Postmodern Winemaking. Clark Ashton Smith
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Richard Rorty famously observed, “Truth is simply a compliment paid to sentences seen to be paying their way.”6 This does not mean that the postmodern practitioner holds all points of view to be equally valid. One goes with what works. Truth is looked for in local functionality rather than in some universal objective reality.
The winemaker’s goals are not perfectly aligned with academic realities such as grants, tenure, and peer credibility. Chapter 12 acknowledges the debt owed by rationalists to the crackpot visionaries who have done the exploratory heavy lifting that has always preceded organized research.
Far from discarding the scientific tradition that has brought us so much knowledge and power, I seek to incorporate its most useful findings and approaches, the ones that prove coherent with our human goals. This book is not intended as a declaration of war on modern enology, or a wine technologist’s apologist diatribe against those earnest voices speaking out for Natural Wine, but rather as a love letter to all those who toil in and around winemaking, and an invitation to every person who has read this far to jump into the deep end. My hope is to convey a perspective that illuminates for each reader a path to your own truth and, more important, a useful model for making sense of the messages that wines themselves may transmit in connecting winemakers and wine lovers.
PART ONE
Principles
1
The Solution Problem
Progress has never been a bargain. You have to pay for it. Sometimes I think there’s a man who sits behind a counter and says, “Madam, you can have a telephone, but you’ll lose privacy, and the charm of distance. Mister, you may conquer the air; but the birds will lose their wonder, and the clouds will smell of gasoline.”
—Jerome Lawrence and Robert Edwin Lee, Inherit the Wind
Louis Pasteur’s 1857 discovery of yeast as the mechanism of fermentation ushered in a century of discovery in the new science of enology, replacing the trial-and-error approach of traditional winemaking. In 1880, research stations in Bordeaux and Davis, California, were established to apply the fruits of scientific advancement to modern winemaking.
The advent of electricity altered traditional winemaking forever. So welcome were the advantages in lighting, labor savings, and refrigeration that one would be hard pressed today to name a winery without electricity anywhere in the world. As time-honored methods and equipment were rapidly discarded, a holistic system painstakingly developed over millennia was abandoned in the wink of an eye.
As easy as it is to praise the advantages of these sweeping changes, there was a downside.
Replacing empirical systems with theoretical methods devalues hundreds of years of specific knowledge and practice, tending to bring a squeaky-clean sameness to all wine. Before electricity, much greater care and attention was devoted to every step of the winemaking process.
When twentieth-century tools such as stainless steel, inert gas, refrigeration, and sterile filtration became widely available for the first time just after World War II, a modern winemaking revolution exploded out of Germany. A completely new way of making Riesling—fresh, sterile-filtered, completely without oxidative characters—rapidly became the standard for white wine making throughout the world.
It is hard today to appreciate the impact of this new type of wine. Sterile filtration came about as a product of nuclear energy, for the first integrity-testable filters were etched in atomic piles. The idea of a light, sweet, fresh, fruity wine like Blue Nun was as world-changing as color television.
Not to be outdone, Bordeaux installed its own stainless steel, refrigeration, inert gas, and sterile filtration, creating new possibilities for fresh white wines and as many problems for reds when oxygen was declared its bogeyman. In The Taste of Wine,1 University of Bordeaux Oenology Faculty Director Emile Peynaud wrote in 1955 that “oxygen is the enemy of wine,” a “blunt definition” unfortunately often quoted out of context. Technical progress banished the old guard from the caves, replaced by followers of Peynaud’s solution chemistry–based scientific enology.
The modern approach spread from Germany first to Bordeaux and then across the ocean in the late 1950s. It sounded like a good idea at the time. In retrospect, it has become clear that using Riesling techniques on Cabernet led us away from red wine’s soulful, integrative properties. The 1961 Bordeaux vintage is still tough drinking even today. Who knew?
It was to take half a century before people once again recognized oxygen’s power to elaborate and refine structure. Without this knowledge, wines of normal maturity exhibited excessive reduction, malformed tannins, poor aromatic integration of vegetal, oak, and microbial notes, and unfortunate aging behavior. By the 1970s, the châteaux were coping by pressing fermentations early and stripping tannins with aggressive egg white fining, which resulted in drinkable styles that lacked depth. In the 1980s, Australia’s flying winemakers introduced extended hang time techniques to the South of France; this overcame reduction problems through field oxidation, leading to fruit-forward quaffs that enjoyed a fad in the United Kingdom and the United States.
The poor longevity of ultra-ripe experiments in the 1990s at prestigious properties in Bordeaux and Barolo, coupled with a sea change in enology from solution-model thinking to an appreciation of tannin structure through research undertaken at Montpellier, Bordeaux, and AWRI (Australian Wine Research Institute), led producers to consider a return to prewar practices.
In the late 1980s, the idea that good tannin structure was capable of integrating aromas began to be explored two hours south of Bordeaux in the tiny hamlet of Madiran, where modern vinification techniques had wrought disaster. If the postmodern movement has a father, it is a peasant vigneron named Patrick Ducournau, who toiled to discover what had gone so terribly wrong with the region’s traditional tannat variety. These huge, tannic wines had become incredibly dry, harsh, and prone to overt expression of microbial defects. His neighbors were busily tearing their tannat vines out and globalizing to merlot.
It was Ducournau’s genius to recognize the real problem: without the use of controlled oxidative polymerization, the art of building structure had been lost. Protecting tannat from oxygen was killing the wines. His development of micro-oxygenation was the first step toward reviving a methodology of élevage, a suite of practices devoted to the “raising up” of refined structure capable of supporting integration and soulfulness. The complete package eventually included an advanced understanding of the use of lees and a complete rethinking of the role of barrels.
THAT’S NO SOLUTION
Scientific enology starts with the idea that wine is a chemical solution. This simple, seemingly obvious statement guides all phases of modern winemaking. It also happens to be false.
Solution-based thinking has shaped our view of wine and how we work with it by bringing to bear the powerful tools of analytical chemistry, chemical engineering, and sensory science. If wine is a solution, its sensory properties derive from the concentrations of substances dissolved in solution. The greater its concentration in the liquid, the more intense that substance’s odor and taste. If this relationship is exactly linear, the solution is said to behave “ideally.”
If wine is a solution, the goal of grape growing must be to maximize good flavors and minimize bad ones. We have only to identify the substances involved and determine which are positive drivers and which are negative. More fruity, less veggie, and so forth.
If red color is dissolved in solution, the way to extract more of it from the skins is to work the cap in a gentle way, which maximizes color but prevents excessive harsh tannin extraction. High alcohol is viewed as increasing the solubility of red pigment.
Tannin is viewed as the price we have to pay for flavor, so we press as gently as possible (or just use free run) to minimize harshness and allow the palate access to fruity flavors. Everything in winemaking becomes about selective extraction.
If excessive harsh tannin is dissolved in wine, the way to decrease its sensory effect is to remove it through selective fining, taking care to minimize concomitant decreases in color and flavor.