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Do We Want Nice Wines, True Wines or Different Wines?

09 Wednesday May 2018

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weird winesJamie Goode’s recent post “We don’t want our wines to taste nicer, but truer” marks an important distinction, although, as usual, I will want to quibble about it.

He argues that most wine consumers prefer wines that are soft and fruity because they taste “nicer”. They prefer these wines for the perfectly good reason that they lack the understanding and experience to profitably taste more challenging wines.  But he rightly argues that for wine lovers with more experience, we should want wines that reflect their origins. He uses cheese lovers as an example:

But let’s make a comparison with cheese. I don’t want someone to take my cheese and make it taste nicer. I want Comte that really tastes of Comte; I want Cheddar with a strong spicy tang; I want goats cheese that’s even a bit alarming at first for its goatiness.

Ordinary cheese consumers are like ordinary wine consumers. A block of mild, creamy, supermarket cheddar is adequate. Too much “goatiness” in a goat cheese would be off-putting.

That there is such segmentation in the market is fine. Not everyone is going to be an oenophile or cheese expert, although he warns wine producers that chasing the price-sensitive low end of the market doesn’t always produce long-term success.

In the end its the differences produced by local terroir that matters.

Generally speaking, though, as with cheese, I don’t want my wines to taste nicer: I want them to taste truer. Where there are wines of terroir – expressing a local flavour – I really want to buy one of these wines that tastes of where its from. That’s what makes wine interesting. Of course, this local flavour is partly derived from the site, which is the conventional understanding of terroir. But terroir as expressed in a wine is an interpretive act. It’s the combination of site, plus the variety (ies), and the choices of the winegrower. Local cultural practices can contribute to the local flavour. Some places have more local flavour than others. That’s just how it is. With wine, if you have a local flavour, no one can copy you.

The implication here, which I think some will find controversial, is that appreciating origins is more important than a purely hedonic response. Wines that express their origins may be less enjoyable than some commercial wines. Appreciation of “terroir wines”  is a more intellectual satisfaction, an appreciation of the meaningfulness of the connection between the flavors and textures in the glass and the land and people who make the wine. But it is more than just that connection. It’s about distinctiveness and individuality. As he says “if you have a local flavour, no one can copy you”.

That last sentence is important. The essence of wine appreciation is the recognition of meaningful difference, appreciating wines as particulars, unique individuals.

But here is the problem. To require that a wine express its “local flavor” is to require that a wine exhibit typicity, that it be typical of the region or vineyard in which the grapes are grown. But if differentiation and individuality are the standard, shouldn’t we also admire the atypical, the wine that seeks its own path, that refuses to conform to local expectations?

There is tension between the criterion of typicity and the criterion of individuality. Wine producers that are comfortable with their wines’ expressing typicity are a bit like aging rock stars pounding out their hits at a casino, a parody of their once creative artistry.

I, for one, while appreciative of true wines want different wines. The search for terroir is indeed an interpretative act but one that seeks continual self-overcoming.

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Terroir and the One True Way to Make Wine

09 Monday Apr 2018

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clos de vougeotMaster of Wine John Atkinson has one of the most insightful discussions of terroir I’ve read in a long while. And that is not only because he manages to reference Thomas Kuhn, Friedrich Nietzche, and Gilles Deleuze, all philosophers who have been important to me at various times in my career.

As Atkinson points out, the different regions of the wine world employ quite different production methods most of which have long histories. Making wine in Bordeaux is much different from making wine in Jerez and has been for centuries. That fact, then, launches his probe:

So my opening question is, how does a bunch of grapes suggest this process? Does Palomino – or, for that matter, the Andalusian landscape –  suggest a solera? Is there something specific to Touriga Nacional that suggests foot-treading and arrested fermentation?

In other words, someone had to decide to employ the distinctive techniques exhibited in each region. You can’t separate winemaking from culture, a point which doesn’t sit well with the reigning ideology that wine should express terroir, the geography and geology of the vineyard, not the decisions of winemakers.

Atkinson’s main point of reference is Burgundy, which he calls the “poster-boy” for the notion that “wine makes itself”.  But this celebration of passivity in the face of nature is also something that has a history, one he traces to the medieval world in Burgundy (and much of Europe) where God’s creation ruled every moment of one’s life.

God’s omnipotence was invoked at every opportunity. Curiosity was a sin, measurement discouraged, and interest couldn’t be levied on loans, as it was a charge on time, and time was only God’s to give. France, like the rest of Europe, was becalmed for centuries.

In a world that was so completely given and ordained, opportunities for human expression were limited, or when they did occur, weren’t recognized as such.

We are just spectators of God’s creation. The vignerons had little to do with the final product; it was all God’s work.

Contrary to popular perception, that legacy of passivity was not entirely swept away by the Enlightenment; it became secularized in the form of a recognition of human weakness and limitation-a form of asceticism as Nietzche pointed out. What was left over, as the dominance of Christianity eroded in the modern world, were the systems of power and hierarchies perpetuated by the social and economic system. In the wine trade:

…there’s all the history, the habituation to vocabularies, ways of doing and thinking, tight communities of sensing, rootstocks, clones, barrels and, of course, regulations. Control and power is dispersed over different agencies and through different actors. Terroir, we might argue, is institutionalized, but not theorized…

Terroir becomes what Deleuze calls a code, a system of imperatives kept in place by people who benefit from it.

Viticulture and enology only appear as the enemy if they’re threatening to undermine a hierarchy from which you profit. Irrigation would certainly improve the fortunes of most of Burgundy’s vineyards, just as it would benefit plantings of similarly anisohydric merlot in Bordeaux, but in so doing it would smooth out some of the differences between crus.

Atkinson reports on several tasting contexts in which what appeared to be environmentally-influenced properties of the wines they were tasting turned out to be a product of  culturally-induced, “nomadic”, expertise. The demand that differences be attributable to geography rather than expertise distorts our ability to understand wine regions:

When divergent styles emerge from the same origin – two phenotypes sharing the same genotype, to use our analogy, we feel pressured into a choice. If we want to hold onto the immanence, exchangeability and proximity of the Environment ⇌ Sensation relation absolutely, we have to nominate one wine as the phenotype and the other as an imposter, or, in the Australian example, as ersatz Burgundy.

