Category Archives: Wine Culture

A New Wine Map?

22 Thursday Oct 2020

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childrens atlasThis attempt to rewrite the wine map appears whimsical—it’s called the Children’s Atlas of Wine after all—but it contains an important insight.

For the past three years, sommelier and wine educator James Sligh has been doodling maps of winegrowing territories in an attempt to show how the wine world’s borders have stretched—an evolution especially linked to the rise of the natural wine movement. It’s a transformation, Sligh discovered, that wasn’t being represented within canonical wine atlases.

Traditional wine maps depict the appellation system. The insight behind Sligh’s  alternative maps is that there are really interesting wines produced outside the appellation system, and so those traditional maps are to a degree misleading if their aim is to capture the geography of wine.

Wines made within appellations tend to be more expensive since they have a marketing advantage—consumers have come to trust wines originating in well-known appellations and will pay more for that trust. Land prices and productions costs follow suit. And many appellations have strict laws governing viticulture and winemaking. These are all incentives to make wine outside the traditional appellations.

Thus, upstart winemakers and growers with fewer resources, and experimentalists seeking to make wines with a difference, have begun to look elsewhere for their grapes. Furthermore, climate change will likely scramble the wine map in the future.

If wine education is to keep up, it may be time to expand the maps.

In plotting his illustrations, Sligh begins by working backward, making lists of some of his favorite contemporary producers located in a general geographic area, then dropping pins onto a Google map.

What he discovers is that many of his favorite producers work outside the system

In Roussillon, he found that Calce, a village that doesn’t appear in a traditional wine atlas, has become home to some of the most important wine being made in France today, including producers like Gérard Gauby, Matassa and l’Horizon.

Obviously, one persons judgment about what is interesting cannot be the basis of a comprehensive re-thinking of how to represent wine regions. But that re-thinking is absolutely necessary and Sligh’s approach is a start.

Here is Sligh’s website.

Is E-Commerce the Answer for the Wine Industry?

15 Thursday Oct 2020

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drinking wine at the wineryAmidst a lot of happy talk about how the wine industry is developing e-commerce solutions to the problem of how to sell wine in a pandemic, Kate Dingwell’s article in Forbes raises an important question:

The rise of e-commerce also poses the question—how do wineries replace the experience of sitting down for a glass in a vineyard and hearing the story behind the wines from the grower himself? While pandemic has seen the advent of virtual happy hours, few, if none at all, have been able to replicate the immersive experience of visiting a vineyard and connecting a consumer and a wine on an intimate level.

The short answer is you can’t.

The fine wine market is built around the personal connection people make when they visit a winery, talk to the winemaker, join the wine club, and make the winery a frequent stop on their weekend getaways or vacations. I doubt that there is a technological replacement for this experience.

I suppose one could be sanguine about wine tourism returning once we get a handle on Covid19. But if wine consumers get really comfortable with the ease and affordability of e-commerce, there is some danger that wine tourism will not return to its former robust state.

That will probably have a negative effect on brand loyalty.

E-commerce sites give you lots of choices and its to their advantage to throw those alternatives in your face with their recommendation engines. “If you like that wine, you will like this wine even more.”

Amazon is at the end of this road and that means every time you make an inquiry or a purchase you will be faced with 50 distractions directing you away from what you were looking for. E-commerce is not about brand loyalty; it actively destroys it.

I guess we can only hope that the attractions of sipping a lovely wine overlooking the vineyard on a crisp autumn day will be so compelling it will overwhelm the benefits of convenience.

But the evidence for that hopeful note is mighty thin.

“Fruit Bombs” are Misnamed

14 Wednesday Oct 2020

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fruit bombIt is common to associate ripeness with warm climates. But there is more nuance to this relationship between heat and ripeness than is commonly assumed. One thing I’ve noticed, when I periodically delve into old world wines, is that while warm regions seem to require alcohol at 14% or above to get their grapes ripe, cooler regions, and some winemakers in California who pick early, get ripe flavors with much less alcohol. (By ripe flavors, I don’t mean raisin notes. I mean rich, clear, focused fruit flavors.)

