On Mon, 7 Aug 2006, Nick Maclaren wrote:

| There has been a problem with some producers, whose hygiene leaves a
| little to be desired, using too much sulphur to stabilise the wine. You
| can often see wine tasters on television complaining about the amount of
| sulphur in the wines.

It's nothing to do with hygiene, and a great deal to do with chance
and alcoholic strength. The things that they are trying to kill are
as normal and widespread as the yeasts.

Well, yes you're right in that some French producers (on the advice I am
reliably informed of an English wine producer, whose word I don't trust
for a minute) are now using massive doses of sulphur to kill off natural
yeasts and introducing cultivated yeasts. Now this is a practice well
known to English winemakers, especially where the wine yeasts are not
endemic but not, I would have thought, worth doing on the continent. But
even in my own humble little vineyard I have managed to get a wine yeast
to stay around to the extent that I haven't used a yeast starter for
some years and rely entirely on one Campden tablet per gallon to kill
off any apiculata yeasts and then let the natural wine yeast do its
work. And it *does* work.

David

--
David Rance http://www.mesnil.demon.co.uk
Fido Address: 2:252/110 writing from Le Mesnil Villement, Calvados, France