Does organic wine last as long?
Organic wine should last longer, so it all comes down to preservatives.
A lot of people confuse preservative-free wine with organic wine and you can have organic wine that’s got no preservatives in it which is sulfur.
But, you can also have organic wines that have below 100 parts per million of sulfur, and that’s where we come in. So we have sulfur because we do want it to last a little bit longer.
There’s two reasons why I think organic wines with sulfur should last a little bit longer, and there’s also a third reason as well. But one is that with our vineyards we work very hard on trying to increase the nutrients of the vines, and you get more nutrients in the berries, those nutrients will act as a preservative and so it’ll actually make that wine last longer.
Secondly, we don’t have any residual sugar in our wines and residual sugar creates anaerobic reactions in the wine and those anaerobic bacteria eat the sugars and age that wine prematurely, so, when we have no sugar we don’t have a food source for that anaerobic bacteria. Therefore, that wine doesn’t increase the amount of anaerobic bacteria, it doesn’t age prematurely.
So we have a wine with no residual sugar but still low levels of sulfur and it’ll still age extremely well because we don’t need to slow those reactions down with high amounts of sulfur. So, yes and no, it’s not as straight-forward as that, but certainly ones with no preservatives don’t last longer.
The sulfur in there does actually slow the reactions down, but organic wines with a bit of sulfur in there, all organic wines have to have below 100 parts per million for reds, 150 parts per million for whites so they should last longer.