I suspect this has to do with the fact that vines start to shut down as the temperatures approach 90 degrees. After that point, the vines produce more sugar but not more flavor. Thus, a lot of that heat in warm climate regions is “wasted” when it comes to flavor. It just produces more sugar and potential alcohol.

There is also evidence that alcohol depresses floral and fruit aromas in wine while increasing wood and spice notes.

So why do we call riper, higher alcohol wines fruit bombs and why do consumers seem to gravitate toward them? I suspect there are at least three factors:

(1)  Higher alcohol reduces the perception of sourness.

(2) Consumers like some sweetness in their wine which ripeness makes possible. Alcohol also directly contributes to sensations of sweetness at least for some people. This enhanced sweetness is interpreted as fruity by the brain unless the taster is skilled at distinguishing sugar from fruitiness.

(3) Alcohol and residual sugar contributes to a lush, full mouthfeel.

None of this is really about fruit or flavor. It’s about sugar or perceptions of sweetness and texture—sugar bombs not fruit bombs.

There are Two Wine Industries. We Need to Stop Conflating Their Interests.

08 Thursday Oct 2020

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airline wineI’m sure Robert Joseph is correct when he argues, in Wine Business International, that emerging wine regions will sell more wine by planting International varieties rather than indigenous grapes.

Did you hear about how Hilton, Sheraton and Hyatt will no longer offer international breakfast options in their Tokyo hotels, and how they will restrict their morning menus to typical Japanese fare such as steamed rice, miso soup, fermented soya beans, pickles and dried seaweed? No?

That’s hardly surprising because it’s fake news. I made it up.

Those hotels, like their Japanese-owned competitors, the Imperial and Grand Nikko, would never dream of doing anything like that – they know many guests expect to start their day with toast, cereal, muesli or fried egg and bacon.

To survive economically, big hotel groups need to give their customers what they like, rather than what they think they ought to like.

That’s the same rationale behind Turkish Airlines pouring Turkish Chardonnay and Syrah on their flights, rather than indigenous Turkish grape varieties. They need to keep huge numbers of passengers happy.

In answer to the question does the world need another Starbucks, more thoughts from Kim Kardashian, or more plantings of Chardonnay, Robert happily looks at the sales numbers and says why of course.

But that ignores the interests of the rest of the industry.  I can’t find a reliable assessment of how many wineries there are in the world. But there are almost 10,000 bonded wineries in the U.S. and the U.S. is only the fourth largest producer, well behind France, Italy, and Spain. Suffice it to say there are probably several hundred thousand commercial wineries around the globe. The vast majority of them are not selling wines to hotels, airlines, or grocery chains.

If everyone is making Cabernet, Chardonnay, and Syrah, 90% of these wineries have no reason to exist. The vast majority of the wineries in the world don’t have to keep the hordes happy. They need to build local markets and give wine enthusiasts a reason to seek out their wines. To do that they need to offer wines that are distinctive, and that means indigenous varietals must be part of the mix.

The idea that the wine world could flourish with a few mega producers selling generic juice to business travelers is absurd.

Yes, there is a market for industrial wine, and there is no reason why emerging regions shouldn’t participate. But there is a whole other wine industry out there that defines the culture of wine. What works for industrial wine doesn’t work for them.

Blind Tasting Cannot Block all Biases

07 Wednesday Oct 2020

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blind tastingBlind tasting is considered to be the gold standard of wine evaluation. And the reason for its status is that it allegedly blocks the biases that come from any preconceptions we might have about a wine. There is no question that our prior beliefs about what we taste can influence and distort our perceptions. If we know and admire the producer or know the wine we are tasting is costly we might view the wine in a more positive light. The influence of confirmation bias and other mistakes in reasoning are well documented.

