Tag Archives: wine aesthetics

Why (some) Wines are Works of Art

02 Thursday Aug 2018

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

Here is Eric’s comment:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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It’s Time to Let Go of the Idea that Wine Makes Itself

23 Monday Apr 2018

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fermenting wineThis recent article by Zachary Sussman in Punch provides a much needed  corrective to what has become a cliché that winemakers do nothing except let the grapes express themselves.

Even those of us who prefer our wines to be made with a lo-fi approach know full well that wine doesn’t make itself. Even the most minimally invasive scenario still involves skillful mediation. David Lillie, of New York’s Chambers Street Wines, sums this up well, recalling a quote from the Jura winemaker Pierre Overnoy: “Making natural wine isn’t so easy—you don’t just decide not to add sulfur and then go take a vacation.

The ideology that a winemaker is nothing but a custodian was useful in drawing a contrast with mass-produced, industrial wines or wines made according to a recipe intended to get big scores. What goes on in the vineyard is crucial to making good wine. But that vineyard work requires a lot of understanding and expertise. And once the grapes arrive in the winery making good wine requires meticulous care and watchfulness. If you’re not going to use chemicals and whiz bang filtration technologies to correct flaws then you better make sure you understand what’s going on in your fermentation tanks.

There are countless decisions that have to be made in the vineyard and in the winery about how to process the grapes, when to move on to the next stage, and about when those processes are complete that mean every wine has the stamp of the winemaker on it, if only because it’s their personal taste that governs these decisions.

Jason Brandt of Berkeley’s Donkey and Goat digs into just one aspect of winemaking, how the grapes are pressed:

First off, before we even load the grapes into the press, we sort them, which not everyone chooses to do, and then you have a slew of decisions on how to use the press, which are all really impactful, especially on the whites,” Brandt explains. He continues to describe “the various programs you can use to increase the pressure on the grapes,” specifying his preferred method of “slowly increasing the pressure, holding it for five minutes and then increasing it again, which is one way to get the extraction you want.” Then there’s the matter of how many turns the press should complete—“I’m not a big fan of having to press-turn, actually, since I think you get flavors that aren’t as interesting or consistent with what we want”—and how long to run it.

This is before we get to issues such as fermentation temperatures, macerations, wine stability, battonage, and aging decisions all governed by the tasting acuity and preferences of the winemaker. The physical activity of winemaking is basically about carrying out logistical strategies, racking wine, moving barrels around and freeing up space. But the intellectual component is really about taste and that involves a creative interpretation of the grapes, vineyard, winemaking equipment and consumer preference.

Without that interpretation you have plonk or vinegar.

The Problems With Wine Scores Episode 489

18 Wednesday Apr 2018

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wine scoresStats wizard David Morrison has a compelling argument that scores between wine critics cannot be compared except in the rare case in which two critics use the same objective scoring scheme. I actually think the situation is worse than David suggests, but more on that in a moment.

His reasoning is as follows.

I have finally concluded that there are two fundamentally different sorts of wine-quality scores in use: (1) what we might call an objective score, based on explicitly assigning points to a series of pre-defined wine characteristics, and then summing them to get the wine score; and (2) subjective (but expert) scores, where the overall score comes from whatever characteristics the scorer wants to express.

David is not referring to the way the scores are expressed via a 100 pt. scale vs a 20 pt. scale. Rather he is referring to the underlying method by which the scores are created.  With objective scoring there is only one scoring scheme so a disagreement among critics would be a genuine disagreement about wine quality. But when critics choose their own idiosyncratic scoring system a disagreement about scores may reflect a different scoring method or different interpretation of the method  rather than a difference in wine quality.

The same scores could mean different qualities (because the scoring schemes are different), and different scores could mean the same quality (because the scoring schemes are different). How on earth are we to know? We can’t!

I think David is exactly right about subjective scores. But I also think what he calls objective scores are also subject to varying interpretations. For example, suppose we develop an objective scoring scheme based on the following pre-defined characteristics with a numerical scale for each characteristic.

We will assess wines for intensity, complexity, balance, length, typicity, and mouthfeel. We will assess every wine using a numerical scale from 0-9 and sum the results producing a score at the end.  These characteristics don’t begin to capture wine quality but adding a more complicated scheme will only increase the problem I want to identify.

