What are low intervention wines?

If you were to google natural wine, you would generate a myriad of definitions, parameters, and opinions; often times contradicting each other, and always inspiring heated debate.

We take the approach of low intervention, and our version of that is evolving with each vintage as we learn, and get to know our vines and the wines they produce.

In the vineyard, we strive to create an ecosystem that thrives and minimizes or effectively eliminates the need for intervention with chemicals. We use cultural practices such as leaf thinning, shoot thinning and balanced pruning to achieve balance and proper airflow in the canopy to combat mildew. We eschew all herbicides and allow local flora (and fauna) to thrive in the vineyard. We have a mechanical arm to cultivate gently under the vines to keep the weeds out of the canopy. In challenging years, we will employ baking soda, and microscopic sulphur to combat mildew, and give organic foliar nutrient additions if a deficiency is observed. This is used in difficult years, but the focus is on cultivating a living soil that feeds the vines, and makes additions unnecessary. We have begun using our pressings to build compost to add to our toolkit.

In the cellar, we employ methods to best allow our hand harvested fruit to express the story of the vintage. This entails manual sorting, pressing ( sometimes over multiple days), juice fractioning (akin to the heads and hearts and tails cuts of distillation) skin contact for various time horizons, barrel ageing for some wines, always wild fermentation and many other approaches depending on what we are tasting. Patience and time are very important in low intervention wine making. We don’t employ settling enzymes, or mechanical fining agents such as egg, or fish, and we never filter our wines. This requires us to allow the wines to clarify on their own, and it does result in a slightly hazy appearance and sometimes some sediment. All of which is perfectly healthy, as the only ingredient is grapes. All those juicy IPAs people love so much are full of delicious sediment and haze, think of wine in a similar fashion. This is in no way to suggest that those that do fine and filter their wines are doing it wrong. We are just doing it our way. I welcome anyone to come by during vintage and spend a day with us to see our approach.

On the ‘natty’ question of sulphur additions. I am in no way opposed to sulphur when it is necessary. To date our wines have recieved no sulphur additions. In the future, we will let you know when they have should the vintage make it necessary.

The wines at Parlan are the result of my own personal journey in the wine world, from behind the bar, to the vineyard, to the cellar. I was drawn to wine by the sense of connection to the people and places behind the wines I was tasting. Much in the way literature allows us to escape into the lives of the characters in the book, wine can give us the ability to travel our way into the life of the wine through imagery accessed via taste and smell. The aromas give us an introduction to the story the grapes are telling us about their time in the vineyard, the way they were handled by the winemaker, the influence the season had on their character development, and perhaps give us a glimpse into the approaches and ethos of the winemaker. The taste can then flesh out the narrative of what the wine is telling us about how it spent its days from grape, to juice, to wine. The challenges it faced on its journey, and the results of those challenges are laid bare for us to experience if we pay attention. Wine is meant to be sat with, to be thought about and to be shared, much like a good book. Wine, when made authentically, more vividly tells these stories. We hope you enjoy the stories from our vineyard, and welcome you along on this journey with us.