New World Winemaker Blog

It seems like it has been a while since the question of whether unfined and unfiltered wines are “better” than their more processed cousins was the topic du jour in the wine media space. Maybe the topic has been talked to death. Maybe writers and marketers alike have decided there is no “there” there. Maybe consumers have read all there is to read, and tasted enough wines to have made up their own minds.

Nah.

“Fining” is the addition to the wine of a tiny amount of some substance — usually a protein such as that found in gelatin, egg whites, or milk — that binds with something in the wine the winemaker finds objectionable and then falls to the bottom of the tank or barrel, allowing the clear wine to be racked off the fining lees.

“Filtration” is the process of passing the wine under pressure through some medium, in order to directly remove something undesirable to the winemaker. Both of these processes can be employed to improve clarity. Fining (and some types of filtration) can modify the wine’s tannin structure. Filtration can be used to completely remove yeast and bacteria, ensuring that a properly-filtered wine won’t re-ferment in the bottle. Specific types of filtration can remove alcohol or volatile acidity. And oh yeah, there’s more — lots more.

Fining and filtration are tools that the experienced wine craftsman can use judiciously to correct minor flaws in a wine, to make a wine “better.” A non-interventionist demagogue may argue that employing any of these tools invariably makes a wine worse, but I believe this point of view would be demolished in a blind tasting of certain wines by a broad cross section of knowledgeable wine consumers. Simply, some slightly flawed wines are improved by fining and/or filtration.

Now I can hear some passive-aggressive “critics” — with no money tied up in grapes and barrels — saying “so don’t make flawed wines.” To this I say “bite me.” You try this, genius. It ain’t as easy as I make it look.

At Westwood I don’t make any whites, and all my reds have no residual sugar, are 100% ML-complete, and are aged long enough in barrels that they should be stable to microbial activity and precipitation. Except in an experimental setting, I take special care in the fermenter to assure that the wines’ tannins have the structure I want to see in the finished wine. I don’t fine or filter Westwood wines because I don’t have to. And rule number one in my winemaking philosophy is “never do anything to the wine you don’t have to.”

That said, if I think a wine is too cloudy I will filter it. If a wine plates positive for Brettanomyces I will sterile-filter it — I don’t like Brett in the bottle. And if a wine is slightly flawed but in my opinion good enough in every other dimension, I will correct that flaw rather than lose a ton of money trying to sell the wine into a saturated bulk market.

I am not a non-interventionist winemaker, simply because I do not trust fate at the wheel of my winemaking career.

We are often warned of the danger of processed food to our health, but what constitutes processed food? The common definition of processed food is any food that is handled through a process. Basically slaughtering and animal to get meat, or picking or handling food constitutes a process that leads to processed food. William S. Burrough’s name of his novel “Naked Lunch” refers to the fact that food is never as naked, as it is at the end of a fork. But the purest would argue that often food is not “raw” anymore, but “dead” by the time it is naked at the end of your fork. Is wine natural by the time it is in your glass? My current winemaking philosophy is that I do not want add anything to wine that will take anything away from it.

Basically I do not want to add fining agents, as far as possible, while at the same time I would consider tannin additions, acid and similar additions that will add something to the wine and make it better, more favourably. Dominique Delteil always warned of the effect yeast has on a wine’s colour, because the proteins in the cell wall would bind tannins that are bound to colour, and thereby reduce he colour of the wine. The real world effect of yeast reducing colour is difficult to fathom, but the possibility and effect exists.

One should therefore in theory either use wild yeasts (very small amount of yeast) or yeast that you know will do the job of fermentation well, so you would not need to re-inoculate and thereby fine some colour out with the new yeast cells. One of my pet peeves is the economical use of the truth by chemical and additive suppliers. Their graphs show the speed and efficiency clearly visible on their graph at presentations. They never ever show the correlation of their product with quality.

Does speed of malolactic fermentation correlate with quality? Was their microbial experiment that they used to get the data from, representative of the whole industry? When I buy malolactic bacteria, imagine my reaction, when together with my expensive packet of bugs, I am given a bag of yeast hulls, to help along the kinetics of the malolactic bacteria, and to help fine the colour out of my wine.

What??

Wine is a complex soup of chemicals, with interactions and kinetics quite impossible for any human brain to fathom exactly. Just because there is potassium in potassium metabisulphate, will it affect the pH of my wine significantly? Will my wine treatment improve the quality of the wine, or will throwing salt over my right shoulder have the same effect? I have said it many times, may we never stop learning, and wondering what is around the next corner.

Louis Nel is the owner and winemaker of Louis wines in South Africa.

Where did this term come from? I’m not the first person to ask these questions. Check out Eric Asimov’s piece in the NY times from October 2006. I think it may be that the term was first used in the film “Mondovino” which, for dramatic effect, built its narrative around facile differences between the “…old world and new, simple peasants and billionaires, and between the local and artisanal styles of wine production and the multinational and mass-produced ones.” Award-winning New Zealand winemaker and writer Drew Tuckwell put it as succinctly as such a vague concept might be clarified: “Non interventionist winemaking is not easy to explain. There are no defined or common rules. It is essentially a very natural form of winemaking… where, in general terms, winemakers resist the use of modern technology and simply allow the wines to express the terroir of the vineyard.” (1) My sainted Dallas-bred grandmother had a term for this kind of marketing-speak: “horse-puckey”. The craft of winemaking is the transformation of grapes with alchemist skill. For centuries the French have applied the terms “elevage” and “affinage” to the winemaking process. The winemaker facilitates the birth of the wine, and then raises it and refines it into something which, if not always transcendent and sublime, is at least palatable. I believe the most apt analogy for winemaking is child-rearing. I for one don’t believe that child rearing can be at all non-interventionist. And neither can winemaking be. I shall step on a slightly taller soapbox to proclaim: I believe that ALL wines – artisanal and mass-produced alike – are valid expressions of the grape, and of the winemaker’s craft. There is no way to define a cutoff between these arbitrary classifications; wines are produced along a technological continuum. On the other hand, all wines are not created equal. There are distinctions between the aromas and tastes of wines made by hand and those produced by machine that are no more arbitrary or subtle than the differences between, say, Redwood Hill Farm crottin and processed American cheese spread, or Boont Amber Ale and Bud. But there is no doubt that the makers of the crottin and the ale are interventionist to a fault in crafting their products. I believe that there is not a capital-poor winemaker worth the title that has not wished for a centrifuge (for clarification), a spinning cone (for alcohol reduction), or for ion-exchange (to remove volatile acidity) at some point in their career – I know I have. In my opinion, any winemaker that will claim in print or in person that they are truly and completely “non-interventionist” with a straight face, or at least without a little lurch (perhaps of self-loathing?) in the pit of the stomach, is a charlatan or worse – delusional. I don’t believe I’m a charlatan, or delusional. My wines are hand-made, with all the attention and care I can lavish on them. Many may disagree with my position and tone here, and call me a bombast. Fine with me. Just don’t call me “non-interventionist”.

John Kelly is the winemaker of Westwood Winery in Sonoma, California. This blog was originally posted 14 June 2008.