Sulphites - A Question of Degree?

The words “contains sulphites” appear on virtually all wine labels; as with any labelling it is meaningless because sulphites are, for wine, the best and the worse thing: it is only a question of measure. Yet the presence of sulphur dioxide has to be mentioned from 10mg/l, a very weak potency when the maximum authorized is 160mg/l for reds, 210 mg/l for whites and roses and 400mg/l for sweet wines…

Yet what is the labelling for if it does not mention the quantity? If the ingredients on the package of a supermarket ready meal merely mentioned “salt”, consumer groups and trading standards boards would froth like hydrophobic dogs. Surely highlighting the difference between a bottle of Muscadet with 15 mg/l, an imperceptible amount, worthy of a talented and meticulous winegrower, and one that contains 10 times more, is not only useful, but extremely relevant to people who have an allergenic reaction to high levels of sulphur.

What is important with sulphur dioxide, is not its presence, which is vital and beneficial for most wines, but its potency. Anti-oxidizing, antiseptic and acidifying, sulphur dioxide, as Pasteur understood at the end of the 19th Century, it protects wine from oxygen which changes the aromas until the wine is spoiled. To protect their wines, the Greeks used, with relative success, pine resin and sea water. That’s if you like pine resin and sea water.  It was only from the 15th Century that the use sulphur dioxide spread in Europe. As ever, progress leads to abuse, through ease and laziness. Harvests affected by rot, rushed harvests or uncontrolled vinification? Just need to cram it with sulphur dioxide and everything is fine! The winemaker’s (un)natural impulse is to control every process in the winery, to superimpose stability by chemical means. This may be in the best interest of the winemaker; it is not always in the best interest of the wine.

The reds are generally less vulnerable, thanks to their tannins, whilst the whites, rosés and sweet wines, more complex to vinify, are subject to higher concentrations of sulphur dioxide which, in high proportions, not only stings the nose with lingering odours of burned matches, but also causes, by the dilatation of the cerebral vessels, those famous headaches which make some people believe that they can’t tolerate white and rosé wines.

Oenologists’ comprehensive insurance, sulphur dioxide, can be used at every stage of vinification: to protect a damaged harvest, during the pressing, fermentation and maturation and whilst bottling. The worst winegrowers use it all the time. The more discriminating will use it only during the delicate and essential stage of fermentation, to protect the indigenous yeast that will give the wine its delicacy and originality. It is then not a problem to sulphur lightly during bottling, to keep the wine stable.

If then the indication “contains sulphites” does not enlighten the consumer, it has a collateral effect of making more visible a class of wine that is very marginal, but nowadays fashionable –the “sulphur free”- which can now declare on their labels “does not contain added sulphites” or even the gloriously gnomic pas de sulphites.

Some people try never to use SO2. This is a small world of adventurers, whose wines stir up polemics and comments, because they result from excess and doubt: stars rub shoulders with failures. It is undeniable that, when successful, those cuvées provide incomparable feeling, because they achieve an aromatic finesse, ethereal and pure, truly superior, and so it is impossible to tell amongst good winegrowers who bottled the same wine with or without sulphites, like Marcel Lapierre in Beaujolais or Thierry Allemand in Cornas. And their argument is an ethical one. Wine is a product of nature; it is the winemaker’s obligation to keep the unique signature of the terroir alive, not to destroy in order to create. Thus all additions to the wine are eschewed and sulphur is kept to a minimum.

But, like unpasteurised cheeses, those extreme wines are fresh products, alive, fragile. They need cold storage: they must always be under 15oC. They are sometimes subject to “off” periods of several months, when the yeasts “devour” each other. When just opened, the carbonic gas needs to evaporate as it can disturb less-experienced wine drinkers. These wines are exceptional and need to be handled with care. I find that chilling the wines in the fridge for half an hour and decanting it a good option. Non/low-sulphured wines are extremely aromatic – often redolent of yoghurt or cheese (the whites) or the barnyard (reds). You can almost smell the explosive interactions of the yeasts.

Too many winegrowers go into working “without sulphur” with imprudence. “I’m fed up with those jokers whose wine doesn’t hold up one bottle in two!!” complained the owner of one of the most famous organic wine bars in Paris. Aside from some unforgettable miracles, how many broken, faded, oxidized beverages are there, when the main aim is to protect the fruit or the purity of the terroir! The issue is never simply a choice or whether you sulphur or not; it involves creating the preconditions for having that choice available. This, in turn, involves scrupulous attention to detail in the vineyard with organic viticulture, low yields, everything done by hand, triage – everything designed to make the vine more self-reliant and to promote deeper root systems. The most articulate advocate of non-interventionist wine-making is the unquestioned pope of the non-sulphur, Pierre Overnoy. This monument to self-effacement has been vinifying his sumptuous, supremely age-worthy Arbois without SO2 for decades. He explains that working “without sulphur”, is possible “when the vines, ploughed for years, have deep roots that give minerality and natural acidity which protects the wines and which chemicals fertilizers bring down”, when the harvest is “healthy, clean and sorted”, when the yeasts “alive, emit natural sulphites when the wine needs them”… In brief, working “without sulphur”, for the winegrower as well as for the consumer, “is not a commencement, it’s a closure”.