Category Archives: Wine Culture

The Dangers of Wine Education

30 Thursday May 2019

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wine educationWine education has become a necessity in the wine industry, not only for people entering the industry but for casual wine consumers as well who want to learn more about what they’re drinking and need help navigating the remarkable complexity of the wine world. This is of course a good thing. Knowledge about regions, varietals and methods opens our senses to subtleties in a wine that might go unheeded if we didn’t know what we’re looking for.

But there is a danger lurking in all that education.

Through education we can become so invested in wine-cultural codes, clichés and conventional interpretations that we are no longer truly tasting wine—we’re tasting what we think we should be tasting,not what’s in the glass. Wine tasting is cognitively penetrable—our beliefs about a wine can influence what we taste. Too much top down processing can lead us to reject wines that don’t fit conventional categories.

As wine lovers we should be trying to render taste-able what has been covered up by convention. This is in part what makes natural wines exciting. They don’t conform to the rules, at least until they become the new orthodoxy.

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Wine Scores are Not the Problem

09 Thursday May 2019

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wine evaluation 3Polemics against wine scores are a perennial crowd pleaser sort of like your favorite supermarket Chardonnay that gets nods of approval from any crowd you serve it to. But I’m still waiting to find an argument that is persuasive largely because wine scores tend to be an all purpose whipping boy for some problem or deficiency that is only tangentially related to the actual practice of scoring.  The recent article by Ian Cauble in The Robb Report is no exception but it’s worth going through the argument to see where it misses the mark.

The argument is as follows:

(1) An elegant, classically proportioned Cabernet gets a middling score from an influential critic.

(2) The middling score reflected the fact that the critic prefers riper, more powerful wines.

(3) The middling score will cause the classic wine to be overlooked by consumers because the critic has clout.

(4) Winemakers chase scores by making over-ripe wines that critics like thus misleading consumers about what they should be drinking.

(5) Therefore, classically proportioned wines are endangered by the practice of scoring wine.

Therefore we should stop scoring wines.

What is wrong with this argument? Well, first of all, an argument that essentially asserts that “we should stop scoring wines because a wine I like received a low score” is a bit like saying “if I can’t win I’ll take my ball and go home”. But let’s look beyond the narcissism for the sake of the argument.

The more general problem is that there is nothing inherent in the practice of giving scores that demands that ripeness  be valued over elegance. The problem (if it is a problem) is the critic’s taste in wine not the fact he/she gave it a score. If critics prefer more elegant wines (as for instance Jancis Robinson does) then they can give the more elegant wines a higher score.

Secondly, it’s worth mentioning that lots of people like ripe, powerful wines. It is a very popular wine style. The argument assumes that consumers like these wines only because critics tell them they should. But where is the evidence for this? It is not only less informed, casual consumers that like them. After all serious connoisseurs are among the customers of Napa cult wines. We might lament the taste preferences of the general public (I do) but that is not the fault of the score.

Thirdly, in the absence of a score, the critic would have had to rely solely on a verbal description to communicate his/her assessment. Would this low scoring wine have received a better assessment if it were entirely verbal. Not if the critic is honest and accurate. Why does “thin, tart and lacks expression” put the wine in a better light than the number? The score does obviate the need for a consumer to read and interpret a complex verbal description. Perhaps there is an implicit claim here that consumers would be better informed if they had to read the tasting note rather than rely on a score. That is undoubtedly true but I still don’t see how that would put the elegant Cabernet in a better light. Furthermore, I doubt that in the absence of a score, consumers would be more inclined to read and interpret the tasting note. As a professor I can tell you, reading and interpreting are neither enjoyable nor easy for most people.

Although it isn’t explicitly stated, perhaps the argument assumes that riper, more powerful wines tend to stand out in a tasting flight more readily than less powerful, more elegant wines. I hear this claim quite often. Its truth is hard to assess but it isn’t obviously true. If most wines in a flight were ripe and powerful, the spare elegant wine might stand out.  Furthermore, assuming professional critics care about their accuracy, I would think they would consciously guard against this bias by giving elegant wines more attention and consideration.

