Category Archives: Art and Wine

Why (some) Wines are Works of Art

02 Thursday Aug 2018

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Lart of wineast week in response to my commentary on Jon Bonne’s article, which had a brief discussion of wine flaws, commenter Eric, who is apparently a winemaker, took issue with the notion that wine is an art. His comment was interesting enough that, instead of a quick comment, I decided to respond via a more extended post.

Here is Eric’s comment:

Wine flaws are like a box of chocolates. If you’re sensitive to bitter compounds then an 80% cacao chocolate is going to taste flawed. Someone who tolerates high bitterness might claim that the 80% cacao is more authentic and true and therefore the chocolate maker and the chocolate are more artistic. (Apply your own wine analogy.) Making a chocolate more bitter, like making a wine flavored with Bourbon barrels, does not make its creator artistic. The chocolatier or winemaker is just adjusting the character of their product to fill a consumer niche. It’s marketing, sales and hopefully profiteering and fame. We made wine in the 1980s using Bourbon barrels because they were easy to obtain. We determined they made inferior wine. Returning to whiskey barrels is not a brilliant, artistic notion but a retread on a discarded idea in an effort to distinguish a product and create media in an oversaturated wine market. To survive in the wine industry, even if you are a yeast salesman, there seems to be a hyped-up requirement to focus on art. We’re constantly trying to tag wine as art and the mere fact that we debate this (no one ever asks if music is art) tells me that if wine is an art and not a craft then it’s a very low and base form of art. Though wine may taste great and make you feel good and gladden your heart, it is still a trifle when compared to a Van Gough. This lightness is a truth and a disappointment and why the industry, especially wine writers and those of us who’ve invested so much of our lives in wine, are continuously searching to prove and sell the concept that there is fine art in wine. This hubristic fixation to perpetuate a highbrow illusion keeps us away from many realities that surround wine.

Let me start by thanking Eric for the comment; it raises several interesting points worth discussing.

Eric is right that the perception of flaws in wine is sometimes dependent on sensitivity to compounds. If you’re really sensitive to brett or volatile acidity so it overwhelms other dimensions of the wine, you will think the wine flawed. Someone less sensitive won’t have that response. The same is true of chocolate with 80% cacao if you’re very sensitive to bitterness, although I think it is still not known to what degree we can adjust these sensitivities via learning.

I also agree that the choice to make a chocolate of 80% cacao does not make that batch of chocolate “more artistic”. If the choice to make 80% chocolate was a decision about a particular batch of raw materials to bring out certain features of the chocolate that would produce an aesthetic experience, and if the decision exhibited the kind of creativity and originality we associate with art, then perhaps that might be “more artistic”.  I don’t know enough about making chocolate to have a view on it. But 80% is so routine, I’m not sure I see the originality there.

The same is true of the use of bourbon barrels in winemaking. But not because it is an old idea. Painters and musicians employ old ideas and techniques routinely. If bourbon barrels do not contribute anything to the positive aesthetic character of the wine then it’s just a failed experiment. And if it was done with the motive solely to “distinguish a product and create media” with no other intention then it’s claim to be art is suspect. Of course artists and musicians often take steps to distinguish their product and create media. But if that is all they do, if they have no other over-riding intention, then their claim to be artists cannot be taken seriously. They lack the intention to create art.

However, if the dominant intention of a winemaker is to produce an aesthetic experience for people who drink their wine, and if their winemaking displays the degree of creativity we associate with the arts, then I see no reason why wine cannot be art. By “aesthetic experience” I mean an experience in which the aim is to seek out and be open to the widest range of aesthetic properties such as elegance, finesse, beauty, power, intensity, etc. The question of “degree of creativity” is of course difficult. It is a threshold, a matter of degree, but involves the intention to recognize when their wine is developing something unique and distinctive and act on that recognition. It is obviously a collaboration between the winemaking team and nature, a form of environmental art.

Ice cream tastes good and makes me feel good. It isn’t art. It doesn’t produce a wide range of aesthetic properties and it usually is not original although I suppose it could be in the right hands.