His example is Aussie Chardonnay, rich and buttery in the 1990’s, leaner and more “Burgundian” today:

Faced with making a decision between the two opposing wine styles, our Master of Wine deferred to his belief (as we did when setting the exam) that the richer, less-reductive style of Australian Chardonnay is more authentic rendition of its environment – because he believes the actions and decisions of the winemakers are compelled by their surroundings. In other words, today’s winemakers should be coerced by the environment just as the Cistercians, in their time, erroneously believed they were coerced by God

Medieval passivity is restored.

At this point, Atkinson seems to come down on the side of terroir as a prophylactic marketing device:

Other people will have their own theories about this, but I suspect that what we’re seeing is a reaction to the war of words between the New World – conspicuously, Australia – and France in the 1990s. With its market share under threat, France claimed terroir was a point of difference setting it apart from, and above, the New world’s offering. Australia retaliated, and claimed terroir was just marketing. The whole debacle brought terroir to the consciousness of consumers and producers, but given the looseness of the definition – its lack of rigour – soon everybody was claiming it.

He goes through several current definitions of terroir pointing out that, if all one has to do to exhibit terroir is plant vines, then everyone has terroir and the concept is too vacuous to be meaningful. The opposing alternative is to suggest only some very special locations can exhibit terroir, a view which he he also rejects:

…not only are we being told what the model of terroir should be, we’re also being told what wine ought to be. The past has done its job with Burgundy, now we just need to correct the errant ways of fallen appellations.

He champions the idea that human beings, soil and environment all play a role in the finished product with the specific contribution differing by region, subregion and ultimately the producer:

I think we underestimate the isolation of wine regions historically, even within the same country. Champagne, Jerez, and Bordeaux just went about things in different ways, they formed distinct networks of production; there’s no sense in which they expediently departed the true path to authenticity and purity taken by the Côte de Nuits’ vignerons.

In other words, even an appeal to tradition will not reveal a single, authentic way of making wine. As for Burgundy:

Burgundy’s inordinately long two thousand-year timeline helped capture some of these differences empirically and structurally. Walls surrounded Chambertin as early as the 7thCentury, and the sustained patronage of dukes, princes and the church provided the region with the stability and resources to flourish. What was bad for peasants was good for wine. There was no opportunity cost attached to centuries spent comparing climats.

Geology and geography matters but even for regions steeped in tradition, the effects of nature are passed through human cultures where they are shaped by contingent, historical factors.Shared and rudimentary vinicultural methods and techniques brought consistency and aesthetic visibility to, what was, God’s creation. For two millennia the effects of geology trickled down through Burgundy’s human strata, recurring tropes and intensities augmenting the vineyards in which they worked.

Referencing the famed Clos Vougeot vineyard he writes:

Clos Vougeot is notoriously divergent…the territory could be sub-divided in alternative ways to yield different but equally interesting variations on a Burgundian theme. Difference precedes identity, if you like.

Accidents of who owned what, the size of the plots and the locations in which walls were built determined the Burgundian system of climates (vineyard plots)—not some magical features of the soil. Only in recent decades when “the rewards for selling in small volumes began to exceed those derived from selling to negociants” , did growers begin to emphasize the distinctiveness of their vineyards. The current fascination with terroir has its origin in the move toward Domaine bottling, a relatively recent phenomenon.

If I read him correctly, Atkinson is not denying the existence of terroir. Everyone knows geography and geology matters. What he denies is that terroir is the whole story. Culture matters.

Coche and Lafon both see themselves as revealing the phenotype of Meursault Genevrières, though the two wines are very different, the expression of house style trumping vineyard designation as a source of similarities and differences. To stretch the genetic analogy, what we have now, with the generation of new possibilities and mutations, looks far more like a form of sexual reproduction that cloning.

The reference in this quote to sexual reproduction is important. Sexual reproduction is imperfect; it creates mutations that send species in new directions. Those differences that subtle variations in winemaking and viticultural techniques introduce are continually redefining regional identities. Whatever terroir is, it’s a moving target as winemakers come up with innovative ways to solve problems and to differentiate their product. It’s the intersection of nature’s creativity and human creativity that creates the differentiations that wine lovers seek, not some essential properties buried in the soil. We should seek difference wherever we can find it.

Atkinson closes, however, on a rather un-Deleuzian note.

Identifying a phenomenon that is ‘Chambertin’ has arguably become harder in recent years as domaine have become more autonomous. Notwithstanding this, those making and those of us tasting Chambertin will continue our vane pursuit of its essence. Phenomena may elude us, but essence will continue to exert a siren force over us.

It seems the search for “the one true way”, another part of our Christian heritage, just won’t be put to rest. That would be a tragedy extending far beyond the world of wine.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

We Shouldn’t Sacrifice Creativity for Ideology

21 Wednesday Mar 2018

Posted by in Philosophy of Food and Wine, Wine Culture

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imaginationMeg Houston Maker at her website Terroir Review has an interesting proposal for how to classify wines, one that I think is in the right direction but has a serious flaw. She argues:

If we think of wine as principally an agricultural product — grown somewhere, made somewhere, and, to use Matt Kramer’s term, expressing “somewhereness” — we must consider not only where the grapes are grown but also how they become transformed into wine. Process matters.

This is absolutely correct. The production process as much as the climate and geology of the vineyard determines what ends up in the bottle. This is crucial information for the consumer to know and is sometimes more useful than knowing the AVA in which the grapes were grown, which may have so much diversity as to be meaningless.

Using the French system of classifying cheese as a model she suggests 4 classifications based on the production process:

Farmstead — The wine is made on the winemaker’s own property using fruit grown on that land. No purchased fruit is allowed. The winemaker uses minimal inputs and interventions in the cellar and omits all additives that modulate the wine’s properties. Production is limited to the size of the estate and production facility.

