eads up, ye vintners! My panel’s discussion at the Portland Indie Wine Festival on “Natural Wine in the Age of Technology” was a shocking reality check for me. It emphasized the truly scary disconnect that has emerged between conventional winemakers and their formerly doting groupies. No more, guys.

It was pretty great to be invited to bat around ideas with these folks, and my hope was to arrive at a definition for Natural Wine, perhaps even a Certification Mark. If a list of Natural Winemaking practices could be codified that’s commercially practical (unlike the ridiculous constraints of Organic Certification), I figure that many winery players will choose to participate. Win win.

It’s not as easy as it sounds. As I discussed in Natural Wine: Choosing Your Priorities, several consumer groups with different agendas are rallying under the Natural Wine flag. These groups do not want the same things. Like any political convention, careful thought and open discussion are needed to spell out those mountains which everybody in the movement is willing to die on.

We made progress. On some issues there is sensible consensus. No Megapurple, no Velcorin. Check. Other arenas are too subjective to be readily certifiable; you just can’t nail down what is meant by excessive oak, or excessive hangtime. Check. On other issues, there may be division: barrel alternatives have environmental and health advantages, and micro-oxygenation, though despised by many, replaces animal fining agents and may represent a return to classical practices before stainless steel and inert gas disrupted red winemaking tradition.

Although it is perhaps even more disreputable, reverse osmosis has nevertheless gained some acceptance in these ranks as a way to support sulfite-free winemaking, but the unnaturalness of “deconstructing” wine came up. (Why bleeding seigné for rosé isn’t also deconstruction was unclear to me.) Natural or not, the inconvenient truth remains that winemakers do a lot more RO than they generally admit, because it’s a powerful tool for quality improvement.

Whatever. Pick and choose some rules, and let us know. Kosher wine rules seem pretty silly to most winemakers, but we know what they are, so products exist. Just spell out the guidelines, and some wineries will show up for it.

Stop the Presses

So we’re cruising through the issues and suddenly, we hit the wall. Strong, very strong feeling in the room against, of all things, yeast inoculation. Really? I was, in fact, caught completely flatfooted. Flummoxed, I responded incorrectly to a question about whether my WineSmith 2004 Roman Syrah was inoculated, whence it was embarrassingly pointed out that my own tech sheet specifies Pasteur Red yeast rather than wild fermentation.

OK, my bad. But so what? This was, to me, a trivial detail, one of a thousand choices every winemaking project strings together, and it simply slipped my mind. My thinking at the time must have been that without any sulfite addition, I wanted a reliable yeast working to avoid sticking or spoilage. Shoot me. But I had absolutely no clue that this issue would loom so large for the natural winers.

But when the moderator dragged out a catalog description from a yeast company, I suddenly understood. Naturally, the extravagant product claims of the corporate yeast titans Lallevin and Anchor could certainly lead any concerned consumer to panic. “My God,” I thought, “She actually believes that tripe.”

Then it hit me. Oh dear. This is not good. For someone who has never made wine, catalog claims like “encourages the fresh fruit aromas of orange blossom, pineapple and apricot;” or “believed to enhance aromas such as fresh butter, honey, bright floral and pineapple,” or “flavor attributes are often described as ripe fruit, jam, hazelnut, and dried plums on the finish” are bound to drive anyone crazy who is interested in true grape flavor expression.

A Large Grain of Salt

Here’s the thing, folks. Any experienced winemaker will tell you that yeast companies’ flavor claims are regarded with about as much credibility as a Louisiana campaign promise. First year enology students do fermentation trials on different yeast strains, and yes, there are big initial differences. All yeasts produce esters – banana, pineapple and other fruity aromas, and the strains vary. These esters are, however, quite unstable, and a year later, the differences disappear, and are not a factor in most wines in commerce, particularly the mature reds that natural wine enthusiasts largely favor.

In contrast, un-inoculated grape juice is attacked prior to the actual wine yeast fermentation (Saccharomyces) by a whole host of yeasts and bacteria, including Candida, Brettanomyces, Metchnikovia, Pichia, Kloeckera, to say nothing of bacteria such as Acetobacter (vinegar), Pediococcus (sweat socks)and Lactobacillus (PineSol) all of which may leave an indelible and lasting microbial flavor profile which permanently obscures grape expression.

It’s not black and white. Clean wines are often made without inoculation, though not as dependably. And, in certain styles. the extra flavors from “natural fermentation” can be positive. As long as there’s not too much wine at stake, "feral ferments" (the more precise term Australians use for this practice) are kind of fun. My friend Carole Shelton uses commercial yeasts for most of her Zinfandels to ensure that the different vineyard sources show their grape flavor differences more purely, but one of her most popular wines is her Wild Thing, a distinctive wine if ever there was one. As a winemaker, I feel the style choice is simply part of my prerogative. I see no right answer, no moral good that is served either way.

Where’s the Beef?

As far as I can tell, detractors of commercial yeast have two concerns. One is that commercial wine yeasts are genetically modified. They are not. T’aint legal. They are simply “wild” yeasts which have been studied, selected for beneficial properties, grown in large quantities, dried and bagged up.

Second are concerns about flavors imparted from packaged yeast. As I have explained, not only is this concern naively overstated, but in my experience, un-inoculated wines are more prone to microbial flavor intrusions than commercial yeast fermentations.

