Nature knows best

I think the best wine, the most honest wine, the most delicious wine, results when it’s left alone to do its thing as much as possible. I choose my grapes carefully, and this is one of the reasons I want my wines to express their terroir – the DeanDavid 2008 2squaremile Syrah, for instance, is so called because the four Shiraz blocks from which the grapes are selected are within, well, two square miles. And I think it’s a shame when a vintage that might otherwise have been unique is tampered with and ends up tasting of something other than what Nature intended – wood, say. As is pointed out on http://wine.appellationamerica.com/wine-review/564/Natural-Wine.html, if Nature gives us a difficult vintage, let’s taste it!

The fermentation of my wine is the only ‘processing’ it undergoes. The yeast and bacteria used in this step convert sugar and acids into alcohol and carbon dioxide in the course of their normal metabolism – and who am I to mess with that? I do regular ‘punch-downs’, which are gentler than their name suggests and really only ensure that good grape-skin contact is maintained with stirring. Wood contact is necessary, of course, but I reuse my barrels for as long as possible, and less than 10% in any one vintage is new wood.

And minimal intervention doesn’t apply only in the cellar. Restricting the use of chemicals in the vineyards is every bit as important, as is careful harvesting – I do mine the time-honoured way, by hand. (Spare a thought for our pretty Cape Dwarf Chameleon, a harmless, vineyard-loving little creature whose numbers were decimated when some farmers introduced mechanical harvesters into their vineyards; and that isn’t even to think about the fact that some of the wines produced as a result of this mechanisation contained essence of chameleon.) Not raping forests for wood (for barrels) is a biggie, as is responsible recycling (the DeanDavid 2008 Syrah is bottled in recycled bottles).

The blog mentioned above lists the eight constituencies of the Natural Wine Movement: ‘the best wine makes itself’, care of the environment, winemaking ‘without all the weird stuff’, wariness of recent technological innovations, controlling the sources of food, wines that improve with time, wine made from grapes alone, and not making wines that all taste the same. I subscribe to most of these. What do you think?

The Slow Food movement is beginning to take off around the world – so why not Slow Wine?