LeRouge&leBlanc issue 152 (Spring 2024) - Montagny awakens

Table of contents:

• Montagny wakes up
• Investigation / Tasting: The Burgundians of Beaujolais
• Portrait: Thibault Liger-Belair, the Burgundian in love with Beaujolais
• AOP Touraine-Amboise: Another home of Chenin
• Meeting with Alice and Olivier De Moor (Chablis)
• Vineyard Journal: Can wine still be made without sulfur?
• Dossier: From cork to cork

Excerpt from the magazine

Editorial: Inputs or intruders?

Last December, when Sylvie Augereau sent an email to all the winemakers participating in the La Dive Bouteille fair that she has been organizing since 2002, she suspected that she might trigger a controversy in the ever-evolving world of "natural" wine. With her sharp wit, she warned the invited winemakers: "Thank you for keeping your overly eccentric vintages at home, for those who believe that lively wines are necessarily deviant... We are really not here to fuel this dangerous discourse. There are inputs that we prefer to certain intruders!" By "intruders," she meant phenolic deviations (brettanomyces), mousey flavors, excessive volatile acidity, and the like...

This gentle provocation stirred up the world of "purists" in the "natural" wine community. One of its usual gurus, who admits to "preferring zigzag wines to straight wines," reacted on social media: "Should we always aim for zero inputs and take the risk that the wine may sometimes be completely eccentric? Or should we deploy a fine safety net to ensure that no fatal defect emerges in the glass? The pitfall then would certainly be that sulfuring becomes a standard and that the ideal of natural wine (from grapes and nothing but grapes) drifts away."

If tasting is based solely on this ideal, it would become more of a practice of an ideology than a matter of taste, a dangerous drift. The important thing would no longer be for the wine to be "loyal and merchant" as it was once said, but without any input, and especially without a single milligram of added sulfur... even if it smells like a stable and has clearly deviant taste characteristics. The sulfur-free zealots constantly refer to an idealized "purity" of wine. As Paco Mora, the wine merchant from Ivry in the Paris region, rightly wrote, when "purity" is mentioned at every turn, it always sends a chill down the spine...

Because the central question, the one that Sylvie Augereau wanted to highlight, more than just sulfur, is the intrinsic quality of the wine and its "drinkability": wine is a beverage, not a religious concept of vinous "purity." The organizer of La Dive hopes to break free from the equivalence of "wine without input = deviant wine," carefully maintained by the extremists of "natural" wine. They want to avoid at all costs a winemaker saying, "If my wine has some defects, it's because it's authentically 'natural'." In other words, those who don't have defects can't be considered as such... This presumption annoys immensely all the winemakers who strive, with absolute rigor at all stages, to produce "spotless" wines without sulfur or with minimal doses of SO2, most of whom can be found in the aisles of La Dive Bouteille... It is worth noting that even the most seasoned tasters are unable to detect a total sulfur dose below 20 mg/l.

At a time when climate changes regularly complicate alcoholic fermentations (cf. our "Vineyard Journal" column p.38), especially those that occur without sulfur, is it really necessary to vilify winemakers who offer "natural, yet straight" wines and to praise those who sell vintages with more than dubious flavors to enthralled enthusiasts of their "purity"?

Like Sylvie Augereau, between intruders and inputs, our choice is clear...

 LE ROUGE & LE BLANC