Artisanal — The wine is likewise made on the winemaker’s property but using locally sourced fruit, possibly mixed with fruit grown on the property itself. Again, the winemaker uses minimal inputs and interventions in the cellar, omitting additives. Production is limited by the size and capacity of the production facility.

Cooperative — The wine is made using fruit pooled from a group of winegrowers, in a facility owned by one of them or by the collective. The grower-makers have stylistic as well as commercial sympathies. Production is limited by the size of the collective, the yield of each grower, and the capacity of the shared production facility.

Industrial — The wine is made using fruit grown anywhere allowed by appellation laws. Winemaking is industrial, and there are no restrictions on cellar manipulations beyond the legal requirements for wine production. Production is principally limited by commercial exigencies rather than raw material availability or capacity.

I have no problem with these classifications but I think at least one more category is needed.

In my travels I come across some winemakers who source fruit locally from a single vineyard and emphasize the quality and distinctiveness of the fruit they use. These are small production, small lot operations that give every barrel the attention that artisanal winemakers give their lots. Yet they are not averse to using additives and processes that “modulate the wine’s properties”. With some lots they may use commercial yeast to help with a high alcohol fermentation, with others, enzymes to extract color to help modulate tannin development, or micro-oxidation to adjust mouthfeel, etc. With other lots they may not even use sulfur to protect the wine if they’re curious about what the results would be.

According to this classification they would be considered industrial wines because they go well beyond minimal cellar inputs. But these are utterly unlike industrial wines. Commercial exigencies play little role in their decisions. The cellar manipulations are used not to save money but to produce a wine according to their vision. Mad experimenters striving to produce distinctive wines, every vintage is an opportunity to push the envelope to make a more interesting wine than in previous vintages. They often hold wines back from release for several years until the wine shows sufficient development, a practice that is anything but financially beneficial. Rather than destroying terroir by striving for homogeneity and consistency, they’re seeking to discover the full range of expression of which the vineyard is capable.

I’m not sure what to call such wines. “Art Wines” comes to mind but I think even Farmstead and Artisanal wines can be works of art so that won’t do. I think I would just classify them as “Winemaker’s Wines” because their guiding star is the winemaker’s imagination.

I know this category  works against the prevailing ideology that only minimal intervention wines are worthy. But I think what wine culture should be striving for is more differentiation, more distinction, more ways for wine to be. Sometimes that distinctiveness will be a product of the vineyard. Terroir is real and a crucial element of wine aesthetics. But sometimes distinctiveness will be product of the winemaker’s imagination. Why should we be forced to choose between them; why not both?

And we certainly don’t want a classification system that forces wine to be less than what it can be. That’s the problem with the old French model of strictly limiting what winemakers can do.

At any rate, I’m on board with a classification system that takes production process into consideration. But we should make room for the full range of processes that produce distinctive wines.

The Decline of Blends and Nature’s Way

03 Monday Jul 2017

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blending wineDespite the historical importance of blending wine, especially in Bordeaux, and the current popularity of red blends on the supermarket shelves, increasingly among the wine cognoscenti, wines from a single vineyard, a single block, a single clone, even a single barrel are popular. Winemakers today are less inclined to show off their blending expertise and would rather showcase the distinctive characteristics of a single source, especially the vineyard, unsullied by outside influence.

Is this a fad or a more or less permanent trend? It’s hard to say. No doubt the wine world is fraught with style changes—witness the reduced use of oak in Chardonnay or lower alcohol levels in Cabernet in recent years. It may be that we will tire of the whole fascination with the vineyard and return to the idea of the winemaker as the mad mixer of many influences creating a whole larger than the sum of its parts.

But, on the other hand, perhaps what we have discovered is that nature, once set in the proper direction, can produce greater differentiation on its own. Perhaps we get more differences by letting the ensemble of environmental effects take their own course rather than trying to direct them through conscious intent. If so, the current fascination with single vineyard wines will only accelerate.

In the end it’s about creating difference and nature may be more creative than we think.

Interview with Randall Grahm of Bonny Doon Vineyard

19 Wednesday Apr 2017

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randall grahmRandall Grahm of Bonny Doon Vineyard may be the most innovative winemaker on the planet with a winemaking process that sometimes seems like one big, gloriously successful experiment. And now he’s embarked on the biggest experiment of all. Popelouchum Vineyard,  a vineyard devoted to developing 10,000 genetically novel grape varieties, some of which, it is to be hoped, will have distinctive character and  be perfectly suited to this site near Gilroy California.

In doing research for my book on the philosophy of wine I’ve been thinking a lot about creativity and winemaking, especially as the vines themselves are co-creators of the wine. It’s as if the vines are agents—”vibrant matter” in the words of Jane Bennett. No one is as dialed in to vibrant matter as Randall so I asked him if he would be so kind as to respond to my questions.

In a sense, growing grapes is like growing any other fruit or vegetable. The goal is to to get sufficient nutrients to the crop and to avoid disease. The question I’m trying to probe is whether good farming and vineyard management does more than produce a sufficient quantity of healthy, well-ripened grapes. If the answer is no then what winemakers or viticulturists do in the vineyard is nothing more than what good fruit and vegetable farmers do. But most fruits and vegetables will not find their way into a beverage like wine that is unique and distinctive, with aesthetic qualities that can produce extraordinary, life-changing experiences.

1. Is growing distinctive, high quality grapes largely about making sure bad stuff doesn’t happen? Or are vineyard practices specifically designed to produce that distinctiveness and aesthetic quality?

