Are these the Purest Zero-Zero Wines Ever?

I visited Vino Gross in Slovenia and I remain in awe

Numbers rarely tell the full story, but having access to wine tech-sheets can be grimly fascinating. Questions that are palmed off with a shrug in the winery are harder to dodge with hard facts printed on the page.

Last week I spent three days tasting 105 wines in the-middle-of-nowhere, Slovenia. Due to the extraordinary diligence of Roka Wine’s Sinead Cabot, we had detailed technical info on almost every bottle. My favourite touchpoints (as ever) were the type of farming, addition or not of cultured yeasts, filtration or not,¹ and total sulphites.

It’s easy for a natural wine fan like myself to live in a bubble, assuming that no-one adds that much sulphite to their wine any more. That EU limit of 200 mg/L for dry white wines? Who even gets close to that these days? Now I know the answer: some seriously risk-averse Slovenian, Croatian and Hungarian growers.

The highest figure I clocked last week was 166 mg/L in a white Furmint from Balaton. A winemaker friend of mine pointed out that it isn’t so hard to get to this level. Fermentation can easily produce 30 mg/L all by itself. Keep topping that up to block malolactic fermentation, safeguard while racking and then ensure everything’s hunky-dory when you bottle, and this is where you might end up. But it’s a belt-and-braces approach that’s only needed when something is sub-optimal: lack of acidity, rotten or bruised fruit, excess residual sugar.

One wine that certainly wasn’t going to make me sneeze was Vino Gross’s Gorca. Michael and Maria Gross don’t use any additions or corrections in the cellar, and work with either zero or minute amounts of added sulphites. Yet there was nothing wild, or ‘funky’ about this wine - just pure crystalline fruit. I’ve often wondered what makes the difference: why does one minimal interventionist make clumsy, dirty tasting cuvées where another (like Vino Gross) achieves such incredible purity? I decided to pay them a visit to find out more.