Why don’t other wine-makers produce low-allergy wines?
The costs, risks and effort involved in making low allergy wines are difficult to justify for the majority of wine-makers. Most wine consumers are not affected by wine, so there is no reason to employ a difficult wine making process for which few will benefit. Making low preservative wine requires us at Monahan to ‘sail close to the wind’ during the fermentation process. One small oversight by our winemaker, or some equipment or electrical failure, can risk the entire batch. Fortunately, because we make only 200 to 300 cases of each batch, the risk is manageable. Making low allergy wines is comparable to sky-diving. The real risk occurs from the time you jump out of the plane until the moment your feet touch the ground. This can be compared to our real risk which occurs from the time we pick the grapes through to the time we bottle. When the sky divers feet touch the ground, that is the equivalent to us getting our wine into the bottle. It means we have landed safely.
