Taste zero sulfite wines Monday at Vino Vino with Alice Feiring

Above: Spanish winemaker Laureano Serres Montagut and his “head-trained” vines. His Macabeo is just one of the “no added sulfite” wines we will be tasting on Monday with celebrated wine writer Alice Feiring.
Wine and Love
Monday, October 25, 2010, 7 p.m.
Six wines, four courses
To reserve for this event ($75 per person),
please call (512) 465-9282.
We will have copies of Alice Feiring’s book,
The Battle for Wine and Love
available for her to sign for guests.
Have you ever wondered what wines without added sulfites taste like? On Monday night at Vino Vino, we will be tasting 3 “unsulfured” wines with celebrity wine writer Alice Feiring.
Since antiquity, winemakers have used some form of sulfur to “stabilize” their wines. In other words, they add sulfur to stop the wine from oxidizing (when in contact with oxygen) and changing color. Without sulfur, the wines would stink and they would turn brown. In the 19th century, European winemakers realized they could add SO2 (sulfur dioxide) to stabilize their wines. Today, all winemakers — in Europe and the U.S. — are required to write “contains sulfites” on their labels.
In recent years, however, winemakers have perfected techniques in winemaking that allows the wine to stabilize using the natural sulfites produced by fermentation. ALL WINE contains sulfites, even wines to which no SO2 has been added. But a new breed of winemaker has discovered that great wines don’t need to be sulfured. They just need to be made with respect for nature and they require a little aeration before service.
Come and find out what “no added sulfite” wine tastes like at Vino Vino with one of our favorite wine writers in the world, the inimitable Alice Feiring, one of our country’s leading experts on natural winemaking and an advocate of “no sulfur” in contemporary winemaking.
THESE WINES HAVE NEVER BEEN AVAILABLE
IN TEXAS UNTIL NOW
Benito Santos 2007 Rías Baixas Vinedo de Xoan Albariño
80-100 year-old pre-phylloxera Albariño grown in sandy and granite soils
Laureano Serres 2009 Abeurador Macabeo (no added sulfite)
100% Macabeo (Viura) grown in clay soils, vinified with 2 days of skin contact, no added sulfite
Vinya Sanfeliu 2009 Trepat Rosat (no added sulfite)
Trepat is a native grape of Penedes traditionally used to make rosé, no added sulfite
A classic 100% Tempranillo aged in large, old American oak casks
Els Jelipins 2004 Sumoll (no added sulfite)
Sumoll with a small amount of Garnacha, grown in clay and limestone soils, whole-cluster fermentation in open-topped barrels, no added sulfite
Primitivo Quiles 1948 Fondillón
Old-vine Monastrell grown in limestone-soils, vinified using the Solera system
October 24, 2010 at 8:25 am
[...] stop at Vino Vino (where Alice will be speaking tomorrow night at a dinner in her honor, featuring unsulfured Spanish wines imported by José Pastor), we just had to head over to another one of me and Tracie P’s favorite restaurants, Fonda [...]
October 24, 2010 at 8:35 am
this is incredibly exciting! the geek in me is squealing…headgear and all!
October 25, 2010 at 10:24 am
[...] There might just be a few spots left for a dinner to be held in Alice’s honor tonight in Austin at Vino Vino. In her words, the wines we’ll be tasting are “hard-core natural.” [...]
October 26, 2010 at 8:05 am
[...] Vino Vino, Austin, TX we dig wine… and food « Taste zero sulfite wines Monday at Vino Vino with Alice Feiring [...]