As to the comparison with Van Gogh, I’m not sure why wine would be a trifle in comparison. Perhaps Eric has in mind that paintings by talents such as Van Gogh tell stories and have a rich set of meanings to be interpreted. But great wines do tell stories albeit not about war and peace. A wine is an interpretation of a vineyard and the winemaker’s materials. It is also an interpretation and extension of the narrative of the winemaking tradition in which the winemaker is working. What some paintings do have that wine perhaps lacks is semantic richness. They can be about a wide variety of subjects—war, loneliness, love, evil, God, etc.  But much art has no great thematic character. Abstract art and instrumental music are not about any of those themes except in a highly metaphorical sense. But wine can function as metaphor as well.

As to people in the industry seeking “to prove and sell the concept” that wine is art, I really haven’t seen it that much. Some winemakers think it’s art, some do not. Few have a well-developed notion of what art is. (which is my job to figure out in any case)

Surely most wines are not art. Most wine is an industrial product designed to serve a market niche and make a profit. And for most wine drinkers it’s just an alcohol delivery system or a boost to conviviality. That’s fine. Nothing wrong with that. But there are many, many winemakers who are more concerned to do something aesthetically interesting and create something distinctive whether that distinction comes from their vineyards or their imagination. And there are many wine lovers who get a rich, aesthetic experience from drinking wine and appreciate originality when they find it.

There is great danger in treating wine as nothing but a commodity. If it is a commodity like orange juice then we only need three or four companies making wine. That won’t support the well over 9000 wineries in the U.S. alone that struggle to stay afloat.

It’s the search for distinction that is the beating heart of the wine industry and when it’s achieved I see no reason why it is not art.

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Power vs. Elegance: Is it a Matter of Art vs. Craft?

05 Thursday Jul 2018

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davidAlthough the general wine drinking public  seems to prefer lush, powerful wines, in recent years wine experts and somms seem to prefer wines with lower alcohol and more elegance. Is there reason to prefer one style over the other as the mark of a fine wine?

We might take a page from the art world to help sort out this issue. The distinction between fine art and craft is usually drawn as follows. A piece of craftwork has a job to do, a function that the craftsperson well understands. The craftsperson thus skillfully creates a work that does its job exceedingly well, without flaws, and achieves technical excellence in how it performs. Style matters but is subordinate to function.

By contrast, a work of fine art commands our attention, not because of the function it performs or because the technique was excellent, but because it is a personal expression of the artist’s viewpoint and because it stimulates the imagination and intellect. Great works of art have a sense of mystery about them; there is something to be understood that requires focused attention on the part of the viewer or listener.

Wines that exhibit power require great technique in the vineyard and in the winery ( and good luck with the weather) in order to extract maximum flavor and texture. Modern technology has made this more readily achievable. And the virtues of such wines strike you right in the palate—without ambiguity. They are well-crafted. But all that power can obliterate any sense of mystery or sense of place. And because elegance is in part a matter subtlety and nuance, elegance may be hard to detect in highly extracted, powerful wines. It is this sense of mystery, place, and the tracking of elegance that stimulates the intellect and the imagination.

Perhaps then we should prefer wines of elegance since they are more than well crafted but express individuality and have a viewpoint that influences the mind as well as the body.

But it is important to note that power does not preclude elegance. Like Beethoven, Michelangelo or Pink Floyd, the mark of the finest winemakers is their ability to achieve both power and elegance.

Can Wine Express Melancholy?

16 Monday Apr 2018

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melancholy

Picasso’s Melancholy Woman

In my conversation with Tyler Thomas, winemaker for Dierberg and Star Lane Vineyards, part of which I posted last week, he said that he didn’t think winemaking was an art because wine is incapable of expressing emotions such as melancholy.

The purpose of wine is to bring pleasure. It’s not art because it’s limited in expression. It’s not supposed to express melancholy. It’s about pleasure and about the property. If you don’t like the wine you won’t ask where it came from.

At the time I didn’t raise objections to his comment since I was more interested in discovering his views on a variety of other issues. But I found the comment curious because, it seems to me, melancholy is one of the more salient emotions expressed by some wines—in particular aged wines that show considerable development but still have some vitality to them. So I want to explore this question of how such wines can express melancholy.

Melancholy is a peculiar and complex emotion. Although often associated with sadness and depression, melancholy is a distinct emotion and mood. it lacks the resignation of depression and is reflective and contemplative, unlike sadness which tends to be an immediate, felt response to a perceived loss. Melancholy has negative and positive aspects; a bit of longing with a touch of sadness but also feelings of pleasure or inspiration which are a central element of the emotion. Often caused by particular memories or thoughts, melancholy involves taking some pleasure in what we love or hope for, so it is tinged with sweetness. For instance if melancholy is caused by the memory of a lost love from the past, melancholy might involve a tinge of sadness at the loss but will be accompanied by pleasurable thoughts of being with that person as well. Melancholy is not always, in fact perhaps not typically, experienced as a negative emotion. Sometimes we attempt to prolong melancholy by seeking a quiet place where the feeling can be indulged. As Victor Hugo said, “melancholy is the happiness of being sad.”