It stands to reason that if we can block these potential biases through blind tasting our evaluations are more likely to be accurate. They prevent us from honestly assessing what our perceptions tell us. But that is only true if in fact blind can succeed at blocking prior beliefs. And that does not seem to be the case. Blind tasting blocks some ways of acquiring prior beliefs about a wine. But as philosopher Jonathan Cohen argues:

What distinguishes blind from sighted tasting is that the former prohibits the taster from employing specific sources of information about the perceptual object (say, from the shape of the bottle, the words on the label, testimony about the methods of production). But this leaves it open that the blind taster might come to hold the very same beliefs about the perceptual object by other means — specifically, as a result of perception and perceptually informed inference — and that those beliefs might subsequently affect her perceptual experience.

What Cohen has in mind is this:

Suppose I dislike Merlot and suppose, unbeknownst to me, the wine I am blind tasting is, in fact, a Merlot. If I am adept at blind tasting, I will correctly judge the wine is a Merlot and my prejudice against Merlot will still then shape my judgment about its quality. In this case, a prior belief is still negatively affecting my judgement about wine quality. Yet I am forming my distorted judgment based on evidence that blind tasting allows—my inference that it is a Merlot. The reasons for wanting to block a bias from influencing my judgment when tasting with no blinders are also reasons for wanting to block bias when tasting blind. So blind tasting fails to prevent my biases from informing my judgment.

Cohen also describes another case in which blind tasting fails.

It has been well established that our perceptual responses to a stimulus are influenced by contrasts with other stimuli we experience at the same time. In the context of wine tasting, how we perceive a wine is influenced by other wines we taste it with. Blind tasting has no ability to block this kind of distorting influence in which our impression of a wine is influenced by something other than that wine.

The only way to block the influence of perceptual contrast is to taste something neutral, such as water, between sampling each wine to be blind tasted. This, of course, is easily accomplished but I doubt that blind tasters are always careful enough to cleanse their palate after each wine.

Thus, blind tasting is not a comprehensive solution to worries about biases.

We Should Get Rid of Typicity as a Criterion of Wine Quality

24 Thursday Sep 2020

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wine evaluationOne of my pet peeves in the wine world is the outsized role typicity plays in judging wine quality.

Wine education is largely about understanding what a typical Barolo, Left Bank Bordeaux, or Mosel Riesling is supposed to taste like. That’s fine. The entrance fee for any community is to understand the norms of that community. The wine world is organized around the distinctive flavors from these canonical regions and you can’t claim to know wine without understanding these flavor profiles.

But why is typicity a criterion for wine quality? Why do judges and critics downgrade wines that aren’t typical of their region? What matters in the wine world is distinctive variation. We seek out regions, sub-regions, and  vineyards capable of producing wines with a distinctive signature and identity. But then we turn around and insist that a wine must be typical of its region if it is to earn the highest accolades. These goals are in some tension with each other.  If we really value distinctiveness it’s hard to see how typicity could be of equal value. If a wine is typical, it isn’t quite distinctive.

If you happen to own a vineyard with an unusual soil composition that gives you atypical flavors, why should your wines be punished by judges for being atypical? As a winemaker, why should you be forced to “edit out” that distinctiveness in order to conform to what authorities deem is the proper expression of the grapes you’re using?

The over-reliance on typicity guarantees that most wines from a region will be generic. Instead of encouraging differentiation, typicity encourages mediocrity.

Simon J. Woolf made a similar point recently regarding the tasting panels that some regions employ to enforce conformity to an accepted flavor profile.

Typicity serves the needs of people who enjoy the game of deducing the region and varietal based on tasting wines blind. Without typicity, it would be impossible to establish the decision trees that blind tasters use to draw their conclusions. Most wine experts were trained using this deductive model of blind tasting; it is an effective way of sharpening your senses. But by elevating typicity to a criterion for wine quality we’ve transformed an instructional method into an aesthetic goal.

The result is fewer interesting wines.

