But even the Japanese farmer Masanobu Fukuoka—famous
for what some refer to as “do-nothing farming”—never meant to suggest
that a farmer should be absent from the action. The same tenets hold
with winemaking. To transform grape into wine is not a Jesus act—there
is no magical staff, no Moses. In fact, remove miracles from the debate.
A winemaker must be meticulously clean, a skillful, careful observer
and above all, make the right decisions to achieve his or her goal: a
palatable (if not delicious) wine. In the case of natural wine, that
merely means that the winemaker is trying to achieve that goal without
additives (with the exception of small amounts of sulfur dioxide) or
unnecessary processing. Intervention is needed, even if the ultimate
goal is minimizing it.
As natural wine grows up—and the discussion of it grows along with
it—we’ve begun to understand it as a perspective on winemaking dictated
by certain principles and philosophies that are evolving. Not only is
there greater education about how it’s made and what it stands for, but
more advanced discussions among winemakers about how not only to do less
to a wine, but improve its stability along the way.
Most of these discussions involve technique. And like any subculture
of winemaking, there are debates about what techniques—from cold
carbonic maceration to skin contact to the use of clay aging
vessels—will be discarded as fad, and what will be upheld as part of the
future of the genre.
With this as the backdrop I asked some of the icons of natural wine—Éric Texier, Thierry Puzelat of Clos du Tue Bœuf, Luca Ferraro of BeleCasel and Elisabetta Foradori of Foradori—to help me take a look at the techniques now popular in their world, what they believe to have staying power and why.
+ Infusion
Infusion, which was merely a whisper last spring, has become a
cacophony this past winter. But what does it actually mean? Rhône
winemaker Éric Texier said that he feels he might have been the first to
use the term to describe “the opposite of extraction”—or the process of
trying to glean as much color and flavor from a grape as it can
feasibly give. Instead of routinely punching the grape skins down during
fermentation to get as much texture and color out of them, infusion is
more passive. Texier likens the technique to making tea—or to the trend
toward lighter roasted coffees, which combine an intensity of citrus and
floral flavors without the bombast and girth of a darker roast.
“Over-extracted tea,” he says, “leads to a lack of definition and
finesse.” Similarly, according to Texier, “great grapes don’t need
extraction in order to give the best they have to give,” he says. “Rayas
[the legendary Châteauneuf-du-Pape producer] is a perfect example: it’s
a wine of insane complexity and deepness without volume.”
Fad or future?
Jury’s out. While the word is trending, at present it’s more an example
of the continued paradigm shift towards wines of more elegance and
drinkability (with resorting to carbonic maceration) than anything else.
To read more, click here