We often feel melancholy (or at least a weakened version of it) in response to works of art, literature or film. The fictional characters and events become the object of our experience of melancholy. But melancholy can be a mood as well as an emotion. Moods are feelings that do not have an object. They come over us, seemingly without reason and can affect our entire personality. The mood of melancholy can arise when in a desolate landscape or on a fog-shrouded lake. In the arts the experience of a melancholy mood (as opposed to the emotion) is most often  found in music. From Elgar’s “Nimrod” from his Enigma Variations to Avro Pärt’s De Profundis to the ambient soundscapes of Bing and Ruth’s Tomorrow was the Golden Age, music of almost every genre is capable of expressing the contemplative, somber mood with moments of vitality that characterize melancholy.

How does wine express melancholy? The answer can be found in the Japanese aesthetic of wabi-sabi.

Wabi  which originally means “poverty”  refers to the roughness of everyday things that have been in use for a long time. As an aesthetic it involves finding beauty in the asymmetry and imperfection of disintegration. Sabi typically means” loneliness” and in the aesthetic context refers to a state of contemplative solitude in persons, and spare simplicity in objects. Wabi-Sabi as an aesthetic principle is an affirmation of imperfection, austerity and melancholy. It’s the beauty of weathered, scarred, ephemeral objects which become more exquisite the closer them come to their non-existence. A broken, earthenware cup, a branch of autumn leaves, a weather-beaten door, if they exhibit a kind of grace, in a context that highlights their evocativeness are wabi-sabi. Melancholy, that peculiar mix of sadness and delight, is the primary mood or emotion evoked by wabi-sabi.

It should be obvious that aged wine, as it begins its downward trajectory while still maintaining elegance and vitality, can be an example of wabi-sabi and is properly attended to in the mood of melancholy. Given the ephemeral nature of wine, we are witnessing the loss of something valuable that exhibits its own unique “patina”. Since each bottle of wine ages differently, its flavors and textures reflect its unique nature and history as the wine responds to the conditions under which it was bottled and stored. With many aged wines, it is likely you may never taste that cuvee again as the bottles from a particular vintage are consumed over time. Thus, an aged wine expresses the passage of time, the quality of impermanence which is associated with the sadness, longing, and inspiration of melancholy. The appreciation of aged wine induces reflection on the lives of the people who made the wine who have left behind this fragment from their past. It invites both memory and imagination but also reflection on the impermanence of cultural achievements and their celebration–the ravages of time as both something to celebrate and fear.

The fact that wines must give pleasure in order for us to appreciate them is no obstacle to wine expressing melancholy since the experience of pleasure, albeit mixed with sadness, is an important element in melancholy. Aged wines, like the objects of wabi-sabi lack the bright, juicy, freshness and power of young wines. They are appreciated precisely because time has exposed some hidden dimension of the wine in which we take pleasure.

Thus, it seems to me wine can express melancholy. If we decline to experience it as we consume the wine that may be testimony to our shallowness or inattention, not any inherent limitation on wines’ expressive potential.

Art Wines May Not Be The Most Expensive Wines

07 Wednesday Mar 2018

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From the Archives:

I defend the view that wines can be works of art. But certainly not all wines. Most wines in fact are just commodities. So which ones count as works of art? One might naturally suppose that Bordeaux Premier Crus or Napa cult cabernets might be prime candidates for vinous works of art. But I think not, for reasons that Matt Kramer captures in an old issue of the Wine Spectator. (Behind a paywall)

Expensive wines, I wrote, rarely surprise. They are known quantities, from known places and producers. Not least, the vast majority are made within relatively narrow taste parameters. Typically that means oak (a little or a lot) and reliance on a relative handful of well-known and much-pursued grape varieties (you know which ones) from equally well-known and much pursued locations (ditto). These wines are in a word predictable.

The most expensive wines are predictable because their producers have a long list of customers who want to know what they are buying when they fork out hundreds if not thousands of dollars for a bottle. What they want least is experimentation. Thus, such winemakers strive for consistency from year to  year.

