“For the love of wine”
This website is a sequel, a continuation with interruption, of my first website Vinternet in the late nineties. Back then there were a few wine websites. I thought about 3, no more. Everything is still in its infancy.
The internet is now full of wine websites, so my ambition is not to be yet another conduit for wine offers. OK, you can order wine through this site. But I can also let you taste them in your personal environment, and above all compare them: taste the differences, name preferences, etc.
Or you put together a number of wines that you would like to taste in your own circle, so a tasting box.
In that case, please contact me at info@invinosanitas.nl or via the contact form on the website, but first look under the heading "Tasting" on this site.
What do I want? My aim is to highlight and explain naturally made wine a little. Actually very simple: it is a wine made from grapes that are not raised in a monoculture, unsprayed and grapes that are embedded in a natural environment of other shrubs that attract insects and birds and provide a natural environment. And what is very important to know: the origin of an industrially made wine is vague. The wines on this site come from farmers who can show you where the grapes are grown and how they made them.
(This introduction is sufficient if you want to look around the site. Additions for enthusiasts are below)
I feel the need to crack a critical nut because there is so much counterfeiting and wine, especially in the low price range, is in danger of turning into an industrial product. There is also a variant of wine that is comparable to the plofkip, but no one is talking about that, at least not in the Netherlands or Belgium. Well in France and by Isabelle Legeron, the first female Master of Wine in France and who immediately throws in the towel: there is too much scheming and manipulation with an originally divine liquid that threatens to become an equivalent of the said floppy chicken.
To learn more about this book, click here . The list of permitted ingredients in this soft wine takes on large proportions. Most are not 'wine/grape specific'. Click here and shudder: http://willamette.wineauthorities.com/pdfs/WineAdditives.pdf
What about the beef pancreas? Is that to boost the Ph level? Apparently yes. An industrial product must be made quickly and cheaply, so ammonium phosphate is added to boost the fermentation process. Yes, you read that correctly: there is a good chance that you will find beef by-products in cheap wine. And that is precisely what Isabelle Legeron's complaint is about: if it is in it, it must be on the label. And it doesn't because the product wine is on a pedestal and apparently it is not allowed to fall from it.
I recently found a strikingly humorous article on the internet. Go to www.chapeaumagazine.com/culinair/wijnen/how-three-bottles-bordeaux-for-a-ten-prille-loves-to-de-knops-helps/
As a buyer and founder of In Vino Sanitas, I only want to focus on wines whose origin can be traced; behind which there is a maker, a person, a passionate winegrower, a nature lover with respect for people and animals. A farmer who is not concerned with the largest possible yield per hectare, including chemical fertilization in combination with monoculture, but someone who does not settle for less and knows how to produce a healthy grape. Making wine is really not difficult. The grape vine is an invasive plant and will survive. You just need to cultivate it.
A healthy grape has a naturally occurring yeast cell on the waxy skin. Break the skin and the yeast cell comes into contact with the liquid and presto...wine in the cap. Well, you can love these kind of wines, I thought. But that is too slow for the producers of mass wines, so they use a chemically made yeast, manufactured in the laboratory and whose taste is already built in. So yeast with, for example, Riesling properties. The number of variations is countless. So you can simply choose the taste and that will be necessary because a raised grape still has excellent taste.
And if all this is not enough: how about Autoroute wines or RN wines, grapes that grow along the highway or the National Route. They are really not washed after harvest. In the Netherlands this would be toxic/chemical waste. Example: grass mowed on the roadsides along highways does not go to livestock. This is, for example, at the Kerkdriel exit in Brabant: high piles of dried roadside grass along the Kerkdriel side. By the way, the better grapes do not grow along the road but on the hills. Burgundy is a good example of this, among others.
History
There is something fishy about this site. 'We' used to be called Vinternet. A long time ago: one of the first sites in the field of wine in the late 1990s. I had put together a nice team: a good taster, a chef/chansonnier Olaf Heynen, a wine writer, a doctor with a passion for wine and who once had translated a book from French by Dr. Maury who prescribed wine for certain ailments. And not to forget a wine-passionate site builder.
But we were too early. Things were not going well enough: internet sales were still viewed with suspicion. Even banks didn't have internet yet. Yes, yes, it wasn't all that long ago. Now everyone offers wine, even newspapers. How crazy it must be.
But even then the idea was to talk to winegrowers about their product, about their passion, about their tradition. And it was precisely those wines that came into our range!
We organized wine picking teams for farmers who still wanted to harvest manually. In 2001 I experienced the best harvest in Burgundy in Mercurey on a 1er Cru
vineyard: Domaine Jeannin-Naltet. Afterwards, many activities were organized, including in Volnay La Pousse d'Or. An experience!
(All geographical images on this site come from "The Wine List, Please" Published by Kosmos Publishers Utrecht/Antwerp.)