Question for Eric Texier

O

Oswaldo Costa

Oswaldo Costa
I know that your Cote du Rhone is available in bag-in-box for the restaurant market and imagine that it isn't sold to the general public to avoid interfering with bottle sales (please correct me if I'm wrong). My question has to do with sulfur dosage: because of the bib vacuum, do you use no (or less) sulfur compared to the same wine in a bottle, or do you use the same amount for both? Seems to me that, if the "no romance" prejudice against bib can be overcome, it is the ideal package for no/low sulfur very fresh/early drinking wines.
 
Thierry Puzelat was telling a story about a low sulfur muscadet producer who tried some BiBs and ended up having them all explode in his warehouse.
 
Bibs are filled by gravity, and for the most modern machines, after being filled by a neutral gaz, usually nitrogen,sometimes argon, but certainly not under vaccuum.
Though I don't have any precise data, filling bibs exposes the wine to much more air than filling bottles, mostly due to filling speed.
Therefore I have to use more sulfur for bibs than for bottles : 30ppm to 40ppm for 5 liters Bib, against oxydation only. Which means around 45 to 60 ppm addition at bottling (to be compared with 20 to 30 ppm for bottles). If the wine is not filtered nor fined, at these levels of free at bottling, the remaining free SO2 will be around 0 after 2-4 monthes. And we all know what 0 free means in terms of stability on early "bottled" wines. I guess a bib of Allemand sans souffre would be much more stable than my Ctes du Rhne...
Probably as stable as a lot of so called sans souffre wines... I bet it won't be long before we will ear of a "indigenous sulfur" concept which could explain the actual level of sulfur one can measure on the vast majority of these wines.

So according to my experience, unless one goes for totally sterile filtration and bottling or a very reliable cold chain, an addition under 40 ppm of SO2 will lead to oxidized and (or) unstable wine within a few weeks after conditioning.

Plus, the bags are very porous to CO2. So the classic trick of the real sans souffre, bottling over 1000ppm of CO2 won't work for long.

Real 0 sulfur freaks stay away from bibs!!!
 
I'm not a newbie in the sense of having been around here for awhile. But anything you tech types say is absolutely new to me every damn time. I can follow what Eric is saying, but just barely, and I am not criticizing him for that. Assuming Oswaldo had my levels of chemical ignorance, I think you should cut him some slack, and cut me some slack by extension.
 
I think I'm following pretty well. Participants, please correct where I've erred.

1) Eric is pointing out that many of the no/low-sulfur bottlings have rather a lot of it, despite what they claim, as his magic device will show if put to the test. I think he's also suggesting that certain well-known bottlings in the genre have more of it than his not-so-labeled CdR.

2) VLM is engaging in his usual polemic against the no/low-sulfur genre, which he's distilled to two-word quips. Saves us all time, I suppose.

3) Actual no/low-sulfur wines are very, very unstable unless treated with utmost delicacy and blessed with good fortune, and I think from everything I've read here and elsewhere it can probably be concluded that if they actually existed in the quantities claimed, there would be a lot more damaged wines than there are. Since most wines that make this claim don't actually go to hell all that often, one might wonder why. I think Eric is gesturing to a potential reason why.
 
originally posted by Thor:

3) Actual no/low-sulfur wines are very, very unstable unless treated with utmost delicacy and blessed with good fortune, and I think from everything I've read here and elsewhere it can probably be concluded that if they actually existed in the quantities claimed, there would be a lot more damaged wines than there are. Since most wines that make this claim don't actually go to hell all that often, one might wonder why. I think Eric is gesturing to a potential reason why.
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This is broadly in line, but there is one subtlety in Eric's post, in his allusion to Allemand. If you have a very long elevage in wood, the wee beasties that might cause you trouble later actually have a whack at the wine first. So they pick the carcass clean, and you can bottle with low SO2 without the fear that some microbe will cruise in and discover a lunch buffet and get all flatulent on you after. (you still have to worry a bit about oxidation, particularly if you are bottling in a semi-permeable plastic bag). This microbiological worry applies in particular to wines bottled quickly after fermentation, which typically have food for the itsy pique-assiettes (sp?) that might wander in.

Sorry, I visited a friend tonight with cats, and the antihistamines may have rendered me incoherent. Let me know if that's not clear.
 
If you have a very long elevage in wood, the wee beasties that might cause you trouble later actually have a whack at the wine first. So they pick the carcass clean, and you can bottle with low SO2 without the fear that some microbe will cruise in and discover a lunch buffet and get all flatulent on you after. (you still have to worry a bit about oxidation, particularly if you are bottling in a semi-permeable plastic bag). This microbiological worry applies in particular to wines bottled quickly after fermentation, which typically have food for the itsy pique-assiettes (sp?) that might wander in.
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Reasonably clear, thanks. How does the long wood vacation protect against badness, or is it just that badness can be deemed unsaleable prior to bottling by a producer who actually gives a shit?

In any case, I think Eric has gestured in the direction of other wines, and I hadn't noticed that they were all long-wood-levage examples. If they were, I missed it, and need to revisit. If they weren't, my takeaway was a suggestion of how much sulfur they actually had, vs. what they claimed, and what that meant for their stability.
 
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