HOWEVER, headaches and hangovers are very poorly understood and there could be any number of other reasons for your issues, including the food you ate, your caffeine intake, and a million other things.

This wine was oxidized beyond recognition. I don’t have a problem with natural winemaking per se, but it is the winemaker’s job to make sure that faults like oxidation and re-fermentation don’t obscure the true nature of the wine.

My observations on this wine were not due to a lack of experience. Rather, it was training that allowed me to identify exactly what was going on. It’s not Brettanomyces, though I don’t doubt that it would be in there. This wine might be Brett city if you tried it now.

If anyone is still following this thread which I found by Googling “Making wine with Noiret Grapes” then let me add a few comments.

I just got back from Michigan where I bought close to 200 lbs of Noiret to make wine. Having made wine this past year for the first time, I had been using frozen grapes. I am also buying CAB FRANC grapes so it will be interesting to try to create a blend from these two juices.

I have to make one comment in defense of Stoutridge wines though I have never tried them. What they seem to be doing is similar to what I encountered on a recent trip to SONOMA where I met with people who run the NPA in Santa Rosa.

I was stunned when I tried this wine because it was so different. Many of the traditional wineries in the area pointed to those guys as nut cases but what I found was a wine that was fruit forward and much like what most peasants and countrymen must have drank in centuries past before the industry succumbed to commercialism and visual and marketing appeal.

I have tried to model much of my wine making in the same way so am anxious to try a Stoutbridge wine. What David has described above seems to me to be the purist form of wine making that is totally noninterventionist. It involves risk due to issues around spoilage and it most likely will not keep for more than 6 months with lack of sulfites or non use of stabilizers to stop fermentation.

However, once one gets used to the taste, this type of wine is a very different experience than what we now think of as wine. Lower in alcohol, each pressing has a very different character when made in this manner. Truly unique rather than consistent.

Also, storage temperature may have been a factor. This type of wine must be stored in very cool temperatures (60 Degrees) or it can start bottle fermentation and one has sparkling wine.

Just as a heads up, you’ve got the year wrong in your reference. The Leike paper came out in 2002. {Eur. J. Phys. 23 (2002) 21–26}

I’d like to disagree with the statement that Gamay is light colored. The good stuff from France, while not opaque, never seems to lack for color. The almost rose like colors I sometimes see in the FL (and this applies to Pinot Noir as well) almost always correlate with a poorly made or overcropped wine lacking in depth and richness.