Some random quotes in support of not filtering too finely. I think that this collection generally reflects the line of thinking from which I have derived my opinions...
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The quintessential non-wine - no bouquet, no fruit, no flavor, and no finish. This wine, a hallmark to the excesses of modern day technology and those wonderful micropore sterile filters, is devoid of any personality, not to mention pleasure.
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Filtration
Controversial clarification process of pumping wine through various filters to remove suspended solids. If overdone, it may also strip out flavor.
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The advent of micropore sterile filters, so much in evidence at every modern winery, may admirably stabilize a wine, but, regrettably, these filters also destroy the potential of a wine to develop a complex aromatic profile. When they are utilized by wine producers who routinely fertilize their vineyards excessively, thus overcropping, the results are wines with an appalling lack of bouquet and flavor.
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The effect of excessive manipulation of wine, particularly overly aggressive fining and filtration, is dramatic. It destroys a wine's bouquet as well as its ability to express its TERROIR and varietal character. It also mutes the vintage's character. Fining and filtration can be done lightly, causing only minor damage, but most wines produced in the New World (California, Australia, and South America in particular) and most bulk wines produced in Europe are sterile-filtered. This procedure requires numerous prefiltrations to get the wines clean enough to pass through a micropore membrane filter. This system of wine stability and clarification strips, eviscerates, and denudes a wine of much of its character.
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Astonishingly, Johnson and Halliday conclude that consumers cannot tell the difference between a filtered and an unfiltered wine! In summarizing their position, they state, "but leave the wine for 1, 2, or 3 months (one cannot tell how long the recovery process will take), and it is usually impossible to tell the filtered from the non-filtered wine, provided the filtration at bottling was skillfully carried out." After 14 years of conducting such tastings, I find this statement not only unbelievable but insupportable! Am I to conclude that all of the wonderful wines I have tasted from cask that were subsequently damaged by vigorous fining and filtration were bottled by incompetent people who did not know how to filter? Am I to think that the results of the extensive comparative tastings (usually blind) that I have done of the same wine, filtered versus unfiltered, were bogus? Are the enormous aromatic, flavor, textural, and qualitative differences that are the result of vigorous clarification techniques figments of my imagination?
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You know the feeling -- you open a bottle of Australian or California Chardonnay and not only is there no bouquet (because it was sterile-filtered), but tasting the wine is like biting into a fresh lemon or lime.
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And the discussion of a myth, #10
10. This wine is closed and needs time because it has just been recently bottled.
The malady of the bottling is a myth because anybody who bottles naturally, with very low SO2 and no fining or filtering, knows perfectly well that the wine tastes just as good in the bottle as it did in the cask. However, we are modern-day industrialists or, as we say, "wine processors." We utilize large quantities of sulfur, and, in addition, we eviscerate our wines by abusive fining and filtering. Thus we use the "maladie à la mise" excuse to justify the poor performance of our wines. If the truth be known, our wines have been stripped, nuked, and denuded, and they are incapable of improvement in the future.
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FILTERING: A process of "cleaning up" a wine used after fermentation (and before bottling); similar to running coffee through a filter, but arguably not always necessary to produce fine wine. The purpose of filtering is to remove sediment, grape skins, dead yeast, etc., from the wine. Filtering can range from very fine to coarse; however, it is increasingly being minimized (or avoided whenever possible) because the finer the filtering, the more flavors and character are stripped from the wine. Many wineries are using the more labor-intensive, old-fashioned practices of fining or racking to clarify wines these days. Historically, many filters before the 1980's were made from asbestos.
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When and where to use heavy filtering and fining is highly controversial, since removing these substances prevents the wine from obtaining flavors from them, affecting the character of the wine. You are certain to hear complaints about "over fined and fi ltered wine." The implication is that such wines will have less flavor. For this reason some wines will say on the bottle that they are "unfiltered."
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The Meilach book recommends initially starting out with coffee filters to remove remaining solids, and in the beginning I did that for a few months. But it requires amazing patience, and a lot of coffee filters. The particles of fruit block up the holes in the filters very quickly, so in short order the filters are completely clogged, and you have to put in another. It became clear to me that coffee filters were too fine a mesh to use for first-level filtration. Since those early days, I have started using paper towels as primary filters. They're much more porous than coffee filters, and consequently let a lot more solid material pass, but I hand-wave that problem away by reminding myself that the bottles will usually be consumed long before I have any problems.
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Filtration
Controversial clarification process of pumping wine through various different sorts of filters to remove suspended solids. If overdone, it may also strip out flavor.
Anyway, a lot of food for thought...
I still don't have a good alternative... Suggestions anyone?