The problem is, in this scheme, all the criteria are assigned equal weight—intensity counts the same as balance, etc. But why assume each criterion is of equal value especially across all wines and all varietals? Pinot Noir will not have the length of most Cabernets. A shorter finish may not damage Pinot Noir in the way it would disappoint in the Cab.  A wine even slightly out of balance will suffer in quality despite making up for that deficit in its intensity and complexity. Typicity is important for some purposes but to give it equal weight in every case would disadvantage wines designed to be atypical.  A young, old-school Barolo will have mouth ripping tannins undermining mouthfeel so we would be forced to discount mouthfeel or make a guess about how it will develop.

For a meaningful objective scoring scheme we would have to find some objective way of weighting the various criteria but that would have to be specific to varietal, region, and style since these all require different values.

Even if we were to manage to develop such a scheme, the most important factor in wine quality at least according some critics—the degree to which a wine expresses the distinctive features of the vineyard—is not and could not be in the picture. There is no objective measure of such a quality.

The whole idea of an objective scoring system is hopeless.

So why do I use scores in my reviews you might ask? Because they are useful in assessing how much a critic enjoyed the wine. But they mean nothing more than that. They are a subjective measure of the degree of quality I found in a wine when compared to other wines I’ve tasted. Nothing more, but nothing less. This information is meaningful to the degree you find a particular critic’s palate trustworthy.

A wine score is an invitation to try the wine, not a data point in a competition.

How Should We Evaluate Distinctive, Original Wines?

22 Thursday Feb 2018

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wine evaluationWhat is going on when we evaluate a wine (or book, film, or musical work for that matter).

Here is one way of conceptualizing it. We develop standards of quality through conversations between experts. In the wine world those standards are often region-specific and are sometimes supported by legal requirements. But the standards themselves are perceptual patterns. There is a flavor and textural profile, a complex pattern of sensations, that a typical Chianti should exhibit that is different from a typical wine from Medoc, for instance. In many regions, especially in Italy and France, there are official panels of tasters that enforce those standards. Only wines that exhibit the appropriate flavor profile are allowed to use their regional designation on the bottle. But even in the absence of official tasting panels a consensus can form about what, for example, a typical Napa Cab should taste like.

These standards are reinforced by wine education institutions. As a result, blind tasters can gain expertise in identifying the origins of a wine. Without these quality standards blind tasting would just be a guessing game. Part of developing a sense of the taste profile of a region is developing a sense of what an ideal representation of that taste profile is like. Thus, in addition to a standard about what a typical wine from a region should taste like, we get a perceptual standard for what the highest quality Chianti or Napa Cabernet should taste like. So there are two standards at work—a standard of typicity and a standard of exceptional quality.

Individual wines then are assessed with regard to how close they conform to those two standards—a typical wine from that region and the best wine from that region. This is a quantitative judgment because we’re concerned with how much order of a certain kind a given wine exhibits. Wines that are typical of a region must have all the expected elements in the right relationship. Wines of exceptional quality must have all those elements but with more intensity and complexity yet all coming together harmoniously—with more order than the typical wine.

According to this conception of wine evaluation, wine scores such as Robert Parker’s 100- point scale make some sense since we are engaged in a quantitative judgment. A score of 95 indicates that a wine has more of that expected order, a clearer, more focused, and more intense sensory pattern, than a wine that scores 85. The latter may be typical but not exceptional. However, it doesn’t follow from the fact that a judgment is quantitative that we have a precise way of measuring that quantity. The degree of order a wine exhibits is something we cannot be very precise about. This is where wine scores become problematic. The scale suggests more precision than is actually available to us. Nevertheless, despite this practical lack of precision, conceptually this form of evaluation is clear enough. We have a general principle embodied in our perceptual capacities—a taste profile representing what is typical or ideal. And a judgment about how much conformity there is between the individual wine and the general pattern of either typicity or exceptional quality.

But there are deep problems with this way of conceptualizing evaluation.

The problem is that many wines have a kind of individuality to them. They express the distinctive features of a particular vineyard in a particular vintage or they may express the distinctive style of a particular winemaker. This consideration is independent of whether the wine is typical or an ideal representation of its region. In fact if it’s quite original it may lack typicity and differ markedly from an ideal expression of its type. What makes such a wine work are the relationships among its elements independently of any relationship to an externally imposed standard. For wines that have that kind of individuality, there is no independent standard or taste profile that it must conform to. Conformity would destroy its individuality. The only way to honestly evaluate such a wine is according to some standard internal to the wine, such as past vintages or by trying to assess how much of its potential for excellence is realized in the particular bottle you’re drinking, which we can know only vaguely if at all.