Nothing in this argument clearly points to the practice of scoring wines as the problem. One might argue the problem is the herd mentality of powerful critics beholden to a wine style that is beginning to lose its luster. Or perhaps the problem is winemakers who lack integrity and try to make a popular wine rather than the wine they want to make. Eliminating scores won’t solve either problem.

Wine scores are not going away. Both consumers and people in the trade find them to be useful. Of course they don’t begin to capture the virtues of a wine. But no one claims they do. Even Robert Parker insists that people should read the tasting note if they want to understand the quality of a wine. The score is just a convenient reference point for contextualizing the quality level of a wine.

The real problem is that wine scores are widely misunderstood. They are not measures of intrinsic quality. They are not the sum total of precisely calculated categories of quality. The only thing they could possibly measure is a subjective preference on the part of the critic at the time the wine was tasted compared to other wines in the critic’s experience. That is important information but it isn’t the word of God.

The Onion is Providing Advice to Wine Regions

06 Monday May 2019

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holy field vineyard

Holy Field Vineyards in Kansas

The Onion is very funny; but also ignorant.

In a blog post entitled “Shitty Region of the Country Figures It Might as Well Give Producing Wine a Shot” they write with a Lawrence, KS byline:

Reasoning that they don’t really have anything else going for them in the increasingly automated post-industrial era of large-scale staple farming, the shittier regions of the country decided this week that they might as well give producing wine a shot. “At this point, maybe we should just see if we could get some grapes to grow here, spend the rainy-day money on a couple tanks of sulfites, and see how we do with fermenting wine,” said the residents of eastern Kansas, as well as those of central Ohio, northern Michigan, western Pennsylvania, and most of Nebraska, Wyoming, and Texas, noting that all that open land would look pleasant covered in vines, if you were on some type of tour where people could drink different whites and maybe see some horses or something.

Apparently unbeknownst to the wits at The Onion, they already make some pretty good wine  in Eastern Kansas, Northern Michigan, and Texas. [I haven’t tasted Central Ohio, Western Pennsylvania, Nebraska or Wyoming yet.] They should have chosen different examples.

They also report:

The plan reportedly stalled when other residents of the shitty regions reminded them that even bad wine takes years to make and that, pound for pound, methamphetamines are still a far more lucrative investment.

That’s worth a smirk, although meth addiction is no laughing matter. But should a company that moved its headquarters from New York to Chicago (as the Onion did a few years ago) be poking fun at flyover country?

Some Good News for Millennials and Bad News for All of Us

01 Wednesday May 2019

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millenial incomeWe’ve heard a lot about how millennials have reduced spending power, thanks to the 2008 recession, and are slow to enter the market for premium wine. So this graph caught my eye. Statistical results depend on how you gather the data and this is only one data point so take it with a grain of salt. But Kevin Drum at Mother Jones usually does a good job with statistical analysis.

Millennial incomes are no lower than previous generations. Nor, generally speaking, are millennials more in debt, less likely to own a home, or less likely to spend money. You can pick out a few small differences depending on how you cherry pick years and which generations you compare to, but millennials right now are roughly as well off as young people in previous generations and their spending habits are pretty similar too.

I can hear the wine industry breathing a sigh of relief, although if this is true that removes one explanation for why millennials aren’t buying as much wine as expected.

The bad news for all of us is that we live in a world where we have to endure the thought of more products like this one:

strawberry-red-wine-cremeI do know people who occasionally drink wine for breakfast. But who wants wine in their yoghurt? This is from the Aussie-inspired Wallaby brand. They do like Vegemite down under so maybe this shouldn’t surprise us. But I would assume they’ve done market research and concluded this is worth a try.

We Need More Truthful Advertising in the Wine Industry

29 Monday Apr 2019

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false advertising 2People in the wine industry devote a lot of attention to finding messages that resonate with consumers, especially consumers in the millennial generation who, it is to be hoped, can replace boomers who are ageing out of the wine market.

