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"In 2000, a French government report noted that vineyards used 3% of all agricultural land, but 20% of the total pesticides. In 2013, a study found traces of pe

"In 2000, a French government report noted that vineyards used 3% of all agricultural land, but 20% of the total pesticides. In 2013, a study found traces of pesticides in 90% of wines available at French supermarkets." Ok, that seems like legitimate concerns. "Wine is regularly passed through electrical fields to prevent calcium and potassium crystals from forming, injected with various gases to aerate or protect it, or split into its constituent liquids by reverse osmosis and reconstituted with a more pleasing alcohol to juice ratio." Pearl clutching nonsense. Does sound a lot like antivaxxer concerns right there. Not sure who to believe here, but I'll lean towards organic wines that used efficient machines and process if I was concerned over the "GMO ARE ALWAYS BAD CROWD" that would rather see the world starve.

simion314 8y ago
My family makes wine just for ourselves(we live in a village) no tech or chemicals are used but the taste is not bad, I do not understand why they say it should taste like vinegar.
- eftychis 8y ago
  It doesn't and shouldn't taste like vinegar. Same here regarding family wine production. Note families tend to share their wine among themselves, so there is some comparison. You can taste the difference if there is some additive or it is industry produced. It is just different. Personally, I find the term "natural wine" kind of laughable (I hope) and a result of marketing. Techniques used in the industry are towards making wine more average and consistent over the years. Not sifting your juices and checking over the yeast, just means you won't know if your wine sucks till it's ready. Hence a significant portion of years will just taste bad, with a few of them being acceptable. You still need to intervene to get true gems (controlled environment etc), as the article implies. There is still a lot of oversight going on. >> According to this view, natural wine is a cult intent on >> rolling back progress in favour of wine best suited to >> the tastes of Roman peasants. I think this hostile sentiment is unwarranted. Wine in general has gotten much better over the years (consistency and taste) as we know much more about the process. I can see why French winemakers want consistency, but I would argue they could label possibly inconsistent wines with a new term than branding them as "garbage".
- petre 8y ago
  Depends where the grapes are from, what species they are and of course also the winemaking the process. There was a joke going around about the difference between German wine and vinegar: the label. In sunnier regions the grapes are sweet but don't get enough acidity and the winemakers have to compensate using tartaric (also citric or malic) acid or ideally more acidic grape juice (imported or from other grape species). In less sunnier regions the grapes don't get enough sugar and they become too acidic. Fermentation naturally stops at about 13% alcohol content but if it's warm in your cellar (>18°C) it can start again and exhaust all the sugar in the wine. When this happens, you can stop the fermentation by adding suplhur. A small amount of sugar is necessary to preserve the flavours in a wine if it's kept in barrels or stainless steel drums. Commercial wines are filtered, pasteurized and bottled after fermentation stops if they're not aged in wooden barrels. Once a bottle of regular (unaged) commercial wine is open, the flavour goes away if left overnight.
vkou 8y ago
> in 2013, a study found traces of pesticides in 90% of wines available at French supermarkets. > Ok, that seems like legitimate concerns. How many pesticides, though? Are we talking about ppb for compounds that are harmful at ppm levels? Or ones that are harmful at ppb levels? Do they accumulate in the body over decades, or are broken down in a matter of days? Of course, none of those questions are answered.
- bvinc 8y ago
  That's a legitimate question that someone should try to answer. But to be honest, I don't care. We live in a world where margerine was touted for decades to prevent heart disease. The fact of the matter is that even if we can find no safety issues now, they can't rule out everything. Health and nutrition is complicated and I don't trust unnatural additions to my food that merely seem safe. I'll opt to ingest zero pesticides any time I can.
- jimnotgym 8y ago
  One world-class expert in the wine trade told me that he favoured vineyards that were careful about pesticide use rather than fully organic ones. The reason as I recall was that some of the nasty things that can damage grapes/ vines and must-be-killed are stopped by a low dose of a specific pesticide if there is an infection, whereas organic growth requires heavy pro-active doses of copper. He felt that was more damaging.
  - phyzome 8y ago
    Integrated Pest Management (IPM) is a great approach that I'd like to see more of. I don't think there are any (useful) labeling standards, though, which makes it harder to promote as an alternative to organic. It really comes down to trusting the farmer...
phyzome 8y ago
Separating and then reconstituting the wine is the part I would personally draw the line at. Maybe it's fine. Maybe they're grossly altering the wine in a way that negates e.g. health benefits, and it's not "wine" in the sense that consumers understand it to be. More generally, I think people are just tired of producers fucking around with their food in various ways.
- hendiatris 8y ago
  This isn’t a big deal. You should probably be more concerned about the pesticides. These machines do dealcoholization, remove volatile acidity (vinegar), alter acidity (done with ion exchange, as opposed to adding tartaric acid directly to the wine). Yeah, there are probably some negative side effects as a result of these techniques, but I'd bet big that they are vast improvements over the alternatives and that the negative effects are dwarfed by those of pesticides
  - phyzome 8y ago
    Ah, I should be clear, I'm not on board with most synthetic pesticides either. I was referring to just the additional list of electrical fields, etc.
akamaka 8y ago
There’s no similarity to antivaxxers here. Natural wines are mostly consumed by wine lovers, not health nuts, and the main concern is what the heavy processing is doing to the quality and distinctive character of the wine.
nilkn 8y ago
I think maybe you're reading something between the lines here that isn't actually there. I think I'd summarize this article as being about groupthink more than anything else. The wine world is overwhelmed with all sorts of rules about what's good, what's not, how something should be produced, and how it shouldn't. "Natural wine" is an attack on all of that. It's just saying, "screw you, we're going to potentially disregard every single rule in the book, and we don't care what you think of the result." I think this paragraph sums up the whole article: "The inconsistency, the impurity, the strong smells, the bits of stems and yeasts that sometimes make it into the bottle – all this signals to the consumer that natural wine is an alternative to the bland, monotonous “perfection” of commercial products, in the same way that slight asymmetries distinguish handmade furniture. Natural wine offers a nothing-to-hide-here image at odds with the stuffy culture of the traditional wine world. To many people for whom a restaurant wine list represents a hellish combination of a geography, history and chemistry test specially designed to make them feel stupid, there is something very appealing about upending the critical hierarchy, or at least being told it can be ignored."
chiph 8y ago
> split into its constituent liquids by reverse osmosis and reconstituted with a more pleasing alcohol to juice ratio I'd regard that with the same esteem as one of the factory-made whiskeys. Technically true, but violates the spirit of the spirit.
- tptacek 8y ago
  The best whiskeys in the world are made by the largest commercial firms; ironically, it's the "artisanal" indie stuff that's most likely sourced from huge industrial concerns like MGPI --- and even MGPI whiskey has merits (you just shouldn't pay extra for it).
  - DennisP 8y ago
    That's true in the sense that many well-known Scottish distilleries are owned by some large corporation, but some of those distilleries make their whisky the same way they did a hundred years ago. The American whiskey scene is much as you describe though. The indie scene is fairly new, and they have to do something while they're waiting for the barrels to age. But some are producing their own offbeat whiskeys; for example, Balcones makes one from blue corn, and another with malt smoked by mesquite.

