Tag Archives: winemaking

Do Winemakers Deserve Kudos?

20 Monday Jan 2020

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winemakerOliver Styles, as usual, raises an interesting question in his latest article for Wine Searcher: Do we over-emphasize the impact a winemaker has on the finished wine?

My immediate response to the question was “well, it depends on the wine and the winemaker”—a point he readily acknowledges.

As he points out, sometimes accidents contribute to great wines. Some winemakers are working within long-established traditions, have exceptional vineyards to work with, or do work framed by a celebrated “house-style” established long before they were on the scene. Some winemakers operate under more commercial pressure than others; business models help to determine whcih wine gets made.

The general point to draw from this is that wine is made by a community, not an individual. Viticulturalists, farmers and vineyard workers, cellar hands, owners, marketing staffs, accountants,  tasting panels that enforce standards, peer pressure, critics, and the consuming pubic through their feedback, as well as the winemaker, all play a role in the finished product. So do the climate, weather, and soils not to mention the vines themselves.

How should we apportion credit given this long list of inputs? As I noted, that is a good question.

One question I think is utterly irrelevant is the one he keeps coming back to:

How do we know what wines one winemaker would make if completely free of responsibilities to the board, responsibilities to the market, the pressures of their peers (this latter is a factor, especially in natural wine circles)? In other words, we can’t be sure that the winemaker we praise wouldn’t have made a completely different wine to the one we like if left completely to her or his own devices.

The answer is we can’t know. We call these “counterfactuals” in the philosophy business and their epistemology is obscure. When a baseball team wins the World Series we don’t wonder whether the manager could have won with a different team. The answer is probably not but that doesn’t detract from the manager’s accomplishment. Would Monet have painted the series entitled  “Waterlilies” if he lacked a garden in Giverny to inspire him? Probably not. So what? We are evaluating an accomplishment under the conditions that explain its genesis, not some alternative accomplishment under different conditions.

He asks: “imagine our top Bordeaux winemakers were transposed into Languedoc-Roussillon without any of their current reputation, would we be using words like “kudos” or “bravo” when talking about them and their Cabardes or their Costieres de Nimes?”

No because skillfully making an average wine, while praiseworthy for the skill involved, isn’t producing a noteworthy finished product.

My point is the way we praise winemakers is somewhat problematic: are we praising the person themselves and their abilities; are we praising the employee of a company for doing her or his job; are we praising their ability to please us?

Wine is an aesthetic object (at least many wines are) and as such it’s primarily the aesthetic quality of the object we are interested in. Whatever praise is due the winemaker flows from that quality.

Of course, we could just bracket the finished product and evaluate the abilities of the winemaker, the way they do their job, or their knack for assessing the market. There is nothing wrong with these evaluations for certain purposes but in doing so we are losing touch with the aesthetic accomplishment.

He closes with another peculiar question:

That doesn’t mean I don’t think winemakers should get any credit, I’m just struck by the possibility of someone out there getting “kudos” for making a wine they themselves don’t like. It must be akin to an actor realizing for the first time they are being typecast.

This contains a genuine puzzle. We praise people for their accomplishments even when there is luck involved. Works of art often have aesthetic affects that were not intended by the artist. That doesn’t diminish the accomplishment. But Oliver is raising a different kind of case. How do we evaluate a case in which the winemaker makes a wine she intended to make, the wine is of high quality, but it’s in a style she doesn’t prefer?

It isn’t obvious to me that the winemaker’s preferences should matter. Presumably, the finished product reflects her skill and aesthetic judgement—she made the right moves to produce the wine. Why would we withhold praise because she would prefer to make a different wine?

Are Natural Wines Terroir-Driven?

29 Monday Jul 2019

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natural wine 2One of the justifications for natural wine that you sometimes hear is that wines that are made without sulfur, filtering or other winery interventions reveal features of the vineyard site and local weather more readily than conventional wines. I don’t think this is quite true and this is not the best way to understand natural wine.