Here’s an idea: Try being honest with your customers. I see far too many industrial brands calling themselves “artisanal”, “family-owned” or claiming their wines are “hand-crafted” when they are anything but. As a result, small wineries that are in fact artisanal can’t differentiate themselves and they lose one of the only competitive advantages available to them.  But, more importantly, this practice contributes to the impression that wine marketing is fundamentally deceptive.

Wine marketing depends on the emotional charge we get from the romantic idea that wine is made by dedicated craftspeople lovingly cultivating small vineyards and carefully tending each barrel until the wine has reached its peak flavor expression. In fact that describes most wineries in the U.S. But it doesn’t describe most wines that you find on the shelves of large retailers and supermarkets.

There are about 8000 wineries in the U.S (depending on who is counting. Some claim the number is closer to 10000). Only about 280 produce more than 50,000 cases per year. Yet those 280 producers account for most of what you find in large retail shops and supermarkets. The top 50 wine companies sell about 90% of the wine made in the U.S. None of that wine is artisanal, boutique, or hand crafted. You simply cannot make that much wine without an industrial process. That doesn’t make their wines bad. But it does mean they can’t focus personal attention on each vineyard lot or barrel as an artisan producer might.

The terms “artisanal” , “boutique” or “hand-crafted” are not legally regulated and in fact there is no precise definition of these terms. Large wineries will sometimes have small-lot production programs. Some mid-sized wineries have the resources and sensibility to give their wines the kind of attention more typical of small wineries. And some small wineries are simply not very good at what they do or lack the resources to make good wine.

But the issue isn’t whether there is an exact cut off point for what counts as artisanal. What is obvious is that wineries with annual case production levels over 50,000—enough to supply large retail stores—are unlikely to use artisanal methods. To claim they do is just false advertising.

Jon Bonné, Weird Wines, and the Post Hoc Fallacy

24 Wednesday Apr 2019

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weird winesIn philosophy there is a logical fallacy called post hoc ergo propter hoc, a Latin phrase meaning “after this, therefore because of this”. In other words, the fact that Y comes after X does not entail that X caused Y. X might have caused Y but you need evidence of the causal relationship not the timing alone.

It seems to me Jon Bonne’s recent article [behind a pay wall] is guilty of that fallacy. Entitled “When It Comes to Wine, Weird is the New Normal and That’s for the Better” his thesis is that the recent movement away from fine wine and high alcohol fruit bombs toward more diverse styles—natural wine, wine in cans, rose all year, orange wine, and wine from less renowned wine regions—was caused by the great recession of 2008. Before the recession, wine lovers had the money to spend on high end Burgundy, Bordeaux or Napa cult wines. After the recession they had to reign in the spending in favor of cheaper and more diverse offerings. His claim seems to be that, but for the recession, we would still be clamoring for high end conventional wines.

He is right that the wine community is undergoing aesthetic change and these changes gained momentum in the late 2000’s. But the claim that it was caused by the 2008 recession doesn’t quite ad up. There are three reasons for doubting this causal claim:

1. The people hit hardest by the recession were not the people buying Bordeaux and Burgundy. The wealthy did lose a lot of wealth quickly but they also recovered fairly quickly. Furthermore, for the few years in which they had to tighten their belts they could buy good knock offs of cult wines and Grand Crus at a fraction of the cost. Why would they start drinking orange wine?

2.  Most ordinary consumers were priced out of the Bordeaux/Burgundy/cult wine market by the late 1990’s, long before the great recession. Perhaps during the Great Recession the upper middle class had to stop buying the occasional splurge wine but why would they settle on weird wines instead of more modestly priced conventional wines?

3. The interest in less conventional wine styles is driven by Millennials, Gen Xer’s and to a growing extent, Generation Z. Except for early Gen X’ers none of these cohorts would have had the money to buy splurge wines in the 2000s. And thus the recession would not have caused them to change their taste in wine.

