Postmodern Winemaking. Clark Ashton Smith
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with perception, art, and language. Novice wine drinkers have a very different, one might say, a purer, sensory experience of what is in the glass than trained professionals do. As they try more wines, they naturally accumulate a growing vocabulary to parse their experience as they connect, through their own invention and through instruction, colors and flavors with sources such as varietal characteristics, oak, microbial activity, and aging. When tied to a wine genre, usually sprung from a European antecedent, this language may allow agreement with other tasters and a capacity to rate quality in the context of accepted style rules.
But these are human cultural constructs that quickly come to dominate perception itself. In appellations with well-established style traditions, wines are experienced through the lens of local custom. As with English speakers in rural Scotland, New Jersey, or the Deep South who do not perceive themselves as speaking with accents, the locally familiar becomes invisible.
It is only when compared to other regions that the local becomes colorful or eccentric. Just as television-speak occurring as a global unaccented standard renders local dialects peculiar, quaint, or even unintelligible, so today have globally distributed “expected” styles of Merlot, Chardonnay, and Riesling restricted the commerciality of small local producers in climatically unique areas. Global styles are not the pinnacle of quality; they provide consistency at the risk of a boring uniformity that has led to a recent appetite for diversity. Sorting among these wines with no fixed standards to guide us is a considerable challenge from which established reviewers such as the Wine Advocate and the Wine Spectator have, for the most part, shrunk from leadership. The coming-of-age of a surprising panoply of well-made wines from regions throughout the New World calls for a shift to a postmodern mind-set that respects and celebrates diversity. The theme of the birthing pains of New World identity is explored more fully in chapter 24.
Hans-Georg Gadamer’s hermeneutics concerns itself with the way language arises as individuals experience art in a social context and maps the interplay of experience, thought, and language, threading a path that accepts both the objective reality of Enlightenment thinking and each individual’s unique creative interaction with that reality. The wine exists, but each person’s experience of it is unique, subject to personal interpretation, the opinions of peers, and the context, sometimes sterile, often romantic, in which it is served. Without question, the surest way to appreciate a wine is to share a glass with the winemaker at its place of origin.
LEVELS OF UNKNOWING
Jean-François Lyotard proclaimed in his seminal work, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, that “postmodernity is not a new age, but the rewriting of some of the features claimed by modernity, and first of all modernity’s claim to ground its legitimacy on the project of liberating humanity as a whole through science and technology.”4 I have drawn much from my scientific training at MIT and Davis and receive regular thanks from winemakers for having applied it to the general benefit of our industry. I want to state definitively that I am entirely in favor of the courageous, skeptical inquiry that science represents. I am not anti-science, any more than I am anti-Christmas, but I am saddened by the commerciality and autocracy that today characterize both. I love enology and would like to see its practitioners clean up their game. I am anti-hubris and anti-arrogance but pro-humility and pro-inquiry.
The proper place for science in postmodern winemaking is in service to the winemaker’s true purpose: to bottle something that when opened months or decades later satisfies human appreciation. It is clear that science has made tremendous advances, but still it must be admitted that our glass of knowledge is far from half full. Our ignorance can be parsed into three categories.
1 Uncollected information: that which we know we don’t know but have yet to discern, investigate, or verify.
2 Invisible ignorance: that which we have not the language even to ask questions about, let alone delve for answers to, restricted as we are by our fixed way of thinking. Richard Feynman said that to see the limitations of current science we need look no further than the mysteries of fluid flow in a pipe.5 Physicists will tell you that their work is so bizarre that the mind really cannot grasp it; instead we retreat into mathematics and machine calculations for our predictions. If we build machines that grind out accurate predictions, can we then claim these as prizes of science, when in truth they are not really within our grasp?
3 The experiential imponderable: that which is either fundamentally mysterious or otherwise unknowable. Scientific understanding works from underlying generalities, so it is not experiential in nature. It can state how to construct a major chord but cannot explain why it is cheerful while a minor chord is melancholy. It can explain why the rain precipitates but cannot capture the apprehension of autumn’s first rainfall under an ancient elm with a special someone.
These lyrical, disorderly, unscientific phrasings point to a different kind of truth, a human truth, the apprehension of which is critical to the human condition and not at all the business of science. The actual experience of drinking wine falls into this category and cannot be published, posted, or televised.
The postmodern respect for diversity is also a characteristic of our craft. Each winery is its own separate world, which is what makes them so much fun to visit one by one on a day’s outing.
I offer no formulations for making wine, nor do I advocate any particular tools. Although I describe the use of oxygen (chapter 3), barrels and oak alternatives (chapter 4), alcohol adjustment (chapter 17), many uses of membranes (chapter 18), flash détente (chapter 19), and yeast inoculation (chapter 23), I present these for winemakers to consider in their own unique situations, as items in their tool kits, and for lay readers better to understand what they are and why we might use them.
If critics are no longer trusted as arbiters of right action, postmodern practitioners need to explain their reasoning in making their winemaking choices. I recommend that you never use a tool that you are unwilling to disclose. This is really what is meant by manipulation. If you know a wine will improve by lowering its alcohol content with reverse osmosis, be a mensch (you too, ladies) and own up to it, explain yourself—and make the better wine. Until we stop sweeping our best work under the rug, we will forever be under the lash of poorly informed, ill-intentioned paparazzi.
My own bent is neoclassical. I make very Pauillac-like Cabernet Sauvignon; Cabernet Franc in a style somewhere between Graves and St. Emilion; a minerally Chardonnay that I call Faux Chablis; and a sulfite-free Roman Syrah. I pick my grapes ripe but not overripe and will, if needed, lower alcohol content, usually below 14%, with reverse osmosis. I generally like to structure my reds with Phase 1 micro-oxygenation. My goals are to show that California grapes are very well suited to European styles and that they are capable of great longevity if properly balanced.
Not all postmodern thought seeks to recapture the wisdom of the ancients, but in wine there is every reason to attempt to do so. Winemaking is far, far older than our knowledge of chemistry and microbiology, and no inquiring mind can remain incurious about what our antecedents knew that we have lost.
Indeed, the most radical and exciting activity in winemaking today is the rediscovery in post-Soviet Georgia—where the technique originated—and other hot spots as widespread as Friuli and Brooklyn, of the ancient method of burying, for many months or even as long as a decade, sealed clay qvevri (giant earthenware vessels) filled with white grapes, skins, seeds, and stems.
The premodern classic eras in which European appellations established their characteristics are creative bedfellows with postmodernism’s challenges to contemporary convention. Like grandparents and grandchildren, they are united against a common enemy.
You have already seen my definition of postmodern winemaking: “the practical art of connecting the human soul to the soul of a place by rendering its grapes into liquid music.” I know this sounds limp-wristed at first glance. My goal in this book is to persuade the reader to embrace this definition as a down-to-earth working mandate that directs our daily endeavors.
A final key element of postmodern thought is a willingness not to know. It would be a sad waste of time for me to attempt to replace the fallacies of my modern forerunners with pontifications of my own. I am quite sure that this book contains nothing