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?

In Dan Berger's latest Vintage Experiences he relates a conversation with a fellow judge, and East Coast Burgundy junkie, who indicated concern about California Pinot Noir and the current fad to blend these with 24% Syrah to obtain more color at the expense of covering up nuance. I was with him all the way until he stepped off the cliff of absolutism: "Color in Pinot Noir ought to be pale, not black. If you see a black Pinot, something is wrong."

Simplistic truisms are almost never true in the wine world, and Pinot is even tougher to nail down than most grapes. This guy may know Burgundy, but he sure doen't know Pinot. While I share his concern, he should have more respect for the variability of which Pinot is capable.

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

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.

I hope a winemaker blogger can be forgiven some inactivity this time of year. As the 2007 harvest winds down, I thought a short note would be helpful to other winemakers struggling with harvest decisions.

Basically, if you haven't picked by now, you should probably do so. A cool summer which hardly topped 90F in most areas encouraged rapid maturation and very screwy numbers and ripeness patterns. For example, Dry Creek Zin was all picked well before Lodi this year! Over half our fruit came in a month early, and then we slowed to a crawl. We are now experiencing unusually cold and rainy weather in which lofty brix goals many winemakers still pick on will never be achieved. That's OK. Look for signs of ripeness: good fruit flavors, brown seeds, skins which disintegrate when chewed and yield color easily when subsequently squeezed between forefinger and thumb. Forget brix!

Clark,

My wife and I had to wonder why you, who leverages science so well in your wines, opt for corks instead of screwcaps. I'm sorry to say we wondered this because we got a corked bottle of Faux Chablis, but it did lead to an interesting topic.Hope you're well,
Derrick

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.

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.

These Uruguayan wines are superb discoveries. Journalists who report them seldom mention that the entire Uraguayan nation's progress with this varietal is a product of the genius of Patrick Ducournau of Madiran, perhaps the most important and certainly the least appreciated and understood winemaker of our time. I have knelt at Patrick’s knee for a decade during which he has transformed my access to winemaking technique and provided me an understanding of wine’s true nature which is the source of my credibility to over a thousand winery clients.

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.

So many wine media pundits speak of their love of Old World wine styles over the standard California offerings, which tend to overblown styles which please up front but lack minerality and length in the finish; muscular and fruit forward but without balance, interest and depth, brawny and generous yet dull and shallow; long on impact but short-lived. And I agree.

Behind the scenes among our winery clients it is well understood that this state of affairs is almost entirely voluntary. Smart marketing follows the money. Sometimes a winemaker just likes rich, forward wines. But mostly winemakers and marketers have better sense than to slog through the mud of today’s brutal competition by trying to sell wines of subtlety and finesse.

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.

In my struggle to discover common ground with critics of wine technology, I find myself sympathetic to concerns that new approaches to winemaking might alter its nature, which is pretty mysterious and possibly fragile. But these concerns are being voiced a century too late, when the advent of electricity and modern science changed wine forever. Electricity isn’t evil in and of itself, but it has conferred great power absent wisdom, and scientific skepticism provides scant protection of mysteries beyond its grasp. In the Age of Progress, these vast changes occurred without much resistance, and it is only now that we are beginning, postmortem, to question technology, of which my innovations such as oxygenation and alcohol filtration are a trivial corollary around which this long overdue debate has finally coalesced.

I reckon it's high time to post my views, which are somewhat at odds with mainstream enology, concerning this beast and its handling. For the anti-filtration crowd (count me in) this is the central problem facing those who take on the making of serious wine.

The reason is simple. The focus of the GrapeCraft philosophy is the creation and preservation of beneficial macro-molecular structure manifesting in wine as colloidal particles, sometimes nearly as large a microbial cell. Sadly, today’s winemaking practices inhibit the creation of good structure during fermentation and ageing and also disrupt it as part of the bottling process. IBM (Integrated Brettanomyces Management) advocates another approach which preserves and also takes advantage of the benefits of good wine structure.

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.

In response to Corrie Brown's inflammatory L.A. Times piece on additives , I received this note:

"Why freak out the ignorant when we are adjusting something that
is already there in the wine?" says Clark Smith, chairman of Vinovation
Inc., a Sebastopol, Calif.-based wine industry "fix-it shop."

