“Looking at it under a microscope, natural wine looks like a small universe.”
(GILLES VERGÉ, A NATURAL WINE GROWER IN BURGUNDY, FRANCE)
The French term vivant (meaning “alive”) often crops up in relation to natural wine, as do phrases such as wines with “soul,” “personality,” or “emotion” that attribute living, human-like traits to what most people consider to be an inanimate drink.
Having decided to take a closer look at this “life,” I enlisted the help of Laurence, a scientist friend and academic, who also had access to microscopes. I gave her two bottles of Sancerre: a conventional, large-volume, own-label store bottle, produced in the tens of thousands, and Auksinis, a wine by Sébastien Riffault, of which fewer than 3,000 bottles are produced annually. Auksinis is a natural wine in the most complete sense—there’s nothing added and nothing removed.
A couple of months later, Laurence emailed me photos of the wines she’d taken under the microscope. The contrast was astonishing (see right). Auksinis was full of yeasts—some were dead, many were alive—while the large grocery store wine was seemingly lifeless. Laurence had even managed to culture what she thought were lactic acid bacteria filtered out of Riffault’s wine. Auksinis was full of microorganisms and yet, contrary to what most people in our disinfected Western world would think, it was both perfectly stable and absolutely delicious. It was a 2009, with a nervous acidity, a touch of smokiness, and notes of acacia, honey, and linden (lime), which was aromatically as clean as a whistle. Not an off-aroma in sight.
On the face of it, there was little to distinguish one bottle from the other—both were Sancerres and both were sold as such in the United Kingdom. But, inside the bottle, it was chalk and cheese. Certainly, the taste profiles of the wines were totally different, but the lack of resemblance went far beyond a subjective “I like that” or “I don’t.” They differed fundamentally in terms of microbiology. Auksinis was full of it; the store wine was not. So, as Laurence sat down that evening to a glass of Riffault, after putting a few petri dishes under the microscope, she was not only literally drinking a live product, but also getting an actual living taste of Sancerre.
Under the microscope: a large-store Sancerre (top) and Riffault’s natural Sancerre, Auksinis (bottom).
Natural wine producers use indigenous yeasts to create living wines, which has a positive impact on the taste of the wine. As Nathalie Dallemagne, the Technical Consultant for Viticulture and Winemaking, CAB (Coordination Agro-Biologique des Pays de la Loire) explains, “If you look at fermenting must under microscope, you can immediately see if commercial yeasts have been used. They are usually bigger than wild ones and the cells are identical since they are all the same strain.”
Three recent-ish scientific studies are a further testament to this “living-ness” and its ability to continue for decades, if not centuries. Firstly, in 2007, the American Journal of Enology and Viticulture published research into the “Survival of Wine Microorganisms in the Bottle During Storage.” Having explored a selection of Bordeaux wines across various vintages, with the oldest dating back to 1929, the team found that most of the older bottled wines contained elevated yeast populations. In fact, a Pessac-Léognan bottled in 1949 contained 4 million cfu/ml (meaning colony-forming units per milliliter), which, according to the authors, amounted to between 400 and 4,000 times as many as the average microbial population found in many pre-bottled wines today. They also found that 40 percent of the bottles contained lactic acid bacteria.
Then, in June 2008, Professor Dr. Jürg Gafner, of the Agroscope Wädenswil Research Institute in Switzerland, explored the microbiology of a selection of Räuschling whites, the oldest dating from 1895. To the surprise of many, he isolated six different, living, dormant yeast strains across the various vintages, including three from the oldest.
Finally, and perhaps most remarkably of all, a Jurassien vin jaune (“yellow wine”) from 1774 was tasted some 220 years later by a group of local experts, who described it as “nutty with notes of curry, cinnamon, apricots, and beeswax with an exceptionally long finish.” According to microbiologist Jacques Levaux, who later tested it at the laboratory, both bacteria and yeast were found and, although dormant, they were still very much alive.
The bacteria, in particular, may hold an interesting secret, as Dr. Karin Mandl from the biochemistry division of the HBLA und Bundesamt für Wein- und Obstbau, in Vienna, explained to me. Although still at the very beginning of her research, Karin is trying to cultivate bacteria found in various wines in the hope of isolating a strain responsible for wine’s ageability. Gilles Vergé, a natural wine grower in Burgundy, is also convinced: “Without bacteria, wine cannot age. It’s they that keep freshness going even in very old wines. They can continue to evolve for decades, if not centuries,” he says. “They don’t need much to survive, just the trace sugars that remain after fermentation.”
THE BENEFITS
So life is key, not just for growing grapes or for fermentation, but also perhaps for wine’s potential to grow old gracefully. This is not to say that only natural wines contain life—after all, all wines are made with yeasts and bacteria (whether indigenous or not), so, at some point in the process, all wines must have been alive. It is just that natural wine is a lot more “alive” than the rest. Many conventional wines will include microbe populations, but how many depends on multiple factors, from agricultural practices through to the processing and additives used in the cellar. Extreme filtration, for example, may well have been the main reason why there wasn’t any yeast in sight in the store example photographed by Laurence.
Élevage is fundamental to living wines, which find their stability with time and age. Natural wines can be very long-lived and bacteria may well be at the root of this ageability.
By impacting on the microflora, these artificial interventions also seem to have an impact on taste. “Chemical wines are like a flat line,” says Saša Radikon, whose family has been making sulfite-free wines in the Collio, in eastern Italy, since 1995. “How long the line is depends on how good the enologist is but, fundamentally, it’s a flat line that suddenly comes to an end. Natural wine, on the other hand, is like a giant wave. Sometimes it shows well, others less, and, like all living things, it will eventually die, but it might be tomorrow or in 20 years’ time.” This, Saša explains, is intrinsically linked to the life inside the liquid, which is noticeable throughout the year. “Our cellar is not temperature-controlled, so it moves with the weather. In winter, when things are slow outside, the wine is slow too. Then, in spring, when life picks up again, so too do the wines. They have more flavors and they taste different. Then back to fall, winter, and to sleep again. The wine is definitely alive.”
Proper living wine is, literally, a kaleidoscope of taste. Try it today, and it will show certain aromas; taste it tomorrow, and it will be different. These are wines with an ever-changing, extraordinarily complex aromatic profile that functions a little like a child’s mobile—different parts rotate individually, showing themselves differently at different moments, so that the whole is never the same twice. Sometimes open, sometimes closed. Sometimes giving, sometimes not. It is almost as though the microbiology needs time to wake up and react, or simply choose to sulk in the corner.
Just as we are beginning to talk about the “second genome” or the fact that, as humans, we are so much more, biologically speaking, than just an “I”—as bearers of genetic information, we’re more than 99 percent other stuff as well, according to Michael Pollan of the New York Times—so, too, wine is more than a simplistic combination of organoleptic compounds, alcohol, and water. It contains “other stuff” as well. And, like our other stuff, that of wine also lives, protects, defends, conquers, grows, reproduces, sleeps, ages, and dies. This is fundamental to what makes wine wine, rather than a simple, sterile, manufactured alcoholic drink.
The Radikon cellar, where wines mature for years in barrel before release.
The late Stanko Radikon and his son Saša (pictured) have been making traditional, sulfite-free, natural wines for decades.
