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The Elephant in the Cellar

Rod Smith

The Elephant in the Cellar

          I’ve enjoyed the Syrah discussion, and am pleased to be asked back for another round. This time, I want to see what the nation’s foremost wine geeks think about an issue that I think is vitally important but never seems to be addressed much beyond eye-rolling shrugs and head shaking.
          This elephant in the room—or, if you will, the wine cellar—is viticultural and winemaking practices that subvertly change the nature of wines being marketed as honest expressions of special vineyards.
          Here’s where I come from, as simply as I can state it. I started drinking wine for the obvious reasons, long before I got excited about it. What was it that finally engaged me to the point where I’ve now spent thirty-odd years thinking about—no, pondering wine on a daily basis? In a word, truth and beauty (okay, two words, but I’ve always thought they were synonymous).
          Most of you will recognize the script: young guy goes to Europe and discovers that each mystical, magical place has its own drinkable essence called wine. This local wine contains the landscape, architecture, culture, and everything else that gives a sense of place. Plus you get a buzz, especially helpful when you decide to, say, sit in a café across from Rouen Cathedral for an entire day to experience the changing light on that iconic façade as recorded by Claude Monet in his amazing 31-painting series.
          Honestly, I’ve long since forgotten what wines I drank that day, if I ever knew; they were mostly fresh, local quaffers served proudly in carafes. But I can still clearly remember what some of them tasted like. Ditto the anonymous riesling I drank after hiking along the Mosel near Trier, and the plump, juicy red in that Alentejo hill town. And couldn’t we all go on and on in that vein? (And isn’t it fun to open a few bottles and trade the actual stories?)
          My point is that it’s been at least 10 years since I’ve been confident that I was getting that kind of signal impression from wines of the New World, especially California. Truth be known, I’ve come to doubt the truth and beauty quotient of modern European wines, as well.
          I’ve put it in terms of confidence because it’s become very difficult to know for sure whether a given wine is telling a real story about a real place, or a fiction that may be based on actual events yet has been cleverly enhanced to be what the producer thinks I want to taste or would be willing to pay for. For example, a cult-stature Pinot Noir which I raved about to anyone who would listen before being told by an informant in a commercial lab that the producer had doctored the wine with Mega Purple, supposedly to make up for “deficiencies” in the fruit. I wasn’t just embarrassed. I felt betrayed.
          In fact, I’ve come to suspect that California, in particular, is increasingly a bottled lie. Marketing campaigns that represent wines as pure expressions of special sites are quite often overtly deceitful. I believe that many wines that are represented as pure expressions of exalted sites are concocted, that is, heavily engineered to hit a desired note. And it’s not that I think that every wine has to be from a single block of vines, produced without any technique whatsoever. I don’t doubt that a great winemaker is like the resourceful teacher who knows how to help a child reach her full potential. But plastic surgery? C’mon. Nor do I have a problem with a good appellation or AVA wine. I just want to know that I’m tasting the true essence of grapes grown in a particular place or places.
          Most of you are familiar with consulting outfits like Enologix, a firm that helps wineries engineer their wines to get high scores (and actually guarantees higher scores). And many of you either make wine yourselves or have made a point of getting hands-on experience in vineyards and wineries. So I’m not here to break any shocking news, nor to lecture or instruct. My point, rather, is to try to move the conversation toward an objective examination of what a fine is, what it should be, and how various viticultural and winemaking techniques may support or contradict a wine’s stature. And please note that I’m deliberately excluding mass-market table wines from the discussion, although I believe, ironically, that most of them are relatively non-manipulated for economic rather than ethical reasons. Let’s focus on wine that expensive because it’s ostensibly a remarkable manifestation of a given summer in a certain place.
          My position going in is that many of the currently accepted winemaking practices (particularly additions such as acid, water, enzymes, tannin, concentrate, etc.) compromise the integrity of the fruit itself, and therefore defeat the ideal of fine wine. They also effectively insult the producers who endeavor to embrace the ideal without cheating. The contrarian might say, “Hey, if Mega Purple is used correctly, not even the most experienced taster can spot it.” Well, maybe not. But is that the point? Hey, if Barry Bonds hits the ball out of the park, who can deny that the ball actually did leave the park? (Yes, yes, I’ve spent long evenings with my redneck wine-geek friends chewing on topics like HGH, Photo Shop, Dolby sound, computers in academics, you name it.)
          Other practices (such as mechanical de-alcoholization, reverse osmos, and various applications of oak essence) seem to me in poor taste, or contrary to the spirit of fine wine, without necessarily triggering my “foul!” alarm. Still others, including chapitalization, irrigation, temperature-controlled fermentation and sterile filtration, may be considered unacceptable manipulations by some yet are already established beyond the point of practical debate.
          And then there’s the whole yeast thing—yikes, where do we start with that?
          So: Truth and beauty versus (or enhanced by) Voodoo vinemaking. Any thoughts?
Parents

