocket knife to remove.
3. Prohibit mechanical harvesting in South Africa. The machines are imported from France and Italy, and catch lots of bugs, chamelons and spiders as well as grapes. Morever, the country is in desperate need of employment and the workers do a much better job.
4. Have gradations for Pinotage akin to Rioja (crianza, reserva, gran reserva) to indicate at a glance the degree of seriousness of the wine.

Ken Wright of Ken Wright Cellars has a video interview on the tech blog Gizmodo. Why would this graybeard of the Oregon wine industry and godfather to the biggest little wine town in Oregon (Carlton) be talking to a tech blog? He discusses using a vacuum concentrator to reduce unwanted dilution in juice after late-season rains, which can make the grapes waterlogged prior to harvesting. (Depending on desired ripeness, picking before the rains may or may not be another option for avoiding bloated grapes.) The device, imported from Italy, essentially reduces the wine to below atmospheric pressure, allowing for low temperature boiling thereby removing the excess water from the tank and leaving a more concentrated juice behind. Gizmodo mentions that there are at least a half-a-dozen other vacuum concentrators in Oregon.

Wright elaborates on why the machine is a good thing: “We spend a year of our life farming. It seems really silly to accept something sub-standard when you can make a difference, when you can do something to heal the issue.”

I give Ken Wright a tip of the ol’ winemaker’s baseball cap for detailing a part of his winemaking practices: What happens in the cellar is not discussed often enough in detail (indeed, even his own web site espouses minimal handling in the cellar).

What do you think, in general–would you rather have a machine-concentrated wine from a waterlogged vintage or the wine that mother nature intended?

I’ve wanted to sell the above line to Wines of Chile for some time. But I found another use for it: this article on natural wine by Mike Steinberger on Slate.com. It really advances the discussion. An excerpt:

Yet when you strip away all the rhetoric and dogma about “natural wines,” what are you left with is essentially just a slogan, used by a group of people to champion some wines that happen to please their taste buds and/or sensibilities…I think “natural” advocates ought to ditch the “natural” label, which is hopelessly tendentious and polarizing, and should instead put the focus where it really belongs, on individual wines and winemakers…Call them good wines, call them distinctive, soulful, or funky wines—just don’t call them natural wines.

How can water reduce one sensation and amplify another? Both alcohol and aroma molecules are volatile, meaning they evaporate from foods and drinks and are carried by the air to the odor receptors high up in the nasal cavity.

Aroma molecules are also more chemically similar to alcohol molecules than they are to water, so they tend to cling to alcohol, and are quicker to evaporate out of a drink when there’s less alcohol to cling to.

This means that the more alcoholic a drink is, the more it cloisters its aroma molecules, and the less aroma it releases into the air. Add water and there’s less alcohol to irritate and burn, and more aroma release.

Given that there’s a notion that “alcohol delivers flavors” in wine, this is a useful contribution to the discussion.

Of course, it takes a lot of water to make wine. Sometimes that water has been added in the late innings of winemaking, a process called “watering back,” with the volume measured in “Jesus units,” an oblique reference to the Marriage of Cana.

In his column, McGee adds water to a glass of 15% zinfandel, bringing it down to 12%. He describes the difference: “A glass of the full-strength wine tasted hot, dense, jammy and a little sulfurous, while the diluted version was lighter all around but still full of flavor, tarter, more fruity than jammy, and less sulfurous…the watered-down wine was surprisingly pleasant, and maybe more suited to summer evenings than the intense original.”

Consumers adding water to their own wine in the glass is rarely discussed in wine geek circles. But in the broader wine-drinking world, it does happen, most often in the spritzer, where sparkling water is added to (white) wine. Perhaps that carbonation further amplifies the aromas? More trials may be necessary here. But one thing’s for sure: spritzers can still make you tipsy. This was immortalized in the episode of The Simpsons Viva Ned Flanders. In it, Homer takes his God-fearing neighbor to Vegas where Flanders breaks down and orders a white wine spritzer. The next morning, the two wake up married to waitresses.

Chaptalization is the term for adding sugar to wine to boost the alcohol level. It is legally permissible in parts of the wine world, particularly northern Europe. Some producers still use the practice, although global warming may be creating more ripe fruit, thus obviating the need. (In other parts of the world, notably where it is hotter, it is prohibited; indeed, it may be permissible to add acid.) Alternately known as enrichment or amelioration, the process occurs before or during fermentation. Although sucrose is usually the addition of choice, from either beet sugar or cane sugar, producers can add grape concentrate or even “rectified concentrated grape must.” Fermentation ensures no residual sugar is left behind since the sugars are converted into alcohol (and CO2).

An anonymous poster recently left a comment on this site claiming lab test showed a wine had been chaptalized (legally permissible) but failed to follow up with the lab report. He or she also suggested that a tasting of the white wine revealed notes of chaptalization, such as caramel and bonbon. Really? What do you think, is it possible to perceive chaptalization in the glass? If so, which sort of descriptors would you apply?

One essay that caught my eye was about the stylistic struggle between modernists and traditionalists that has been roiling the wine world for some time now. (For those who haven’t been following, “modern” wines are often characterized as having abundant, ripe fruit, lots of extraction, quite a bit of oak influence, and higher in alcohol while “traditional” wines are construed as being less overtly oaky, having much less extraction and manipulation in the cellar.)

In the piece, Mike Steinberger argues that the polarization has been overplayed–too bad since it could really do well in a Broadway adaptation, perhaps besting the Sharks vs Jets! Further, there’s a vast gray area between these two poles. Finally, he argues that the rise of modern wines has actually been largely beneficial by getting the traditionalists to clean up their cellars and pay more attention to their vineyards. Here’s a snippet:

It is wrong to depict this modern-versus-traditional split as a kind of Manichean, zero-sum battle. It is something far more mild: a push here, some push-back there. Not only that; it has largely redounded to the benefit of both wine and wine consumers.

