GrapeCrafter

I am on the hot seat this week for Pamela Heiligenthal’s forum called Vino Exchange at Enobytes.com.

It will be a free form, multi-topic discussion where I take questions on any subject. I’ll field questions on wine technology from my usual shy perspective. I’ll also discuss my recent decision to license out the Vinovation service business and devote myself to characterizing and chronicling for Appellation America all 307 U.S. and Canadian appellations. Thus we will be able to discuss what regional diversity I’m encountering and the factors that cause wines to express themselves differently in different regions.

Readers should feel free to log on and observe or contribute. Come help make it interesting!

Now that I have sold off the high tech service business, I get to have true fun tasting through and characterizing the AVAs of North America for AppellationAmerica.com, my new day job. I recently worked closely with the folks at PS I Love You and in particular with Petite Sirah guru Robert Brittan to tease out the true nature of this awesome New World varietal. I recommend my two articles, one characterizing the varietal's diversity, and the other speculating on its sources. Please check them out.

I apologize to those of you bored backwards out of your underpants with the previous technical discussion. Lest you imagine I spend all of my time on such technical matters, please check out my recent posts at Appellation America concerning Petite Sirah. There are two articles -- one popular, outlining the regional diversity we encountered in our tastings, and one more theoretical which speculates on the sources of regional diversity in the grape, and I believe offers useful framing of that discussion for other varietals.

A friend asked me to summarize what's meant by this term. Since winelovers are a lot more familiar with oxidation, I could simply say that to chemists, reduction is its opposite. Reductive strength is just a synonym for anti-oxidative power.

But this didn't register much. So I said that when you buy roses at the florist, if you're five years old you buy the most open, beautiful ones, but if you are older and wiser, you buy them when they've just begun to open or even totally closed, if you want them to last the longest. You weigh the joy of the initial presentation against the shelf life.

I just finished a typical blending exercise in which a disturbing question came up yet again. Sell the sizzle or the steak? We were looking at two blends for WineSmith Cabernet Franc, a flagship wine for which we are well known. Although we have always made it from 100% Alexander Valley fruit, I have insisted we label it as California. The reason is that escalating real estate prices are driving grape prices for Sonoma County fruit through the ceiling, and I have feared that one fine day we'll need to look elsewhere for affordable fruit. Sure enough, in 2007 we started working with a Lake County grower, Diamond Ridge, which grows spectacular Cab Franc for half the price of our priciest Sonoma grower.

So here’s the ridiculous conversation that went on, identical to what goes on in most every winery all the time. On the one hand, we could blend all our Sonoma and Lake County wines together, resulting in 400 cases of a spectacularly delicious blend that's 38.5% Lake County (thus entitled only to a California or North Coast appellation) at a price that would make it possible for restaurants to pour by the glass. OR we can blend away half our beautiful Lake County wine into some other program and end up with 325 cases of an inferior, more expensive wine with no prospect to be sold by the glass BUT at 24.9% Lake County we can use the holy Sonoma County appellation, thus making it much easier to sell.

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 AppellationAmerica.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.

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.

Huge flap by Napa vintners over tightening rulemaking procedures at TTB. Perhaps I am missing some subtleties, but the changes seem like a positive step towards real definition of our so-called appellation system. Since we currently have very little burden of geographic proof and nothing whatever of wine flavor characterization or winegrowing rules, we are hardly in the league of European standards under which varieties and growing practices are severely restricted and tasting panels pass judgment on the quality and typicity of each vintage.

I think U.S. appellations are silly. It's sad how easily Americans are being duped in their quest for easy guarantees. They are the enemy of terroir, a method for corporations to co-opt the hard work of pioneers. Smart small guys should devote their energy to distinctive expression of their unique piece of ground rather than supporting marketing bandwagons which inevitably will undo them.

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.

Ye builders of appellations beware. The bell tolls for thee.

Washington State corporation Ste. Michelle has joined forces with rapacious Italian giant Antinori to assimilate Napa Valley collectible Stag’s Leap Wine Cellars, following in the footsteps of another appellation pioneer, Carneros Creek Winery, swallowed up just a year ago year, while a third namesake winery, Dry Creek Vineyards, struggles against insolvency to maintain independence.

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.

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.

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.