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2006 Harvest Oddities

Another odd year.  It seems like they all are.  After the intense early September heat of 2004 and the extreme cold of 2005, we’ve seen our share of recent physiological peculiarities in California fruit.  But Nature continues to find new motifs with which to toy with us and test our mettle.

 

To be sure, vintage variation in California occurs within a much narrower range than the wild fluctuations typical of France and Germany.  We do not follow the Eurocentric philosophy of planting varieties at the northern extreme of ripening potential, nor are we much subject to the dilution and rot associated with autumnal rainfall.

 

On the other hand, we do irrigate.   Our European friends warn us that this keeps roots near enough to ground level that vines appear to be more subject to climate proclivities.  Here and there, California vineyardists have eschewed irrigation.  Besides all those old vine zinfandels, we see more contemporary successes (Christian Moueix forbids it at Dominus, for example), but by and large the yields from irrigated vines barely permit Napa growers to pay their mortgages on ridiculously overpriced real estate.  In Europe, more often the place is already paid for.

 

So in July of 2006, California got hit with merciless heat — in excess of 100^oF for three solid weeks.  This was actually the best possible time in terms of fruit condition, well after berry set and well before veraison.  Foliage was sufficiently developed to shade these nascent clusters, and little sunburn is apparent.  Most vineyards seemed outwardly to have dodged the bullet.

 

But now we are seeing some odd manifestations as the fruit begins to mature.  Some are quite variable across the State – in some Lodi vineyards, brix seems alarmingly retarded, perhaps because a portion of the fruit, falling prey to the stress of July, stopped maturing altogether.  In other Lodi cabernet vineyards we see 26 brix while acid remains high and flavors undeveloped.  In one North Coast Viognier picked in late August we saw such low acid that the pH was 4.5 – almost impossibly high.

 

These variations are probably explained by the differences in timing of the hot spell vis a vis the maturity status and water availability in various plots.  But there are three bizarre effects which are repeated by everyone I talk to: 

            1.  Low tannin

            2.  Low vegetal flavors

            3.  Bland

 

The third is probably an artifact of the first two – fruit aromas do not develop until nearer to harvest.  Tannins do not increase during maturity, and are critical for color extraction, so smart winemakers will be getting out their bag of tricks, each with a different strategy:  “seigné,” (bleeding off juice), co-fermenting with tannic varietals like Carignane or even the skins of tannic whites like Chenin Blanc, various oak products in the fermenter, and above all, trying to solve the riddle of proper hang time.

Good Structure as the Key to Soulfulness

In a recent interview, the question came up “I know you’ve talked about how the German theory of wine doesn’t really apply to red wine, but I’m curious to know a bit more of the why behind that. What about red wine makes cold stabilization and sterile filtration undesirable, and why isn’t white wine affected in the same way? I assume it’s connected to the larger, more complicated molecules in red wine, but I’m curious about the mechanics.” I thought it was a good question which others might be interested in hearing about, as it probes the true nature of wine.First I’ll mention that the line isn’t really between red and white, but between structured and unstructured wines. Many whites (such as Faux Chablis, or method champenoise champagnes) have a lot of colloidally suspended material.But we know the idea of macromolecular structure must be correct for all red wine, because the anthocyanins which give red wine its color are not very soluble in a 13% alcohol: 87% water solution. The maximum you can get to dissolve results in a light pink solution. This puzzled enologists for many years since Ribereau-Gayon first pointed it out in the ’60’s.

We now know that the color molecules aren’t dissolved at all — they’re contained in tiny pieces of goodge we call colloids, which are sometimes almost as big as a bacterial cell. If we disrupt these particles with sterile filtration or drag them down to the tank bottom during cold stabilization, we lose texture but also we lose the aromatic integration properties they impart to wine. I believe this integrative phenomenon is central to wine’s ability to provide a soulful, visceral experience.