Of course, individuality is not the only thing we value about wine. But it is what separates the best wine from just ordinary, good wine. Although we can intelligibly ask how distinctive or original a wine is, the question of how closely it conforms to an external standard is irrelevant. At this point, it isn’t at all obvious what a wine score is supposed to measure. Such wines create their own rules.

To Know a Wine, Try a Little Tenderness

19 Monday Feb 2018

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When drinking fine wine, we tend to focus on the intensity and complexity of aromas, the lushness of the texture, how refined the tannins feel, and the length of the finish.  But, thanks to modern wine technology, most of the wine you buy above the $20 price point will have intense aromas and a plush, refined mouthfeel. Lost in our pursuit of power and luxury are more subtle features that are difficult to pin down or describe.

Great wines, even those that are powerful and impress with their size and weight have a gentle, inner beauty that emerges from nuance and subtlety. They have complexity but it’s not doled out all at once and can be sensed only by carefully observing a wine’s motion.”Finesse” is what we usually call it, and many of those industrial wines that seem of high quality don’t have it.

But to discover these dimensions of a wine you have to allow the wine to take control, giving the wine a chance to direct your attention. Like two dancers in sympathetic motion, taster and tastant melt together becoming one, as if we sense in the wine an offering, a generosity that too much aggression or impatience will destroy. Gracefulness really is a form of grace.

Discovering these dimensions of a wine takes time. A cursory tasting, a need to move on to the next flight,  and a calculative frame of mind that attempts to add up a score will not allow them to emerge.

If something hits you over the head, it isn’t nuance. If it screams it isn’t tenderness.

Wine and, according to Otis Redding, young girls share this need for tenderness.

Wine Importer Kermit Lynch Tells Us What Good Taste Is

24 Wednesday Jan 2018

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character and wineSince I’ve been banging on this topic a whole lot recently, why stop now? Especially when what I’ve been arguing is supported by a luminary such as the great wine importer Kermit Lynch who is probably more responsible than anyone else for introducing Americans to wines from small, high quality, European producers.

The issue is the modern tendency to describe a wine as if it’s a basket of fruit instead of trying to articulate the personality and emotion of wine. Reminiscing about his early years in an interview for Food and Wine magazine, Lynch says:

Now you see French winemakers, Italian wine makers, saying that this wine smells like a cherry or a berry or something—no, no, back then the wines were human beings.

You know, all that berry and cherry stuff, it’s not even a practical way to talk about wine, because even if you tasted a lot of wine, if you go in and taste the new vintage when it’s three months old, it might smell like cherry. You go back a month later and it might smell like boysenberry. You go back later and think “My God! Where did that coffee aroma come from?” So by the time your review gets in the magazine, the wine no longer smells like what it did when you smelled it. That’s always bugged me, the new way of writing about wine as if it were fruit juice. When wine was described in human terms, as a man or woman for starters, then you really got down into some interesting conversations.

He’s right about this. Wines change. They’re always in motion, in the mouth, in the glass, in the bottle, and in the barrel, always interacting with their environment and showing different aspects over time. Because wine continually changes its form, even as we taste it, we have to relate it to other things that continually change such as a person’s mental and emotional state, the features of our natural environment, or the tensions and releases of music.

Wine lends itself to metaphors associated with persons because each wine is an individual and has a unique way of unfolding just as each person or song is an individual with a distinctive character.

The fruit basket approach to tasting notes does capture a part of what we taste but leaves the most important part, the wine’s process, out of the description.

Alas, I see no prospects for a change in our approach to writing about wine—we seem to like our fruit basket if only because it’s comfortable and familiar.

The Art of Wine: Cain Vineyard and Winery and the Art of Brett Management

16 Tuesday Jan 2018

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Cain spring mountain Charles OrearIn the wine world today, the “spirit of the age” is the pursuit of pure fruit expression. Find a healthy vineyard site where the grapes have character and will ripen without losing acidity. Experiment with fermentation until you find that magical extraction point where fruit, tannins, and color are in balance. Give it a kiss of oak to add complexity and roundness. Filter and fine to get rid of off flavors and aromas, and you’re well on your way to high scoring nirvana. This approach has created the modern, hugely successful wine industry and critical standards have developed that reflect that success.

