Naked Wine by Alice Feiring

Author:Alice Feiring
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Da Capo Press
Published: 2011-08-01T04:00:00+00:00

Remembering this conversation now, I knew I couldn’t take more time on this trip. I had to get to Spain. This search was going to take a minor fortune, but I vowed I’d come back and get to the bottom of it all. Another trip to Ardèche was in my future.

We took a short ride to a barn, which sat in back of a swimming pool. The bronzed, bikini-clad woman we walked past was impossible to ignore. With Andrea making an appropriate comment about her, we walked into the warm shed area holding his fiberglass tanks, where he makes about twenty-five wines, most of which he does merely for experiment. And then we were on to his Grande Arnaque, the big joke, a fat and slutty Syrah he calls une belle pute, beautiful whore.

During our barrel sampling, again I just couldn’t understand. “Why don’t they taste like those perfumed carbonic tastes and aromas?” The wines burst open my observation that carbonic maceration wines taste the same. It was very difficult to understand.

He said that every day, he drains off the juice from the tank and places it in another tank. The juice then continues its alcoholic fermentation as if it were a white wine, without the stems and seeds and skins. Still, the wine was extracted, as if it had been trodden a little bit, or punched down, or had the cap submerged. I was completely stumped with the conflict between my palate and what he was telling me. My reality was challenged.

Then Andrea gave me the “it’s not me, it’s the terroir” bullshit. But he knew he was bullshitting, because he put that damned wink at the end for punctuation. Perhaps it’s what comes of growing up in Communism; you learn to be secret, but not without a fierce sense of irony. “Anyway,” Andrea said, “Sometimes I think.”

“No pigeage?” I asked.

He claims not to do any pigeage or cap submerging. I have to say, I still am not totally sure I believe him, though I can’t imagine why he would mislead me, other than to have some sport.

“Why? I asked.

“I’m lazy,” he answered.

“You don’t use sulfur?”

“As a rule, no. But if a wine needs it, I use it.”

“The Grande Arnaque,” he says, putting some of the 2009 in our glasses, “I put in sulfur. If I need it, I put in one gram. What I do know is that I won’t go to hell if I use it. Sulfur is to sleep well. If you need to sleep well, you use it.”

From my end of things, it didn’t look as if he really needed to sleep. He had boundless energy. Or perhaps if he does need peace of mind, he needs to add the sulfur. But one gram? It is often said that sulfur allows a winemaker peace of mind—that the wine will be safe from unwanted organisms. After all, the substance is an antiseptic, a safeguard for the wine. But one gram of sulfur is far too little and would do nothing at all.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.