Postmodern Winemaking. Clark Ashton Smith
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wine is a solution, it can be sterile filtered without changing its sensory properties, removing particulates without affecting the solution.
In general, solution theory leads to an analytical (sometimes called “reductionist”) view that wine flavor is the sum of its pieces. Off-aromas are connected directly to root causes: horsey aromas require more microbial control; excessive woody notes lead us to use older barrels or shorter durations; veggie aromas mean pulling more leaves to minimize shade. To manage the whole, you manage the pieces. You break wine into its sensory constituents (using the Aroma WheelTM, for example) and figure out ways to amp up the good stuff and dial down the bad stuff. That’s quality improvement.
In the postmodern view, every one of these beliefs is injurious to wine quality.
There have long been hints that the solution model doesn’t work. Early anomalies included the sparing solubility of anthocyanins, wine’s red color compounds, reported by Pascal Ribéreau-Gayon in 1974.2 Beyond a light rosé color, it seems, red wine is theoretically impossible. My ultrafiltration work begun in the early 1990s showed that anthocyanins, which have molecular weights of around 300, will not pass through a filter with a porosity of 100,000.
“Ideal” solution behavior predicts that the concentration of a compound in solution corresponds to its aromatic intensity. But when we micro-oxygenate Merlot, its bell pepper aroma decreases without any change in its pyrazine content. Why do pyrazines, Brett characteristics, and oak components, even in very high concentrations, sometimes marry benignly in the aroma, yet in other wines stick out as annoying defects?
The solution model was a powerful starting point, one that led California winemakers out of a wilderness of largely defective wines in the ’60s to our present world of nearly defect-free wines. But aesthetically, we have hit the wall.
I may be going out on a speculative limb here, but I am convinced that wine used to be a lot more exciting. I believe that postwar modernization has cost us fifty years of clean and comparatively soulless wines. I believe that what we are drinking today is not the compelling beverage the Romans used to stabilize their empire. Those were free-range wines. Today, we hover over our wines like helicopter parents, shielding them from the essential experiences that develop depth, character, and strength.
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.” When I first encountered these quotations in the ’70s, I thought they were a bit over-the-top. There was no way to know for sure if wines had something more special in Stevenson’s and Franklin’s day, or if the rhetoric was simply of a different age. We are as ignorant of such wines today as the East Bloc, with no one old enough to remember prewar capitalism, was of free enterprise.
But today, if you look hard enough, there are many examples of postmodern wines that convincingly bear out these extravagant phrases. We will meet in future chapters a host of postmodern winemakers, and when we do, I urge you to seek out and try their wines as you read their views.
From two decades of postmodern retrospection, an aesthetic construct has emerged that not only holds the solution model to be false, but considers the extent to which a wine deviates from “ideal” behavior to be a pretty useful working definition of quality. Solution model behavior is not just incorrect; it is undesirable.
In the movie Annie Hall, Woody Allen’s character tells an old joke: “A guy walks into a psychiatrist’s office and says, ‘Doc, my brother thinks he’s a chicken.’ ‘Well, bring him in and we’ll put him on the couch and cure him,’ says the shrink. ‘I’d like to, Doc, but I need the eggs.’” This is the position of the winemaker with modern training who might consider letting go of the solution model. If manipulating concentrations isn’t effective, what will be the new way of working? The answer starts with a new language that interconnects the concepts of a structural model of wine and addresses the very human goals at the core of winemaking. In the rest of this chapter, I present the language distinctions that embody this alternative perspective.
To begin with, it takes some getting used to the idea that it’s okay that we don’t actually know what we’re doing.
FUNDAMENTAL MYSTERY
The new view begins by accepting that enology has fundamental limitations. As useful as modern winemaking has proven in eliminating gross defects, it has done little to promote excellence. Its central tenet is that a clean wine will show varietal character. This is fine for Muscato, but when it comes to great reds—pardon me while I yawn.
Winemaking is really just a branch of cuisine—the ultimate slow food. Our job is not to explain but to delight. If music is any indication, the ways of the human psyche are often unpredictable and quite nonlinear (see chapters 11 and 25 for more on these ideas). In chapter 21, I’ll explore the hilarious clash of Biodynamics and science to illustrate this theme more thoroughly.
AROMATIC INTEGRATION, REFINED STRUCTURE
A 2005 review by Roy et al. in Materials Research Innovations hammers home the point that the properties of systems depend less on their composition than on their structure.3 In Japanese samurai swords, hard and soft steel are folded like puff pastry until there are millions of layers in the blade, resulting in steel that is flexible yet holds an edge. A lump of coal, a graphite tennis racket, and a diamond are all 100% carbon, but their sensory properties are entirely different because of how the atoms are structurally arranged. Consider the house you live in. The agreeability of your home’s architecture depends less on how many bricks it contains than on the way they are put together.
Structured foods like bisques, reduction sauces, and emulsions are at the core of great cuisine. Aromatic integration is how sauces work, and why the saucier is the most important chef in a French kitchen. A great béarnaise doesn’t smell of tarragon, mint, fresh onion, and vinegar; it just smells like béarnaise. The finer the emulsion, the more surface area between the fatty beads of butter and the aqueous phase that surrounds them, so in a great sauce there can be square miles of interactive surface in a tablespoon. The result is aromatic integration, because the intimate contact of fatty and aqueous regions provides close contact for the diverse flavor components.
I like to think of wine structure as similar to that of a samurai sword. Swords need two conflicting properties: the ability to hold an edge (conferred by the hardness of high-carbon steel) and the flexibility not to chip and break (conferred by soft, low-carbon steel). Around seven centuries ago, Japanese swordsmiths hit on the idea to weld together both kinds of steel, which resulted in a bar that could be sharpened on one side and had a flexible back. Then they found that a better blade, one that had both properties, could be made if they flattened and folded the blade several times. A blade with four folds, for example, would have sixteen (24) layers. The finest blades had as many as four million layers, held an edge forever without sharpening, and were also unbreakable.
In structured wines, similarly, tannins, anthocyanins, and other aromatic ring compounds, which are almost insoluble in solution, aggregate into colloids—tiny beads of various sizes and compositions. It is this fine colloidal structure that allows interaction between the aqueous and phenolic regions in a wine, blending the aromatic properties as if the wine were home to all things.
Winegrowing choices at every stage have profound consequences for the textural and integrative properties of these colloids, as well as their stability. The way the wine feels on the palate, the soulfulness of the aroma, and its longevity in the cellar are all determined by the wine’s colloidal structure. (The brilliant work of Patrick Ducournau and his colleagues at Oenodev in developing tools and methodologies to enhance structure is described in chapters 3 and 4.)
The fineness of a great sauce is the source of our word finesse. Wines with finesse feel good. Their unified flavors are able to touch us deeply by soothing the thalamus in the midbrain, creating a sense of harmony, peace, viscerality, and profundity. (The phenomenon of harmony and its strongly shared nature is explored more fully in chapter 11.)
Figure 1 depicts in cartoon form the notion of aromatic integration. The first panel