I respect and enjoy polish, clarity, and clean, focused fruit power. But it doesn’t make me fall in love. Maybe it’s the old drummer in me, but what I really love is a bit of funk, aka “barnyard”, “animal”, or when euphemisms are in order, “savory”. Often, these flavors are the result of a brettanomyces infection that most winemakers go to great lengths to eliminate from their wine and which all the wine tasting certification agencies treat as a fault.

I guess I’m a bit out of step with the spirit of the age. It wouldn’t be the first time.

tractor

Winery Entrance

So I was excited to visit with Christopher Howell, winemaker at Napa’s Cain Vineyards and well known for his use of brettanomyces as a flavor element. Chris is also one of the most thoughtful winemakers I’ve met, very comfortable putting wine in the larger context of the humanities and talking meaningfully about his philosophy of winemaking.

Brettanomyces bruxellensis, or “brett” as it’s called, is a yeast which, along with its close cousin dekkera bruxellensis, infects winery equipment, barrels and sometimes grape skins. They create compounds that result in various aromas some of which are intriguing, such as sweaty saddles, bacon fat, or barnyard, and some that are just unpleasant such as band-aid or rancid cheese. Some people are quite sensitive to these compounds and will be put off by even a whiff. Thus, many winemakers strive mightily to eliminate any trace of it. In some cases an entire winery will have to be dismantled and rebuilt to eliminate the yeast spores that keep on giving vintage after vintage.

However, for others, the presence of a modest brett aroma gives wine character and interest and some of the great wines in history have been influenced by brett.

“How did we learn that this was wrong?” Chris Howell asks. “We value civet in perfume. Why not wine? It’s all about context”, he says, as he goes on to explain that our preferences for particular aromas are very much a cultural artifact, learned from the social environment around us. The clear implication is that maybe our tasting practices and wine education materials should not lump brett in with cork taint or the presence of hydrogen sulfide which are always unpleasant.

Cain winery; Cain Five; Napa; Napa County; California; USA; North AmericaThe trick of course is to know how to keep brett  at acceptable levels. “We don’t know how to manage brett yet”, says Chris but adds optimistically, “it always stops. It’s a fermentation and we kind of know when it’s going to stop.” The science of brett management is still nascent. After all, why study something that most people want to get rid of. But clearly Chris’s 28 years of experience with these vineyards and his wine education in France give him an instinctual understanding of how to assess brett levels and potential development. As you can see from my tasting notes below, the brett character is subtle and more of a background note. “It shouldn’t be the dominant flavor component”, says Chris. It adds character without being the character.

The value of brettanomyces is not the only issue about which Chris Howell walks off the beaten path. Another bête noire of modern winemaking is the presence of bell pepper aromas in Cabernet Sauvignon. The result of compounds called pyrazines, they do mar fruit expression when too dominant. Yet, not all green notes are  unpleasant. “Cab should carry green notes if that is what your vineyards give you. Everyone thinks it’s bell pepper so they just get rid of it”, according to Chris. “But it’s part of what makes our vineyard distinctive.” Once again it’s a matter of degree. If there is enough complexity and evolution in the wine, the smell of green herbs—mint, sage, rosemary– becomes complimentary adding character to what otherwise tastes like fruit juice. “I like wines that transcend fruit” asserts Chris, and indeed his wines have an herbal character that hearkens back to an older style of Napa Cabernet before the the fascination with fruit bombs became the rage.

“We don’t have to please everyone. Some people don’t like our wine and that’s fine. I just want them to suspend judgment and approach them with an open mind.”

That said, Chris’s wines nevertheless have that glow of California sunshine–rich, dense and powerful, with exuberant fruit expression yet with an complex array of non-fruit flavors creating contrast and intrigue.

I would be remiss it I didn’t mention one other important contributor to Cain Vineyards’ signature wine, the Cain Five. That would be elevation.valley The estate vineyards slope downward from near the crest of Spring Mountain with a spectacular view of Napa Valley at elevations that range from 1200 to 2100 feet. The combination of intense sunlight, shallow soils, and good drainage often produce smaller berry size and tougher skins in mountain fruit. Notoriously, the tannins in mountain wines can be hard to manage but produce powerfully structured wines when given time to develop. Cain Five, their signature blend from estate grapes, is no exception. It is a firm, fiercely tannic wine that manages to be elegant and supple as well. That sounds like a paradox but paradox is the essence of great wine.

These wines are as original as the person who makes them.