Please inform Mr. Clark that it is news to this ignorant one that chicken,
milk, wheat, dye, oak chips, bentonite (and other ingredients mentioned in
the LATimes article) are already there in the wine. Silly me, I thought wine
was made from grapes. Mr. Clark's remark is insulting. I have just recently
begun trying new wines, and this article, plus Mr. Clark's remarks, will
cause me to reconsider. -Mary C.

Dear Mary:

The forests of France currently being cut down for barrels are 200 years old, and are being depleted at four times the necessary rate because so many winemakers have failed to examine sensible approaches to conservation. If you about 25% of the high quality wood outside the heart and inside the cambium can be split and shapen into a stave which ends up in a piece of fine furniture that seals properly 75% thus gets simply thrown away because chips have a lousy image. Pretty stupid.

Bad wood makes bad wine, be it made into barrels or chips. There’s plenty of both on the market. Chips aren’t worse than barrels. It turns out they’re actually inherently better.

We're all having fun over on Eric Asimov's blog, The Pour, commenting on his article When Technology is Worthwhile. Check it out for the full range of opinions on this subject.

My second post in that conversation is as follows.

Kudos to Eric Asimov of The Pour for another article telling it like it is. Journalism like this makes it possible for winemakers like Mike Havens and Randy Dunn to come forth honestly about their use of micro-oxygenation or reverse osmosis. In the current reactionist environment, make no mistake that these men are heros.

And I loved Eric's method to define “natural wine” by discussing the wine list of one of my favorite dining spots, Restaurant 360 in Brooklyn's Red Hook district. I know exactly what he means, because proprietor Arnaud Erhart picks such pearls from the Loire and all over which really exemplify the aesthetic I believe in -- wines of living soil that take skillful chances in the cellar and deliver as a result a dimensionality and soulfulness normally absent in today's scientific wines.

The issue in overoaked wines is not excess, it's artlessness.

Jim Concannon used to say that oak should work in wine like garlic in cuisine -- you use it to accentuate and lift the wine's native flavors. On the other hand, there do exist "lovers of the stinking rose," and sometimes to appeal to these freaks (as at the Gilroy Garlic Festival) garlic becomes the whole theme of a dish. It's fun for a while. So with oak, and many a novice has been temporarily taken in, later to scorn its excessive use.

In The Impoverished Student's Book of Cookery, Drinkery and Housekeepery, Jay F Rosenberg offers "A Brief Essay on Horsemeat" in which he advances the thesis that the only reason we do not consume the flesh of a horse is that there is no cute sexy name for it. We don't speak of eating cow, pig and baby sheep. I'm not sure I agree, for I do feel humans are the better for respecting our noble synergies with Labradour Retrievers, Tonkinese cats and Arabian stallions, and it even grieves me to see the gentle affable skate on a menu.

But Jay has a point, and in winemaking, too often a name evokes much confusion. Somebody please tell me the difference between artesanality and manipulation! So it is quite sad that there exists no cute sexy name for an oak chip. In France they are called "eclats", which are like bolts of lightning -- huzzah!. But here we haven't spun it yet. Much ignorance and misconception among winemakers bars us from this the most proper method for obtaining oak extractables with control, predictability, and (only incidentally) economy. And the media are no help. Who would admit to using anything but the all-holy barrel?

A terrific new site has emerged called Appellation America, which while ambitiously furthering the notion of transforming the way we think about wine in this country, also takes on current issues generally and promises to be a rewarding stop for oeno-surfing.

In the same vein as the mixed compliments I offered Jon Nossiter's Mondovino, I applaud Appellation America’s efforts to focus consumer attention on new regions, and generally to impart more openness and curiosity to the wine drinking experience. We winemakers get tired of the demand to push that same oaky butterbomb chardonnay button all the time, and consider it more rewarding to offer something that speaks distinctively and unexpectedly of a specific place.

The ever-dilligent neoprohibitionists' toxic scare-of-the-month is the attempt to utilize the Food Allergen and Consumer Protection Act of 2004 to require all wines for which protein fining agents have been employed during processing -- egg white, isinglass (a product of the sturgeon fish) or casein from milk -- to carry a warning label, despite the fact that no study exists linking these practices to any human health detriment. In its current manifestation before FDA, no criteria for residual levels are specified and the burden is on the winery to prove no danger exists. Here we go again.