In a simple solution, these problems don’t exist. The precipitation of bitartrate or the filtration of bacteria doesn’t effect the concentration or aromatic expression of, say, the terpenes which give riesling its fruity, flowery flavors. But neither do these wines prompt the same mysterious soulfulness. Their focused fruit can be lip-smackin’ delicious, but people who say a wine’s first duty is to be red are looking for something more substantial than focused fruitiness. This is the same reason bisque is generally preferred over consommé.

Enough is too much

In the August 2006 edition of The Wine Spectator, we see once again the old armchair viticulturist refrain regarding crop yield that less is always more.  James Laube’s assessment of the 2005 vintage is that it should be a good vintage, but he finds that its size casts that into doubt.  Putting aside that the record crop is mostly based on record bearing acreage rather than high yields per acre, I contend that in many cases, (Napa Cabernet being the most glaring), quality suffers mainly from undercropping. 

Vines distribute their energy between crop maturity and vegetal growth depending on the number of fruitful buds which the pruner leaves and which survive spring rain and frost as fertilized clusters.  Less fruit means more leaves, more shade.  Shaded clusters tend to have poor color and vegetal flavors.  Undercropping also increases berry size and flavor dilution.

We’d have less need of RO’s to concentrate flavor if we understood vine balance better.  We’d also pay less for these improved wines if that pricey Napa acreage were put to more efficient use.  Meantime maybe the 2005’s can be given credit for what they are without worry that they’re not actually as good as they taste.

Pinocchio: It Takes One to Know One

How’s your Italian?  The latest phrase to learn: “Pinocchio Wine.”  This refers to a new Italian political movement “to protect the industry against artificial ageing techniques,” by which they mean use of oak chips.   

After serving a decade with the OIV Groupe d’Expertes Sur la Technologie du Vin, I can assure you that wine purity through effective regulation is not the Italian way.  That would be the French.  The Italian way is (surprise!)…LOOKIN’ GOOD!   

If they really believe these techniques produce bad wine, then they have nothing to fear, as consumers will continue to choose their superior wines, no? 

What’s behind this Rush Limbaugh-esque coinage?  Why, it’s plain, old-fashioned, protectionism.  That’s right, unfair trade. 

Italy has made a name for itself for making good value wine. Rivers of good cheap Gavi, Greco, Chianti, and, of course, Pinot Grigio have flowed from
Italy’s ports for decades. Bravo!  But now a few of them have gotten a bit lazy.   

The wine industry has moved forward, and wine continues to improve throughout the world.  As the Old World looks for a protectionist edge, what could be more simple than to demonize progress?  They’ve been around longer, and are looking for ways to exploit those highly touted venerable traditions  There should be a law or something. 

The truth is that an air-dried, carefully toasted oak chip gives much more predictable flavor extraction than a barrel.  Barrels suffer from the Forrest Gump Box-of-Chocolates Syndrome – you never know what you’re gonna get.  Well-made chips give winemakers more control at a fraction of the cost to the consumer and to the environment.  That is why even the greatest and most expensive wines in the world now use them.  And that is why the industry moved on:  better, cheaper, more control makes sense in any language. 

Napoleon planted those forests for the French Navy of the future – a useable tree is 200 years old.  Environmentalists take note:  insisting on barrels extends the current practice of wasting 75% of the good, useable wood.  So we cut down those forests at four times the needed rate in order to make poorer, more expensive wine to boot.  Why?  No reason except…LOOKIN’ GOOD!                                                                                                                       What’s artificial about an oak chip?  A better question: What’s traditional about a conventional Italian winery?  Let’s see ‘em ban electricity, stainless steel, refrigeration and freeze-dried yeast.  Doesn’t the consumer have a right to know about pesticides, enzymes, wine chemical additions, fining agents and inert gas?  Oops!  Wrong demons.  Sorry. 

In taking this position, the Italian politicians’ long wooden nose is growing.  Italians were the first Europeans to begin experiments with chips and other oak adjuncts.  Bravo!  Their scheming politicians should leave Italian winemakers alone.

