TN: Diinner at Dino's (3/8/17)

Speaking of which, a recent bottle of Barranco Oscuro "Varetùo" was edible but tasted more like a natural wine than tempranillo. It never got out from under the slightly cheesy, funky thing. No más.
 
originally posted by Jeff Grossman:
Speaking of which, a recent bottle of Barranco Oscuro "Varetùo" was edible but tasted more like a natural wine than tempranillo. It never got out from under the slightly cheesy, funky thing. No más.
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What vintage? I've had several bottles of the 2013, and two of the 2014, and all were clean.
 
originally posted by Oswaldo Costa:
Very useful discussion. I, too, thought BD was only about agriculture, not cellar work, so I always snidely smirked that a BD wine was not necessarily a natural wine. Now I'll have to eat my snides and smirks.
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No, it's still true. Pontet-Canet, for instance, crows about how since it has gone BD, it has reduced its new oak from 60% to 50% and that was still their choice. And as I said, nothing in the document cited at least prohibits R-O or various other stuff.
 
originally posted by Jeff Grossman:
O: 2014

J: Doesn't this cover it?: "12.1.9 Concentration of must is not permitted."
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Not sure. R/O is often used to reduce VA, as well widespread use in CA to reduce alcohol levels in finished wines.
 
originally posted by Jeff Grossman:
O: 2014

J: Doesn't this cover it?: "12.1.9 Concentration of must is not permitted."
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As I said above, must is the unfermented grape juice. It is concentrated by additives that BD would understandably find objectionable. RO is practiced upon the fermented wine, sometimes to increase concentration, sometimes to decrease alcohol without changing concentration.
 
Hm. There is the catchall:

"12.15 Omissions

The addition of any material or method not mentioned is not permitted unless first cleared with the Demeter Association."
 
originally posted by Jeff Grossman:
Hm. There is the catchall:

"12.15 Omissions

The addition of any material or method not mentioned is not permitted unless first cleared with the Demeter Association."
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And of course all BD vineyards clear every little step they take with Demeter. Even if they do, RO isn't an additive. If they wanted to interdict the method, they could do it.It's worth keeping in mind that BD is a theory about agriculture and a holistic relationship with nature as a totalizable concept. Its primary interest will be what happens in the vineyard. It will be understandably opposed to cellar practices that disrupt the agricultural endproduct's--in this case wine's--connection to BD's concept of nature. But practices that don't do that should be matters of indifference.And the dynamic whole of nature doesn't give a hornfilled shit about how wine was made 50 years ago as opposed to since the 1990s, though no doubt some BD winemakers do.
 
In any case, it's quite a shift, for me at least, to go from thinking that biodynamics ONLY had to do with agriculture, a view adopted after watching a video interview with Eric Texier a few years ago, to realizing that Demeter, as a regulating body, seems to normatize cellar work rather significantly. This means that, in practice, many BD wines may be, ipso factotum, natural wines.

The theory of BD may have nothing to say about cellar work, and we know that Steiner never touched a drop of Coulée, but it seems that Demeter, as regulating arm, is reaching, or overreaching, into cellar work in a significant way.

Whether that is limited to preserving the spirit of the agricultural work is hard to say, since any and all intervention could be said to interfere with the purest expression of the agrioultural work.
 
It's a principle like any other, and has the same kind of reach. Imagine that the end product was an apple. And imagine that there was some kind of additive spray that would make the apple last longer for shipping but was made of chemicals that disrupted the apple's role in nature. BD would naturally want to eliminate that. Now imagine that there was some method of treating the apple that didn't, from BD perspective, change its role in nature. It wouldn't care about that. The Demeter rules fairly wreak of that distinction. Hence the language about oak, which, to an anti-interventionist wine geek, seems obviously to say nothing in particular. From a BD perspective, it says exactly what BD intends. Because BD shares some important aspects of organic farming, there is a wine geek notion that it is a version of the same thing. But it really isn't, any more than homoepathic medicine is the same thing as a medicine that is aware of the science behind traditional cures and learns from it, just because some of their practices seem to overlap.
 
originally posted by Jonathan Loesberg:
No. Just being careless, despite the intellectual damage belief in BD reaks.
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I doubt you would be so forgiving if a student had done that. First wreaks [sic] instead of reeks. Then reaks [sic] instead of wreaks?

Ah, ha. Fun is fine, but you are a bit heavy handed about Biodynamics.
 
originally posted by Sharon Bowman:
Hop on Pop
originally posted by Jonathan Loesberg:
Now imagine that there was some method
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Let us also shed a quiet tear for the disappearance of the subjunctive mood.
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Maybe because I studied Italian and French (with drill-sergeant-like Old World teachers) that it was so drilled into my head. Oddly (or not) it is a class identifier in Italy.
 
Huh, that's really interesting. I also have a martinet's dedication to its use in French (though it hasn't been lost or socially staggered) and likely am over-zealous about its disuse in English.
 
originally posted by Sharon Bowman:
Hop on Pop
originally posted by Jonathan Loesberg:
Now imagine that there was some method
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Let us also shed a quiet tear for the disappearance of the subjunctive mood.
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We're it were so, winegrrrrl.

Mark "He can't tell the difference between the subjunctive mood and a simple conditional" Lipton
 
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