RG: It’s certainly about both. You have to make sure that bad stuff doesn’t happen, i.e. your mildew is controlled, vines are not overcropped, each cluster is receiving an optimal amount of sunlight, etc. And while there are certainly things that are very important in educing the expressivity of a site, hence, complexity in the wine – evenness of ripeness achieved by crop thinning, shoot positioning, etc. – it is also the case that virtually all of the distinctiveness and aesthetic quality of a wine is likely mostly linked to the site itself, and how lucky/thoughtful the vineyardist has been in making his initial site selection; eschatologically speaking, it’s as if you can’t necessarily redeem your viticultural soul simply with good works, but rather, farming a grand cru is something like living in a state of (likely undeserved) grace. (How you ended up there is always a great mystery.) Having said that, there are certainly some practices, viz. biodynamic/organic farming, non-tillage, etc., that enrich the health of the soil biome and work to amplify the unique characteristics of the site.

2. I would imagine choice of vineyard site is one of the crucial decisions a producer must make. You recently have begun to develop the Popelouchum site near San Juan Bautista. What do you look for when you are assessing vineyard sites?

RG: As mentioned, above, the choice of vyd. site is the most crucial decision a producer must make. I must confess that I am still a bit of a neophyte in assessing true agronomic virtue, but to a first approximation, I’m looking for physical and geo-chemical properties that create conditions for better homeostasis in the plant. I’m looking for appropriate water-holding capacity and fertility – Goldilocks-like, not too much, not too little – and for the right balance of clay – again, too much is problematic, too little likewise. Soils that are rich in minerals as well as those that have a lot of internal surface area are also quite interesting – schistous, calcareous, granitic, volcanic, all quite interesting. Silty, sandy loam not so much. In much of California I feel that north and east facing slopes are particularly interesting to mitigate the effects of bright afternoon sun and our very dry climate. Fog, alas somewhat of a vanishing commodity, is also particularly useful in preserving finesse in wines. In my own case, I happened to dream about Popelouchum before I actually saw it, and once I saw it, it was clear that it was an incredibly special place. (Claude and Lydia Bourguignon, agronomists to the viticultural stars seemed to confirm this observation for what it’s worth.) But this – having a prophetic dream – is not an entirely reliable method for making a vineyard selection.

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

RG: Elegance and intelligence, to use the parlance of T.S. Eliot, is what I seek. Again, the main tenet is that if you are growing grapes that are exceptionally well-suited to the site, you are not compelled to make heroic interventions in the winemaking process – correcting the acidity, potential alcohol, etc. Having said that, I am gradually inching toward the more radical view that a great site (such as Popelouchum, for example) might enable you to grow a fairly wide variety of grapes successfully (with the likely exception of Pinot noir). I think that as tasters we do get imprinted on certain styles of wine that we continue to return to. In my case this is Burgundy. I find that the wines I am most consistently drawn to are ones that have a sort of weightlessness and power (or persistence) at the same time. There is also a sense of dimensionality to the wine (whether you call this “minerality” or “life-force” is open to discussion. But I am particularly drawn to wines that are capable of great ageability, as well as show the ability to “move” or dance and evolve from the time they are opened.

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

RG: You can have a certain preconception of what kind of style you are aiming for with a given wine, but ultimately, it is the conditions of the grapes at harvest that will determine your style. (Though, if you’ve been paying attention, you have theoretically been gently nudging the grapes in one direction or another throughout the season; crop reduction or restriction, deficit irrigation being techniques for boosting “concentration” and potentially creating more even ripeness. For the record, most of my career I’ve been squarely making vins d’effort, rather than vins de terroir, the former being those on which the winemaker has imposed his stylistic predilection to a far greater extent (though you can think of this distinction as a bit of a continuum). Someday (soon), I aspire to make wines that could truly be characterized as vins de terroir, wines more expressive of place, where I will be more focused on revealing the characteristics of both vintage and site, and have a much lighter hand as far as my own stylistic preference.

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

RG: Wine is a bit like music; it’s not necessarily “about” anything. But great wine, like great music, should touch the emotions. How is that done? Maybe in its ability to suddenly move into strange and unexpected directions, or expressing some sort of tonality/harmony that resonates deeply inside of us. Inspiration touches us when it reveals possibilities that we never dreamt of; a great wine does this easily. I also believe – and forgive the slight New Ageyness of this – there is something like the taking of the holy sacrament when one consumes a vin de terroir.[1] You are taking part of Mother Earth, a digestible part that is deeply nourishing you on any number of levels; I think this can’t help but provoke an emotional resonance.

6. I’ve heard you say that originality is important to you. Could you elaborate on that? What do you mean by originality and why is it important?

RG: The genius of a grand cru or a unique terroir is its originality; in other words, wines from that place don’t taste like anything else out there; in crass commercial terms, that is their “value add.” In aesthetic terms, that is the bliss of the recognition of something truly original. The main problem I have with New World wines is that they are largely derivative; they are often (at best) pallid imitations of more successfully congruent European efforts. But there’s often nothing about them that makes them irreplaceable or unique. An original wine inspires us in the same way that the discovery of a new species of flower or discovery of a new planet inspires us; it makes our experiential world richer. The problem with New World wines, at least as I see it, stems in part from how we grow our grapes and how we treat our soils; if we use drip irrigation and crop at high levels in less than appropriate climates (usually too warm), we never achieve true vins de terroir. The use of herbicides kills beneficial soil microflora that work to extract minerals from the soil. (Not that North American palates are particularly keen on wines that express soil characteristics or vintage variation.)

7. How does viticulture help bring out the aesthetic properties (e.g. beauty, elegance, finesse, intensity, etc.) in a wine? Do these concepts play a role in your decision-making?

RG: As mentioned before, a vibrant soil microbiology seems to amplify soil characteristics, which in turn seems to produce wines of far greater beauty, elegance, finesse, etc. A vibrant microbiology also seems to inure plants against disease and untoward stress. Growing grapes on the appropriate site largely obviates the need for heroic interventions – acidulation, dilution of alcohol, etc. – which in turn, helps to produce a more seamless and harmonious wine.

8. Does imagination come into play in managing your vineyards?

RG: I don’t think that imagination helps all that much (though certainly can’t hurt); being a good vineyardist is more a matter of being a good observer of what is actually happening. Biodynamic practice relies to a great extent on the cultivation of imagination and intuition – what is precisely the right preparation to apply and when should I apply it? Being a successful biodynamic practitioner is, I believe, a lot like being an acupuncturist or homeopath; you are guided in large part by your intuition, but it is primarily based on your acute powers of observation. (I’m personally a lot stronger in the intuition department than in the observation department.)

