Tom Glasgow
Thomas W Glasgow
Thought the dotster had first dibs on this stuff.
Dinner with Abe Schoener
- Thread starter Matt Latuchie
- Start date
Salil Benegal
Salil Benegal
Parker or Wetlaufer? (What about both?)
Oswaldo Costa
Oswaldo Costa
I think that's a trifle premature. When Abe stops making wine in California, starts making it only on Long Island, and starts drinking it every day, then, and only then, will this thread have achieved the full measure of our devotion.
Zachary Ross
Zachary Ross
Yes, but is there serious WIWPie consideration?
Tom Glasgow
Thomas W Glasgow
Greek literature.
Jeff Grossman
Jeff Grossman
Bricco Babelico is a really good match with doh!-nuts.
John Roberts
John Roberts
The Great Books program, presumably.
John Ritchie
John Ritchie
How common is it for producers to rely on acetic acid to make up for deficient levels of malic and tartaric?
Not very, I would hazard, since acetic acid is commonly referred to as "volatile acidity" in the wine press. Abe: I wonder about your decision to add sulfuric rather than tartaric acid. You rail against tartaric as nothing that you'd want to put in your mouth, but I'd guess that that would go tenfold for sulfuric. My own 2¢ is that the source of commercial tartaric acid is grapes or another fruit, so it's not exactly Frankenstein material, whereas sulfuric acid is ultimately derived from petroleum. I also find that tartaric acid has a discernible taste, but maybe that's what you're trying to avoid. Despite my now 35 years of labwork, I have never to my knowledge tasted sulfuric acid, but I'd guess that it's more or less devoid of flavor.
Mark Lipton
Florida Jim
Florida Jim
Mark,
Might be just a guess, but I bet Abe meant SO2.
Best, Jim
John Donaghue
John Donaghue
SO2 as in winery sanitation, spoilage inhibitor, etc. Natural or not it's one tool that can be difficult to get away from as a winemaker. Not everyone can be Pierre Overnoy...
John Donaghue
John Donaghue
I won't presume to speak for Mr. Schoener, but like Jim said I assume he meant sulfur additions and use of sulfur (usually combined with citric acid) for sanitation. I'm not sure that using sulfuric acid to correct for acidity is even feasible.
abe schoener
abe schoener
I'm choking on laughter.
abe schoener
abe schoener
These are such good questions. I am really delighted to address them. Sometimes I say in the winery, there are only two questions about elevage:
how much VA?
how much SO2?
by "SO2", I mean the dilute sulfurous acid that we purchase in stainless cylinders and that, when we decant it into glass bottles for immediate use, gets tagged with a big skull and crossbones written in black on blue tape. that SO2. (more on its toxicity below)
The two questions above are related to each other in the following way: under almost all of our maturation/elevage conditions, the wines are exposed a fair amount of atmospheric oxygen (most of our wines age in wooden barrels that transpire). the more we allow oxygen access to the wine (all other factors being equal), the more VA we will experience, usually in the form of simple acetic acid-- the acid of vinegar. When we want to arrest the development of VA in a wine, we top the barrels and thereby diminish the access to oxygen, and then we sometimes also add SO2; sometimes high amounts of it. When we anticipate in advance that we do not want a wine to develop VA, the two techniques that we employ to achieve this are: mature the wine in stainless, and add SO2 both before and after fermentation. The only wine that we make in which we do not do both together is LSB (barrel-fermented and barrel aged with a high SO2 addition before fermentation and regular adds after fermentation and during maturation.)
We never add SO2 to increase acidity. I have never contemplated it, nor calculated nor experimented to get a sense of how much one would have to add to modulate acidity. The stuff that we use is furiously low pH, so it would have to have an effect-- but it is also true that the highest sulfur add I have ever made was 100 ppm, or 100 grams of S02 per 1000 liters of wine (a 1% add would be 100 grams per 10 liters by comparison). The adds are small but very powerful.
The SO2 adds that we make always affect the flavor and aroma of the wine immediately and strongly, but subtlely in the long run. We do not sense an accentuation or increase in acidity, but we often think that a given wine tastes sharper or better focused, or, similarly, less flat and spread out. This effect tends to hold. It also almost always makes the wine taste hard and ungenerous at first, as if it were balling it up in a fist. This effect diminishes over about a 3-week period. Lastly, it usually dumbs the nose and sometimes contributes a volcanic aroma (alluded to above). I am rather insensitive to the last; my cellar mates tease me that my SO2 receptors have all been burned out. This too diminishes over 3-6 weeks depending on how much SO2 we have added.
To be perfectly clear:
We DO sometimes encourage the production of VA (in the form of acetic acid, not so much the aldehydes that are part of VA) by bacteria in the wine. I know of no one else in the US who does this and indeed it would be uncommon for a well educated winemaker to admit to doing it. VA is almost always regarded as a flaw, and one that is really pretty elementary to prevent. This view is not universal in Europe, I think. Certainly not based on a few evenings' drinking at The Ten Bells.
And to encourage the production of VA, we suspend or omit the use of SO2, not the other way around.
Mark Lipton's question still stands: why in the world support the use of a toxic chemical that can be shipped only under permit and must be dispensed with a gas mask, when I "rail" (perhaps that is a little strong!) against the use of crystal tartaric (derived from fruits and vegetables in China; a very sustainable by-product of making fruit syrups, beet sugar, and other totally natural products)?
I think that there are 3 reasons:
1) I do not like the short or long term gustatory effect of using tartaric, though I like both in SO2;
2) there is nothing clever about opening bags of tartaric, but working with the microbes and guiding the wines up to the edge of the cataclysm is cool;
3) though there is nothing cool about working with a toxic substance that comes out of a steel container, the effect of SO2 on wine is amazing; whereas the effects of tartaric are predictable and seem pedestrian. That is why I can never allow our winemaking to be called "low intervention" simply. Some of the techniques are (no inocculation); some of the wines depend only on such techniques (the chardonnays); but some of the wines depend on the use of SO2 and other relatively powerful non-spontaneous activities. I love and marvel at effect of S02. I can easily imagine making a lot of good wines without it (I did for about 6 years), but I love the wines that I have learned to make with it, and, in some slightly perverse way, look forward to making sulfur additions.