In response to Eric Asimov on sweetness of California wines

Heated discussion ensued in response to Eric Asimov’s indictment of California wines for what he termed ”sweetness.” (See http://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/19/dining/19pour.html?_r=2&oref=slogin&oref=slogin) 

A large number of responses ensued, defending our honor.

The missing element in this discussion is the importance of mineral energy.  Old world wines currently outshine their New World counterparts by manefesting an energetic “back end,” a finish full of drive, race, nerve which gives an overall impression of completeness, breeding and depth.  This is often confused with acidity, but that energy is in the front of the palate.

It’s increasingly clear to me from many experiments that minerality in the finish is associated with living soil.  I believe Claude Bourguignon’s contention that mycorrhizal fungi associated with vine rootlets can facilitate uptake of trace minerals which the vine itself cannot import.  This requires a complete soil ecology including healthy covercrop and earthworms.  You have only to taste the difference between a hydroponic tomato and one from your garden to grasp the importance of living soil.

In areas lacking summer rainfall, Californians and South Australians need to work at living soil much harder than the French or even vineyards of Long Island or Niagara.  And only a few well informed banks and tourists realize the importance of “weeds” — hence the manicured, freshly disked, pesticided appearance of most Napa vineyards.

The resulting simplicity and shallowness in our corporate wines, combined with the hotness and bitterness which elevated alcohol imparts (see my blog grapecrafter.com) leaves many New World wines lacking in ways you point to.  They may enter the mouth with delightful rich fruit, only to fall flat half way across the palate.  But as California winemakers catch on to this aspect, our wines are beginning to manifest the sense of nobility and breeding we expect from the French, together with the inimitable American spirit of expressiveness and generosity.   Look around some, and taste our future.

God’s Country

California winemaking gives me the creeps.  And I’m not alone.  Everything winemakers do is completely dependent on hispanic labor.  Yet we treat these people like animals. 

You have no idea.  When I negotiate a sale of a piece of Napa real estate to be converted to vineyards, the first thing we do, before the D9’s can fell trees and rip land, is to hire Mexicans to hand-carry out the bedsprings (which foul the backhoes of the machinery) left behind by the displaced tenants. 

 Upwards of 20,000 migrants are employed in North Coast farming (and not a lot of locals want to horn in on their jobs).  Thanks to high visibility initiatives by good-hearted corporations like Beringer-Blass and Kendall Jackson, low income housing is now in place for nearly 10% of the need.  The rest sleep in the woods.  No kidding.

When I was winemaker for R.H.Phillips in Yolo County, I had an employee of several years who chose to return to Mexico because the dental work there was a better deal.  A month later he was deposited at 3 AM on my partner’s doorstep by a “coyote” human smuggler who offered to beat him to death with a baseball bat if we didn’t produce $3,000 cash on the spot, compensation for redelivering him to “God’s Country.” 

 This is the sea we winemakers all swim in.  We don’t speak of it.  We hear the contraversy raging around immigration, and we just want to lay low and sell some $50 cabernet.

Time for truth. 

I feel Americans are being conned, imagining that jobs are lost when these hardworking yet humble people sneak across the border to make our lives work.  On the one hand, these people would much rather work in their own country, in their ancestral home. 

But until their own agriculture stabilizes, we are privileged to access their skilled expertise and hard work as the lynchpin of our winegrowing enterprise. 

God blesss them for it.  Heaven knows no white man will pick our grapes.

Ageworthiness and alcohol level

I was asked whether there’s any truth to the assertion that high alcohol wines don’t age very well. To summarize what we know about ageworthiness, we should recognize two distinct realms where observations have been made. One is that, on the whole, wines with high alcohol tend to have higher overall ripeness. There is much experience and scientific understanding to verify that these wines age poorly. But this tendency is not universal, because brix and ripeness are only loosely connected. Secondly, we have a small body of experience and research which suggests that alcohol itself somewhat hastens ageing in otherwise identical wines.

