GrapeCrafter

My posting at AppellationAmerca.com on Natural Wine: Choosing Your Priorities is resulting in new visitors to this site looking for additional information.

This blog consists of pieces on various wine technology topics. These are sorted into Categories: Postmodern Winemaking, Natural Winemaking, Terroir, Alcohol Adjustment, Social Responsibility, and so forth. The Search function will bring up titles discussing your keyword: sulfites, micro-oxygenation, chips, allergens, fining, and reverse osmosis are rich in content. I also recommend the GrapeCraft Glossary or the calendar wheel which ties all the concepts of postmodern winemaking together.

I confess I’ve been holding out on my readers about an intriguing area of research Susie and I have been pursuing lately, that of the relationship of wine and music. My wife, Dr. Susan Mayer-Smith, a French-trained clinical psychologist who holds two music degrees and was awarded first chair flautist for the Chicago Symphony at age 19, has been working with me to explore the GrapeCraft core notion that wine is liquid music.

At Vinovation many times daily we conduct “sweet spot” trials to determine the proper balance points for alcohol in the wines our 800 California clients bring us, and we always find the same two things. First, the points of harmony (roundness, softness, sweetness) and dissonance (harshness, disjointedness) arrange themselves in a very nonlinear fashion. You don’t find balance throughout the 13%’s with lower alcohols being thin and salty and higher alcohols hot and bitter. Instead you get dialed-in radio stations: specific points of harmonious balance just a tenth of a percent away from terrible wines.

OK, I’ve had it. There is no sadder state of affairs, no more urgent education requirement in the U.S. wine scene than to get Americans to understand serious dry rosé. What is wrong with people?

My answer to Chris Bunting’s desert island challenge, (i.e. what beverage would you choose as your only quaff, but of unlimited supply, if abandoned on a desert island?) was instantly apparent to me. Serious dry rosé (not, please, to be confused with the pink sodapop embarrassment so aptly termed “blush”) is the cornerstone of French culture because it’s cheap and goes deliciously with everything. You know that aisle at Safeway with the Cap’n Crunch, Cocoa Puffs, etc.? The French fill it with hundreds of vins gris, almost all under four euros.

Mr. Smith,

Your article spurred me to thinking and after talking to a few winemakers in the Central Coast (which I write bout) I decided to propose a collaborative experiment. I would appreciate your thoughts on the idea.

-Arthur
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Dear Arthur:

The discussion about maturity often collapses the aspects of brix and flavor ripeness. The former is a good indicator of eventual alcohol content but is almost unrelated to the latter.

This week's blog is posted at Appellation America.

Matt Kramer is a nice guy. At least that’s what I’m told from my winemaker friends to whom he’s granted an audience. I get the impression he and I see eye to eye on many current issues in wine production: the pre-eminence of distinctive terroir expression, the importance of living soil, the need for balance rather than impact, concern about centrist tendencies that turn wine into a shallow commodity. In sum, the fight for the soul of wine.
But Matt and I don’t speak to each other. It seems he’s concluded that the winemaking tools I created automatically destroy the soul of wine. In his latest article The Wine Behind the Machines he pontificates that any winemaker making use of these new techniques necessarily produces the “Miss America smile: glossy and insincere.”

Where does he get this? Certainly not from tasting. Thousands of sincere and thoughtful winemakers, many of which Matt praises highly, make use of alcohol adjustment and micro-oxygenation on a regular basis. The only thing that makes me different is that I disclose. So would everybody else if Matt and his fellow inquisitors would lay off the incendiary articles.

Here's a note from Derrick Schneider whose excellent blog An Obsession With Food minces many dicey issues.

Clark,

One of my site's readers asked the question below (he sent in a similar note as a letter to Art of Eating), and I wondered about your opinion on the subject.

"did you try drinking the wines blind and identifying the one with the sweet spot, and then drink (blind) with food and once again identify the one with the sweet spot?"

