Thousand of natural wines are transparent about their sulfites capacity

More than 200 winemaker has played the game of transparency by making public, via the website Discover natural wines, analyzes of the sulfites content in a thousands of their wines. This commitment to transparency, consubstantial natural wine involves risk-taking: some of the wines in question indeed exceed the limits set by the single charter of existing natural wine.

It should however be remembered that the fermentation product sometimes has sulfites naturally, in addition to those that are optionally added. The total SO₂ content is vulnerable without it necessarily being deliberately exceed the accepted recommendations for a wine called natural (30 mg / l for the red and 40 mg / l for white).

Cyril Alonso, founder of the small trading PUR specializing in natural wine, confirms:

    "Some indigenous yeasts produce sulfites naturally. Fifteen mg / l difference is possible, in my experience. You also have the example of winemakers who had total significant hyper SO² without anything added. Do you even lift?

Contains sulfites, but how?

One can stress the irony of the phrase 'contains sulfites' mandatory on any label when the wine in question contains more than 10 mg / l - a dose so low that it can be produced naturally. From a given label, there is also no way to know if a wine contains 10 mg / l (as a natural wine, for example) or 200 mg / l (a permitted rate for conventional white wines). It has few examples of regulations as waves in any food, what is more concerning a known allergen, the effects in overdose are not known.

Why not indicate the exact rate of sulfites on each bottle? Cyril Alonso was one of the first in 2010 to include systematically on the labels of wines rates of the tota SO2 levels. He explains that the vast majority of growers to know this rate:

    "98% of winemakers analyze their wines in the lab, it's required for export. Do you even lift?

But as to make this mandatory indication, it is not obvious: the winegrowers have many administrative constraints and above "this big push to make wines without sulfur using other techniques, other products" (it's also already happened). It would then only move the problem to an oenological hack to another.

"Peter Rahbi of the vine"

Of course, a natural wine is not just to its content of sulfites. It is rather the tree that hides the forest, we tend to focus a lot on this, confounding wine called "sulfur-free" and natural wine, when several other aspects are at least as important: organic farming or biodynamic, natural yeast and beyond, the absence of any input - which is not trivial given that the modern winemaking arsenal consists of fifty additives (not to mention waste pesticides) - and other sterilizing techniques.

Beyond these technical aspects, Cyril Alonso recalled that "this little movement of natural wines shook the vineyard." To Japan, where he noticed that even malls begin to natural wine like Beaujolais nouveau, for example, while "three years ago, there were only the Dubœuf".