Fabulous or Flawed?

By Sylvia Jansen, DipWSET, CSW, Sommelier

In a 1990s French comedy film, a devious host decides to wreck a fine aged Bordeaux by adding vinegar to the wine. On tasting the corrupted bottle, he declares he just made the wine better. Sound crazy? Maybe not. This character’s palate clearly had a preference for volatility (also referred to as volatile acidity, or VA for short). How about you? Would a bit of vinegar in your wine make it intriguing and refreshing? Or just flawed and irritating?

The movie was fiction, but those aromas and tastes are real. They exist in many wines and are among the great dividers of opinion with wine lovers. The major contributor of wine volatility is acetic acid (think vinegar) which along the way also results in the formation of the aroma compounds ethyl acetate and acetaldehyde (think nail polish or polish remover). These compounds grow in environments where there is alcohol, sugar and oxygen (think fermented wine especially).

Each person has his or her own tolerance and preference levels for volatility in wine, and the same goes for winemakers (and wine reviewers, by the way). Some winemakers work hard to avoid any detectable VA, and some winemakers work purposely to achieve the lift that volatility brings to a wine. Some even want it to be prominent. In sparkling wines, for example, Champagne and other quality sparklers generally want to aim for beautiful fruit, toasty notes from ageing, and beautiful bubbles. No discernable VA is wanted on that voyage. But those who are making edgy, bubbly pet-nat (a gluggable, spritzy bubbly often with its own sediment in the bottle or can) is another story. The VA gives the pet-nat a lively, cider-like edge.

A tiny concentration of VA in a table wine can lift and accentuate aromas without obviously showing vinegar, giving a little prickle in the nose, and can add to our appreciation of a wine’s complexity.

Avoiding VA for many winemakers means using sulphur dioxide (SO 2 ) as a disinfectant, or keeping temperatures low, or keeping barrels or vats topped up to avoid oxygen contact. (Our friend Adi Badenhorst in South Africa, for example, uses minimal SO 2 but aims for beautiful fruit; his Secateurs Chenin Blanc is vibrant and delicious, with very low VA.) A higher level of volatility can be the result of even lower intervention both at harvest and in the winery. For these reasons, some natural or low-intervention wines can show high levels of VA. (Terracura nv Smiley Chenin Blanc, also from South Africa, is savoury and edgy with volatility.)

However, the purposely “natural” wines are not the only ones to show a lot of VA. Several traditional wine styles tend to show high levels of VA, including Tawny Ports, as well as some Barolo and red Burgundy wines that have spent a long time in barrel. Similarly, dried grape wines (like Amarone della Valpolicella), and sweet wines created from the famed noble rot (aka, Botrytis cinerea) such as Sauternes are often quite high in volatility, because at harvest these grapes already tend to have high levels of acetic acid bacteria present. You guessed it: not everybody likes them. But those who like them, love them.

To be clear, there is some VA in all wine, and legal limits are imposed in most jurisdictions. But here’s the thing: the human threshold is considerably more sensitive than allowed maximums, and some humans are more sensitive to it than other humans. Or less tolerant. Or both. If you like that cider vinegar, prickly edge in your wine, you do not need to add vinegar to your Bordeaux: there are some mighty interesting wines out there with lively volatility. If you want to avoid it, be clear that to you, it’s not intriguing. You are just a bit sensitive.

So here’s to you, sensitively.