9. How much effort and ingenuity in the vineyard does it take to make a wine that expresses terroir?

RG: Again, I believe that most of the effort and ingenuity is done in the set-up of the vineyard – from the varieties chosen to vine spacing to the selection of rootstock to the method of vine conformation (head-training vs. cordon, etc.) I think that most of the ingenuity is a matter of figuring out how to do the right thing for the grapes in a way that is not insanely cost-prohibitive. Farming organically (or biodynamically) in a successful manner is often a question of managing your calendar thoughtfully and executing things like weed control (or mildew control) in a timely fashion. So maybe as much organizational skill is needed as ingenuity.

10. Do you think the use of technology in the vineyard (e.g. mechanical pruning, mechanical harvesting, etc.) is as effective as low-tech methods at maintaining the quality of the grapes?

RG: I don’t think it is, but to achieve wines at a certain price-point, the implementation of technology is seemingly a necessity (also, if immigration policy changes, it is a foregone conclusion.) I try to have an open mind as far as the deployment of technology in viticulture; there are certain things that machines can do “better” than human beings, i.e. mechanically sorting, but it is my own observation that too much reliance on technology – kind of like using special effects in film-making – may somehow detract from the hand-made quality, the slight imperfections that I think may need to be retained to elevate a product to a higher level of complexity. I’m not sure if super-strict criteria for mechanical sorting may end up giving you something like a photo-composition of a “beautiful” person, one almost too beautiful and perfect to be real.

11. I’ve heard it said that pruning is an art? Do you agree? What is it about pruning that requires creativity or imagination?

RG: Pruning is most certainly an art, and I wish I were myself more artful in its practice. I have recently come across an Italian fellow, who is considered more or less the grand-master of pruning. (He’s actually a pretty interesting character – kind of reminds me a bit of Zoolander in appearance, as he and his team have very impressive uniforms, coiffure, and he seems to be always affecting a striking pose.) He is in some rarified viticultural circles considered a great celebrity. He views vines not just in their outward sculptural form – one that one is nominally always trying to balance – but is also conscious of the vine as a dynamic entity, considering the movement of fluids, xylem and phloem through the plant, and how they might be optimized to minimize disease spread, and most efficiently balance the vine’s energetic flow, if you will. But, this technique is based on very, very careful observation (not what one typically finds with many pruners) as much as on creativity or imagination. So, his technique is really getting closer to an I-Thou relationship – with a vine(!)

12. Because different winemakers who share the goal of expressing terroir will make quite different wines using the same grapes, presumably there must be multiple ways of expressing terroir. Do you have a specific idea of what best expresses the terroir of a vineyard or region? Is there something that you’re looking for such that you can say “that’s it” when you taste it developing in the wine?

RG: Well, it is far, far too early for me to be making pronouncements on whether I’ve successfully captured or represented the terroir of any vineyard. (Many winemaking families spend countless centuries in this discovery practice.) So, I will most certainly never get to “best expression of terroir.” But, one can certainly observe and apprehend when you’ve achieved something like the expression of “minerality” or “dimensionality” in a wine – in other words, a quality that is demonstrably not just from the grape variety or from the winemaking technique, but somehow arises from the site/soil itself. It is a bit of a paradox when you think about terroir as the “eternal” part of the vineyard equation, that which transcends the hand of the human being, but also is clearly something that is open to multiple interpretations. Different growers within the same grand cru like le Chambertin or le Musigny may well favor one interpretation over another, but I do believe that some interpretations are more valid or at least more original than others – ones that are most uniquely themselves, and not so much pandering to say, a more “international style.” (That I regard as the willful obscuration of terroir.) A grower may well lose the thread for a while – I think about Comte de Vogüé wines in the 1980s when they hired a charlatan consulting enologist. And it goes without saying that we are living in a very dynamic world engendered by global climate change, a phenomenon which itself is endangering the expression of terroir.

13. I’ve heard winemakers talk about “reading the vintage” or “reading the vines”. Can you talk about your thought process in reading the vintage or vineyard, and especially discuss the role of intuition vs. science.

RG: Alas, I was a semi-permanent liberal arts major in school, so I think that I temperamentally favor the role of intuition vs. scientific reasoning. Arguably the most interesting wines I ever made were in my earliest vintages when I understood essentially nothing, but I was somehow more connected to the Universal Intelligence. I know that sounds pretty New Agey, but I don’t have any better explanation. Maybe it has to do with being blessed with the so-called Beginner’s Mind. In this case, I was able to achieve that because I truly was a Beginner. Put another way, I don’t think that you can scientifically reason yourself to great wine; having an understanding of scientific principles can certainly help, but some mysterious other thing is needed to ever really approach real greatness in wine.

14. I’m sure when you’re in the vineyard you’re always looking for signs of disease, varmints, and the degree to which vines and fruit are developing as expected. What else are you looking for such as other changes that you could take advantage of.

RG: Sometimes you just get a crazy idea that somehow works to your advantage. Years ago, it was clear that a certain block of Loureiro grapes in our vineyard in Soledad were so behind schedule in ripening that there was absolutely no possible way they could potentially ripen during the growing season. (This was already now early October and they were really far off from ripening.) I directed my colleague to drop half of the crop on the ground immediately to accelerate the ripening process of the fruit that remained. The fruit that stayed on the vine did pick up its ripening pace and we harvested it in late October at maybe 21 Brix barely, just limping over the finish line. Maybe a week after that – it still hadn’t rained – I observed the fruit that we had dropped on the ground, which had been sitting there for perhaps three weeks or so, was still more or less intact, with no discernible sign of degradation. (We didn’t disc the field, rather mowed, and had left a relatively intact straw mulch on the ground.) In fact, these stragglers, which were just showing the faintest traces of dehydration, were sweeter than the fruit we had harvested from the vine and had very intense flavor development. We ended up picking them up off the ground and using them in the final blend; the resultant wine was absolutely stellar. Then, there are sometimes the more prosaic last minute adjustments in our program based on the qualities we observe in a particular batch of grapes, where a red grapes might truly do better as a pink than the red we had intended, a particular batch of grapes might be better suited to a sparkling wine than to a still – these sorts of à la minute improvisations happen with some degree of regularity.