simion314 8y ago

My family makes wine just for ourselves(we live in a village) no tech or chemicals are used but the taste is not bad, I do not understand why they say it should taste like vinegar.

eftychis 8y ago
It doesn't and shouldn't taste like vinegar. Same here regarding family wine production. Note families tend to share their wine among themselves, so there is some comparison. You can taste the difference if there is some additive or it is industry produced. It is just different. Personally, I find the term "natural wine" kind of laughable (I hope) and a result of marketing. Techniques used in the industry are towards making wine more average and consistent over the years. Not sifting your juices and checking over the yeast, just means you won't know if your wine sucks till it's ready. Hence a significant portion of years will just taste bad, with a few of them being acceptable. You still need to intervene to get true gems (controlled environment etc), as the article implies. There is still a lot of oversight going on. >> According to this view, natural wine is a cult intent on >> rolling back progress in favour of wine best suited to >> the tastes of Roman peasants. I think this hostile sentiment is unwarranted. Wine in general has gotten much better over the years (consistency and taste) as we know much more about the process. I can see why French winemakers want consistency, but I would argue they could label possibly inconsistent wines with a new term than branding them as "garbage".
petre 8y ago
Depends where the grapes are from, what species they are and of course also the winemaking the process. There was a joke going around about the difference between German wine and vinegar: the label. In sunnier regions the grapes are sweet but don't get enough acidity and the winemakers have to compensate using tartaric (also citric or malic) acid or ideally more acidic grape juice (imported or from other grape species). In less sunnier regions the grapes don't get enough sugar and they become too acidic. Fermentation naturally stops at about 13% alcohol content but if it's warm in your cellar (>18°C) it can start again and exhaust all the sugar in the wine. When this happens, you can stop the fermentation by adding suplhur. A small amount of sugar is necessary to preserve the flavours in a wine if it's kept in barrels or stainless steel drums. Commercial wines are filtered, pasteurized and bottled after fermentation stops if they're not aged in wooden barrels. Once a bottle of regular (unaged) commercial wine is open, the flavour goes away if left overnight.