Even though natural winemakers start their fermentations using native vineyard yeasts, the dominant yeasts that complete the fermentation are not necessarily from the vineyard. The hardier yeasts that populate the winery and winery equipment can often take over the fermentation, especially as alcohols creep up and kill off the wild yeasts; they may be a different strain from the yeasts in the vineyard and can sometimes profoundly impact the flavors and textures of the wine.

Furthermore, in the absence of sulfur or filtering, bacteria blooms and oxidation can cause unusual flavors and aromas to develop. These flavors and aromas are often interesting and delicious but they are not coming from the vineyard. In fact the distinctive character of the vineyard or vintage may be more difficult to discern when masked by the strong aromas coming from bacteriological activity.

Thus natural wines don’t necessarily reflect the distinctive character of a vineyard—what they do reflect is the distinctive character of the total environment in which the wine is made. In the absence of intervention by the winemaker, ambient yeast and bacteria populations, ambient temperatures, availability to oxygen, etc. have some influence on the flavor of the wine.

This is not to say that vineyard site doesn’t matter. The quality of the grapes always matters. But what makes a natural wine distinctive may or may not be vineyard specific. Instead of capturing forces at work in the vineyard, natural wines capture a wider variety of causal factors in the environment that emerge as a result of the winemaker’s hands off approach.

If you have a great vineyard that produces wines of distinction, it’s an open question whether that distinctiveness can be captured by natural wine production. Only experimentation and a tolerance for risk will reveal the answer.

Myths of the Wine World #1: Winemakers Make Wine

09 Thursday Aug 2018

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forkliftAs with all myths, this one has an element of truth to it. In the Oxford Dictionary, the primary meaning of “to make” is “to form (something) by putting parts together or combining substances”. In the winery who actually puts the parts of the wine together? That all depends on the size of the winery.

In small production wineries under about 1500-2000 cases per year, if they’re charging less than $40 per bottle, it’s usually the winemaker and his/her family who actually handle the grapes, sorting them, putting them in the destemmer, moving them to the fermentation tanks, getting the barrels ready, crushing the grapes, racking off the juice, moving pallets by forklift, and so on. They’re actually making the wine by putting parts together. (Wineries that make expensive wine can afford to have a crew do all that “making” although lots of artisan winemakers enjoy being hands on.)

But as production exceeds that level, the physical labor is more than one or two people can do. They need to hire help. The winemaker has to pitch in when short-handed or during times of peak work load or emergencies. But routine tasks of “making” are done by hired help—temporary migrant workers, interns, underpaid newbies trying to get a foothold in the industry, and better paid production managers who divide their time between supervising and pitching in. And once production starts to creep over 5000 cases, which includes most of the wine made in the world, the winemaker does very little “making”.

What do “winemakers” do? They make most of  the decisions about what to do with the grapes or wine and when it should be done. They spend a lot of time checking their vineyards or testing in the lab. They are buried in spread sheets, planning, planning and more planning, and supervising the work crews. (not to mention schlepping the wine and trying to sell it after its made.)

In the modern winery, winemakers are really wine designers. They work hard but its mental labor and communications not the physical labor of making.

In Praise of Cellar Rats

02 Wednesday May 2018

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cellar-rat-wine-toursIn the modern winery, the term “winemaker” is often misleading—“wine designer” might be more appropriate. In most wineries with an annual case production above about four or five thousand cases, the winemaker’s job is to determine what to do with the wine. It’s someone else who carries out these instructions. The actual “making” is performed by cellar workers who spend much of their time on the business end of a hose or in the seat of a forklift.

Most of the physical labor in a winery involves moving the wine from container to container and preparing containers for their  next occupation.

Oliver Styles used the occasion of May Day (celebrated in many countries as International Worker’s Day) to call attention to the job cellar workers do.

