GrapeCrafter

The panel discussion at the Portland Indie Wine Festival panel discussion on Natural Wine in the Age of Technology held fascinating lessons for me in the disconnect between consumers and winemakers. Our hope was to arrive at a definition, perhaps even a Certification Mark, for Natural Wine. If a list of winemaking practices is commercially practical (unlike Organic Certification), many winery players will choose to participate. I argue in Natural Wine: Choosing Your Priorities that several consumer groups with different agendas are rallying under the Natural Wine flag. Careful thought is needed to determine the mountains everybody wants to die on.

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.

These revered words, first coined by Martin Ray and later popularized on Robert Mondavi Reserve bottlings, were early buzz words of noninterventionist winemaking as a hallmark of the ultrapremium.

In our laughably complex world, the American consumer loves nothing so much as an easy answer to any shopping challenge. I just bought a high-def TV, and believe me, I can relate. But as I explained in Spoofulated or Artisanal?, winemaking is beset with alarmist paparazzi eager to spin panic. Lovers of easy answers are their chosen prey. So what’s the real skinny about winemakers who employ “traditional” tools like fining and filtration in an effort to bring us the best wine they can?

As I explained in Spoofulated or Artisanal?, the conversion of grapes into that stuff in your glass is obviously a major technological reshaping every time. Unlike the free, open ‘70’s and ‘80’s, today’s winemakers are lying low and keeping mum while paparazzi fire live ammo over their heads.

I don't like it, I don't accept it, and I don't think you should either. And I tell you, we can go back. We just have to start up some honest dialogue. Begin with this: the real truth is that wines, and I mean all wines, become distinctive through artifice. That’s what winemakers do, don’t you know. You just can’t draw the line at no manipulation. You have to pick and choose.

Of course most folks just let the winemaker pick his own tools, a method I strongly recommend. Choose your winemaker with care, then delegate the details. Representative democracy is based on the notion that people are more expert at evaluating people than complex issues.

So let's say you get a chance to size up a winemaker at a dinner event or retail store, or better yet at the winery. How do you conduct the interview?

Please check out my posting at Appellation America on the subject of wine manipulation.

Dan Berger’s article in Appellation America offers a brilliant insight: overripe wines are wimpier. And as a winemaker weary of apologizing for youthful leanness and austerity, these words are a breath of fresh air.

He’s right! Today’s overpriced prune bombs may offer cheap thrills to impact thrill-seekers who lack the stones to appreciate good structure, minerality and integrity serious wine offers. But they’re wimps.

A surprisingly well thought out New York Times article on terroir, was delivered in May by food writers Harold McGee and Daniel Patterson. While it starts off silly in posing and then debunking the idea that terroir means that soil is literally transported by vines into their grapes, the piece then lays out this complex subject well and concludes properly by defining terroir as a collaboration of natural flavors unique to a place stewarded to the glass through skilled artifice. Missing only is the connection I observe between organic practices and enhancement of wine quality: flavor, structure, longevity and minerality. This connection is impossible for someone to make who has not spent a lot of time in vineyards both conventional and green-oriented and working with the resulting wines.

For this reason, I admire even more John Williams’ articulate essay on the Science of Sustainable Viticulture and am pleased that his considerable experience reflects my own observations. Here we find testimony of this underappreciated connection between living soil and wine quality.

A fascinating distinction is emerging from some recent intellectual sparring over wine manipulation. I have proposed that the unique flavors of a specific terroir are best displayed when the presented with a skilled hand. Winemaking is cooking, and this is basic culinary doctrine. Over-spicing or other sorts of clumsy manipulations can certainly get in the way of natural expression, but a skilled practitioner in the kitchen – by very definition – makes his work as invisible as possible and relies on the native flavors of his raw materials to carry the central themes presented at table.