“You know what’s crazy is that groups of tasters everywhere still consider limpidity as a guarantee of quality or excellence.
It’s absurd. You only need to pass the wine through a filter and it will be clear!”
(PIERRE OVERNOY, A NATURAL WINE GROWER IN THE JURA, FRANCE)
So exclaimed natural wine legend Pierre Overnoy when we met in the Jura in the fall (autumn) of 2013. And, absurd as it may sound, it is the way things are. People do eat and drink with their eyes, which is especially problematic for wine. I have often found myself in judging competitions with fellow tasters who want to exclude a wine for being hazy, regardless of its quality. Similarly, growers have for years had problems with local wine boards and export authorities if their wines do not look the way officials expect them to (see Who: The Outsiders, pages 108–109). As Olivier Cousin, a natural grower from the Loire, in France, says, “It is difficult, because our wines are not filtered, so they have deposits. We have created such a stereotype of the ‘perfect’ wine that our wines are considered imperfect, and yet we are the ones with perfect wines since they’re only grape juice.”
Wine is made from fruit, which, when pressed, creates a juice that contains “bits” (pulp, grape skins, live and dead microorganisms, etc.). With time, and the right conditions, these bits settle, and clear wine can be racked off and bottled. Some growers, such as Gilles Vergé in Burgundy, don’t bottle for years to ensure their wines are completely settled. Others bottle their wines before the full settling process has finished (often because of cash flow), resulting in wines that can be slightly hazy. Some wines are even purposefully produced with the fine lees kept in the bottle, producing a very cloudy style of wine, as is the case with traditional col fondo prosecco. What’s more, over the course of time, even the clearest of proper living wine will develop sediment in the bottle. Most conventional producers fast-track wine settling, using additions and processes (such as fining and filtering) to create the clarity they think customers want. Essentially, there are three options for the wine grower: time, cloudiness, or intervention.
While cloudiness in a barrel sample (above) is understood by all in the trade to be part of wine’s natural progression, cloudiness at bottling is sometimes (mistakenly) seen as a fault.
Although cloudiness may occasionally indicate a fault (perhaps a re-fermenting wine, which may produce unpleasant off-flavors anyway), most of the time, it doesn’t—just like cloudy apple juice. In fact, some cloudy, natural white wines actually taste better if you shake the bottle before opening. The sediment disperses evenly throughout the wine, adding texture, depth of flavor, and overall balance—a bit like adding flesh to a skeleton. Try it. Pour yourself a glass, then gently shake the bottle and taste it again. Have a go with pétillant naturels, col fondo proseccos, or even older, unfiltered whites. (Don’t do this with old red wines or ports, though, as the sediments are usually larger and are best decanted out.)
Most of us are formatted tasters. When we hear key words (such as region of origin or grape variety), we taste inside a box of knowledge, an important contributing factor of which is the visual. This can be so powerful that it actually alters what we taste in the wine. I once spiked a bottle of riesling with some red, flavorless food coloring and served it blind (i.e. the tasters couldn’t see the label) to a group of seasoned, wine-professional friends. Everyone, without fail, thought it was a rosé and even found red berry notes in the wine.
Much of what we taste is so predetermined by what we see that it is really tough to recognize flavors without context. Try this at home: get a friend to cut up as many different nuts and dried fruits as possible into tiny pieces so they’re not easily distinguishable. Put a blindfold on and ask your friend to feed them to you one by one. You will see how tough it is to identify them. The visual dominates so much that in order to really connect with flavor we need to be able to step back and focus simply on the mouth. It gets easier with practice, as you start registering individual flavors.
Try a wine and then decide what you think of it. You’d be surprised how many people have already made up their minds just by looking at the bottle, its weight, its label, or how the drink looks in the glass. The visual is wholly irrelevant to a wine’s quality.