63 62 Nº 38 6 URUGUAY 50mg/L added completely obscures a wine’s natural profile, personality and innate verve.” For Spencer, wines made with zero sulphur are still the way to go, “as these wines are utterly alive, and you can really taste it.” However, “outside of that,” she adds “my personal limit for enjoyment is around 30mg/L, though it is really dependent on the wine”. Raphael Rodriguez, Director of the importing company Vine Trail, agrees. When you use higher levels of sulphur, “your wine is protected from everything,” he says “but on the other hand, something that is meant to be alive and full of energy becomes ossified and petrified.” I pushed for a number, but Rodriguez was resistant. “It’s not black and white. It’s something you need to test on a daily basis. There are so many parameters that come into play, you cannot put a figure on it.” Finding balance in a contentious debate BRIDGING THE W ith the rise of the natural wine movement in the 1990s, the use of sulphur dioxide (SO2) became a divisive, hill-to-die-on issue. Amongst natural wine fanatics, it divided the purists from the phonies, whilst the convention in many of the world’s most prestigious wineries has continued to be to use large amounts of the stuff. But these two positions have become increasingly untenable, and there is a growing consensus on how much sulphur is too much or too little, with the caveat that every wine is different. For Honey Spencer, Co-Founder and Sommelier at Sune and author of Natural Wine, No Drama: An Unpretentious Guide , the sweet spot falls well below the EU’s legal stipulated limits for organic wines—which is an upper level of 100mg/L for red and 150mg/L for white and rosé. “It’s personal,” she admits, “but I would say anything over Sulphur divide WO R D S J O E L H A RT I L LU ST R AT I O N S ROA N NA M O NAG H A N 65 64 Nº 38 6 URUGUAY randomly, to a culture in which reductive, tight, acidified, high sulphur-level white Burgundy has become the norm with some producers,” he says. “And it’s just uninteresting.” “Less sulphur is better for wine quality; for wine perfume, for wine flavour, for wine pleasure,” he explains. “However, if you take it to the extreme, with zero added sulphur, you end up with too much risk, with the wrong flavour, the wrong bacteria taking over.” Harvey refers here to the potential of wines having excessive volatile acidity, mouse taint, too much brettanomyces or oxidation. “You can draw a graph where less is more, where less sulphur dioxide means better wine, and that works until a certain point, but when you get to zero sulphur you have mass variability.” For Harvey, “Less is more but zero can be a disaster.” Frank Cornelissen was one of the most prominent early advocates of zero-sulphur winemaking, but he started adding sulphur in 2018, eventually coming to the conclusion that sulphur is a necessary part of winemaking. His aim is “the search for purity in wine,” he tells me, which is what led him initially to the zero-sulphur wines of Marcel Lapierre, Pierre Overnoy, Patrick Deplats, and Domaine or old cask, allowing the wine to outlive any issues with malolactic fermentation. “The white wines in particular that survive very long elevage are spectacular,” Harvey says, “but not many survive.” One such winemaker is Richard Leroy—a widely celebrated producer, famous for not adding SO2, and who Rodriguez represents at Vine Trail. He points out that committed as he is to this risk, he often has to throw out barrels. “You cannot rush things” says Rodriguez, even though “you’re taking risks financially.” Finding the right level of sulphur use may also relate to the type of sulphur used. Most sulphur used in winemaking is industrially produced through a highly- processed extraction of sulphuric acid from an initial fossil fuel base. There is another option, however. Bordeaux vigneron Alain Déjean (at Rousset-Peyraguey) heads up a biodynamic network in the region called Dynamis, which focuses on sharing knowledge, but also importing elemental sulphur from volcanoes. This type of sulphur, which is extracted, purified and uncrushed—and was used in Roman times—retains a higher level of active free form of SO2, which, “The best way of speaking about it is in terms of taking risks,” he clarifies, and by the time you get to 70mg/L, there’s less risk, and the wine is more likely to close. And, he adds “that’s what happens with some of the top white Burgundies. Many of them aren’t taking a risk.” David Harvey of Raeburn Fine Wines—a wine merchant and importing company— agrees on the Burgundy point. “We’ve gone from white Burgundies for whatever reason— and we still don’t know—oxidised early or Gramenon. But after tasting too many wines with mouse taint, he decided to invest in biochemical analyses at wine laboratories in Bordeaux in 2014-15. The result of these trials, for Cornelissen, was the belief that without SO2 additions, that purity he’s looking for may be lost. “In simple words,” he says “any wine can get this off flavour if the bacterial level in the wine is out of control.” In 2018, he began adding low quantities of SO2 at every stage of racking, which is a departure from the norm. “Most low sulphur wineries work with a good dose of SO2 before bottling,” he says. Curious about how his position may have changed elsewhere, I asked Cornelissen whether he still felt zero-zero wines can express terroir and create ageworthy wines. “The longer I make wine the less I believe this,” he says. “Except in extreme low Ph wines which have high tannins and/or acidity.” For Harvey, “there are some people who use no sulphur who make really amazing ageworthy wines.” This requires upwards of three years of elevage in tank J O E L H A R T U B R I D G I N G T H E S U L P H U R D I V I D E 66 Nº 386 U RUG U A Y Dynamis claims, means less can be added. Here, sulphur use can be seen as necessary, without trading in on natural values, although this has its sceptics too. Cornelissen—who uses powdered and gas metabisulfite—is one of them, as he feels volcanic sulphur is “totally impractical and hard to calculate how much you add based on the analyses.” Overall, there is, at least, a growing consensus that less sulphur is wise, and no sulphur tricky. “What we saw happen is that the really great modern-style winemakers, Parker- era winemakers, reigned it in and started to go a bit more soulful in their expression,” says Harvey, “and people who had really gung-ho naturalista tendencies but were also really good tasters, reigned in the zero-sulphur programmes, making better wines, so there’s been a convergence in style and quality.” This confluence has also met on the prioritisation—across the spectrum—of healthy grapes, farmed without chemical intervention. For Spencer, this means “without proper farming—meaning the absence of synthetic applications—one simply cannot make wine without sulphites.” Put another way, “being sensitive to taking care of the planet is, at the end of the day, the most important thing,” Rodriguez says. “In the grand scheme of things, the sulphur thing is peanuts.” J O E L H A R T U B R I D G I N G T H E S U L P H U R D I V I D E