Will UV Treatment of Wine Save Terroir?
Saturday, January 31st, 2009It seems like every week, there’s a new story about some inventor debuting some newfangled technology to make wine better. Most such stories seem to involve some device that can turn cheap wine into much better wine, auto-magically, which I’ve now decided is the wine world’s equivalent of the famous line “I’ve got a bridge to sell you.”
But occasionally we actually get some news of a technological innovation that doesn’t involve auras, electromagnetic fields, or crappy wine, and which might actually make a difference in how wine gets made from here on out.
Such is the case with the story this week, of the first wine to hit the market that has been treated with UV light 
instead of sulfur dioxide and filtering.
Sulfur dioxide is one of the most useful and prevalent chemicals used in the winemaking and winegrowing process. It is used both as a disinfectant for winemaking equipment, but also as an additive to wine, in small quantities, with one primary purpose — to prohibit the growth of unwanted bacteria and yeasts in the wine. You’ve likely heard of that nasty stuff called Brett (Brettanomyces yeast) that gives wine a manure-like smell and flavor? Well it’s one of the chief reasons that nearly every commercial wine in the world uses at least a little sulfur dioxide.
Even after a wine has fermented to dryness (no more sugar for the yeasts to eat) there are still lots of living things in the wine that potentially can cause the wine to change in ways that most winemakers want to prevent. One of the last steps in the winemaking process is to either make sure that there’s nothing more for these little critters to feed on, or more commonly, to try to either kill them or remove them from the wine. Hence the use of sulfur dioxide (think edible RAID for renegade yeasts) and filtration (which strips them out of the wine completely with a strainer, so to speak).
The problem with sulfur dioxide is that it stays in the wine, and in large doses can change the flavor and aroma of the wine, as well as increase the likelihood that people with allergies or sensitivities to sulfites will have a reaction to the wine. And the problem with filtration is that it tends to strip out a lot of the character of the wine — unfiltered wines tend to be more complex and to show their terroir better.
It’s the sulfite problem, I believe, that has really motivated the investigation into UV treatment of wines. The idea being that if there is a way to kill the active biological agents in a wine without adding sulfur, then so much the better for everyone. And that’s just what this new processing seems to do. Wine gets sloshed around in a series of chambers and exposed to UV light until all the yeasts and bacteria are dead. Simple as that.
Of course, anyone who makes handcrafted wines will tell you that “sloshing wine around in a series of chambers” is not exactly how they′d want to treat their young wine. Much is done in the winemaking process to avoid excessive turbulence and agitation of the wine. You’ve doubtless read or heard wineries make a big deal about being gravity-fed, and not doing any pumping of their wine, for precisely this reason.
But leaving aside for the moment the question of whether this agitation might do more harm to the wine, this technology interests me the most for its secondary benefit: the potential to keep many wineries from having to filter their wines.
I′ll drink wine treated with sulfur dioxide all day long for the rest of my life (well, I do anyway at the moment). But whenever possible, I choose to drink wines (especially red) that are unfined and unfiltered, because invariably they are simply better than wines that aren’t.
Filtration and fining (a process used to reduce sediment while the wine is in barrel) are quite common winemaking practices, especially here in the United States. They are used both to prevent biological agents in the wine from acting up and re-fermenting the wine once it has been bottled, and, unfortunately, to remove cloudiness and sediment from wine because American consumers see them as flaws and often refuse to buy cloudy or sedimentary wines or return them after purchase if they notice such things.
It’s a sad but understandable state of affairs. A lot of wineries take a better safe than sorry approach, and both fine and filter their wines rather than risk either spoilage or consumer rejection. But as a result, they often strip the soul out of their wines.
But if tomorrow, every winemaker in the world stopped filtering thanks to some handy UV technology, the quality of wine would significantly increase immediately, and, dare I say it, there would be a lot more terroir out there on the market.
Really it’s like some sort of Kermit Lynch (an importer who has championed unfiltered wines for years) wet dream. The idea that even $8 wines produced in large quantities could conceivably get to market without fining and filtration is a really tantalizing future. Of course there’s still a lot of education to do to convince consumers to ignore the sediment and cloudiness in their wine. But the world would certainly drink better for it.