One can argue that this is natural. Certainly it was traditional standard practice until a scant century ago, a mystery throughout 6,000 years of winemaking. Amazing as it seems, Louis Pasteur only elucidated the actual mechanism of fermentation in 1857, two years after the famous 1855 Paris Exposition which established the pecking order of Bordeaux Chateaux. This doesn’t mean there was no inoculation. The passing down of “mother” for wine, for vinegar and for baking goes back to ancient times.

Nevertheless, then as now, one can simply crush the grapes, stand back, and hope for the best. Fair enough. But the types of wines we drank back then, particularly white wines, have much less commercial viability today. As a result, many winemakers use commercial yeasts in order to protect the purity of grape expression. Vigorous, predictable yeasts also make it much less risky for winemakers wishing to work without sulfites or avoid sterile filtration.

Like any master baker, a winemaker spends a lifetime experimenting to find the perfect yeast, optimizing the extraction of grape characteristics for the specific set of fermentation circumstances to be carried out. Most winemakers are skittish about rolling the dice during fermentation, because an un-inoculated must is like Forest Gump’s box of chocolates – you never know what you’re gonna get.

A package of commercial yeast is like a vineyard produced from identical grape cuttings - all faithful copies of a known entity, be it Cabernet Sauvignon or Prise de Mousse. So far I haven’t heard any Natural Wine folks insisting we grow our grapes from seed. Natural or not, it would be the end of varietal winemaking and the sales of wines in categories understood by the marketplace.

Why Blow the Dough?

The main reason winemakers inoculate is cleanness. Second is stability – a vigorous yeast is more likely not to stick. Third are the physical properties, tailored to the intended fermentation regimen: tolerance of hot or cold temperatures, low foaming for barrel fermentations, slower fermentations for more time on the skins, good settling in a champagne bottle, faster breakdown during sur lies ageing. Fourth would perhaps be health considerations. Since the 1980’s, when the carcinogen ethyl carbamate was discovered in some wines, the Wine Institute and UC Davis have recommended that wineries favor Prise de Mousse, a champagne yeast with high enzyme activity which degrades the compound’s precursor, urea.

Who’s kidding who?

Is the indigenous yeast part of terroir? Depends on what you think the "T" word means. We all worship at the altar of terroir, but we really don’t agree on what it is. For many winemakers, terroir expression equals presentation of the unique grape flavors which the climate and soil of a place produce. Travel in Bourgogne and it becomes obvious that Fixin is Fixin and Santenay is Santenay. Many winemakers believe a predictable commercial yeast accentuates these differences. Wild yeast doesn't result in more unique flavor expression of place, but less - wines that taste more of their microbes than their grapes.

The terroiriste faction argues instead that the native yeast is part of the land’s expression. Some even oppose the old practice of “mothering,” because they think the seasonal climate variations within a specific vintage are reflected in the populations that show up in the fermenter. It’s a weird position, because rather than exploring the distinctive taste of the place as expressed in the grape, they want (or so they claim) to taste variations within an appellation as the highest expression of terroir.

But that’s not what appellations are for. They are simply consumer guides. We can buy Beaujolais, Sancerre, or St. Emillion and know what to cook to go with it. Here and there in the New World, such identities are also emerging - Napa Cab with steak, Amador Zin with barbeque. These are styles, courtesy of a winemaking tradition associated with that place. The predictable expectation provided by the hand of man is the essence of appellation. The soil and climate may contribute to the special properties of the cheeses of Parma or Cheshire, but let’s get real - it’s almost all the choices of the cheesemaker that determine style. No mold, it just ain’t Roquefort.

Show Me the Money

I think the yeast choice, with all its consequences, is properly the province of the winemaker. Most winemakers choose the predictability and pure grape expression yeast inoculation affords for a simple commercial reason. It is a rare bird indeed that will actually taste a wine and say “Wow, this tastes completely unlike anything I’ve ever tasted. How delightful. I’ll take a case.” That’s just not what happens in the marketplace, even in the hangouts of the ultra-natural. The impulse not to swallow something that smells weird goes way back to our hunter-gatherer days, and resides deep in the DNA.

Yet we try. My own WineSmith Cab Franc, Faux Chablis or Roman Syrah certainly don’t run with the traffic. That’s why I can count the barrels on one hand. Mainstream Cabernet Sauvignon and Pinot Noir pay my bills, and you can bet I inoculate.

It isn’t reasonable for consumers to evaluate these technically and commercially complex trade-offs. Passionate winelovers can certainly help out, though, if they can develop a distaste for the pat answers that armchair opinionists offer up. My advice is to find wineries you like, and leave the driving to the pros.

Take Home Message

We didn’t complete our list at the Festival. We ran out of time, but there was another reason. Once we listed all the things a Natural Wine consumer might want, we didn’t end up with a sensible formula. There was no winemaker on our natural wine panel who was willing to abandon yeast inoculation AND sulfites AND sterile filtration. If there is to be a certification mark, it needs some flexibility. In an ideal future, winemakers will be open about the technical combinations they choose, even the weird-sounding ones, and will explain their rationale as we did twenty years ago.

Active dialogue would be much less boring than the endless parade of winemakers claiming nebulously to “do the minimum.” If natural wine fans want to cause that dialogue to happen, they need to practice sympathetic active listening. A respectful ear combined with some actual wine purchases will get a winemaker’s attention every time, and can lead to increased experimentation with wild yeasts. Which I, for one, would enjoy. Meantime, talk is cheap for the guy who doesn’t have to live with the consequences himself.