However the legal issues eventually sort out, a possible silver lining I can see is that winemakers might begin to rethink the outmoded technique of protein fining. Skill in the vineyard and the cellar can turn those excessive tannins into the building blocks of a proper structure for rich, refined mouthfeel and increased aromatic integration.

Dear Clark:
I own a small winery in Washington State. I produce small lots of Bordeaux wines. My annual production is 500 to 700 cases a year. Merlot, Cabernet Franc, and Cabernet Sauvignon are my main focus. I also produce about 100 cases of Syrah. Due to my small size I have chosen to bottle my own wine rather than hire a mobile bottling line. My question to you concerns filtration of my wine prior to bottling. I originally intended to use a plate and frame filter (1 micron) to remove yeast and other large particles when transferring wine to tank for blending followed by a pes cartridge membrane filter (.45 micron) prior to the filler during bottling. Since researching a number of articles, it is a bit confusing whether or not my original plan would achieve my goal of maintaining high quality stable wine in the bottle. What would your thoughts be?

Jim Myers
Medicine Creek Winery
Olympia WA jmyersincp@aol.com
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Dear Jim:

You’ve picked a thorny issue, one that strongly divides the industry. Many winemakers wouldn’t consider bottling anything without sterile filtration – they consider that the risk of microbial activity in the bottle is too great. This could be of three types: Saccharomyces (i.e. normal wine yeast), malolactic bacteria, or Brettanomyces.

On the other side (my side) are an increasing number of winemakers who find that this type of filtration disrupts wine structure so that texture and aromatic integration suffer.

In the past six months I’ve used this space for essays which have focused sharply on specific matters I’ve felt passionately the need to explore. Now I realize that I haven’t yet shared with readers the organized framework for which the blog is named.

As we enter the new year, I’ve decided to blog a series of short pieces which elucidate the tenants of GrapeCraft: vineyard enology, coextraction, aromatic integration through structural refinement, microbial equilibrium, and tuning to soulful resonance. I’ll dissect each of these areas, show how the calendar guides us, and how each links to the others.

Many readers are interested in how wine technology works, why winemakers are drawn increasingly today to new methods, and whether such oddities can work into the highly ethical aesthetic which we all demand of wine craftsmanship. Reverse osmosis and micro-oxygenation are funny sounding names. I’ll explain how these tools work into postmodern winemaking practice and compare them against questionable conventional practices such as fining, chaptalization and sterile filtration.

I’d like this exercise to occur as a dialogue with readers. To goad me along, I hope you will use the comments function to register questions and opinions.

Why do Californians seem hell-bent on establishing so-called appellations? Well, I guess I understand why: local pride, a wish to create a point of distinction from others in the marketplace, and a hope eventually to be able to sit back and charge twice or ten times what your wine is worth like they do in Napa and Bordeaux.

But it doesn't work. What does happen is land gets more expensive. Napa cult cabernet sauvignons shelfed at $100 are generally made from grapes that go for $10,000 per ton because they are raised on land that goes for $100,000 per acre. Good Mendocino cab can be had for $10 because it's made from $1,000/ton fruit which is grown on $10,000 land. See a pattern?

So fame inflates prices, but also costs. That's why Andy Beckstoffer has been arguing that Napa growers can't make any money.

Is there anything more we could possibly do to impede and marginalize the organic wine movement in this country?

Through elitist and exclusionary political moves, organic wine activists have seen to it that their cause is practically impossible for the average winery to embrace. This is a shame, because the remaining small cadre of practitioners do not possess the research muscle to bring organic wine up to the expectations of gatekeepers and consumers. No offense. Paul Frey and Tony Norskog are some of the brightest winemakers I know. But they’re just two guys. If organic wines are to rise to the standard now available from other organic produce, we need thousands of winemakers just like them to shake out the details of how to do it. Not too likely, folks.

Edward De Bono said "A myth is a fixed way of looking at the world which cannot be destroyed because, looked at through the myth, all evidence supports the myth."

It's a double entendre. First, the common view of Science as a dependable repository of facts, an authority on How Things Are, simply doesn’t exist. I believe our faith in this myth, this notion of “Science” has proven dangerous to our society generally and a disaster for winemaking.

