Having enjoyed Dard and Ribo's white St Joseph, I picked up a bottle of their white Crozes in The Sampler just now only to discover lots of brown-coloured crud floating around in the bottle. It certainly didn't look like something that had precipitated since bottling and it was so large you could have removed most of it with a tea strainer.

I put the bottle back on the shelf pretty quickly: I mean really - I don't want my wine sterile-filtered, but surely a (very) coarse filtration is better than lots of little brown lumps. Is this intentional (a bit like organic growers leaving the maximum of mud on vegetables for autheticity) or is it just careless? This sort of thing is a bit of a problem in the "natural wine" movement, which is a shame because I'm actually pretty sympathetic to it.

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