Cain’s wines illustrate something that I’ve been calling “resonance” and is a feature of all great wines. They build in intensity, starting with an undercurrent of tension in the midpalate that keeps broadening in the mouth even after peaking and beginning to fade. There is duality in the wine. The satiny mouth feel and fresh, round fruit gives way to rising intensity emerging from the background as the acidity and tannin begin to dominate, the fruit reappearing again as a pale image on the finish. Especially as the wines age, both the acidity and tannins seem fragile, but they somehow take over and drive the momentum. My point is that this is a play of forms in transition like the tonal effects operating in the background of a symphony. Great wines are not static; they form themselves in the mouth. Resonance is the key to greatness in wine. Lesser wines are pleasing but lack resonance. There is no better place to discover resonance that at Cain Vineyards and Winery.

Here is the lineup of wines that we tasted starting with the young uns:

NV 13  Cain Cuvée  Napa Valley

A blend of two vintages, 2012 and 2013, with fruit from both Spring Mountain and the valley floor, and a blend of Merlot, Cabernet Sauvignon, Cabernet Franc and Petite Verdot.   Just a hint of barnyard, against a background of baked earth, this is a hearty wine with some rusticity on the finish. Quite savory with notes of blackberry bramble, toast, and French roast coffee on the palate, and a hint of bitterness on the finish, the tannins are fine grained and quite accessible. Juicy up front it acquires a relentless inner drive, defiant and a bit feral.  Score: 90  pts.  Alc: 14.3%  Price: $35

Cain Five 2013 Spring Mountain District

Their signature wine is outstanding, stunningly complex. Rich, deep blackberry fruit but with savory herb highlights, thyme,  hints of caramel, a slightly smoky, saddle leather aroma, a bit of licorice and floral notes emerging midpalate round out the aroma notes on this very complex wine.  Deeply concentrated, it gives an initial impression of being sumptuous and elegant yet it’s powerful, exuding a kind of spiritual calm but with latent energy pulsating below the surface. Concentrated fruit, incisive acidity and broad, dry yet refined almost talc-like tannins create a sense of massiveness in the background that bely its welcoming surface. This wine is about contrast held in suspension. Made from 100% mountain fruit from estate vineyards, it’s a Cabernet dominated Bordeaux-style blend. Score: 94 Alc: 14.3% Ave. Price: $123   Peter Gabriel’s Rhythm of the Heat captures the spirit of this wine.

Cain Concept The Benchland Napa Valley 2013

A Cabernet dominated Bordeux-style blend from Rutherford bench grapes grown on the valley floor. This wine shows a bit more red fruit in the mix–voluptuous black cherry, cocoa, sage and dusty earth–but lacks some of the funky flavor of the other cuvees.  This wine has a lovely, round mouthfeel, which is not surprising since the fruit is from the Rutherford bench and has the character of more typical Napa Cabernet. It is lush and generous right from the introduction with bright fruit notes persisting through the long, languorous finish. Happily, the oak is already very well integrated. This is more intimate, romantic, and stylish than the Cain Five, yet it still has a firm backbone. Score: 93  Alc: 14.6%   Ave Price:$93   Robert Palmer’s Addicted to Love nails the attitude.

Cain Five 2006  Spring Mountain District

This has warm, generous fruit and earth, ripe black cherry, saddle leather, thyme, and subtle roasted meat on the nose. Full and concentrated on the palate, the midpalate shows some softness that is disrupted by hi-toned acidity and burgeoning tannins and so the wine shows off a bit of brawn is it progresses. The tannins are beginning to show some mellowness because they’ve become powdery but you sense they were massive when young. Despite the ripe, round fruit, the structure keeps drawing your attention to an angular point that draws energy just before the finish as if the tannins and acidity want to tame its exuberance. 46% Cabernet Sauvignon, 26% Merlot, 13% Petit Verdot, 9% Cabernet Franc,and  6% Malbec. Score: 93 Alc: 14.1%

Cain Five 2004 Spring Mountain District

Gorgeous, simply gorgeous. Ah, so nicely pungent, you first encounter a heady mix of saddle leather, mushroom, and tobacco, resting on top of mocha, the fruit, what fruit? Actually there is some dried black cherry and dried plum filling in the background but this is very savory. There is also a leafy character and a mineral core after some aeration, just an endless parade of bewitching flavors. After years in the bottle, the midpalate is pure silk, but a rising current of powdered tannins threaded with delicate but prominent acidity produce a broad, wave-like finish showing dried fruit and a hint of charcoal.  At this point in its development it still has a very generous nose and a lively palate. The mood is intense, feral, and sort of angst-ridden, not rustic but urban tough. I was surprised that the Stones Paint It Black really resonated with this wine. Score: 96

Reviews based on industry samples

The Limitations of Blind Tasting

08 Monday Jan 2018

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blind tastingIn the wine world, blind tasting is the principle methodology for judging wines. Ideally, wines should be tasted without knowing the producer and often without knowing the region or varietal. The purpose of blind tasting is to eliminate sources of bias that might shape our judgments. Students being trained by the main certification agencies must devote endless hours tasting wines blind and learning to identify via the flavors and textures the origin of the wine.