But art, at least as we have conceived it for the past 150 years, thrives on experimentation and innovation. Artists solve problems in their medium, challenge conventions, and pose new questions. We expect a work of art to be original, an expression of an artist’s imagination that helps us see something in a new way. Thus, works of art that are excessively bound to conventions or designed to cater only to existing taste will fail as works or art regardless of how pleasing they may be to the eye. Similarly a rock band that repeatedly makes roughly the same album will be dismissed by critics regardless of their sales figures.

If a wine is to qualify as art it therefore cannot be excessively predictable or merely a “crowd pleaser” regardless of how exclusive or well-heeled the crowd. And thus the most expensive wines may fall short as works of art.

This is not to say that genuine art must eschew all conventions or ignore existing standards of taste. If a work is to be understood it must make some concession to the past and to existing standards. And this leaves some wiggle room for artists and winemakers to innovate within the constraints imposed by the need for their audience to grasp their point. The mere fact that a work is popular does not efface its artistic merit. But if the “taste parameters” are too narrow we have a Kinkade not a Van Gogh.

Wines with an established reputation, if they are to be works of art, must find a middle way between predictability and innovation. It is achievable but not easily so.

Wines with a less established reputation and devoted to innovation might more readily achieve the status of an art, and that is a good thing for wine lovers of modest means.

 

Emotions and Wine: Finally Some Empirical Data

15 Monday Jan 2018

Posted by in Art and Wine, Food Science, Philosophy of Food and Wine, Wine Culture

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wine and emotionAs dedicated readers of this blog are likely aware, I’ve been arguing that we respond to wines not just with our senses but with emotions as well. (See articles here and here for example) In some cases a particular wine may directly induce an emotional response in us. In other cases, we make metaphorical associations with a wine that has emotional connotations.

Thus far I’ve been relying primarily on my own experiences and the experiences of others who report such experiences. My thesis is not that associating wine with emotions is a common activity. I don’t know how widespread it is. Rather I claim that such associations are available to us if we pay attention to them and that they enhance the aesthetic experience of wine in just the way paying attention to emotional expression in music enhances the experience of music.

Now there is some empirical data to support my thesis. The Academic Wino is reporting on a study, apparently the first of its kind, to be published in the journal Food Quality and Preference entitled “The Relationship Between Sensory Characteristics and Emotion in Wine Preferences”. The study shows that consumers do in fact make these associations between wine and emotions. Unfortunately, the study is behind a paywall and I don’t yet have access to it. But The Academic Wino helpfully summarizes it for us.

This study had two parts:  a sensory evaluation of the wines by a trained panel (11 total: 5 women, 6 men; faculty and researchers from the School of Agricultural, Food and Biosystems Engineering at the Universidad Politécnica de Madrid in Spain), and a consumer evaluation of the wines with an additional emotional response analysis…

The sensory evaluation by the trained panel used standard tasting methodology. The consumer evaluation is the interesting part.

For the consumer evaluation, participants were first asked to complete questionnaires on demographics and wine consumption habits. Next, they participated in a “warm-up” or “practice” tasting session with 7 wines presented [blind] at the same time.  Finally, after the warm-up, they were presented with the sample of 6 test wines briefly mentioned above.

After tasting the wines (which were presented in random order), participants were asked to rate their liking of each wine (using a 9-point hedonic scale), and what emotions were elicited by each wine (using the EsSense 25 software). Emotions were rated using a 10-cm line scale with the labels “very low” and “very high” at the ends (and everything in between).

The 208 participants were recruited from the School of Agricultural, Food and Biosystems Engineering at the Universidad Politécnica de Madrid, consumed wine at least once a month, and included young adults, middle aged adults and older adults. Here are some of the results:

  • “Most of the emotion terms evaluated were found to be significantly different between the wines.
  • Only 4 out of 26 terms did not show significant association with the wines (“adventurous”, “free”, “wild”, and “worried”).
  • The emotion terms “good”, “happy”, “joyful”, “mild”, and “pleasant”, were positively associated with fruity and floral aromas/flavors in the wines.
  • The emotion terms “aggressive” and “guilty” were associated with the aromas/flavors of vanilla, clove, and licorice.
  • “Aggressive” was also found to be associated with astringent characteristics.
  • Using cluster analysis, wines were found to be grouped differently when looking at sensory characteristics alone versus when looking at emotional variables alone. (NOTE:  cluster analysis shows which wines are most similar to each other.)
    • Sensory analysis grouped the wines as: 1) the verdejo white in one group; 2) the chardonnay and rosé wine in another group; 3) a Rioja Tempranillo (2012) and a Ribera del Duero Tempranillo in another group; and 4) a different Rioja Tempranillo (2013) in the last group.
    • Emotion analysis grouped the wines as: 1) the verdejo and chardonnay wines in one group; 2) the rose wine in another group; 3) the two Rioja Tempranillos (2012, 2013) in another group; and 4) the Ribera del Duero Tempranillo in the last group.”

