Postmodern Winemaking. Clark Ashton Smith
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Google, but we do increasingly reexamine the hidden impact of these conveniences. (See chapter 16, “Pressing Matters,” for a humorous postmodern fable along these lines.)
Modern scientists view themselves as having shed allegiance to myth and superstition and believe that they have been trained to see the world rationally, as it “actually” is. After decades of dedicated study, they feel qualified to answer press inquiries, testify in legal actions, and serve on government task forces as reliable, dispassionate experts in their fields.
Postmoderns, in contrast, assert that science draws its legitimacy from myths of its own: the capacity of the rational mind to comprehend the natural world, the inevitability of progress, the universality of Nature’s laws, and the power and freedom inevitably gained by knowledge of them. In addition, every expert is seen as having an ax to grind, often tied to grant money, corporate patronage, or legal retainer. Knowledge is not seen as always good. Many would gladly return to a time before we obtained knowledge of the atom’s secrets or biology’s terrorist potential.
In their skepticism of modern science, postmoderns aspire to break down the wall between the professional and the amateur. In this book, I strive to address both groups by using language that is as simple as possible, but no simpler, respecting both the lay reader’s intelligence and the need for clarity, even seduction in my prose. I have often found that it is much easier for laypersons to relate to such postmodern winemaking concepts as structure, mineral energy, and soulfulness than it is for many professionals. Wine lovers are in fact often astounded to learn that these holistic terms are in professional disrepute, while concrete sensory component descriptors (e.g., berry, citrus, tar) are considered more relevant in academic circles.
APPLICATIONS TO WINEMAKING
In the eleven chapters of Part I, I articulate my own picture of postmodern winemaking, largely in technical language, though I’ve done my best to make my thinking accessible to a broad lay audience. For readers who have not made wine before, I recommend beginning by reading Appendix 1, “Winemaking Basics.” All readers should keep in mind the “Glossary of Postmodern Terminology” as well, particularly the interactive online version, for insight into technical expressions. There is merit in reading the online glossary from beginning to end, A to Z, taking advantage of the links.
In the following discussion I will elucidate the winemaking applications of postmodern techniques, including construction, deconstruction, and juxtaposition. In addition, I will explore the application to winemaking of such postmodern themes as environmentalism, collaboration, localized and transient truths, subjectivity, holism, transparency, authentic scientific inquiry, and courageous uncertainty.
Many postmodern art forms juxtapose disparate worldviews, often interweaving elements of high technology with classical aesthetics. Scandalously, my own work is characterized by a willingness to apply winemaking’s new power tools, some of which I invented, to the making of classic European styles, for which I am affectionately known in Natural Wine circles as Doctor Evil.
In my WineSmith Roman Syrah project, which Jamie Goode referred to in his insightful blog, wineanorak.com, as “the surprising juxtaposition of wine technology and natural wines,”1 I utilize high-tech tools as needed in order to make sulfite-free reds of wonderful aromatic expression and remarkable longevity. These tools include reverse osmosis (see chapter 18), which facilitates balanced wines of perfect ripeness and maximum antioxidative power and is useful to trim occasional volatile acidity. In creating a refined structure that can integrate microbial aromatics and stabilize tannins, I then routinely employ micro-oxygenation (MOx) (see chapter 3) in reds just after fermentation in order to exploit the very phenolic reactive power true ripeness imparts.
Any winemaker will tell you that serious discussions about wine begin and end in the vineyard. That is where the magic happens. It is the winemaker’s job, through skilled artisanal effort, to become invisible, the better to clear the way for the influences of provenance that are the sources of regional character: climate, soil, altitude, latitude, cultivar, vineyard practices and local social traditions.
I think winemakers get a bad rap. Yes, it’s our job to appear invisible, to stay out of the way of natural expression, but that involves a very intensive sort of doing nothing. The artisan, though ignorantly despised for his stealthy conjurings, remains the secret agent without whom all is lost, for it is through the skillful winemaker that apparently naked flavors of place become manifest in the glass with the same apparent ease and weightlessness that years of effort lend to the graceful, seemingly effortless fluidity of the prima ballerina. Naturalness in wine is an illusion borne of much study and struggle, and winemakers ought to be proud of what they do instead of pretending to do nothing.
We have come a long way from the ridicule and marginalization that initially greeted Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring in 1962. Millennials entering our industry today insist that environmentally friendly practices such as Integrated Pest Management can and must be the rule. While I am disappointed by many details of organic certification for U.S. wines, as I discuss in chapters 5, “Vineyard Enology,” and 8, “Speculations on Minerality,” I support the notion of living soil and believe that such vineyards not only support environmental concerns but also make better wine. I go on to propose the adoption of a similar philosophy in the cellar in chapter 10, “Integrated Brettanomyces Management.”
While I find that these “better wines” have more palate energy and dimensionality, are more resistant to oxidation, and hold up longer in the cellar, they also have their own special problems, which I discuss in chapter 7, “Redox Redux.” They are better in a technical sense, in the way that an athlete has a better body. But wines resulting from organic practices are not to everyone’s taste, and thus are in no universal sense ideal.
IDEAL WINES
Postmoderns question the utility and virtue of generalized universal truth discovered through rational inquiry and manifest in formulas, equations, and laws. Modern enology has been organized into a set of fundamental best practices that enable wines in commerce to be more dependable than ever before in history. Large corporate wineries with the marketing muscle to enter the three-tier distribution system (producer to distributor to retailer to consumer) are now able to put on retail shelves tremendous volumes of Merlots, Chardonnays, and Pinots that feature precise and consistent flavor profiles.
The triumph of modern standardization is that Annette Alvarez-Peters, chief wine buyer for Costco and one of the six most influential people in the wine world according to Decanter magazine,2 was able in 2012 to opine, quite correctly, that wine in Costco is a commodity no different from toilet paper. “In the end, it’s just a beverage. Either you like it or you don’t.”3
Costco restricts its offerings to 300 brands, less than a tenth of a percent of the wines on offer nationwide, with $1 billion in sales annually. Another force in U.S. wine sales is the mega-distributor Southern Wines and Spirits, which dominates U.S. distribution with fewer than 10,000 labels, a mere 5% of the total selection approved for sale by the U.S. Alcohol and Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau (TTB). These wines succeed in the three-tier system largely to the extent that they precisely fit the standardized model for flavor and packaging associated with their standard wine type. If they are “interesting,” they fail. Enologix, a highly paid Sonoma-based wine database enterprise, thrives through advising wineries how to scientifically reverse-engineer Wine Spectator scores, instructing winemakers how to make standardized wines that will garner top reviews.
If you’re looking for diversity, you will have to get in your Prius and seek it out. Despite rumors of its impending demise, there is another, separate wine industry with perhaps one hundred times the labels and one-hundredth the sales volume. But you have to go there.
Postmoderns focus on truths that are local, particular, and transient, and on honoring diversity and pluralism. What industry could more vividly embody these notions than the multiplicity of individual vineyards throughout the world? In vino veritas. Each terroir has its own truth, its own story to express in its own way. My work with AppellationAmerica.com’s Best-of-Appellation evaluations program seeks to compile a Blue Book that articulates the regional characteristics of all 312 appellations in North America so that we can move beyond varietal labeling to a consciousness