It is true that there are a lot of interesting “weird” wines available today in the $20-$40 range. But there have always been good, conventional wines in that price range. I don’t see how the change in economic circumstances explains the aesthetic change. It’s also true that the iconic fine wines are no longer affordable. But that little to do with the recession.

There are two simpler explanations than the one Bonné gives. The first is that baby boomers, who learned to taste when fine wine was more affordable, are aging out of the wine market. They are being replaced by people who lack that background because they never could afford those wines and never acquired a taste for them. They are open to diverse styles because they never acquired the rather staid, conservative image of wine that ruled baby boomers for several decades.

But perhaps more importantly, tastes change because we get tired of the same thing after awhile. I don’t think we need an implausible economic explanation for our need to avoid boredom.

Updating Biodynamics

22 Monday Apr 2019

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biodynamic vineyardBiodynamics is a method of farming that treats the entire farm as a living organism. Developed by philosopher Rudolf Steiner in 1924, it is now being employed by many vineyards throughout the world in an attempt to improve vineyard health and produce better wines. To call your wines “biodynamic”, certification by the Demeter organization is required. It is controversial because many of the farming practices employed by biodynamics are of questionable scientific validity.

For instance, Steiner claimed there are  lunar and astrological influences on soil and plant development and so the timing of when to plant, maintain and harvest your crop is based on both the phase of the moon and the zodiacal constellation the moon is passing through. The timing also depends on whether the crop is the root, leaf, flower, or fruit of the plant. Phases of the moon are also supposed to influence how a wine tastes.

Katia Nussbaum of the San Polino Estate in Montalcino posted a lengthy thought piece on Jancis Robinson’s site about (among other things) biodynamic farming and the need to reconceptualize it for the 21st Century. After a discussion of Darwin, social Darwinism, the microbiome, and new biological models that attribute a level of consciousness to plants, she writes:

Steiner had ideas that pre-dated the organic movement, but elucidated them using the analytical tools and culture of his times and environment. He wrote in the absence of highly powered microscopes and understanding of quantum physics and string theory. He worked through categories and essential truths, through notions of dichotomy, such as the male and female, through astrology and metaphor.

My questions are these:

Why must biodynamic theory fossilise and stick to the original readings of Steiner and his theories of the cosmos?

Can we not use his original intuition and translate it into a modern language to make it more useful to ourselves and our understanding of how vines work and interreact with their environment, to gain a better understanding of how to produce healthier grapes and better wine?

The article is worth a read and Ms. Nussbaum’s plea for an updated biodynamics is welcome.

However, I suspect most winemakers and farmers who employ biodynamics are already on board with her suggestions.

As Craig Camp of Oregon’s Trune Vineyards has often asserted:

The Demeter standard for wines states, “Observation of the Biodynamic calendar is encouraged.” It does not demand only “calendar-specific work days or that “farmers are only permitted to execute vineyard work…on very specific days.” The statements above [ed. in this article not Nussbaum’s] are false and following the biodynamic calendar is not required for Demeter Certification. …If you can’t prune or pick on the ideal day due to weather and practical considerations you know that all of the other work you’ve done will still make exceptional wine.

Two considerations lead me to think biodynamics is being continually updated:

1. As a group winemakers are notably empirical. They make lots of observations and change their practices when something isn’t working. And they have a sustained interest in the science of viticulture.

2. Biodynamics can be time consuming and expensive to implement, especially during the initial conversion of a conventional farm to biodynamics. No one has time and money to waste engaging in practices that don’t make a difference.

Grape farming and winemaking are of course “slow arts”. It often takes years to see the results of an experiment. But as time goes on the question of what works and what doesn’t will be sorted out even in the absence of a grand theory to replace Steiner’s more fanciful notions.

Terry Theise and the Soul of Wine

18 Thursday Apr 2019

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person thinkingI think the best books I’ve read about wine are the two by wine importer Terry Theise. Reading Between the Wines is a thoroughly enjoyable account of his life in wine and a passionate defense of artisanality. But it’s his most recent book What Makes a Wine Worth Drinking: In Praise of the Sublime that really gets my philosophical juices flowing.

