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 think it’s part of a good winemaker’s work to work the street. Musicians who hole up in the studio never get a feeling for how their work is received. You gotta tour. The winemaker’s version is to ride with a salesperson and go one-on-one with his customers as he runs his route. Alternatively, you stand behind a table and pour. Wine is a people business, and often the buying decisions get made for reasons having nothing to do with what’s in the bottle. So an opportunity to work the market and be truly known in a pure way unpolluted by the tricks of salesmanship is a pearl of great price.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Any winemaker will tell you it's got to be in the grapes. Winemaking goals have value only when the grapes they start with contain flavor, color and tannin appropriate to the targeted wine style, and the whole exercise is pointless absent distinctive terroir expression.

Believe it or not, university training doesn’t include an appreciation of what the vital elements are, nor how vine physiology works with or against winemaking goals. Science just hasn't progressed that far yet. That’s why there is so much confusion about such issues as yield, berry size, canopy manipulation, veggie flavors and hangtime. California’s industry is not organized around a coherent body of accumen about what wine really is and how it behaves. I’m talking about cooking techniques, not scientific theory. Our new coinage, “Vineyard Enology” refers to the study and practice of growing grapes for winemaking within the context of GrapeCraft’s principles.

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.

Two points to begin. First, I don't subscribe to the health arguments. Since the human body produces a gram of sulfites per day -- ten times as much sulfites as you find in a bottle of wine -- how can there be an allergic reaction to sulfites? And second, there are many technical methods to make wine without sulfites -- pasteurization, as is done for Japanese sake, to name one. That's not my interest.

I'm interested in why the Romans planted all those grapes. I'm interested in why Robert Louis Stevenson called wine "bottled poetry" and Franklin's definition of wine as "proof that God loves us and desires us to be happy." Conventional wine doesn't occur to me like that. I got to wondering, as a winemaker, what I was missing.

Monday I was visited by an earnest and energetic MW who dragged her hapless but cheerful husband and son to my winery for a chat about the evil things I do and how on earth I can go on living with myself.  Well, she was a lot kinder than that, but I did sense her concern. 
She felt she needed to see the offending equipment up close.  This proved a very good idea, for as her hubby remarked, it’s just a pump and a stack of filters and what’s the big deal?  I said I didn’t know either, but maybe they’d like to taste some wine.