Time Is Not an Ingredient
People talk a lot about what natural wine leaves out. Surprisingly little about what you can give a wine instead: time.
Talk about natural wine and you quickly end up with what's missing. No added sulfur, no cultured yeast, no enzymes, no fining agents, no filtration. Fair enough; lists like that are easy to write.
Another decision fits badly on a back label: waiting.
Our wines spend at least a year in our cellar, many considerably longer. That wasn't a concept at first, more a lesson we had to learn several times over. A wine can be fully fermented and still a long way from where we want to drink it. Young wines in particular can be enormously persuasive: fruit, fermentation aromas, carbon dioxide, reduction, all at once and all loud. That can be lovely. It can also mislead, a bit like the candidate who shines in the interview and turns difficult in month three.
Some things sort themselves out after a few months; others only appear then. A wine that seems finished in spring can slide into a difficult phase by autumn. Another stays closed for ages and then finds a shape nobody predicted, ourselves included. Time doesn't solve everything. A bad wine doesn't turn good by sitting around, and some developments we could happily have done without. Sometimes, after a long wait, the right decision is simply: we're not bottling this wine as it is.
Time is not a magic trick. It just makes visible what quick corrections tend to skip: what's actually left of a wine.
When the calendar doesn't decide
If you don't filter and don't add sulfur, you hand back some of the tools that slow a wine's development before or after bottling. That doesn't make the wine morally better. But it changes the work. We have to be more precise early on and more patient later. A wine we don't understand yet won't become easier to understand because there's a bottling date in the diary.
So we taste the barrels again and again, and not to decide something every time. Often the most important result of a tasting is that nothing needs deciding yet.
That sounds more relaxed than it is. On a farm, time costs money. A barrel that stays in the cellar another year takes up space. Wine that isn't sold ties up capital. And the extra time guarantees nothing. Economically, life would be much simpler if every wine kept to a timetable.
Unfortunately, it doesn't.
An old cellar
Our stone cellar dates from the late nineteenth century. Its thick Muschelkalk walls keep the temperature fairly steady through the year, and among the small barriques stand large old casks that have been here longer than some of our convictions about how wine should be made.
Old cellars are easy to romanticise. Ours is beautiful, but it's not a museum, let alone a time machine. It's a workplace, and its most important quality is easy to overlook: things can happen slowly here without something constantly having to happen.
Wood lets through small amounts of oxygen. Yeast and lees change. Wines settle, aromas shift, some tensions resolve, others only now come to light. Some of this we understand fairly well, some only in hindsight. In the cellar, time becomes part of the work. It's no use as an ingredient; you can't dose it. It's a condition, like temperature or the barrel.
Romance lurks here too. If one year is good, surely two must be better, five more serious and ten a work of great art. Wine doesn't work like that. Some wines we like best young, others grow deeper and calmer with time, and some lose exactly what we loved about them. Duration alone is no achievement.
The question is the same every time: what does this wine need?
Back to the vineyard
When we taste a barrel after a long time, we surprisingly rarely talk only about the cellar. We talk about the harvest, a dry August, a cover crop that looked different from the year before, the decision to press earlier or later. Over time some traces of the cellar work fade, and other differences come through more clearly.
That's one more reason we keep wines from individual parcels apart for as long as we can. For us the vineyard doesn't stop at the cellar door. Down there we sometimes understand only years later what happened outside. And sometimes, admittedly, not even then.