There were some differences depending on gender and age which I will ignore for now.

The conclusions however are a bit puzzling. I’m not sure if these are conclusions drawn by the authors of the study or by The Academic Wino. She writes:

Out of 26 different emotions of focus in this study, only 4 were found to be insignificant (“adventurous”, “free”, “wild”, and “worried”), providing evidence that emotions are important in the overall enjoyment of a wine and thus preference.

It is certainly evidence that such associations are intelligible and meaningful to consumers. However, it’s not clear to me how emotional response figured into overall enjoyment. Participants were asked to rate their liking of each wine so perhaps the study correlated preferences with various emotional responses. But the conclusion has some odd implications.

If a wine conjures up negative emotions for an individual, that person is probably not going to buy that bottle of wine in the future.

This doesn’t sound right to me. The summary states that emotion terms “aggressive” and “guilty” were associated with the aromas/flavors of vanilla, clove, and licorice. And that “aggressive” was associated with astringency, meaning the coarseness of the tannins. These are all descriptors associated with big, red wines such as at least some Tempranillo. But surely we can’t conclude from this that tannic, red wines with vanilla and clove notes are unpopular because they evoke negative emotions.

In terms of relationships between emotions and specific wine styles, the study found that white wine characteristics were often associated with more positive emotions, while aged wine characteristics were associated more often with negative emotions.

It is true that aged wines are not to everyone’s taste. But among wine lovers, connoisseurs, etc. aged wines are esteemed. And in the general wine drinking public big red wines, dubbed aggressive in this study, are also much admired. So I’m a bit suspicious of the claim that wines associated with negative emotions are therefore not enjoyable. Again, as I’ve been arguing, the association is often metaphorical. We associate astringent wines with aggressive emotions but they don’t make us feel angry or afraid. It’s an association, not a direct causal relationship between the wine and an emotion. Similarly, a piece of music may express anger or fear, but we don’t feel angry or afraid when listening, and it’s that expression that we find enjoyable despite the fact the emotion may be classified as “negative”.

So we need more studies that can tease out this relationship between what is expressed, what is felt, and how these factors influence preferences.

At any rate, this is a fascinating area of research and thanks to the Academic Wino for summarizing it.

The Art of Wine: Winesmith and Postmodern Winemaking

06 Tuesday Jun 2017

Posted by in Art and Wine, The Art of Wine

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Clark-tab-1-628x471Since the birth of modern art, artists and art theory have had a symbiotic though troubled relationship.  The conceptual nature of modern art and its “difficulty” for the ordinary patron meant that art had to be explained, and so the theorist acts as a critical interpreter and translator providing context and meaning for what might otherwise seem obscure. (Yes, there is irony in the jargon-laced abstractions of art theory serving as clarifying explanations).

In the wine world, by contrast, aesthetic theory plays almost no role. Although there have been articulate winemakers such as Paul Draper or Randle Grahm who can put wine in a larger context, and wine writers occasionally wax philosophical, “theory” in the wine world usually means science and there is little discussion of the aesthetic aims or the larger meanings of that science.Clark Smith, proprietor and winemaker at Winesmith is a prominent exception. With Clark you not only get delicious, intriguing wines. You get chapter and verse on the science and aesthetics of wine found in his book, Postmodern Winemaking and his website which is brimming with information.

Clark defines postmodern winemaking as “the practical art of connecting the human soul to the soul of a place by rendering its grapes into liquid music.” That sounds like you might expect a discussion of auras and energy fields, but that definition rests on rigorous science and many years of experimentation seeking that elusive quality that makes a wine great. Clark invented the filtering technology that enables winemakers to remove alcohol through reverse osmosis and is equally at home talking about beauty or vicinal diphenol oxidation.So what is “soulfulness” in a wine? In a phrase, “aroma integration”:

“Aromatic integration is the source of soulfullness in food be it a bearnaise, a bisque or a Bordeaux. When aromas are integrated into a single voice the food speaks to the soul in the way a symphony does when the orchestra plays as one.

