I am a purist, or at least I try to be.  From my early days at Robert Mondavi Winery, I was moved by Tim Mondavi’s passion and approach towards winemaking – native fermentations, unfiltered bottling, no shenanigans when it came to blending, and much more.  I have adopted some of those tenets, as well as so many others which I’ve learned along the way.

THE SPICE RACK

We winemakers have countless options and products at our disposal.  Do we add yeast, should we acidulate, French or American oak or none, do we filter, do we fine?  The list is endless and can be dizzying. Some of the things we add are perfunctory to winemaking -- I always add sulphur, in small amounts, to promote a healthy environment and avoid spoilage.  I also use French oak barrels, which by no means is naturally occurring in wine, but I find it complementary.   I am guided by whether my decisions help enhance vineyard expression.  And, usually, less is more.

Let’s further explore just one category… fining agents.

EGG WHITES

Red wines, especially Cabernet and its siblings, rely on tannins to build texture.  And, developing ripe tannins in the vineyard is one of the greatest challenges.  The perplexing thing about tannins is that the actual quantity is less important than the quality.  Getting them ripe, and later knowing how to extract them during fermentation, is a delicate fusion of art and science.  No “spider graph” or chemical assay from a lab can guide a winemaker to get it right.  Proper extraction (pulling everything good out of a grape and leaving the bad stuff behind) requires an understanding of the science while using intuition and your palate to guide you.

Too often, red wines are over-extracted in the winery or possess unruly tannins from their vineyard.  One mitigation strategy is the use of egg whites. The process of fining red wine with egg whites hails from Bordeaux, and its practice continues throughout the winegrowing lands.  The protein in egg whites (albumin) does several things to red wine – the webbing action helps in clarification, it has an antiseptic effect , and a rather non-discriminatory removal of tannin occurs, which also removes good tannins, texture and nuance.  And, you just added eggs to your wine!  As mentioned, getting ripe tannins and properly extracting them is difficult.  Even after decades of research and the practical application of the findings, I still rely on intuition during fermentation to achieve textural balance. This means throwing your fermentation recipe out the door and reacting to that vineyard, in that tank, from that vintage. 

Natural clarification is a painstaking endeavor, but required to honor the best expression of the vineyard. In the blind fining trials for red wines I have made, I almost always prefer the control (no fining agents). And, if I have to use egg whites as an antiseptic, then I didn’t pay attention during all those Microbiology classes, or shortcuts were taken during cellar sanitation practices. Egg whites belong in my whiskey sour, not my wine.

DIRT AND FISH PARTS

Making white wines is a different undertaking than reds, and both present unique challenges.  White wines should be elegant, lengthy and not astringent.  They are supposed to be brilliant, clear, and free of particulates. With all its pigments, red wines can hide those imperfections. White wines, in all corners of the world, are treated with fining agents for purposes of removing flaws, like bitterness, or for cosmetic reasons -- something that never felt right to me.

An earthen clay (Bentonite), and the swim bladder of sturgeon (Isinglass), are the primary fining agents used for white wines.  Yeah, dirt and fish parts!  My first reaction when hearing that these are the traditional and common additives to finish a white wine was to ask why?  Not only out of curiosity -- who first thought to add fish parts and dirt to wine -- but why do it in the first place?  Warning: chemistry bout to happen! Bentonite is a positively charged material which acts through cation-exchange to remove heat unstable elements in your wine.  So, if consumer X buys a white wine and chucks it in their trunk on a summer day while driving home from a winery, the wine can throw a haze, if not heat stabilized with Bentonite.  Isinglass is a form of gelatin which binds astringent phenols and also helps to clarify wine.  So, I pondered, is it not incumbent on me to assure my wines do not have issues with clarity and astringency to begin with?  And, if a little haze exists, or the wine isn’t perfectly clear, isn’t that a cosmetic issue and not a quality concern? To make matters worse, most fining agents are fairly indiscriminate in their actions.  Not only are you removing flaws and cosmetic issues, but also aroma, length, nuance and other vineyard-derived components which are desirable.  I will take quality over cosmetic imperfections everyday…