I received some passionate defense of the folks at UC Davis in response to my post on minerality.

I do indeed have serious issues with the manner in which the folks at Wickson Hall comport themselves, which can’t really be dealt with in a single blog. I have to confess a personal disappointment in my alma mater which I hold to a high standard against which it often falls short. I'll just lay down the gauntlet that having graduated “with highest honors” from the program, served as Dr. Boulton’s TA for two years, taught an Extension course for 23 years, and served two years as President of the Trellis Alliance (the wine industry bridge organization), I have found the professors of the Department as a group (with many exceptions) to be frustratingly narrow minded, politically manipulative and disappointingly out of touch with wine production needs and trends.

I started this blog to tell lay wine enthusiasts the truth about what is happening in wine production and to share my personal views of how this exciting area of artistic endeavor is unfolding. The Department of Viticulture and Enology at UC Davis has marginalized itself to such an extent that it is not a player on that stage. I don’t think it’s relevant to pursue such boring matters here. For those of you who are interested in debate about this outmoded institution, I promise to post a general article critiquing the Department within the month at www.winecrimes.com. Unless you went to school there, my advice is not to waste your time reading it.

I do want to clarify my opinions regarding minerality.

Few aspects ring more passionately for lovers of WineSmith wines than their obvious minerality. The source is pretty clear -- living soil. In a recent Wines and Vines article, Tim Patterson reports that “the one thing we do know is that it has very little to do with minerals.”

In support of this silly conclusion, Tim interviews pundits Ann “Aroma Wheel” Noble and her colleague, analytical chemist Sue Ebeler of UC Davis. Both admit they are unable to make sense of the analytical data on this subject. Amazingly, Tim accepts this professed cluelessness as proof that minerals are unrelated to minerality.

Get used to it. In an otherwise perfect wine, that tiny faint hint of …what is that? Rotten eggs? Mildewed washcloth? Clam bog? Or maybe the wine’s just closed – you sense it has lots to give, but the aroma seems all zipped up like a computer file, and you can’t get at it. It’s not easy for the experienced connoisseur, to say nothing of the novice consumer, to switch gears into thinking of reductive strength as a mark of quality and ageworthiness.

The most interesting part of the wine business now is the move to living soil, climbing the ladder from sustainable to certified organic to biodynamics. These wines have very strong reductive energy, however, and involve substantial re-learning how wines behave on the part of both the winemaker and the consumer.

Steve DeLong’s hilarious article "Pimp My Wine" expresses with good cheer the angst felt by the disillusioned wine buff who’s discovered that the fantasy that “wine makes itself” isn’t really true -- that in fact winemakers are as diligently at work as any other chef at refining and presenting the tastiest product possible to place into today’s hotly competitive marketplace. It’s odd from a winemaker’s perspective that we’re supposed to be artesanal, but we’re not supposed to do anything. I mean, nobody gives a four star chef grief for using tools and spices.

But there are rules of taste. The flavors of oak, the fruit enhancement of special yeasts, and the other elements of the "pimping" litany in Steve's list -- all need to incorporate well. Steve’s unsuccessful kitchen experiments to “pimp” a wine himself took me back to the early ‘90’s when the Benziger family had me working on non-alcoholic wine as a legacy to Bruno’s interest in offering an alternative for the alcohol-averse.

The Pinochio wine debacle seems to have hopped the border from Italy to France. INAO has proposed a ban on oak alternatives to barrels for wines of appellation.

The truth is that an air-dried, carefully toasted oak chip gives much more predictable flavor extraction than a barrel. Barrels suffer from the Forrest Gump Box-of-Chocolates Syndrome – you never know what you’re gonna get. Well-made chips give winemakers more control at a fraction of the cost to the consumer and to the environment. That is why even the greatest and most expensive wines in the world now use them. And that is why the industry moved on: better, cheaper, more control makes sense in any language.

Napoleon planted those forests for the French Navy of the future – a useable tree is 200 years old. Environmentalists take note: insisting on barrels extends the current practice of wasting 75% of the good, useable wood. So we cut down those forests at four times the needed rate in order to make poorer, more expensive wine to boot. Why?