A sense of unity and harmony is the goal. But contrary to much of what you hear about winemaking that treats oxygen exposure as the enemy, it’s the absorption of oxygen that is the key to both flavor integration and age-worthiness.

…a young wine when challenged with oxygen behaves homeopathically, increasing its reductive strength….In effect the introduction of oxygen has made the wine hungrier for oxygen. Instead of oxidation we get increased reductive strength.

Oxygen introduced at the right time accelerates the bonding of color molecules and tannins, shortening the polymers, creating a more refined texture and more opportunities for the flavor molecules to bond to the colloids. The soulfullness of flavor integration is a product of refined structure. And these properly formed tannins will remain in suspension longer holding on to their aroma and flavor as the wine ages.

That’s the theory. In practice?

Every wine I’ve tasted from Winesmith has been its own unique child. Here are 4 of the siblings.

Faux Chablis Napa County 2005

California Chardonnay grapes inspired by the explosive minerality and stalwart ageability of Chablis. The nose is floral showing lemon blossom with a subtle background of dry hay. This florality is very unusual in a wine this old. As with many great wines, there is caprice and vacillation with occasional tropical notes hovering uncertainly between pineapple and ripe banana. Round but not weighty on the palate, the texture is supple, with a layered mouthfeel, angularity at the foundation and ethereality on top, a wine of duality like others in this lineup. The finish is generous and long, with no rough edges, and an endearing seam of pure mineral water,  giving way to a subtle electrical charge at its final destination. Sunny and playful, yet exotic and mysterious like this gorgeous offering from  Debashish Battacharya . This music brings out honey notes in the wine.

 

Roman Syrah California 2005

“Roman” refers to a series of wines made with no added sulfites, akin to “natural wine” although aficionados would blanch at the use of micro-oxygenation to build structure.  Light garnet and transparent in the glass with some browning, this Syrah shows floral aromas blended with a hint of volatile acidity against a rich almond/milk chocolate background. The palate has an electric intensity, the mineral/acidity playing a top note against a wonderfully soft, ingratiating mouthfeel with good midpalate extension, gradually unfurling that electric minerality which reappears on a finish of fine-grained tannins. It’s good natured but quirky and other worldly, a wine of paradox, soft and pretty but with a core of bristling acidity, aging but refusing to go quietly. The grapes were sourced from Renaissance Vineyards in the North Yuba AVA.

Amon Tobin’s Kitchen Sink is as quirky and other worldly as this wine.

 

Syrah  Suisun Valley Mangels’s Ranch 2005

This Syrah differs from the Roman in that it was sulfited and the grapes sourced from Suisun Valley, a relatively cool climate region adjacent to San Pablo Bay. It shows intense aromas of chocolate-covered berries, caramel, and newly turned earth with hints of dried flowers. The full bodied, lush palate has that same electric acidity. The tannins are soft, like velvet, yet persistent supporting a lengthy finish which I would describe as  chalk without the grit, the minerality hanging on forever as the fruit fades.  Tense mineral top notes contrast with the lush full foundation gradually fading to a powdery, yet enveloping texture. The wine caresses but has a provocative edge.

Erik Truffaz “Flamingos” pulls something earthy out of this wine.

 

Crucible Cabernet Sauvignon Napa Valley 2007

Straight from the cellars of Sauron, the nose shows intense cassis and sweet black cherry with fig undertones mingling with wet autumn leaves against a hazelnut background. It’s dense and full bodied in the mouth, the finely honed tannins giving plenty of quiet yet resolute structure. The midpalate is extraordinarily broad and dimensional with a seam of raucous dark fruit that owns the night forging its way to a finish that builds layers of character. This wine perhaps best illustrates the idea of flavor integration. The palate seems deep and broad yet the core of intense dark fruit belts out a single note like a massive chorus singing in unison. There is no fruit basket here; just exquisitely rendered force, a wine that shows why power and elegance are not contraries.   This spent 60 months in old French oak with grapes sourced from the vineyards of Napa Valley Community College.

Disturbed’s incredible “Sounds of Silence” will match this wine’s countenance. You have not understood this song until you hear this version.

