Postmodern Winemaking. Clark Ashton Smith
some of wine’s obvious and important behaviors have been completely overlooked. Don’t you think somebody should have told me in college that a cabernet, on the day it completes fermentation, can consume fifty times the oxygen a barrel can give it, yet three months later only a twelfth as much? The fact that wines in general vary a thousandfold in their individual oxygen uptake capacity is pretty big news. The observation that ambience, particularly background music, completely alters wine balance has vast implications for wine appreciation and for the work of sommeliers.
The regimented thinking of modern enology has much to answer for. Yet we would be foolish to abandon the innovations and insights of the past century. Instead, we need simply to place recent gains of knowledge in their proper humble context. Technology has given us power tools, and now, like any craftsman, we want to understand how and when to use them, and what their dangers are. As a first step, we must become intimately familiar with the surprising attributes of our base material, the subject of the coming chapters.
TAKE-HOME MESSAGES
Louis Pasteur’s 1857 discovery of yeast as the mechanism of fermentation ushered in a century of scientific discovery for winemakers.
Neither boomers nor millennials have experienced wine as Stevenson’s “bottled poetry” or Ben Franklin’s “proof that God loves us and desires us to be happy.”
Wine has qi, life energy. When it is young, it is best served so as to exchange qi with the world around it. When it is old, it must guard its qi.
2
Creating the Conditions for Graceful Aging
Every wine has one of three purposes: to delight, to impress, or to intrigue. Generous, pleasant wines make us smile (the “yummy” style). Big, impactful wines with aggressive tannins and high alcohol are designed to blow us away (the “wow!” style). These styles have grown in popularity in recent years, paralleling the trend in cinema, with comedy and action/adventure films now surpassing dramas in popularity.
Box office receipts have waned for the third style: wines that make us think. Distinctive wines-of-place that call on us to ponder new experiences are not the rage. Yet these wines represent the core aesthetic that makes wine special. Distinctive wines of place carry the torch (we might call these the “hmmmm . . .” style or perhaps the “Aha!” style) for the entire wine industry, and without them, we might just as well drink vodka. They don’t run with the traffic, and that is their appeal. When you serve them, expect way more head scratching than giggling.
While Internet chatter about the importance of this type of wine far exceeds the public’s interest as expressed in dollars spent, it’s the genre most winemakers get in the game to make, and also their path to being taken seriously by sommeliers and critics. And although these are not the grocery store commodity wines that move all those boxes, distinctive wines-of-place produced in tiny quantities in every corner of North America today make up the overwhelming majority of wine labels.
I like the term wines of discovery for these wines, whose purpose is not to shoot your basket but rather to make you dribble down to their end of the court. Here you are in the age of convenience, encountering wines that need age. Balls. Now you have to go out and rent cellar space.
The test of time is an important dimension of these wines of discovery. The pursuit of enhanced maturity allows us to choose between making vins de garde, which achieve greatness after extensive aging but are troublesome in the cellar, and vins d’impact, well-behaved young musts that require little attention and are easily bottled in youth but lack longevity and distinctiveness.
Every wine has a trajectory in time. If wine were baseball, a fruit-forward vin d’impact would be a pop fly, compared to a line drive reserve-style vin de garde. Generally, the better a wine tastes in youth, the shorter its life expectancy. Every winemaker would love to produce wines that drink well both in youth and with age, and widening the arc of a wine’s trajectory is certainly the winemaker’s Holy Grail. It is also an attempt to defy gravity.
The wise winemaker chooses the wine’s purpose early on. Choices favoring one or another style begin in the vineyard years before harvest, starting with its location and varietal selection and culminating in harvest maturity decisions. In recent years, many techniques have been developed in both the vineyard and the cellar that can push wines into early affability or instead increase longevity and profundity. With skill, and to a limited extent, it is possible to do both.
The aim of postmodern winemaking is to capture what Nature has put in a vineyard’s grapes and present it with grace and balance. As a branch of cuisine, winemaking, the ultimate slow food, has much in common with the making of sauces, because the soulfulness of flavor integration is a result of refining its structure. Granted, wine is not an emulsion like mayonnaise: the particles that make up the structure of a wine are not tiny beads of oil but instead are made up of phenolic chains that aggregate into tiny globs called colloids. But in both cases, the particles’ shape and size affects their power to integrate flavors. For this reason, wine’s texture is strongly related to its aroma.
Control of tannin polymerization is a central postmodern skill. Small, stable colloids not only impart finesse and soulfulness in youth, but they also prolong wine’s longevity. Poorly formed tannins precipitate readily over time. When this happens, just as in the curdling of a sauce, aromatic integration is lost. Elements previously married become individually apparent, resulting in wine that seems over-oaked, vegetal, or Bretty. Wines with well-formed structure can carry much higher concentrations of these aromatic elements without offending the nose.
The willful formation of structural integrity by the winemaker is termed by the French élevage, and successful wines are said to have race, or good breeding. Like all good cooking, élevage methods require training and attention to detail. Good structure begins in the vineyard with vine balance.
Winemakers will always say they do the minimum. Try that on your three-year-old. Still, a good winemaker, like a good parent, strives to become invisible. The final product must sing its song of place, and the skill of the winemaker, like that of a good piano tuner, should go unnoticed.
CONNECTING THE DOTS
Over the past two decades, a picture of the nature of wine structure has slowly emerged that we will explore throughout this book. While much of this mental construct lacks direct confirmation, the same could be said for many embodiments of modern science such as the Periodic Table of Elements, which lacked direct evidence in its first hundred years. It has been my privilege since 1997 to work closely with Patrick Ducournau’s OenoDev group, based in Madiran (Hautes-Pyrénées), who painstakingly knit together a working hypothesis that guides postmodern practice by combining empirical observations of many thousands of wines with recent advances in phenolic chemistry, largely centered at Montpellier under Michel Moutounet and Véronique Cheynier but also involving the Australian Wine Research Institute’s Tannin Project and work at UC Davis by Roger Boulton on copigmentation and polymerization studies by his colleague Doug Adams, all founded on Vernon Singleton’s life’s work on phenolic oxidation, the focus of chapter 6.
I was able to contribute to this brain trust Vinovation’s trials with ultrafiltration, through which we obtained direct evidence of noncovalent bonding that empowered investigations of colloidal behavior in red wine. Through my consulting work, I have also had the opportunity to road test the emerging theory by working with hundreds of winemakers and thousands of wines over the past decade and a half.
I am the first to concede that this view of wine structure is little more than a useful working construct, but I have found in it substantial utility for guiding winemaking decisions. Scientific verification is not the engine of progress in winemaking today; it is the caboose. As in any cooking technique, empirical successes initially drive theory. What follows, therefore, is probably not true in all its elements. But there is no doubt of its usefulness as a guiding schema.
BUILDING BETTER WINE
Tannins already exist in the ripe berry skins and seeds as polymers. Much attention has been focused on the ingenious and laborious work done at Montpellier on