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3/12/08

Time Magazine: France-Wine-The Purest Pour - by JEFFREY T. IVERSON

For the complete report from TIME click on this link

France-Wine: The Purest Pour - by JEFFREY T. IVERSON

"The French wine world seems to have been bitten by a bug," observed food writer François Simon in Le Figaro recently. The pest in question is a tiny but evangelistic movement devoted to vin naturel — wine made completely without chemical intervention. It's an approach that "flies in the face of the practices widely used in viticulture," says Dominique Lacout, author of a natural wine-lovers' guide.Pioneered in the 1960s by Beaujolais enologist Jules Chauvet, natural wine-making strives for a pure expression of the vintage and land through organic farming and the banning of modern cellar practices like adding laboratory yeasts, chaptalization (adding sugar to increase alcohol content) and filtering. The results range from sublime to suspect: some natural wines go down more easily than fresh grape juice, while others have distinctly earthy, leathery or even barnyardy aromas that can be hard to tolerate.

Perhaps that's why natural-wine bars often brim with newcomers to wine — and foreigners from countries without ancient viticultural traditions. "The Japanese are not as infected by the traditional wine culture," says wine importer Yasuko Goda. "And modern, over-concentrated blockbuster wines never go well with Japanese food." In the end, getting too caught up in vinification politics means missing the point of natural wine. "It's not just a protest movement," says Lacout. "It's a search for flavors and authenticity, the real taste of food and wine."

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