 

 

Smoke Taint is an Expression of Terroir

17 Thursday Sep 2020

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California Wildfires-Wine CountryAlthough early reports from parts of California and Oregon are grim, it is still too early to determine how much the 2020 vintage will be affected by smoke taint. At this point, there really is no way to be sure about the extent of smoke damage. This  article on the Bay Area’s CBS affiliate’s website explains why:

And now the labs are overrun,” said Dr. Anita Oberholster, a UC Davis enology professor. “They have a 30-day backlog at this point in time so, not only do you need to pick a week from now but you can only get your number 30 days from now.”

Oberholster’s research shows the most accurate markers for smoke damage only show up after fermentation, which means fruit tested in the field may miss signs of exposure.

The is a real dilemma for winemakers trying to decide what to do with their grapes. Some are ready to give up on the 2020 vintage.

It’s a dilemma facing a lot of Bay Area grape growers right now: whether or not to harvest at all. Smoke damage, called “taint,” can affect the taste and aroma of wine and the industry doesn’t want to do anything to degrade the region’s reputation for quality.

“We will not be making — much less releasing — wines that have any type of impact from smoke, I can promise you that,” said Michael Haney, executive director of the Sonoma County Vintners Association.

That sounds a bit too categorical. Every situation is different. If you’re in the business of selling grapes, your customers will want to know what they’re getting. They won’t want to buy grapes they might not be able to use. But winemakers, especially winemakers who care about terroir, face a different question. Is smoke taint an element of terroir?

Wine is remarkable because it reflects the geographical characteristics of the region in which the grapes are grown, and those variations are the source of wines’ appeal for many wine lovers. It is obvious that wine regions in the Western U.S. will face the threat of wildfires every vintage going forward. Fire is as much a part of the ecosystem of wine grapes in these regions as temperature spikes at harvest. If you can taste fire in the wine, isn’t that like tasting the effects of morning fog or a spring frost?

It’s not as if smoky flavors are unusual or always a defect, as fans of the Northern Rhone will attest. If smoky flavors are acceptable when they result from the toast on oak barrels, why not when the cause is a naturally occurring, local phenomenon.

Of course, no one wants a mouthful of ash. If the smoke flavors are unbalanced that will be a problem. But winemakers have ways of controlling smoke taint, up to a point, through fining and filtering.

One complication is that the effects of smoke taint are unpredictable. As a wine ages, the smoke flavors may become more apparent. But that unpredictability is what makes terroir-driven wines interesting and is part of the allure of drinking aged wines.

I doubt that fans of Yellowtail want smoke aromas in their Syrah. They want this year’s vintage to taste like last year’s vintage. But the terroirists should make a virtue out of necessity.

As wine lovers, we should embrace the influence of smoke and reward those winemakers who learn to make the influence of smoke a virtue and a source of interesting variations.

Wine Language and Diversity

09 Wednesday Sep 2020

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wine and languageEsther Mobley’s thoughtful article in the San Francisco Chronicle entitled “Wine’s diversity issue starts with the way we talk about wine” raises important questions about ethnocentrism and sexism embedded in wine language, although I’m not sure she offers a clear solution to the problem. It is behind a paywall so I will summarize:

But now, it’s becoming clearer than ever that the conventional language used to describe wine isn’t merely intimidating and opaque. It’s also inextricable from racism and sexism, excluding dimensions of flavor that are unfamiliar to the white, Western cultures that dominate the world of fine wine and reinforcing retrograde notions of gender.

She points out that many of the taste references used in wine reviews are flavors and aromas specific to France. Words such as brioche, cassis, garrique, coulis, and pate de fruit mean nothing to someone unfamiliar with French or haute cuisine. Such language is a barrier to anyone trying to learn about wine or get ahead in the wine world if they lack the cultural background from which these terms are drawn.

She is certainly right about this. There is a diversity problem and an accessibility problem. The narrow focus on white Western cultural references makes wine inaccessible to people unfamiliar with those references.