  • I don't wish to seem cynical, but I think these issues are really meta-problems. That is, I would like to see the primary research on real-world real-time examples, rather than the generic dismissal of manipulation. Sure, wine is manipulated--the very idea of training or pruning a vine, let alone irrigating, is a primary manipulation that we all accept and in fact demand. The list could go on throughout the viticultural cycle, and we think of such manipulations as dropping fruit or clipping leaves to achieve greater ripeness as perfectly acceptable. Not to mention a dizzying array of inputs both organic and non. Manures, minerals, herb teas, fertilizers, potassium, calcium, nitrogen, copper sulfate, whatever.

    And this is well ahead of anything done in a cuve or a cellar. There we have concocted for centuries ways of making something raw and crude taste better: sparkling wine, fortified wine, flavored wine, multi-vintage wine, multi-regional wine, on and on. Chaptalization, must additions, dosage, acidification . . . all time-honored, and responsible for some of humankind's greatest wine achievements.

    The fundamental problem is the complete disjunction of two things we think we like, or have been conditioned to like, by modern winemaking and its cheerleaders in some segments of the so-called press. These are "ripeness" and "somewhereness" (I dare not use the t-word). The former, much praised, totally displaces the latter, much mythically and spiritually craved. And that is just the beginning.

    I would like to see a primer, and perhaps more investigative journalism, of delineated practices that are oft-decried, even though they were developed in honest attempts to make wine" taste better." What exactly is a must evaporator, and who uses one? How many methods are used to dealcoholize wine? What goes on in a "spinning cone?" Please define and give me examples of wines whose must was "watered back" before or during fermentation. Also, list the allowed proteins and enzymes and yeasts and bacteria that can change wine, and give us concrete descriptions of how they're used and who uses them. Are they all bad? Where do we draw the line?

    Sure, it's easy to condemn Enologix. THAT's a cynical operation. What are its recommended manipulations, and who uses them? I want names. And what makes an egregious manipulation obvious, or distasteful?

    Sorry to be so strident, but the general sense of shortcutting, manipulating, and cheating by the evil mad scientists in the winery seems like the stuff of urban legend . . . until whistles are blown. Let's hear 'em.

Comment

  • I don't wish to seem cynical, but I think these issues are really meta-problems. That is, I would like to see the primary research on real-world real-time examples, rather than the generic dismissal of manipulation. Sure, wine is manipulated--the very idea of training or pruning a vine, let alone irrigating, is a primary manipulation that we all accept and in fact demand. The list could go on throughout the viticultural cycle, and we think of such manipulations as dropping fruit or clipping leaves to achieve greater ripeness as perfectly acceptable. Not to mention a dizzying array of inputs both organic and non. Manures, minerals, herb teas, fertilizers, potassium, calcium, nitrogen, copper sulfate, whatever.

    And this is well ahead of anything done in a cuve or a cellar. There we have concocted for centuries ways of making something raw and crude taste better: sparkling wine, fortified wine, flavored wine, multi-vintage wine, multi-regional wine, on and on. Chaptalization, must additions, dosage, acidification . . . all time-honored, and responsible for some of humankind's greatest wine achievements.

    The fundamental problem is the complete disjunction of two things we think we like, or have been conditioned to like, by modern winemaking and its cheerleaders in some segments of the so-called press. These are "ripeness" and "somewhereness" (I dare not use the t-word). The former, much praised, totally displaces the latter, much mythically and spiritually craved. And that is just the beginning.

    I would like to see a primer, and perhaps more investigative journalism, of delineated practices that are oft-decried, even though they were developed in honest attempts to make wine" taste better." What exactly is a must evaporator, and who uses one? How many methods are used to dealcoholize wine? What goes on in a "spinning cone?" Please define and give me examples of wines whose must was "watered back" before or during fermentation. Also, list the allowed proteins and enzymes and yeasts and bacteria that can change wine, and give us concrete descriptions of how they're used and who uses them. Are they all bad? Where do we draw the line?

    Sure, it's easy to condemn Enologix. THAT's a cynical operation. What are its recommended manipulations, and who uses them? I want names. And what makes an egregious manipulation obvious, or distasteful?

    Sorry to be so strident, but the general sense of shortcutting, manipulating, and cheating by the evil mad scientists in the winery seems like the stuff of urban legend . . . until whistles are blown. Let's hear 'em.

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