Long celebrated for his portfolio of mostly German and Austrian wines as well as grower Champagne, in these two books he articulates a sophisticated philosophy of wine and introduces a badly needed corrective to our fatally crabbed and often vulgar approach to wine.

But like any work of philosophy, this book raises profound questions. Here a few quotes that I think raise the most important questions we need to answer.

Great wine can induce reverie; I imagine most of us would concur. But the cultivation of reverie is also the best approach to understanding fine wine.

What is it about us and what is it about wine that induces a dream-like state? There is something about certain perceptions that move the mind, that set the mind in motion, and take us to another plane. What is it about taste that enables reverie and why does wine’s capacity to induce reverie help us understand fine wine?

If wine had turned out to be merely sensual I think for me its joys would have been transitory. I’d have done the “wine thing” for a certain number of years and gone on to something else. What continued to drive me, and what drives many of us, is curiosity, pleasure in surprise, and those elusive, incandescent moments of meaning—the sense that some truth, normally obscure, was being revealed.

How can a beverage reveal truths? What kind of truth is this and how would we know we have it?

About particular wines there are certain questions we should pose according to Theise:

Is it charming, imperious, hyperactive, pensive? What sort of texture does it offer? Is it crisp or creamy, nubby or sumptuous? Is it contemplative, energetic, clever, profound? I feel it terribly sad that such language is often debased as inauthentic because it tells us much more about a wine than the prevailing geek-speak.

How could a beverage have personality characteristics? What licenses such a judgment? And why is important that we attribute personality characteristics to wine?

Some wines such as a wine called Souches Meres…are so haunting and stirring that they bypass our entire analytical faculty and fill us with image and feeling.

How does wine stimulate the imagination? We know that painting and literature provoke thought and mental imagery. But wine doesn’t really depict anything; it does not form an image. How is taste connected to the imagination?

My own palate, such as it is, does well at interpreting how a wine behaves, the kind of temperament it seems to have, the shape and torque of its motion and ways its various acts are organized—”acts” in the sense of dramatic arcs such as exposition, development, denouement.

Wine does change as it moves on the palate. But how can those changes acquire a narrative arc. It seems we come back to the same question—how does wine stimulate the imagination and why is it important that it does so?

When a fragrance is evocative yet indistinct—when it doesn’t specify its cognate (such as lemons or peaches or salami or whatever)—it seems to bypass the analytical faculty and go straight to your imagination and from there you climb about the fugue state directly to your soul…

In terms of wine we seem to infer the presence of soul when a wine is redolent, when it has atmospheres of nonwine things, when it echoes, peals, plays overtones. And again in terms of wine qua wine we usually sense the presence of soul in wines with a lot of tertiary elements—that is, things other than the clear flavors of grapes. That’s natural; soul is usually more inferential than literal….

Drinking a very old wine can be a soulful experience—and at least for me—it is almost always an experience of love, gratefulness, and sadness. Soul indeed seems in some way to adhere to sadness. Not that it is sad, but it rides on the back of sadness like a little kid on his Dad’s shoulders….

Wine, I find, can offer soulful moments …but it is also a vector to mystical (or peak) experience.

So we arrive at the ultimate question. For Theise wine has the kind of meaning we reserve for the most profound works of art, speaking to our deepest values and most profound commitments.

There are really three general questions that must be answered:

Why does wine move the mind and the heart? And how does it do so; what are the mechanisms through which wine moves us? Which leads me to a third question: Why do so few people in the wine world acknowledge wine’s power to move us? Are these dimensions discussed in the Master of Wine program or in WSET classes? At UC Davis in the oenology program? The answer to that would be no. Why not?

I have some thoughts on these matters. To be continued.