However, her solution is a bit puzzling. She writes:

It’s not that western European flavors should be vilified, or use of French restricted; it’s that the dictionary should be expanded. And as new pathways are created to usher in a more diverse new generation of wine professionals, the resources to do that expansion will grow.

Expanding the vocabulary to use a more diverse set of references is laudable but I don’t see how that solves the accessibility problem; it makes it worse.  Trying to incorporate taste references from, for instance, Chinese cuisine or Peruvian food may be more inclusive, but it re-inscribes the problem of accessibility since these terms would be just as unfamiliar as the French terms to many people.

Yet she doubles down on this as the solution:

Part of the work, certainly, has to do with deliberately exposing oneself to new flavors, something that happens to be very feasible when you live in the Bay Area. Another part of it is really, truly paying attention to those flavors, whether it’s the pungent saltiness of XO sauce or the mouthwatering tang of umeboshi.

Again. How does this make wine language more accessible? Are we to replace French cultural references with those available to residents of the Bay area in California? Expanding our wine vocabulary to include references familiar to non-Westerners is a worthy goal in itself, especially if it improves our ability to describe wine accurately. But it’s wishful thinking to assume that it will make wine more accessible.

But at the end of her essay, she makes a useful suggestion:

Then again, talking about wine isn’t just about fruits and flowers and sauces. Sometimes, the exercise of conveying what a wine tastes like may require a little more imagination.

She praises use of the term “petrichor”, which refers to the smell in the air after a rain, because it is “universally intelligible”. I think there is an important clue here for how we might solve this problem of accessibility.

To my mind, personality traits and emotions are, for the most part, universal, despite some cultural variability in how we experience them. Metaphorical descriptions of wines as angry, joyful or dour can capture the holistic character and individuality of a wine in a way that a list of fruit descriptors cannot. It does require an imaginative leap to view wine as a person. But once that leap is made, it opens up a rich vocabulary for describing wine.

Finally, her discussion of gendered terms is much more straightforward.

For example, it’s commonplace to describe wines as “masculine” or “feminine.” A masculine wine, we’re meant to understand, is aggressive and muscular; a feminine one, delicate and floral. I’ve used these terms myself in the past, but I won’t in the future — not only because this wine-gender binary feels like it adheres to an outdated, irrelevant set of gender norms, but also because it happens to be vague and unhelpful. Sexism aside, these terms fall into the same obnoxious camp as “wet river stone.”

There is simply no excuse for using “masculine” or “feminine” to describe wine. If a wine is aggressive and muscular then call it aggressive and muscular. The gender term adds nothing to the description; it’s just lazy.

Wine Traditions are Not What We Think They Are

02 Wednesday Sep 2020

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grape stompingIn the imaginations of most people in the wine world, wine is deeply embedded in tradition. Traditional wine regions in the old world remain a benchmark for what counts as wine quality. The best-known wine regions and many of the most respected producers trace their lineage back hundreds of years, and this history is a prominent feature of their reputation as well as their marketing materials  The fascination with stories about the origins of a wine and its rootedness in family traditions emerges from a shared understanding of the wine life and what it means. Long before there were armies of Instagram addicts looking for the next new wine fad, wine was rooted in local folkways and geography. It is difficult to think of a contemporary social practice more bound to tradition than wine.

But this respect for tradition is really about people and their cultural context. When it comes to the wine itself, it isn’t obvious that what we drink today is anything like what wine drinkers in the past were drinking.

This article in Wine Searcher is a fascinating read on what we know about the wines of the past.

When wine producers claim to make wine in the traditional way, which tradition do they have in mind? Until about 1000 years ago, wines were a blend of ingredients and used tree resin as a preservative:

Even as grape wine, per se – not mixed with other sugar sources – became more common as agriculture developed, aromatic tree resin was still added, usually from terebinth and pine, as well as exotic, imported frankincense and myrrh.  McGovern says that “almost every ancient sample that we’ve analyzed, dating as late as the Medieval period, has had a tree resin additive.

The Greeks and Romans diluted their wine with water, sometimes with sea water.

