Postmodern Winemaking. Clark Ashton Smith
that minimize tannin content result in an alcoholic solution containing apolar terpenes and esters that are hydrophobic. The polarity of the water drives these compounds into the aroma. The lower the alcohol, the greater the aromatic expression. By contrast, red wines contain a confusing excess of aromas: varietal fruit and vegetal elements, nuts and phenolic aromas resembling herbs, tea and cocoa, oak constituents, and microbial by-products (such as the horse sweat aroma of Brettanomyces) depicted in panels 2–4. These are largely composed of benzene ring and other double-bonded ring structures that are driven into the aroma by water, resulting in a cacophony of conflicting scents.
A properly formed tannin colloidal structure is capable of providing a home within the wine for these aromatic compounds. The shorter the tannin chains, the finer the colloids and the greater the interactive surface area for intercollating these compounds due to their affinity for ring-stacking among the tannins, as shown in panel 5. The result is an aroma that is primarily varietal fruit, with oak, vegetal, and microbial notes in a supporting role as muted, integrated elements (panel 6).
FIGURE 1. Aroma projection in whites compared to aromatic integration in structured reds.
HOLISTIC APPROACH
In the postmodern view, better wine doesn’t result from adjusting intensities. We do not seek to pump up the positive Aroma WheelTM attributes and suppress the negatives. Instead, we try to merge all the wine’s flavors into a coherent whole, like a well-conducted orchestra producing a unified, soulful voice.
It is a useful technique in modern science to pull a phenomenon apart into its constituent pieces, a technique called “reductionism” (not to be confused with “reduction,” which is the converse of oxidation and is often employed to refer to sulfides and “closed” characteristics in wine aroma). Reductionism has come to dominate modern enology at many levels, from monoculture in the vineyard to draconian microbial eradication in the cellar. Simpler systems are easier to grasp and manage, but they do not necessarily yield preferable results.
Wine sensory scientists have attempted to define wine quality through reductionism, often mapping specific aromatic “drivers” of competing products and matching consumer preference groups within quadrants (www.tragon.com/news/articles.php). But wine’s virtues are greater than the sum of its parts. The notion of high performance is best investigated by driving your Porsche, not by examining its disassembled parts laid out on your driveway. The interaction of all elements results in a whole whose functions cannot be predicted except as a single integrated phenomenon. Holistic examination is highly challenging, but it is not categorically unscientific. The lively “deliciousness” debate in 1995 makes for entertaining reading on this issue (see http://winecrimes.com/UC_deliciousness.pdf).
Modern sensory science insists on concrete terms such as those in the Aroma WheelTM, often evoking the old adage that you can’t manage what you can’t measure. But poetic terms like harmony, austerity, generosity, and balance are all essential to wine experience and cannot simply be shown the door by deterministic reductionism. I have witnessed many enology students held up to ridicule by their sensory professors when attempting to employ these terms. Better to consider the sign in Einstein’s office that read, “Not everything that counts can be counted, and not everything that can be counted counts.” In the postmodern view, we should learn how to work artistically with, and even to apply science to, holistic properties instead of pretending they do not exist.
MICROBIAL EQUILIBRIUM
Similar to the now well established vineyard practices cumulatively termed Integrated Pest Management (IPM), a balanced ecology can also be pursued in the cellar. Once the importance of structure is recognized, one is much more reluctant to sterile-bottle red wines. This means that the microbial dramas of the wine must be played out in the cellar prior to bottling. Thankfully, structure is useful in integrating the resulting complexities. The principles of Integrated Brettanomyces (or “Brett”) Management are the subject of chapter 10.
LIVING SOIL
Wine quality was eroded in the modern era also by the replacement of organic principles of viticulture with the facile but destructive farming solutions of petrochemical agriculture: herbicides, pesticides, and convenient but unsustainable mechanical methods of soil manipulation. These have robbed contemporary wines of flavor interest as well as longevity.
The promotion of soil health and the encouragement of a complex soil ecology have a wide range of benefits. Living soils buffer seasonal variations in water and temperature, prevent erosion, and minimize mineral depletion. Vines in symbiosis with mycorrhizal fungi receive more complex nutrition and are more easily brought into vegetative balance. Wines from these soils exhibit enhanced flavor interest, palate liveliness, and antioxidative potential.
The hands-on, boots-on-the-ground approach to achieving vineyard health, vine balance, and proper maturity is called “Vineyard Enology” and is the subject of chapter 5.
LIFE ENERGY
An aspect of wine inexplicably left out of modern winemaking training is the central problem of reductive strength. Randall Grahm of Bonny Doon Vineyard (profiled in chapter 14) taught me that wine has qi (pronounced “chee”), Chinese for life energy. When it is young, it is best served to exchange qi with the world around it. When it is old, it must then guard its qi. Life energy diminishes during aging, so starting out with an excess of qi is a good thing. I used to consider sulfides a defect. Now I worry about young reds that don’t have them.
Postmodern practice eliminates many problems that conventional winemakers obsess about, such as excessive tannins, bitterness, vegetal aromas, and microbial spoilage, all of which are much more easily handled using postmodern techniques. In place of these difficulties, new challenges emerge.
Several emerging practices direct our attention to wine’s reductive vigor. Picking ripe but not overripe (and the resulting phenolic reactivity), enhancing structural finesse through the practice of lees incorporation, and the use of organic principles with their resulting minerality all combine to produce wines with substantial life energy. On the positive side, these practices result in wines of structural integrity, liveliness on the palate, and graceful longevity. The downside, however, is substantial antioxidative vigor, which tends to impart youthful austerity and even reductive aromas, thus delaying release dates and cash flow. Youthful mean-spiritedness can be overcome by careful balancing of the wine’s energy.
HARMONY AND DISSONANCE
Much discussion in modern sensory science revolves around how subjects differ in salivary rates, taste bud densities, aroma and bitterness thresholds, and specific anosmias (aroma deafness). Postmodernism sees this work as important but asks for a balancing voice that recognizes shared experience. Subjects who differ in hearing acuities can still appreciate music together, and differences in visual acuities do not preclude appreciation of paintings and movies. The commonalities that individuals perceive, though more difficult to characterize, are essential to the artistic process.
Everyone perceives that a major chord is cheerful and a minor chord is melancholy, whereas played together, they constitute noise. As we shall see in chapter 11, there is strong evidence that the qualities of harmony and dissonance are as mutually perceived in wine as they are in music.
BEYOND THE LOW-HANGING FRUIT
In the chapters that follow, I explore each of these realms in more depth. Like any dogma, modern winemaking has solved the easy problems but left behind the more challenging ones. The postmodern notion is to return to a quest for technique based on human values rather than scientific principles, guided less by theory than by keen observation of what actually works. It is trial and error but assisted by modern tools. Eye on the prize: the elusive soulfulness, profundity, and harmony that consumers go crazy for and critics demand. To get there, it is time for less theory and more technique, care, and attention.
In retrospect,