LAURENT CHANIAC CONSULTING

During the last few decades, the world of wine has drastically changed with farming method linked to an industrial age alongside the introduction of chemicals. There is an ancient world of the wine that can be traced somehow back to 9000 BC. This does not imply that the wine would have been better or lesser than it currently is, but for sure it would have been a very different kind of juice! The journey of wine in time has delivered some lessons through a multitude of trials, which created different school of thoughts in producing wine.

In essence the great wines are issued from good grapes that come from lands that have been looked after with ecosystems that are sustainable and self-sufficient. The healthier the land is, the less reliant on chemicals it is, and this helps to achieve natural yield in grape production as well as increasing the impact the land has on the fruit.  The main contributors on the end product that is wine are the soils if they are alive, the climate and what man makes of it. Some call it Terroir.

You would have heard of Sulphite that are contained in wine, it is that chemical, an antiseptic, that is a bio-product of fermentation, all wines have it. Some extra sulphite can be added by the wine maker to ensure that a wine is safe through its life time. In too much quantity it gives you headache, smells like a scratched match or tickles your nose. Nevertheless it is a requirement in most cases to ensure wine lives long enough to reach its prime, a minimum addition of sulphites tends to act as a seasoning element to the wine, keeping it safe and palatable.

The wines that have not had any added sulphite relate to what is called the natural wine movement, and is not a define category by law.

When I first started to taste those natural wines I did find them incredibly different, with flavour’s that were very unusual and they also taught me what were the faults in wines.

It was an eye opener, though I would consider very few to buy or sell at the time. What all those “natural wines” have in common is that low man intervention in the wine making process; wines are not often move from barrel, filtered on simply worked on. This minimum intervention process has for result to produce wines that have acidity that are much higher and are therefore much fresher. That freshness may disturb some and it is not a conventional taste. This is a taste you develop or not but this style of wines is more related to how wine used to be made and where wine came from. You embrace the progress or not, you use what was learnt or not. It is simply a different school of thoughts. I like both worlds, the accomplished wines that use technology and the more natural wines. The style, flavours are just very different.