Natural Wine
Qu’est que c’est? By Victoria Gilbert
Can tasting a wine change your life? Maybe, maybe not, but it can certainly set your mind on a new course. Wine is like music: we have our favourite bands, our beloved artists who move us or make us dance; as we have our favourite wines we gravitate to. Then one day, a piece of music plays that you’ve never heard, and you stop, captivated by the beauty of it. You’ve found a new sound to thrill you, to make you feel different. Natural wine is different. It’s made with little to nothing added from the vineyard to the bottle. These are wines created without chemical intervention and with minimum manipulation. From growing to bottling, there is as little intervention from the winemaker as possible. Grape growing and winemaking is precise, conscientious labor, and it is particularly so in natural wine. Natural wines started 70 years ago in the
Beaujolais region with French winemaker and chemist Jules Chauvet, who stopped adding sulphur to wine and embraced fermentation with indigenous yeasts. Interest in natural wine grew in France and slowly made its way to Canada. “We’re going back to the roots of winemaking,” says Andrzej Lipinski, owner and winemaker at Big Head wines in Niagara-on-The-Lake. “We do not want to interfere with mother nature,” says Lipinski who makes his wines without adding yeast during the fermentation process, a method few local wineries take. “With added yeast we are changing the profile, we are changing the flavours of that wine,” he says. The Polishborn winemaker recently launched a line of wines called “RAW” which never touches oak. Instead Lipinski uses concrete tanks and, in the future, massive orange terracotta TODAYMAGAZINE.CA 21
