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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?
  • Anonymous
    Anonymous

    Rick,

    We can only hope the day will come when "scores" aren't the deciding factor of quality to the layperson.  However, that day is a loooooonnnnnnnggggg way off.  Thanks to the Blackberry, iPhone, etc. these scores and the bearer of the scores is easily attained, at the ready, at the table.  

    I see it a couple of times a night.  It's a little disconcerting, and above all, disheartening.  

    Lest, is the issue of "if it's not expensive enough, it must not be good, or it will not impress my guests."  Disgusting!!  But, if you walk around with your nose in the air, it's hard to see the pile of sh!t you're about to walk into.

  • In Australia, I asked the winemaker if he acidulated.  He said "I do whatever the hell I want to."  The wine was good.  He then said "So do the Bordelais, they just don't admit to it."

    Teach people how to taste & what wine is for and the market will sort itself out in a couple more generations and many more Americans will drink "table wine" every night and pay cash. (Not Carlo Rossi, loaded with sulfites, but honest, affordable wine).

    They'll leave the trophies for the Chinese or the Wall-Streeters or someone dumb.  They might even have growers in their own county and fill up en vrac by then.  

    Furthermore, taste & pairings are in the palate of the beholder.  If they like hybrids, that's OK. If they like Parker wines, that's OK (they just can't serve them to me).  

    The United States already has too many laws for me, most of which are enforced inconsistently.  

    And the wine industry, unlike any other, already has too many wine ratings and writers and bloggers  After a couple more generations Americans, growing up with wine, won't read scores.

  • He is there because we have put him there, or better yet he just appeared because we all of a sudden have decided to see him there. Manipulation with foods for that matter have always existed, its the the guaranty of our survival. Clonal propagation is essential for the existence of expected repetition of the pleasure of taste that we all expect. How exited would it be to allow random and uncontrolled sexual propagation of vines. Frustrating and exhilarating at the same time, but quite contrary to the desired familiarity that we expect if we pull a bottle of wine from the shelf to pair it with the maltagliati in succo de pomodori, lovingly prepared to a well guarded recipe handed down through the generations.

    Thats the problem in a nutshell. On the one hand we want things to be the way we are accustomed and due to ever increasing demand things are being prepared in larger and larger batches with little regard to the human touch, but on the other hand the system that allows for the duplication of what we like becomes unacceptable.

    So the pendulum swings in the other direction. Wine production has always been controlled by humans. We decide what is desirable and what not. As the zeitgeist shifts ever so slightly into a new direction, the old and tried systems become offensive to the point of abandonment. How fickle we are in our assessment of value, and subsequently in our arrogance in wanting to shape the opinion and desires of our fellow men.

    I always looked upon myself as the great facilitator. If it is your wish to impress your date with a bottle of grape juice on steroids, or loosen the shyness of a companion with a perfect bottle of spumante, so be it. It’s about you, your taste (or the difficulty to taste) your sense of adventure (or outright fear of the unknown) or if you just want to nurse a perfect bottle of  Clos de la  Roche through seven courses of impeccably prepared culinary gems. It’s all about our guests.

    So it looks to me like the key to this whole thing is to be able to anticipate the direction the collective taste bud is heading and have the perfect pairing ready for it.

  • So, what about the idea put forward by Geoff, Peter, and a few others—listing the ingredients? I agree w/several of you who have expressed a distaste for regulation. I don’t generally like any kind of regulation, although it’s often a necessary evil. But requiring that ingredients be disclosed wouldn’t tie anyone’s hands, it would simply inform the consumer. I routinely read food ingredient labels in the store to help me distinguish among similar-looking products (in tonic water or ginger beer, for example, I look for cane sugar rather than corn syrup). Why not have similar information on wine labels?

    Perhaps there could be a label designation such as “Artisinally Made” (see Peter Neptune’s post, above) that would actually mean something, and exempt a qualifying producer from the labeling requirement.

    A couple of years ago Leo McCloskey, president of Enologix, was quoted in the LA Times: “The wine industry is completely unregulated. It would be useful to have labels that detail everything in a wine. It would tell the consumer what they are drinking.”

    Clark Smith, chairman of Vinovation Inc., disagreed. “Why freak out the ignorant when we are adjusting something that is already there in the wine?”

    Wine Institute legal counsel Wendell Lee agreed with Smith, saying that the problem with listing additives is that it could change consumer perception of all wines. “Wine would look engineered instead of natural.”

    Well, a lot of wine is engineered. We all know that. So what do we all think about it?

    BTW, in the same article, McCloskey said, “When you can’t create value in the vineyard, you have no choice but to create it in the winery. The industry lives and breathes on the story of being a natural product. But there is a lot of fast food in wine.”

    (here’s the url) www.latimes.com/.../la-fo-newwine28mar28,0,6448175,print.story

  • Hear, hear, Fred. I miss those halcyon days before the Attack of the Shelf Talkers.

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