It’s quite encouraging to see technological progress like this in the wine world, especially when it might offer both the opportunity to get more people drinking wine (for less fear of headaches and reactions) and make it easier to make wines with a little more soul.
Original post by Alfonso Cevola
statuesque peaks to make good wine, you just need good soil, and apparently Cooper Mountain provides great raw material in the form of fast-draining, mineral-rich soils.
thrive, but the Anderson Valley, three hours north of San Francisco, is the de-facto home for growing and making wines from these varietals in the style common to the French border region of Alsace.
I’ve been away from the home fires for a couple of days and seem to have landed in Dante’s Hell for journalists. As I mentioned to a friend earlier today, I am the Invisible Man. I mean, I know I don’t live in NY any longer (not any longer than I had to), but when you meet a person 4-5-6 times, you’d think they’d at least try to pretend to remember you. Hey, I don’t want them to present me with an award, but these are folks who are writing about wine and the hospitality business. Seems they could stand to take a cue and become a little more hospitable. Not to mention the benefits from actively working with contacts like we do mulch. The new network? Meh, a lot of these folks are from the dead tree school of writing.
So, I’m in a press conference. Basically a bunch of weary Italian speakers spouting banalities about Brunello and how great Italy is. Along the way a writer (one whose book on Italian wine up to this moment I had recommended to everybody) asks the panel a question. No one on the panel answered that person. So I decided to open up my “no good deed goes unpunished” toolbox and reached on in and tried and help this writer out. After all, we’re colleagues right? Oh wait, the PR firm didn’t get my request for the luncheon so they would allow me to come to the press conference but not to the press meal. I guess they only had so much swag to go around. Not to worry, the merchant’s luncheon was much more fun.
This expert writer now scowls at me. “I am not talking about anthocyanins; everybody can get that kind of information.” At this point I am really regretting being a nice person from The West who was raised to be polite to everybody, even those afflicted with foot-in-mouth disease. I drop-kick the punt. “It appears you don’t want my information to provide you with the answer. But even if that is not what you are looking for, that is the answer.” And I turn 180 degrees and remove this person from my field of sight.
We have folks in a dying or dead industry. Journalism and book publishing. And we are attempting to exchange ideas, bring them up to speed. Remember? I am the Invisible Man, I don’t exist.
My point? Other than the endless frustration with the old school media who I have to keep reintroducing myself to at seminars (a very humbling and tedious ritual for a normally shy person like me), I think it is that you think you are going to engage in some brainstorming with fellow colleagues and what you have really done is to have landed yourself in the cockfighting ring. And for some reason, it seems to be worse with females. Maybe they have had to scratch through all those glass ceilings all those years and they are just wary of another white middle-aged male. If that’s all they see, I pity them for their apprehension. I’m not a threat. I have a day job. I don’t want their gig or their assignment or their spotlight.
Change. Yeah, everybody’s talking about it. From what I’ve seen and heard this week, though, my takeaway is this: Everybody wants everything around them to change, as long as they don’t need to be doing any of the changing themselves.
A while back I wrote that I was scaling back to 
The V.P.’s and general sales managers have been streaming out of the office to California for the end of year sales and performance reviews with the wineries, and some of them have been coming back saying we here in Texas have been showing the rest of the country how important tenacity is in these times. Having lived here all these years, I’m not sure if it is just plain stubbornness or perhaps not buying into the bicoastal American dream. You know, lots of credit, other people’s money, buy low, sell high. Or don’t even buy, just take the money and tell folks how great everything is, and don’t invest a penny. Well, we here in flyover country probably have a retinue of sins, venial and mortal on our bloodied hands, but for the time it looks like we made it through the year with only flesh wounds. We’re talking sales now folks. But 2009 is barreling past us and things are s.l.o.w.i.n.g. d.o.w.n. Duh.
I don’t mean to rant, but last week I was in two steakhouses and two Asian restaurants. The Asian places had food that seemed to be more serious. Smaller portions (and prices) higher sourcing and quality. I had a Carbonara at one of them that was better than any Italian place nearby. And I had a Bolognese at an Italian-inclined (?) concept that had nothing to do with Bolognese. So, go figure. I’m crazy. Hey, while my Austinopoli co-conspirator wants to make the world safe for Italian wine, I just want to serve man. With as little salt and garlic as possible.
I had a Petite Sirah from 
