To download our current wine list please click on the link below.
“Organic wines – much more than a food”
Extracts from Goldstone’s owner, John Cushing’s wine column in Shropshire Magazine
Over the last five or so years the wine shelves have developed a section given over to “wines made from organic grapes”. That’s a mouthful in itself and do I detect a note of marketing department careful word smithery? Wouldn’t straight forward Organic wine do?
You can grow grapes organically relatively easily because the vine needs to be under stress to produce the most flavoursome fruit. Fertilizer and pesticides encourage lots of leaf growth and big flavourless grapes. The grapes are only destined for the press, so a bit ugly and small is not an issue unlike the dessert grapes we eat. The vines will look a bit weedy but a bit of hoeing soon tidies. But it doesn’t matter what you do, grapes are prone to rotting at ripening as autumn dampness arrives, if this happens the whole lot is a write off. That means no organic grapes and a bankrupt vineyard. There is a pragmatic solution, growers are allowed to spray with copper sulphate to stop the rot. The other certainty is that the harvested grapes will contain wild yeasts which will ferment the juice in an uncontrolled way, this has to be stopped using Sulphur compounds. This has always been the case and while these are not complex modern untried chemicals they are still chemical intervention which is not what organic means. But it does explain the careful phrasing of the label designers. The sulphur stops oxidation and in theory keeps wine fresh but you can taste it as a flattish after taste and it does give you a head ache when drinking cheap white which has been liberally dosed.
The tendency is that larger producers have pursued organic wine because there seems to be a market for it based solely on that premise irrespective of real flavour and quality gain. They are on the shelves and you will have to pay an organic premium of about 50 pence per bottle.
Wine is a natural product and best quality is produced by being sympathetic through out its growth, harvest, fermentation and storage. And that is what many smaller producers have dedicated their lives too so that they have a distinct product that makes them stand out and achieve a premium price. The ancients would have developed a natural way of nurturing the vine which would have been based around farmyard muck, waste products such as animal horn and dried nettle leaves. They would have worked out the best time of day to work on the vines and have even involved the stars and the lunar cycle so that they would always prune under a new moon and so on. All the new industrial chemicals came along and these ancient methods were lost, great for industrial mass produced wine but not individuality. Some pretty hardnosed wine makers have redeveloped this system of biodynamic production and benefits appear in flavour and quality when you are drinking. In 1997 Domaine Leflaive held blind tastings of wine made from adjoining vines separated in cultivation by biodynamic or modern method. The next year all was converted which is testimony to commercial decision not lunacy. Biodynamic producers have considerably reduced their need to spray copper sulphate and they can harness the wild yeasts to ferment the wine so almost doing away with the need for sulphur. That’s how it should be. Look out for producers, Chapoutier, Leflaive and Sesti to start your exploration and you can buy under any phase of the moon.