15. What part of the winemaking process requires the most creativity?

RG: That’s a tough one, but I think that there are opportunities to insert creativity into almost any aspect of the winemaking or even wine selling process. I’m not sure if this qualifies as creativity, but an incredibly useful skill is learning how to not act and not intervene, especially if that is something that you’ve done most of your career. (There’s probably an analogy to parenting in there somewhere.) Maybe where creativity it is most needed is discovering/creating the language needed to talk about what it is that you’ve possibly achieved. Wine language has grown pretty impoverished, I think, becoming more Babel-esque with every passing year. If you (say, hypothetically) produce a wine that is rather different than anything else out there, how do you begin to communicate a sense of its value? Robert Parker’s genius was realizing that wines could be compared to school exam scores, thus creating a language that everyone understood, even if it was utterly misguided.

16. Describe some of the things you do in the winery to bring out terroir in your finished product.

RG: As far as enhancing the expression of terroir, that’s really work that is primarily done in the vineyard – biodynamic practice, yield reduction, judicious thinning, dry-farming, precision of harvest date, etc. In the winery, it is mostly a function of things that you don’t do, or it’s a matter of figuring out what is the least amount of intervention that you can possibly do and still maintain a product with essential integrity, i.e. expressive of its terroir and absent of major flaw. As with cooking, it’s a function of not overly complicating the dish, and not over-saucing it.

17. Do aesthetic concepts such as elegance, harmony, character or finesse play a role in your decision-making process? Are there other aesthetic concepts that you want to mention that are important to you?

RG: All of the above feature. Remember that you can’t simply dial up elegance, harmony, etc. Typically these features spontaneously arise from great terroirs that are farmed thoughtfully. You can compose a wine by blending (through trial and error and some intuition) with the intention of creating (or better, discovering) some of these aesthetic elements, but a blended or composed wine will very seldom have the same degree of integrity and seamlessness as a wine that is naturally complex without artifice. Again, this is not something that one can reliably produce through one’s winemaking efforts, but the phenomenon of a wine being able to “dance,” or unfold in a kind of kaleidoscopic fashion, revealing itself the way a precious stone might reveal its facets, is a sort of aesthetic ideal for me. I call this “dimensionality;” maybe it’s the wine’s ability to work and play well with oxygen…

18. You’ve done a lot of experimenting with various techniques for aging wine. How intentional are these experiments? That is to say to what degree are you able to anticipate the results of the experiment? And how do you define success?

RG: In candor, some of these experiments were more intentional than others, and we haven’t always experienced anything like the results we expected, but in most every case, we’ve learned something useful, and that of course is a definition of success. We’ve experimented with ageing the identical wine in different types of vessels – large format barrels, smaller barrels, wood tanks, vs. glass demijohns, etc. and have observed wildly differing results in the expression of the final wine. One most interesting results is that we found that the imposition of a strong stylistic element, such as what one achieves by the deployment of glass demijohns – this adds a lovely textural element as well as a strong savory element, complexity, and generally works to better integrate a wine, but counter-intuitively, seems to work best in wines that have relatively less dense flavor profiles, i.e. pinks and whites, rather than full-bodied reds. It seems that denser wines carry their own strong center of gravity, and just need to be handled a bit more circumspectly.

19. How important is tasting to the winemaking process?

RG: It is utterly crucial, but it also must be “bracketed,” i.e. you can’t believe everything that you taste, i.e. as tasters, we are very imperfect instruments and are often fooled. The amount of subjectivity that exists in evaluating a wine is just staggering and truly humbling, and one must be systematically on guard as far as making decisions based on anything like single impressions. You need to taste a wine over and over to really get a sense of what it is all about, and where it is going. Having the experience of making wine from the same vineyard for many years prior is also enormously useful in understanding the wine’s likely evolution and trajectory. I am still utterly shocked at how much the aspect of one’s own personal mood plays in the evaluation of a wine; I bet it is a rare Bodhisattva wine critic who can separate out his/her own emotional state and not allow it to color the perception of the wine. If readers to wine journals only knew…

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

RG: Have never quite thought of it that way; it certainly requires enormous concentration, and occasionally I find myself in an almost trance-like state, following a certain kind of internal rhythm, iterating various blends according to some personal algorithm. It’s a matter of looking for a sort of internal harmony or resonance. I’m not a musician but I imagine that there is something similar that happens when a group is jamming and a player finds him/herself in a particularly inspired groove; some part of his/her brain has taken over, and it is well beyond the conscious mind.

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

RG: I’ve said it now in so many different ways, but I do believe that beauty is linked to originality, to complexity as well, to be sure, and ultimately to an experience that takes us out of ourselves. As I’ve mentioned, vins d’effort, or ones where the winemakers stylistic efforts are so visibly discernable, come off to me like slightly clumsy stagecraft; one never completely buys into the illusion of entry into an alternate reality, and as pleasant as they are, don’t really move us. But a great wine, expressive of terroir, creates its own perfect, seamless world, to which the taster must surrender, and allow him/herself to become transported/transformed. I think that a wine that can engender the desire in the taster to thoroughly let go, as it were, is one of very rare beauty.

[1] Written by a nice Jewish boy.

Wine Fundamentals Are Not Like Rules

06 Thursday Oct 2016

Posted by in Philosophy of Food and Wine, Wine Culture

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ballet dancerAs usual, Matt Kramer’s essay “Why the Fundamentals Matter”, in which he compares wine to the 5 fundamental ballet positions that every aspiring dancer must learn and practice, is interesting. But the analogy I think breaks down immediately. No ballet dancer can succeed without knowing the 5 fundamental positions. But wine quality is not so cut and dried.  I have an allergy to any complex activity, including wine appreciation, being described in terms of rules. And I think each of Kramer’s “rules” are too fraught with exceptions to “prove the rule”.