You Do Want Wine On the Rocks

17 Wednesday Apr 2019

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the rocksI just want to add my two cents to W. Blake Gray’s article on The Rocks District of Milton-Freewater. This is a new AVA, awarded in 2015. It’s located in Northern Oregon just across the Washington border and is a subregion of the Walla Walla AVA. The Wine Spectator’s Harvey Steiman called The Rocks “the most distinctive AVA in the U.S.”  I visited The Rocks last fall and for once I think reality lives up to the hype.

They grow Rhone varietals, mostly Syrah, and it’s extraordinary. Every Syrah I tasted from several different wineries had a distinctive gamy, leathery, mineral funk that leaps from the glass—I’ve never tasted anything quite like it. I suppose it’s the softball-sized lava rocks that populate the vineyards that account for the distinctive flavors. But oenologist Timothy Donahue argues its the high sulfur content, high potassium, low PH and the use of high levels of copper sulphate as a fining agent that gives the wine its flavor profile.

Whatever the explanation these wines are worth seeking out. Cayuse is the best known winery operating in The Rocks but their wines are allocated and hard to get. Last weekend for my tasting group I poured Saviah “The Stones Speak” Syrah in a line up with high scoring wines from Napa, Mendoza, Brunello di Montalcino, and Barolo and it was consistently mentioned as the favorite.

Unfortunately, if you look for “The Rocks District of Milton-Freewater” on the label you will seldom find it. As Blake Gray explains in his article, for a wine to use an AVA on the label it has to be made in the same state as the AVA. Most of the wineries who use The Rocks grapes are located in Washington and have to label their wines from Walla Walla. Some wineries, such as Force Majeure, are building a facility in Milton-Freewater but the town is small, relatively poor, and off the tourist track so it may be a while before the name appears on many labels. But the AVA has a helpful website that lists all the wineries who use grapes from The Rocks.

My crystal ball is as cloudy as anyones but it’s a safe bet this will soon be one of best known AVA’s in the country in the near future. And maybe it will put Syrah back on the list of most sought-after varietals.

Does Great Wine Mix with Great Friends?

15 Monday Apr 2019

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wine and friendsIt is an article of faith in the wine community that wine is meant to be served with food and should always be shared among friends. It is certainly true that wine enhances most meals and brings life and conviviality to social occasions. But I’m not sure all wines are destined for the communal table. I’ve been reading through Terry Theise’s recent book What Makes a Wine Worth Drinking: In Praise of the Sublime, and I find lots to agree with in this quote:

One evening I served a wine to several guests and wished I hadn’t. Not because they were unworthy of that wine—they were more worthy than I was if it came to that—but because the wine was so noble and galvanic I wanted to be led away into its reverie. But a host has obligations, not least among them not to be vacant and pre-occupied.  (Sometimes I wonder if great wine is inimical to socializing,  but follow  that idea where it takes you and you risk sounding misanthropic.)

Really great wines provoke thought and stimulate the imagination. They demand concentration over an extended time and flourish within silence. Too much commotion means you miss much of what such a wine has to offer. When I’m opening a special bottle at home, I want the bustle of me getting dinner on the table to be out of the way. Of course sharing a great wine with family or friends is also a consummate pleasure but especially so in a small group of like-minded devotees who will not be offended by me being “vacant and pre-occupied”.

Last night I had the pleasure of sharing several gorgeous wines with my tasting group of about 20 friends at a restaurant. It was a glorious evening, the wines were extraordinary, and the conversation delightful. The job of hosting the event was widely shared but I’m still expected to describe and comment on the wines. With only a few minutes to ponder a tasting pour and come up with comments I felt like at the end of the evening I needed to apologize to each wine for being too brusque and ungracious. So much beauty was lost in the press of time management and social obligation. They each deserved more of my attention.

This is of course a problem with no solution. The point of a tasting group is to share the experience. It is much worse to be unfair to friends than to be unfair to a wine. But there was nevertheless something sacrificed that should not go unheeded.

The Greek word for human is anthropos and misein means “to hate”, so to be misanthropic is to hate humans. The Greek word for wine is “oinos”. Is “misoinoic” a word? Perhaps it should be.