 

I hope it’s clear from the above that these are starkly original wines embodying paradox and depth, yet made with intention bringing together rigorous science and aesthetic sensibility. But as with all great art they give great pleasure as well; the soul is not satisfied until the endorphins flow.

Winemaker Interview: James Frey of Trisaetum Winery

08 Wednesday Feb 2017

Posted by in Art and Wine, Wine Culture

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trisaetum gallery

Art Gallery at Trisaetum

James Frey, winemaker and owner of Trisaetum Winery in Willamette Valley, Oregon has a very impressive resume in my estimation. In addition to producing several high-scoring cuvees of Riesling and Pinot Noir each vintage, including the first domestic Riesling that really knocked me out, he is also an accomplished painter, displaying his vineyard-inspired artwork in a gallery adjacent to the tasting room. So James was a natural choice to provide some insight for my book project on the art of winemaking.

I am grateful to James for taking the time to respond to my questions about the creative aspects of winemaking.

1. Describe your “aha” moment when you first fell in love with wine.

Wine wasn’t around my family table growing up, so I came to wine in my twenties…and fell in love with it when my honeymoon took a detour (on a whim) through Napa.

2. What motivated you to get into winemaking?

Passion.

3. What did you do before you got into the business of making wine?

I worked in Corporate America for two different Fortune 500 companies as the head of Brand and Advertising at both of them. While I loved the challenge and the people I worked with, it was never truly a passion of mine. My passions were what I did on the weekend: be with my family, make wine in my backyard and paint. So I decided at the ripe old age of 39 to leave corporate America behind and devote my full energies to those things I was most passionate about.

4. How does that background help you make wine?

My corporate career did very little to help me make wine. A strong background in business certainly helped make a winery…which is actually a rather complicated business.

5. You are also an established artist. How does that background help you make wine?

You need science to make a good wine. You need to understand botany and chemistry and physics; wine doesn’t just make itself. There’s this romantic notion that you throw a cluster of grapes into a bucket and come back in 12 months and it’s a beautiful bottle of wine…it just doesn’t happen like that. So you need science to make a good wine…but you need art to make a great wine. Great wines cannot be manufactured in a lab; they come from your palate. They come from years and years and years of tasting…and years of blending…and years of experimenting.

6. How is winemaking similar to painting in terms of the creative process?

You start with an idea of want you hope to create…but then it morphs and changes as mother nature does her thing…and so you have to go with it. My best paintings grow organically; same with wine. The more you try to control and manufacture either, the more staid and simple the painting or the wine becomes.

7. Do you have a philosophy of winemaking—a style that you’re aiming for? How would you describe that?

I don’t really. I have wines that I like (those with life and energy and balance)…but each of those descriptors are based on what my own palate perceives. So my philosophy ends up being making the wines I like that are true to the vintage and true to the varietal.

8. At what point in the winemaking process do you decide on what you’re aiming at regarding style?

You taste, taste, taste…and make small tweaks in your approach depending upon what mother nature gives you in a particular vintage. It would be a shame to overly manipulate the wine.

9. Does your goal, the profile you’re aiming at when you set out to make a wine, change during the winemaking process? If so, how?

Yes, I always make small tweaks in technique based on the characteristics of the vintage. Oregon has great vintage variation, so you have to both embrace that every vintage is going to be different, and not get too wedded to some formula for winemaking.

10. Do you think of wine as expressing something? If so, what?

Wines express both a short-term and long-term memory. The short-term memory is what happened during the vintage (hot, cold, wet, dry, early, late, etc…). The long-term memory is what happened millions of years ago when the site and the soil were created. My grapevine’s roots grow through millions of years and layers and layers of soil…and that root system’s job is to bring aspects of that site into the wine.

11. Do aesthetic concepts such as elegance, harmony, character or finesse play a role in your decision-making process?

I think those are all important words for wine.

12. How does knowledge of winemaking help recognize aesthetic properties (e.g. beauty, elegance, etc.) in a wine? Perhaps a different way of putting this question is “what does a winemaker taste that an ordinary consumer would miss?”

I’m not sure we taste anything different…we just do it more often so may be quicker to form our opinions on a wine

13. Do you consider winemaking an art? (I know definitions of art are controversial but don’t worry about having a precise definition, unless you want to give one)

Absolutely. See my answer to question 5. You can’t make great wine in a laboratory…you different wine than me.make it in the vineyard and with the palate of the winemaker. It’s why a different winemaker using the exact same grapes I use would end up making a completely

14. To what degree do the conscious decisions you make in the vineyard and winery produce the intended result. Or in other words what role do chance and luck play in winemaking?