Drinking neat wine, unless it was an exceptional Falernian, was considered barbaric, and so one part wine was mixed with four or five parts water.

Of course, without climate control and modern storage containers, spoiled wine was probably the norm rather than the exception.

Even as we move into the modern era, wine still did not resemble contemporary wines. Domaine Romanée-Conti has kept records of their winemaking practices for 300 years.The modern practice of macerating red wines for 3 weeks to extract color, flavor and tannins is a relatively recent practice. Well into the 19th century, quality red wines were basically oxidized, over-oaked rosé

Contrast this to production methods in the 1800’s, where maceration times were only four or five days and aging in oak was for four or five years.  A four to five day maceration would extract most color, but little to no tannin, essentially creating a dark rosé. Aging a rosé in oak for four to five years should guarantee oxidation. Such a wine would be at high risk for perceptible volatile acidity levels as well; oxygen would enter through barrel pores over such a long period, slowly feeding acetic bacteria.

What we think of today as traditional wine-making is probably no more than 150 years old.

We talk about traditions; we don’t drink them.

What is Fine Wine?

27 Thursday Aug 2020

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romanee conti 2Robert Joseph in Meininger’s Wine Business International argues that we need new wine categories since the terms we now use to divide up the wine landscape lack precision.

I have a modest proposal that the term ‘commercial wine’ be removed from the lexicon. I have deep reservations about the imprecise definition of ’fine wine’ but at least these words fit nicely together, whereas ‘commercial wine’ means— what? Wine that’s good enough to be bought and sold. On that basis, La Tache is as much of a commercial wine as Barefoot. Whereas, an un-commercial wine is presumably one that’s piled high in a warehouse waiting in vain for a buyer.

I use the term “commercial wine” often and in no case do I mean “good enough to be bought and sold”. By “commercial wine” I mean large production wines available at the supermarket and in some of the less selective Big Box stores. I think most of my readers know what I mean. But Robert is right that the term is imprecise unless we specify what the contrast term is—”non-commercial” certainly doesn’t mean wines that can’t be sold.

He then speaks favorably of Austin Beeman’s categories:

Beeman’s equivalent of ‘commercial’ is ‘market-driven’ and covers any wine that is specifically tailored to suit the customer.

His second category is “terroir-driven” and the third is “producer-driven”.

These categories are a step in the right direction because they are sensitive to production processes which are important in defining wine styles. But these categories don’t quite work either. Presumably most wineries make wines they think their customers will like. There are degrees of “tailoring”. Artisan winemakers don’t build wines based on the results of market research. But they nevertheless allow consumer expectations to play a role in their winemaking decisions.

As to “terroir-driven” vs “producer-driven”, as Robert points out, there are too many shades of grey and examples that fit both categories for these to be helpful. Marlborough Sauvignon Blanc is surely terroir-driven—no one else makes Sauvignon Blanc that tastes like that. But they are certainly “market-driven crowd-pleasers”, a clear example of what I call “commercial wines” because they are high production and widely available.

Here is my proposal, which is influenced by Burnham and Skilleas The Aesthetics of Wine but with modifications. I say we stick with “fine wine” but avoid using the term to refer to price or exclusivity. By “fine wine” I mean any wine that rewards extended aesthetic attention or is produced with the intention to reward aesthetic attention. By “aesthetic attention” I mean attention focused on the wine (not it’s price, reputation, etc.) and distributed across a wide variety of the wines properties. Aesthetic attention seeks to explore every dimension of a wine.  Some inexpensive, widely available wines reward such attention. Some very expensive wines do not reward such attention.

It seems to me, in the end, this is what matters. Fine wine is interesting wine that we want to explore. If a wine is made with the kind of care required to produce interesting variations and it delivers, then it is fine wine. Commercial wine is wine produced in a way that is indifferent to aesthetic qualities. It may be refreshing, food friendly, or “smooth” but if there is nothing about the wine to explore, it’s not fine wine.