Here are Kramer’s 5 rules of wine quality:

1.  Expression of a place is a wine’s highest calling.

2.  A wine has got to be clean.

3. A perfect sphere is the ideal. (Meaning overall harmony is the ideal)

4. Originality, not replication.

5. Greatness can come from places not previously recognized as great.

I’ll focus on (1) today and cover the rest of Kramer’s rules in subsequent posts.

I agree that expression of place is central to an explanation of wine’s appeal. Wine succeeds at expressing place perhaps more than any other food or beverage and that general characteristic is in part why we love wine. But it isn’t always the ideal for which great wines aim. For instance, Vega Sicilia  Unico, the great Spanish wine from Ribera Del Duero is a blend of grapes from 85 geographically dispersed vineyards that are vinified separately and then blended. The aim of this wine could not be an expression of a particular place. The same is true of many of the Premier Crus Chateau of Bordeaux whose wines are made from vineyards scattered throughout their respective regions. Granted in all these cases the wine reflects characteristics of the broader region but they achieve their originality through blending that will obscure the influence of particular vineyards.

Furthermore, a wine can express a sense of place, showing a flavor and texture profile typical of a site, but nevertheless be rather simple in its flavor profile. Why would such a wine be inherently superior to a wine with complexity that lacks a sense of place, especially if it shows originality? In fact as noted above, complexity is often achieved by blending away characteristics of particular vineyards.

Surely complexity is a characteristic of great wines, but that is often in tension with terroir expression.

Most of the great wines of the world are made by using extreme sorting methods with trained workers picking grapes by hand and then using optical sorters to eliminate grapes that look good but have machine-detectable flaws. So what goes into the wine are perfect berries. But do “perfect berries” express a sense of place better than just the mix of grapes that a vineyard gives you in a particular vintage, flaws and all? Some winemakers think that having some diversity in the crop, including some over-ripe and some under-ripe berries, adds interest and complexity to a wine.

I’m no terroir skeptic but I doubt that the expression of terroir is always the fundamental aim of a great wine.

 

 

 

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Wine, Scientism and Specialization

28 Thursday Apr 2016

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wine scienceI complained recently about Mark Mathews new book Terroir and Other Myths of Winegrowing, arguing that it’s obvious to anyone with a passing acquaintance with wine that climate,weather, sun exposure, yeast, bacteria, and soil—all aspects of terroir—help explain wine flavors.

Matt Kramer has now piled on as well with more insight about how someone so learned as Mathews, a professor of oenology at UC Davis, can go so wrong.

I wish I had a dollar for every winemaker and grapegrower I’ve met in Napa, Sonoma and elsewhere in the world of fine wine who have told me that they had to unlearn everything they were taught by their wine science professors in order to gain traction in their fine-wine ambition. Too often the nuances sought for fine wine are not necessarily captured by the “facts” established in one or another often-narrow scientific experiment.

Kramer accuses Mathews of scientism—the belief that only scientific knowledge counts as real knowledge and everything else is just nonsense. The charge seems appropriate here.

Science is of course a hugely successful enterprise that serves as the most impressive exemplar of genuine knowledge we have. One can’t do epistemology (theory of knowledge) without understanding how and why science works. And we have no reason to doubt settled, scientific consensus on any topic that has been subjected to thorough scientific scrutiny.

But, as they say in the computer science field, garbage in, garbage out, and Kramer points to the problem with Mathews’ hasty conclusions.

One of the features of professor Matthews’ book—and virtually all of the others of its sort penned by his fellow academic wine scientists—is that it never reports actually tasting wines, let alone trying to correlate tasting experience with academic knowledge. Nowhere in Terroir and Other Myths of Winegrowing does the author refer to a tasting experience. Such a thing is too subjective and thus inherently suspect.

This is a stunning claim and a wholesale indictment of Mathews approach to wine knowledge.

Mathews and his ilk are looking at a narrow range of data excluding facts that are too ambiguous to fit their need for quantification and exact measurement. So, to draw on another cliché, if all you have is a hammer everything looks like a nail. If quantification pays the bills then everything will be quantified or made to disappear. Many scientists are specialists interested in the parts but ignoring the whole if the whole can’t be neatly packaged for easy access with the tools at hand.

And wine doesn’t lend itself to that kind of inquiry. Wine cannot be understood in a laboratory. It needs to be understood in context, among people tasting, enjoying and learning together. The investigation of wine is an intellectual pursuit but you can’t understand it without bringing in culture, tradition, and various tasting communities with their own aesthetic interests all trying to grasp something inherently ambiguous and a bit mysterious. With regard to wine, If academic knowledge is not trying to explain tasting experience then what exactly is it doing and why?

No doubt the wine world is fraught with half-truths, mythologies, and ideological snafus that wine science can help to untangle. That Mathews seems to have no interest in the tasting experience, however, speaks volumes about the limits of science when its focus is too narrow.

Terroir is Not a Myth

07 Thursday Apr 2016

Posted by in Wine Culture

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terroirI haven’t had the chance to read Mark A. Mathews’ book Terroir and Other Myths of Winegrowing. But if Tom Wark’s summary of the argument is accurate I’m unimpressed.

The myth of terroir apparently rests on three claims:

1. The varietal is more important than characteristics of soil in determining a wine’s flavor;

2. There are no flavor molecules transmitted from soil to the vine or berries.

3. The soil’s drainage ability is the main influence that soil-type has on wine flavor.

But I don’t know anyone who would deny these claims. None are controversial and defenders of the importance of terroir can accept them all. More importantly, this argument ignores crucial dimensions of terroir.  Weather and climate are part of the terroir of a region or vineyard; surely Mathews doesn’t think these are irrelevant. Features of the landscape such as elevation, aspect to the sun, proximity to other plant life, and the presence of native yeasts and microbes also influence wine flavor and are all part of terroir. Most importantly, the decision regarding which varietal (and clone) to plant in a particular location is made in light of all of these factors and is thus part of the concept.