As to the state of play in the non-war, he argues, the pendulum is swinging back to the traditionalists. As evidence, he cites, on the one hand, general fatigue with Super Tuscans and garage wines of Bordeaux. On the other, he notes the tremendous regard for traditional Piedmont producers such as Giacosa, G. Conterno, and G. Moscarello, a tsunami of articles about Lopez de Heredia in Rioja (I’ll add that the crowds are always deep at their annual distributor tasting in NYC), and a “greater demand for authenticity–for wines that are made by people who actually get their hands dirty in the vineyard.” Check out the whole article in print if you get a chance.

What do you think? I find it a convincing argument while also admitting the evidence is still contained to something of a niche. But with all the interest in natural wines, making wine in amphorae, resurrecting heirloom varieties, and a greater respect for the vineyard more generally, that niche could expand noticeably over the coming decade. Moreover, the amount of column inches (remember those?), blog posts and tweets in favor of traditionally styled wines must sooner or later spark some demand, thus leaving some modern producers wondering if they might want to cancel their next order for new oak barrels and experiment with something a little more olde tyme.

UPDATE: the article is now available online at The World of Fine Wine website. Also, they are extending a 20% discount to the readers of this site; enter WFW5 into the subscription form (DrVino.com receives no compensation).

cropped image from lopezdeheredia.com

Here’s the video’s pitch on why winemakers should use enzymes:

Major wineries produce large quantities of wine and as a result need to optimize their capacity by reducing production times. [image: hand harvesting] Enzymes are used by these larger wineries to speed up production process. Small wineries on the other hand are more interested in using enzymes to produce a higher quality of wine, particularly when the grape quality isn’t the best.

Other quotage comes form their enthusiastic client, Ch. Tour Prignac, who says that they use it “to produce optimum quality and obtain a color fitting to a great, age-worthy wine.”

They later elaborate that their products, under the VinoFlo name, offer deep colors and flavor intensity.

What’s happening in this glass? The winemaker practices minimal intervention and uses no sulfur. So one theory is refermentation, which can come from excessive heat exposure. Or it could be a tsunami of tartaric crystals, which can be caused excessive by cold exposure. What do you think? And more importantly, would you drink this wine?

If they are tartaric crystals, consider this from the Oxford Companion to Wine: “Only the most informed consumers appreciate the harmlessness of tartrate crystals in bottle. Although tartrates precipitated in red wines usually take on some red or brown pigments and are commonly regarded as mere sediment, in white wines they look alarmingly like shards of glass to the uninitiated. The modern wine industry has in the main decided that tartrate stabilization is preferable to consumer education.” All right, then, we can consider ourselves educated! More on cold stabilization and the “wine diamonds” of tartrates can be found here.

Site reader and distributor Damien Casten sent in an AP story (with no byline) yesterday entitled “Geologists debunk soil impact on wine at Ore. talk.” The Oregon event was a special session at the annual conference of the Geological Society of America.

At the meeting, Alex Maltman presented a paper with this to say about minerality: “The widely cited direct, literal connection between vineyard geology and wine taste seems scientifically impossible. Whatever “minerality” in wine is, it is not the taste of vineyard minerals.” He calls any perceived connection a “romantic myth.”

Fair enough, there may not be a transfer of minerals from substrate to the glass, but is terroir debunked? Not quite, argued Jonathan Swinchatt in a paper that cites the indirect influences of drainage, accessibility to water, microbiology, soil temperature, and trace element chemistry. He argued that unraveling these links is “devilishly” complex and thus “the connections between geology and wine will remain elusive for some time to come.”

Terroir: clear as mud!

After the jump, Greg Jones, a climatologist from Southern Oregon University (and son of the founder of Abacela Vineyards and Winery in Roseburg, OR) chimes in with his thoughts from the conference and the reporting of it.

Over the years of being in the media’s eyes on climate and wine, I have found that they get it right about 25-40% of the time. The rest of the time they capture what creates the story, not the truth.

Yes, I was at the meeting (a very good session in my opinion) and gave two talks. Even what I said was taken out of context in the AP story as was much of everything else. There was no ‘debunking’ only good debate about the relationships between climate, landscape, soil, and the vine. The take home was that it clearly is a non-linear issue that we know virtually nothing about, but that the use of terms like ‘minerality’ are over-done and have no connection or basis for being derived directly from some mineral aspect in the soil. It never stated that soil has no impact on wine, to the contrary the take home for me confirmed what I truly believe … that geology, landscape, and soil are important factors that mediate the interaction between climate and the vine, especially soil water supply and nutrition. But that climate is the most basic and most profound in terms of what can be grown where and how. For me this gets back to the sense of place or the importance of site being at the core of terroir!

In the original AP piece that I saw, they said “Jones found that more than half of existing vineyards are planted on land that is only marginally suitable for growing grapes. Nearly a third of the planted acreage is mismatched to climate: Cool-climate grapes such as pinot noir are growing where it’s too warm, and varieties requiring more heat are growing where it’s too cold.” My comments were simply that in many instances sites are not ideal for grapes more because they were owned and planted, instead of sought out for growing grapes. Therefore many sites are not ideal, but compromises … which further accentuates the importance of site selection! The 1/3 mis-matched varieties is correct. In smaller emerging areas this is always the case were growers are trying to find out what does best where … my modeling shows that climate can delineate this suitability with much less trial and error.