Mother Nature will always have the potential of changing your intended result and you have to live with that. Given a “typical” vintage, the conscious decisions in the vineyard and winery have an enormous impact; there are a vast number of different wines you can make from a single vineyard…especially with Pinot Noir and Riesling.

15. Could you comment generally on the sorts of things that winemakers have little control over?

The weather.

16. In what sense is making wine a creative activity?

There are scores of decisions your make during a vintage that can produce a different result—in the vineyard: when you prune, organic versus conventional, leaf pulling, fruit thinning, when you pick, etc… in the winery: whole cluster or destem, stainless steel or oak, native or cultured yeast, cold soak or extended maceration, enzyme or natural, new barrel or neutral, what forest for your oak, time in barrel, filter or not, fining or not, etc…

17. At what point does imagination come into play with regard to winemaking?

The best winemakers in the world have incredible imaginations.

18. How important is originality to you. Is it important that you make a wine with your distinctive stamp on it.

Yes, it’s important that I’m making my own wine and not trying to replicate someone else’s wine.

19. In typical cases, how close does the finished product come to your original vision, and how do you balance the desire to let the grapes speak for themselves with achieving your intended style?

That’s very vintage dependent.

20. Terroir has become a buzz word. How important is terroir to you?

In making Pinot Noir and Riesling, the site is tremendously important. In my opinion, no other two grapes in the world do a better job of taking what’s in the soil and what’s at the site, and putting in into the glass. We celebrate the fact that our three vineyards produce three incredibly different wines…even though we farm them the same way, ferment them the same way and age them the same way.

21. How important is tasting to the winemaking process?

It is the single most important thing we do.

22. Does the sort of tasting you do in the winemaking process require imagination?

Absolutely…because in most cases you’re imaging what the wine will be…not what it is right now.

23. What must a wine be like to be beautiful?

Beauty is in the eye of the beholder.

What Makes a Great Wine Great?

02 Thursday Feb 2017

Posted by in Art and Wine, Philosophy of Food and Wine, Wine Culture

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la tacheJamie Goode’s post What is Greatness in a Wine? is insightful because it moves greatness out of the realm of subjectivity and personal preference:

Greatness is conferred on wine by a community of judgement. When we, as the wine community, taste wines together, we recognize the great wines. It’s an aesthetic system, where we form a judgement together, by tasting together, discussing, listing, buying, consuming.

But ultimately this kind of answer is unsatisfying. When the wine community confers greatness on a wine presumably there is something about the wine that warrants such a judgment. Without an account of what that is, the judgment is threatened with arbitrariness. The job of a critic is not just to announce greatness but to explain it by giving reasons. A genuine understanding of “greatness” would include those reasons not just the fact of widespread agreement.

Such an account of course is hard to provide. As Jamie writes, “There’s no definition that we can apply to determine whether a wine is great or not.” Each great wine will be great for different reasons and general rules that mention complexity, harmony or finesse will not capture the individuality of great wines. The best we can do is use description, metaphor or some other rhetorical device to call attention to those features that seem salient yet inarticulable.

Yet, perhaps Jamie’s idea is in the right direction. A great wine is great because it appeals to a wide range of people in the wine world who agree it’s a benchmark but often for vastly different reasons. Each person’s account of why the wine is great will differ due to biological differences, differences in descriptive powers, aesthetic preferences, and the fact that we all have different tasting histories. Thus, perhaps what makes a wine great is it’s ability to generate a verdictive consensus despite those differences.

Greatness in a wine lies in a wine’s capacity to be appreciated from many different perspectives, a multi-dimensional potential that invites a common verdict despite vastly different ways of arriving at it.

Thus, it is not the fact of agreement that makes a wine great but an underlying breadth or accessibility that makes it alluring from multiple points of view.

Sadly, without some way of quantifying this “underlying breadth” or specifying its causal mechanisms that explanation is close to empty—like attributing the effectiveness of a sleeping pill to it’s dormitive power.

But it does point to the fact that this underlying breadth is not an arbitrary accident but is in some sense “in the wine” and perhaps it is something we can learn to sense if we practice looking for it.

The search for it is likely to be more interesting than picking out aroma notes.