No-sulphur wine
Posted on 17 May 2009
I’ve been quite overloaded with samples lately, many unsolicited, which meant having to make my way through a stash of partly unexciting commercial staff. More or less belonging to this category, some bottles by Piedmontese producer Teo Costa. It’s a largish estate with a confusing dual-branded range of too many wines (although some are quite fine – I was pleasantly surprised with the Barolo Monroj 2004, classic, elegant and very good value).
Two wines that caught my attention, though, are a white and a red made fully without the addition of sulphur. There is currently a (justified) fashion towards organic and biodynamic wines, but even biodynamics is not necessarily synonymous with no sulphur addition. Sulphur (usually in the form of sulphur dioxide; hence the Contains sulphites mention on wine bottles now obligatory in the EU) is considered a ‘traditional’ additive to wine, and has been used for centuries to protect from bacteria and oxidation. These two factors make no-sulphur-added wines (there is always a bit of sulphur naturally produced during fermentation) a challenge. With low SO2, your wine is prone to all sorts of bacteria including acetic bacteria that change wine into vinegar (with no SO2, this is handled by extreme hygiene in the cellar, and keeping wine at low temperatures throughout – not always easy for shops and consumers) and is likely to oxidise if exposed to air for too long (which is why you are usually advised to drink a no-sulphur wine in one session and avoid decanting, though there are some exceptions).
You will find a growing range of interesting low- or no-sulphur wines from Alsace, Beaujolais, the Loire, but very few from Italy, where the concept has been establishing itself more slowly. That’s the background of my interest in trying these wines. Both are from 2008 and are classified in the umbrella DOC Langhe.
The white Di Vin Natura 2008, a blend of Sauvignon Blanc with local Arneis, is forgettable: showing a good saline intensity of terroir in mouth, it just lacks fruit, and the nose is fairly chaotic, reminiscent of of home-made ‘wine’ with all sorts of yeasty, microbial aromas. The red Di Vin Natura 2008 (blended from Nebbiolo, Barbera, Cabernet and Melot), on the other hand, is really interesting. It too displays a rustic just-finished-fermentation nose (aroma is rarely a biodynamic wine’s strength) but on the palate there is a moment of blissful fruit intensity of the kind you almost never encounter in a ‘normal’ wine.
Sulphur puts a wine in order: it is like packing a porcelain vase for shipping. It stabilises, immobilises, and to an extent, standardises. But it does so by putting a layer of matt varnish over the fruit. We get a lot from sulphur – a vast majority of our wines would be undrinkable without – but need to give up something in exchange: this unadulterated, tangible, pulsating presence of fruit flesh. If you’re feeling nostalgic about this loss, no-sulphur wines are for you.