Tuesday, October 28, 2014

Unfined, Unfiltered, Un-What?

After an exhausting few hours of climbing at the Philadelphia Rock Gym at East Falls and a super filling dinner at the Falls Taproom I was ready to finish the day in a comfortable chair with a glass of red wine a la Stanley from The Office. The wine settled upon is the one pictured here aside my editor Turnip, Domaine des Deux Puits 2012 Cotes Catalan Syrah

A pleasant wine with low tannins and aromatics that remind me of something between Celestial Seasoning's Red Zinger Tea and crushed raspberries. It's an easy wine to drink at the end of a long day, priced well at about $12, but not the kind of thing I'm going to cellar for ten years to break out at a wine dinner and rave about the developed bouquet. The juice itself is an everyday sort of wine, but what got me thinking was the sentence on the label that mentioned the wine being, "hand harvested at optimum ripeness to give a full, generous style of Syrah with no oak aging or filtration."

There are a few items in that sentence that would catch my eye if I was in an unfamiliar store trying to pick out a bottle. Now the bit about "... optimum ripeness," I tend to glaze over, because what wine would boast picking at anything else. 

You'll probably never see, "We pick two weeks after optimum ripeness to create something akin to a Denny's Blueberry Syrup." Although some folks do make that wine.

So that part can be ignored. The no oak aging is a nice piece of information, because to my tastes I don't usually like to see oak as the dominant flavor in the wine; whisk(e)y is one thing, but I generally prefer my wine to taste like fruit, herbs, and stones inspired by the vineyard in which it was grown. It's the "no filtration," part that catches my eye. But if you aren't familiar with the role of filtration, let alone the choice not to filter, then how would this help?

This is a wine making decision in which the philosophy of the winemaker begins to express itself. There are those that believe the act of fining (using a protein of some sort to clarify the wine), filtering (running a wine through filters), or cold-stabilizing (another conversation to come) ruin a wine's inherent flavors.

If you are trying to make a $10 Cabernet Sauvignon from South Australia that tastes the same regardless of vintage, then you will generally fine and filter the hell out of that wine. But if you are trying to make a wine taking as few steps in the process as possible to deliberately adjust the final product, you might not fine or filter.

The advantage to fining and filtering is a consistent product that won't make any one nervous because of sediment in the bottle, but if one doesn't fine or filter a wine there's a greater chance the wine can throw sediment. Sediment is not going to hurt you, but if you don't know what it is, it could be rather alarming to find in your glass. 

Now for whatever series of reasons in my upbringing and life experience, I fall into the camp that believes too much fining, filtering, and cold stabilizing will remove flavors unnecessarily to make a consistent brand instead of a more (I know it's a loaded term) honest wine.  

"Honest wine" is a term I hesitate to use because in simply saying it that way it creates a stark dualism between honest and dishonest wines, which I don't think is a correct dualism to form. But in a time where the use of oak dust, chips, and staves are used in conjunction with processes like reverse osmosis and confectionery adjustment agents like Mega-purple, it's refreshing see terms like unfined or unfiltered on a label to give me a clue about where the winemaker is coming from.

For further reading on wine adjustment agents and Mega-purple, I turn you towards more informed individuals than I: Dan Berger and Keith Wallace on the subject.

No comments:

Post a Comment