There's a winery in La Rioja where they let mold grow freely because they believe it imprints character to the wine and...

There's a winery in La Rioja where they let mold grow freely because they believe it imprints character to the wine and they don't clean the racks in years, there's even lots of cobwebs.
What does Veeky Forums think?

another photo

spooky

name? I'll try a bottle

Viña Tondonia, it's breddy gud but expensive as fuark.

Seems to me the cork is sealed with sth, don't think the mold can make it into the wine. Makes for a nice story and pictures I guess.

This. If the seal on the cork isn't airtight the wine will go bad. If it is it shouldn't make any difference what's growing on the outside of the bottle.

Natural cork isn't 100% airtight normally, miniscule amounts of air get through. That's why cork is still used for wines that are supposed to age, you want a tiny amount of oxygen going in.

>you want a tiny amount of oxygen going in.
If you're making sherry or the kind of oxidized whites that have totally fallen out of fashion. But if the cork loses its integrity you don't even end up with vinegar - you end up with spoiled wine that tastes like rotten cork.

Not really, there's a microoxigenation that doesn't let bacteria that creates acetic acid to grow, but keeps yeast alive so wine can mature

if the bottles were perfectly air tight, wine wouldn't age

It's not about the cork being outright porous, that might indeed end up in vinegar, but just not 100% airtight either. It's supposed to let very tiny amounts of oxygen through. Apparently those big red wines from Bordeaux, Rhone or where ever don't age that well when kept under a 100% airtight seal. That's what I've been told by a professional winemaker anyway.

>because they believe it imprints character to the wine
>mold getting through glass bottle
>mold infused wine

this is the dumbest shit I've ever read on Veeky Forums. I would never buy from those assclowns, not even ironically.

read

We're talking 1mg O2 per YEAR getting through a good cork. And this is only relevant to the very small percentage of wines suitable for bottle aging - wines with super tight structures that can transform into something more complex in the bottle over years instead of just fading and becoming dumb.

Most wine produced is meant to be drunk young. Hell, some roses start fading by the end of their first summer in the bottle with natural cork. Many whites won't last longer than a couple years, and plenty of reds have nothing to gain from years down and natural cork. This is why synthetic cork (and screw caps) have made headway in the industry. The vast majority of wines benefit from an airtight seal because a little oxidation will undermine them, not improve them.

> Hell, some roses start fading by the end of their first summer in the bottle with natural cork. Many whites won't last longer than a couple years

terribly outdated beliefs

You are a faggot

Sounds like they're just a bunch of lazy spics desu famalamadingdong

I've been in the business, and watched it happen. A few years ago the roses from Provence were so light that by the end of summer there was nothing left of some of them. All the fruit faded and you were left with a glass of lightly acid nothing. But people kept ordering rose into the fall that year, so we had to scramble to find a replacement for the one we were serving.

If your establishment needs gimmicks, then it's not worth going to

ye olde spunk bottles pictured in the laid of the uberneet

>The truth hurts

Everything is just gimmicks. Life is a big fucking gimmick.

Watch the Japanology video on soy sauce, good brewers let something similar to that winery occur.

So a regionally famous sommelier give us "young" roses that have been sitting in the cellar for 8 years, they should taste like ass, right? Wrong, they were bretty good. You know why? Every fucking wine has sulphites right now, they don't get bad so easily. They can age, no matter if they are white or rosé.
Other thing is that you drink that off-dry fruity bullcrap USAns pass as wine, and even an aged red wine still tastes like a fruity wine for fags.
An aged wine it's not bad, it's just an aged wine.

Really makes you think

sounds a lot like my fridge, does that mean I can make artisan wine in it?

>Every fucking wine has sulphites right now
Only wine from warm regions needs sulphites colder regions don't include it.

Heredia is pretty god tier, but I don't see the point of discussing it in pleb land aka Veeky Forums
It really is not all that expensive considering the value. The entry level bottling is cheaper than the most absolute pleb tier napa wines

every single one
it's the cheapest way to substitute a lot of procedures, necessary or not

I just wanted opinions about letting a cellar become this disgusting but it degenerated into this

Maybe in Clapburgerstan.

Spain, France (except uppity vineyards), Italy...

I know people with vineyards in all three of those countries and half of them don't use sulphites. Stop generalising. Like I said, it depends on climate.

You don't know very much about wine making. Keep drinking those wine coolers, kid.

Cold, cold german here.

Most German wines I know also contain sulphites, no matter the price, and we are a quite cold place for wine.

>if the bottles were perfectly air tight, wine wouldn't age

There are more processes going on in the aging than that - if it was just oxygen, you could age a bottle twenty years by pouring it into a carafe.

I'm from spain and every bottle I ever had in my hands reads (CONTIENE SULFITOS)
The only wine I ever tried without them, is homemade

yes, there's molecular breakdown of compounds, etc.

Labeling conventions vary. Maybe you just stick to cheap wines exclusively. Even homemade wine has sulfites, what is meant in this thread is "no sulfites added" which is a thing, but more common as you start looking at higher end wines.