My response, though I imagine yours will be more insightful:

"Thanks for your comment (and the corresponding letter to AoE -- my joking aside, Ed appreciated all the commentary).

The short answer is no.

Dear Dr. Singleton:

It was an honor to read your reflections about me appended to Alan Goldfarb’s recent blog. Studying your work has been a life’s privilege over the years, and I just wish there were only a few of your comments I was confused about from the encyclopediaic knowledge you imparted in Wine Phenolics! So I imagine you can relate to my current difficulties in being understood.

I fear few are aware of the theoretical underpinnings you provided some 20 years ago for the oxygenative wine structuring we now perform routinely, to say nothing of your studies of wine’s reductive capacities, which even today fall mostly on deaf ears. Most enologists’ oxygen regimen for chardonnay and cabernet is still pretty much the same.

Not every member of the press is bent on demonizing today's imminently sensible postmodern alcohol-balancing practices. Here's one journalist in the normally chilly region of Tasmania who takes a balanced view. Mark Smith of the Launceston Examiner (no relation!) tells it like it is.

Another sensible discussion on Eric Asimov's blog concerning high alcohol in wine. To summarize, elevated alcohols are an artifact of the desire for more richness of flavor expression, and sometimes can result in a beautifully balanced wine which can carry as much as 16% with perfect grace. Such wines are the exception, and even in these cases one cannot prudently drink as much as one might wish. The commercial success of the Big Wine is undeniable, and many commenters defended the trend, though others thought less would be more.

What’s missing from this conversation is the simple fact that the majority of California winemakers who are using extended hangtime to increase body (often but not always sacrificing longevity for richness) are reducing their alcohols in order to have a balanced palate. Between Vinovation and the Spinning Cone, we are now adjusting about 45% of the wine in the North Coast. There are still many producers who are shy about balancing the wine because it’s supposedly evil. But the vast majority choose the sensible road – they do it and they don’t tell you.

I was asked whether there's any truth to the assertion that high alcohol wines don't age very well. To summarize what we know about ageworthiness, we should recognize two distinct realms where observations have been made. One is that, on the whole, wines with high alcohol tend to have higher overall ripeness. There is much experience and scientific understanding to verify that these wines age poorly. But this tendency is not universal, because brix and ripeness are only loosely connected. Secondly, we have a small body of experience and research which suggests that alcohol itself somewhat hastens ageing in otherwise identical wines.

Mr. Smith,

Thank you very much for your thought-provoking response. I did spend time looking through the Vinovation website, and I also picked up the recent The Science of Wine by Jamie Goode to get some medium-level descriptions of the processes.

I'm just beginning the research for this article, so I'm not yet on deadline. I'd be happy to set up a time to chat when you get back from South Africa. I live in Oakland, so I can easily arrange to come up to Vinovation to talk to you.

Would it be possible to attend a sweet spot tasting? I realize your clients consider this a sensitive area, and I'm happy to sign nondisclosure/confidentiality agreements if they're nervous about being fingered in the press. I just want to get a sense of what the tasting process is like.

I assume each wine has a different set of sweet spots?

How different do the wines taste? Or to put it another way, could you spot a Vinovation client in a blind tasting? Maybe because of the characteristics of the structure?

Do you have a sense of how well Vinovation wines age? How gentle is the "sweet spot" process?

I'm trying to grasp how other wines fare without your consulting. You mentioned chaptalization, but do European wine makers just add a known quantity of sugar that always brings them to the "right" alcohol based on yeasts and brix (or Baume, I guess). And if the "right" alcohol varies from wine to wine, how do they know how much to add. And what do the CA wineries that aren't your clients do?

In other words, good wines do come out of France without adding sugar to the grape must, and you pointed out that few of the vineyards can generate "natural miracles." So what explains the discrepancy?

Can you point me to the research about brix vs. phenolic maturity? As always, thanks for your time and thoughts.

David