The wines that I
love have one thing in common: fermentation is by indigenous or natural yeast.
A simple
reference to indigenous yeast has cascading implications. Least the way I see it after visiting many vignerons. Indigenous yeasts can only be meaningful and
successful if a vigneron practices viticulture
in harmony with nature, hand-harvests, and minimal intervention in the
cellar. Pictured left is the Noella Morantin vineyard in Loire.
If a wine
producer decides one day to use indigenous yeast after farming his vineyards
conventionally with chemicals of herbicides and pesticides, it is not going to
happen too easily over night. Indigenous
yeast lives in the vineyards. So when
vineyards are sprayed with chemical, there will not be enough indigenous yeast
population for fermentation.
And if a wine
producer uses a machine harvester, grapes burst and bleed before they make to cellar. And as soon as the
grapes bleed, it is grounds for a bacterial infection. To stop the bacterial infection, a dose of sulphur
must be added to the juice or crushed grapes.
Once the sulphur is added, the indigenous yeast is instantly killed. So lab yeasts must be added. And to feed the lab yeasts, additional
chemicals need to be added. And so a
list of intervention continues.
Over-worked or intervened wines to me taste flat and soupy.
To me, the
difference between the wines made from indigenous and lab yeasts are
significant. The ingenious yeasted wines are lively and fresh.
The story behind
indigenous yeast came up when I was listening to I’ll Drink To That – an
excellent podcast out of New York
I never bought
into the idea that just because one can sell the wines, one doesn’t have to ask
how the wines are made and taste. I
always thought it is the other way around: Because one knows how the wines are
made and taste, one wants to sell them.
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