They don’t get their own label, they don’t get their own tank named after them, they aren’t courted by the media, they aren’t asked to look after next year’s capex or barrel order; but without the work that they do, a winery could not function.

They usually don’t make much money, the work is often seasonal or part time, and it can sometimes be dangerous. But if they don’t do their jobs well, wine quality suffers. When winery equipment isn’t clean, critters grow; if the barrels or vats aren’t ready, the grapes or wine are sitting where they shouldn’t be.

We don’t think about it often, but wine quality absolutely depends on this work. One consequence of our focus on advanced technology and information is that we lose sight of the physical processes that actually make things happen. They are just a means to an end; grunt work. But just as we learn more about the world by walking through it rather than driving past it in a car or by preparing a meal rather than eating fast food, we know more about wine when we pay attention to the physical processes that make it.

When means and ends are no longer separated life in its fullness comes into view.

Cellar rats, vineyard workers—without them the world is a poorer place and they have a perspective on wine few of us can share.

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 Magic of Wine Production

19 Monday Mar 2018

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magicWinemaking involves a series of activities generated by an idea of what the finished product will be like. That idea first appears in the winemaker’s imagination as the grapes are tasted in the vineyard at harvest. But as any winemaker will tell you, surprise is in the future and that original idea will have to be modified as the wine makes its way through the production process. Wine is a living thing with a “mind” of its own.

Like artists, winemakers spend much of their time manipulating stuff—crushing grapes, punching down must, racking juice, cleaning barrels, maintaining and repairing machines. It’s  physical activity that forces changes to that imaginary “wine” shaping a product that is still a dream . And just like a work of art in process, as the wine unfolds it will suggest the meaning it will have to anyone receptive to its potential. It’s not the idea but the making that unlocks potential by making it available to be perceived for both the winemaker/artist and her audience. The work liberates the object from the creator making meanings that outstrip the original idea as if the meaning somehow makes itself as the creator constructs the work.

There is an excess of meaning here that seems to have no origin.

Mundane, mechanical labor creating something of extraordinary beauty—21st Century alchemy.

Winemaking is Hard

03 Wednesday May 2017

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winemaking disasterIf you ever get the idea that it would be cool to make wine in your garage, on weekends, when the spirit moves you, you should probably read this first. And keep your expectations very, very low

As my experience proved the hard way, there’s a reason most winemakers learn their skill with a university degree. While fermentation is a simple process, good winemaking simply is not. Most of the nuances of winemaking are invisible and microscopic, especially with natural wines. There might not be any visual indicators of a problem, and the aromatic indicators are minute, demanding that the stewards of vino be scrupulous and focused on their grapes from the field to the bottling line.

Yes. It was a real mess.

Terroir is Not a Myth

07 Thursday Apr 2016

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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.

Is Winemaking a Craft or an Art?

24 Thursday Mar 2016

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winemaker at workThe claim that winemaking can be an art form tends to raise hackles. Tom Wark recently included it in his list of wine myths. The reason given for this reluctance to view wine as art is typically that winemaking is more accurately classified as a craft. So it is useful to note what distinguishes craft from art.

The traditional distinction between art and craft comes from Kant, among others, who argued that crafts, regardless of how attractive, are useful for some purpose—pottery is used as a container, furniture is used to provide comfort, etc.—while art serves no purpose other than contemplation. But this view cannot explain architecture or music, both of which are arts that serve purposes other than contemplation.

A more useful distinction is between objects that are created from a preconceived plan vs. those that explore boundaries and take on a life of their own as they are being created. The early 20th Century philosopher R.G. Collingwood insisted on this feature of a craft. A furniture maker knows before she begins what the final product will look like. A skilled carpenter knows the steps needed to create a work and the craft of carpentry is a matter of applying skill to raw materials in order to embody the idea in them.

An artist, by contrast, may have only a vague idea of what the final product will look or sound like and she is using skill to explore and discover how the work should develop. The end only emerges in the process—there is no template for creating art. The artist is routinely as surprised as her audience.