But while blind tasting has its value, and is certainly useful in sharpening one’s senses, it seems to me to harm aesthetic evaluation. In fact it makes aesthetic evaluation impossible.

In the aesthetic evaluation of any artifact, the success of a work depends on how the materials that make up the work are used.  Aesthetic judgment is a matter of recognizing the degree to which a work realizes the potential of its materials. Great works of art have a sense of completeness about them; poor works leave us with a sense of something missing and incomplete, a use of those materials that lacks expressiveness.

Wine evaluation is no different. A wine is good to the extent it realizes the potential of the grapes, available oak treatments and other processes that go into making the wine. Great winemaking unlocks the hidden potential of the grapes and vineyard and makes that potential available to us.

The problem with blind tasting is that if you don’t know the geographical origin and varietal of the grapes used to make the wine, you have no way of assessing the degree to which the wine realizes that potential. You have no way of identifying what that potential is. In fact, I would argue you need to know the aesthetic aim of the winemaker before assessing whether the wine accomplishes that aim or not.

Evaluations of wine based  wholly on blind tasting by necessity never reach the level of aesthetic evaluation because there is no way to assess the degree of compliance to an ideal without knowing what that ideal is.

Of course, in many contexts we can taste wines blind, and then once the origins of the wine are revealed go on and complete a genuine aesthetic evaluation. But in too many contexts, such as competitions, reviews by magazines, etc. the brunt of the evaluation is based on tasting the wines blind. And sommelier certification agencies devote most of their attention to an evaluative practice that leaves aesthetics out of the picture.

Aren’t we therefore creating a wine culture incapable of aesthetic judgment?

A Sin Against Beauty

20 Wednesday Dec 2017

Posted by in General Aesthetics, Philosophy of Food and Wine, Wine Culture

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no rulesBlake Gray committed a sin against beauty on his blog yesterday.

A winery sent him a press notice about the release of a wine made from a nearly extinct varietal, a form of communication which he usually ignores. However, because it was a rare wine that he might otherwise be interested in tasting he responded as follows:

Interesting but I’m not sure why they would pick it so ripe (16% alcohol!) that you won’t be able to taste the difference between this and Merlot.

Sorry, you probably didn’t want that feedback.

Gray then goes on to explain:

The next step normally would be to taste the wine and talk about it but to be honest, I’m not interested in tasting this wine. I don’t have a hard cutoff for alcohol percentage in a table wine, but 16% is well above what I want to drink and what I want to recommend. If I taste it, and it’s delicious — super smooth, interesting, complex, my Saint-Macaire dream come true — I still would never order a bottle of it, because I couldn’t finish a glass. So should I recommend a wine like that, that I would not drink myself?

The problem is not with his preference for lower alcohol wines, a preference I share. The problem is you can’t know what a wine tastes like without tasting it, just as you can’t know what a painting or piece of music is like with the experience. Aesthetics is a domain without rules because each work is a unique individual, a law unto itself. Each element in an aesthetic object is so sensitive to context that even very similar works affect us in vastly different ways. There are no aesthetic principles that allow one to deduce that a work is of high quality; even a thick description of a work will not tell you if you will enjoy it or not.  You have to have the experience.

I’ve had wines with 16% alcohol that were crisp and refreshing and wines at 13% alcohol that were flabby and dull. The alcohol percentage is just a number and an often inaccurate, unreliable number as well. (The law allows a 1% variance in wines over 14%.)

Just as there is no recipe for producing quality wine, there is no rule book for what one will like or whether varietal character will be evident. At best, we can make educated guesses about such matters, and it’s that element of surprise that makes wine (and paintings and music) thrilling.

Of course ,if Blake doesn’t like a wine he ought not to recommend it. But he can’t know if he likes it until he tastes it, not because he doesn’t know his own preferences but because its in the very nature of aesthetic experience that cases cannot be generalized.