vkou 8y ago

> in 2013, a study found traces of pesticides in 90% of wines available at French supermarkets. > Ok, that seems like legitimate concerns. How many pesticides, though? Are we talking about ppb for compounds that are harmful at ppm levels? Or ones that are harmful at ppb levels? Do they accumulate in the body over decades, or are broken down in a matter of days? Of course, none of those questions are answered.

bvinc 8y ago
That's a legitimate question that someone should try to answer. But to be honest, I don't care. We live in a world where margerine was touted for decades to prevent heart disease. The fact of the matter is that even if we can find no safety issues now, they can't rule out everything. Health and nutrition is complicated and I don't trust unnatural additions to my food that merely seem safe. I'll opt to ingest zero pesticides any time I can.
jimnotgym 8y ago
One world-class expert in the wine trade told me that he favoured vineyards that were careful about pesticide use rather than fully organic ones. The reason as I recall was that some of the nasty things that can damage grapes/ vines and must-be-killed are stopped by a low dose of a specific pesticide if there is an infection, whereas organic growth requires heavy pro-active doses of copper. He felt that was more damaging.
- phyzome 8y ago
  Integrated Pest Management (IPM) is a great approach that I'd like to see more of. I don't think there are any (useful) labeling standards, though, which makes it harder to promote as an alternative to organic. It really comes down to trusting the farmer...

phyzome 8y ago

Separating and then reconstituting the wine is the part I would personally draw the line at. Maybe it's fine. Maybe they're grossly altering the wine in a way that negates e.g. health benefits, and it's not "wine" in the sense that consumers understand it to be. More generally, I think people are just tired of producers fucking around with their food in various ways.

hendiatris 8y ago
This isn’t a big deal. You should probably be more concerned about the pesticides. These machines do dealcoholization, remove volatile acidity (vinegar), alter acidity (done with ion exchange, as opposed to adding tartaric acid directly to the wine). Yeah, there are probably some negative side effects as a result of these techniques, but I'd bet big that they are vast improvements over the alternatives and that the negative effects are dwarfed by those of pesticides
- phyzome 8y ago
  Ah, I should be clear, I'm not on board with most synthetic pesticides either. I was referring to just the additional list of electrical fields, etc.

akamaka 8y ago

There’s no similarity to antivaxxers here. Natural wines are mostly consumed by wine lovers, not health nuts, and the main concern is what the heavy processing is doing to the quality and distinctive character of the wine.

nilkn 8y ago

I think maybe you're reading something between the lines here that isn't actually there. I think I'd summarize this article as being about groupthink more than anything else. The wine world is overwhelmed with all sorts of rules about what's good, what's not, how something should be produced, and how it shouldn't. "Natural wine" is an attack on all of that. It's just saying, "screw you, we're going to potentially disregard every single rule in the book, and we don't care what you think of the result." I think this paragraph sums up the whole article: "The inconsistency, the impurity, the strong smells, the bits of stems and yeasts that sometimes make it into the bottle – all this signals to the consumer that natural wine is an alternative to the bland, monotonous “perfection” of commercial products, in the same way that slight asymmetries distinguish handmade furniture. Natural wine offers a nothing-to-hide-here image at odds with the stuffy culture of the traditional wine world. To many people for whom a restaurant wine list represents a hellish combination of a geography, history and chemistry test specially designed to make them feel stupid, there is something very appealing about upending the critical hierarchy, or at least being told it can be ignored."

chiph 8y ago

> split into its constituent liquids by reverse osmosis and reconstituted with a more pleasing alcohol to juice ratio I'd regard that with the same esteem as one of the factory-made whiskeys. Technically true, but violates the spirit of the spirit.

tptacek 8y ago
The best whiskeys in the world are made by the largest commercial firms; ironically, it's the "artisanal" indie stuff that's most likely sourced from huge industrial concerns like MGPI --- and even MGPI whiskey has merits (you just shouldn't pay extra for it).
- DennisP 8y ago
  That's true in the sense that many well-known Scottish distilleries are owned by some large corporation, but some of those distilleries make their whisky the same way they did a hundred years ago. The American whiskey scene is much as you describe though. The indie scene is fairly new, and they have to do something while they're waiting for the barrels to age. But some are producing their own offbeat whiskeys; for example, Balcones makes one from blue corn, and another with malt smoked by mesquite.