This seems to me to be in the right direction.

According to this criterion, some wines are clearly craftwork, not art. Many wineries have a “house style”, a flavor profile they seek to achieve with each vintage, and their winemaker’s skill is in using technology and knowledge of winemaking to get as close as possible to that flavor profile. Most wines found on supermarket shelves are like this—their customers expect reliability.

But some winemakers take a different approach. They wait until they see the grapes before deciding what to do with them. Once the grapes are sorted and fermentation begins they make further decisions about how to proceed but nothing is written in stone. There are always surprises each vintage that require techniques be adjusted and the target flavor profile be modified. Experiments using new techniques with uncertain outcomes are just part of the game with constant tasting and further adjustments in conception required as it becomes clear how the experiments are working out. For some winemakers, winemaking is an adventure full of uncertainty. The end product of course is a good tasting wine, but what that means is in doubt until it goes in the bottle.

This is winemaking as an art.

There is more to say about what makes something a work of art but simply referring to the craft of winemaking will not disqualify some wines.

I have yet to hear a compelling argument that disqualifies some wines from being art.

Why “Terroir Wines” can be Works of Art

17 Tuesday Jun 2014

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oldworld winemaking

Painting by Joseph-Noël Sylvestre. In the public domain

Recently, the usually reliable Andrew Jeffords began a blog post on wine tasting with a bit of oft-repeated nonsense:

Winegrowing is not artistic composition: a true work of art (poem, novel, symphony) is entirely created by the single fashioning mind. Without that mind, the work would not exist. What M. Guigal and Mr Gago do is craft: skillfully growing and then transforming an agricultural crop.

Someone else could do the job, with less skill.

I think many people assume this about a work of art—that it springs entirely from the creative genius of the artist and reflects only that individual’s personal viewpoint. According to this view, because the best winemakers don’t overly manipulate their wines but must allow the grapes and the distinctive characteristics of the grapes’ geographical origins to dictate the final product, winemakers are not artists. They don’t have the freedom that artists have to make what they want.

But this conception of artistic activity is a peculiarly modern, Western view of artistic production. Many artistic traditions think of art quite differently. On this alternative  view, artists are given something to work with—some material, tools, and a history of problems and solutions that represent the tradition they are working in. Creating art is a matter of appreciating and figuring out how to display an object’s distinctive characteristics. The artist must be sensitive and responsive to the potential that exists in the object. Rather than imposing her point of view on the object she is in conversation with it, and her activity is a matter of making sure inessential or irrelevant elements are excluded

This principle that the potential of the object guides the artist’s vision underlies much environmental art. It is the guiding thought behind Japanese aesthetics as well. But even in traditional Western views artists understand themselves to be responsive to their materials.  Michelangelo famously described his art as being responsive to the potential in his material:

“In every block of marble I see a statue as plain as though it stood before me, shaped and perfect in attitude and action. I have only to hew away the rough walls that imprison the lovely apparition to reveal it to the other eyes as mine see it”

And even novelists speak this way when describing their art. They don’t put words in their character’s mouths or invent actions out of thin air. Instead they allow the characters to dictate the course of events by listening to their characters’ voices and allowing them to direct their creative activity. Art is not the product of a “single, fashioning mind” but a result of a “dialogue” between artist, materials, and the past.

The winemaking process is similar, especially when the winemaker is concerned to preserve the sense of place in a wine. Their talent lies, in part, in being responsive to their grapes and what they are capable of. Of course, this does not mean the winemaker is passive; she must still make countless judgments about how to bring out the potential of the grapes she has available. This is why the very same grapes in the hands of different winemakers will produce vastly different wines. Winemakers like artists are not controlling nature; they give expression to the nature of their object, a creative act that depends on the something outside their control.

It is thus only a narrow and timeworn cliché about artistic genius that makes some people skeptical about the artistry of winemaking.