Mathews seems to think the term applies only to soil composition but most people use the term more broadly to include all these factors.

No doubt winemaking practices play an large role in determining wine flavors as well. In fact, the vast majority of wines exhibit little influence of terroir despite what the marketing brochures say. If they are blends of grapes from multiple vineyards or regions or if they are produced using aggressive winemaking techniques the influence of their geographical site is muted.

But for winemakers who take care to preserve the unique expression of their vineyard sites it is surely misleading to call it a myth.

Good News for Wine Nerds

28 Monday Sep 2015

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wine mustThe concept of terroir, the idea that the flavors in wine reflect the geographical characteristics of the region in which the grapes are grown, is a fundamental source of fascination in the culture of wine and central to wine appreciation. There is no doubt that geography deeply influences the final product, but how it does so remains a bit of a mystery. Weather is the obvious influence and soil composition seems to play a role as well but wines from similar soils nevertheless show distinct characteristics; weather and soil may not be the whole story.

One of the more intriguing hypothesis to come out of recent scientific work on terroir is that wine is influenced by local bacteria and other microbes. Scientists have discovered that each vineyard has a unique collection of microbes and those microbes will be in the wine must when the grapes are crushed, but thus far there has been no evidence that the microbes are influencing the flavors in the wine—until now, according to this research published at nature.com.

Native yeasts populations in several wine regions in New Zealand were isolated and analyzed for their influence on aromas in wine:

We experimentally tested and quantified the extent to which genetically distinct regional populations of S. cerevisiae affect wine phenotype in terms of volatile composition. We show significant positive correlations between the genetic and geographic relatedness of natural S. cerevisiae sub-populations and their effect on resulting wine phenotypes. As far as we are aware this is the first empirical test for whether there is potential for a microbial aspect to terroir. This result aligns with the belief that microbes significantly contribute to the regional identity or terroir of wine and may potentially extend to the differential effects of microbes on other important agricultural crops and produce generally.

All the usual caveats about one study apply but if this research is replicated, the endless discussion of rocks that takes place in wine circles may be replaced by endless discussions of the different genotypes of  S. cerevisiae

Terroir: Is it Real or Is it Marketing?

24 Monday Aug 2015

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terroir 2I’m giving a presentation on terroir this week so I’ve been thinking about the controversies that surround this mysterious concept.

Is terroir real or is it a cheap marketing device used to encourage the romantic idea that wine is not just fermented grape juice but a reflection of a unique piece of hallowed land?

“Terroir” refers to the natural environment in which a particular wine is produced, including the varietals planted, the climate/weather system, landscape and soil. The term also sometimes refers to the characteristic flavors imparted to the wine by that environment. The concept has been used for centuries to market wine and sell regional characteristics, especially in Europe where wines have traditionally been labeled according to their geographic origin rather than type of grape.

For many wine connoisseurs, the ability of a wine to express it’s terroir is the very essence of wine quality.

Other’s think it’s a lot of bunk and of relatively little importance in explaining wine quality. For these terroir skeptics, it’s the decisions made by the winemaker about vineyard practices and winemaking techniques that explain wine quality. By itself, the vineyard won’t produce quality wine without the right judgments made about canopy management, yield, watering program, when to pick, fermentation temperatures, use of yeast, aging program, etc.

So who is right? Does the vineyard or the winemaker make the wine?

Both sides have a point. Wine doesn’t make itself. It’s a human product that requires very careful cultivation in the vineyard and winery. Score one for the skeptics.

But on a good site, in a good year in which the weather cooperates,  following standard practices in the vineyard and winery, with careful monitoring to make sure nothing goes south, will produce good wine. Score one for the terroirists. But even the terroirists will admit that it’s in bad years where the winemaker really earns her salary. Score another point for the skeptics, although in bad years obviously the weather matters which shows the importance of terroir—so let’s call that a draw.

Well this is getting tedious. Look, everyone in the wine business knows that there are good and bad vineyard sites and that climate and weather have a huge effect on wine quality. It is also well known that aspect to the sun, elevation, and other characteristics of the terrain explain differences between vineyards. The influence of soil is more complicated. Drainage and aeration matter and soil types help determine which varietals will flourish in a particular vineyard. But on the question of how soil composition effects flavor there is lots of disagreement, and the science is a long way from providing an answer. I just spent 5 weeks in the Willamette Valley Oregon where everyone talks endlessly about dirt—but I came away thinking the clonal mix in the vineyard was more important than soil type. And there is some evidence that yeast and microbial life in the vineyard plays a significant role as well.

To deny that terroir matters is foolish. Of course it matters. The question is to whom.

The real issue is whether these geographical factors leave a signature in the wine, a distinctive flavor peculiar to a region or vineyard, that attentive tasters can discern. The answer is yes if the winemaker has taken pains to preserve those distinctive flavors and if a given taster has the breadth and depth of tasting experience to pick out that subtle signature. But that means it matters to only a small subset of all wine drinkers and winemakers.

If you buy your wine from a supermarket, terroir does not matter. Wineries with a distribution large enough to fill supermarket shelves harvest grapes from multiple vineyards in many locations. These wines are blends and any distinctive characteristics from a single vineyard (or in most cases a single region) have been blended away, not to mention the processes of industrial winemaking that tend to strip away the subtle, distinctive flavors that reflect terroir. And unless you constantly taste wine thoughtfully from a particular region you will likely not develop the discernment to recognize those flavors.

Terroir is the playground of committed winemakers seeking a unique expression of place and connoisseurs who revel in those particularities that only terroir can provide.

The rest of us can pound sand or clay or whatever.

When you see the word terroir on the back of your supermarket wine, it’s marketing, not quality. But if you want to really explore the full potential of wine then learning to taste terroir in the glass is the only way to get there.