A key distinction must be made between a wine’s alcohol level and the state of ripeness of the grapes, which leads to the compositional status of the resulting wine. Alcohol level is closely related to the brix at harvest unless the wine has been adjusted: add any additional alcohol from chaptalization or fortification, minus any alcohol which may have been removed by the various existing mechanical processes such as reverse osmosis or spinning cone.

Fruit ripeness is only loosely related to the grape’s sugar content. Depending on the climate in which grapes are grown, and particularly the weather at harvest, grapes may reach the same state of compositional ripeness (color, flavor, tannin status) at anywhere from 20 to 30 degrees brix. The low numbers are common in France, and in fact in many parts of Germany, 20 brix is considered late harvest for riesling. In California, which lacks autumnal rainfall, riesling often doesn’t reach the same degree of ripeness until the high 20’s, and cabernet is typically also picked between 25 and 27 brix. But in a cool year like 1999 or 2005, much California fruit got overripe by hanging too long while winemakers were waiting for these numbers.

Overripe red wines lack fresh aromas, have low reductive strength, develop pruney aromas and fail to age well. In technical terms, the degree of oxidative polymerization of the tannins has proceeded on the vine to an excessive extent. It might be said that the wine has run down the chemical battery it normally uses to protect itself from oxygen during ageing in barrel and in bottle and to defend itself from oxygen-loving microbes like Acetobacter, or vinegar bacteria. High ripeness also tends to be associated with high pH, which is the “gas pedal” of ageing, and controls the rate of oxidation of many wine constituents. Such “over the hill” wines tend to brown early and their tannins dry out — that is, they become grainy and move from the top of the tongue to under the tongue and into the cheeks, giving a dirty impression which obscures flavor perception. The tannins have essentially curdled, and just like a botched bearnaise sauce, they fail to integrate aromas. As a consequence these wines show, along with oxidative notes of caramel and prune, also disjointed aromas of oak, vegetal notes and microbial smells, which then protrude in the nose in unpleasant disarray.

On the other hand, sometimes grapes achieve very high brix without these problems. A case in point is the 1999 CSU Fresno Syrah in our study, which came in on September 17th at 31 brix, but possessed fresh blueberry aromas and fine, firm tannin, and is still drinking quite well today. So high alcohol per se does not necessarily indicate overripeness. This wine was, however, quite hot on the palate, and the high level of alcohol caused a bitterness in the finish and also exacerbated the astringency of the tannins. When we adjusted the alcohol down to the normal range, these imbalances disappeared, and the wine did well in competitions and aged well.

Not so the unadjusted 18% wine, which more rapidly developed raisiny notes, browning, and oxidation. A dozen or so trials over the years have shown us that high alcohol wines develop differently than their counterparts in which we have reduced the alcohol, wines with exactly the same composition of color, flavor and tannin. We often see zinfandels developing raisiny notes more rapidly at higher alcohol, for example.

We don’t know why this is happening. A possible explanation may stem from the fact that at higher alcohol, wine has a greatly diminished dialectic constant — the driving force of water to “herd” phenolics into the colloids. These tiny tarry bead-like gobs hold most of the color and tannin in red wine. They also provide a protective zone for many aromatic compounds to insinuate themselves inside. I can only speculate that the decreased stability of these colloids at higher alcohol exposes these hidden aromatics to oxidative attack.

San Diego Reader on GrapeCraft vs hang time

You need good eggs from the chicken, but don’t ask her to scramble them for you…http://www.sdreader.com/published/2005-07-21/crush.html

The Communality Paradox

This weekend Napa Valley has hosted the 2006 Symposium of the Institute of Masters of Wine.  One of the most stimulating speakers was a chap under whom I studied Sensory Science at UC Davis, Dr. Michael O’Mahoney, a thoughtful and erudite chap who also brings his training as a Shakespearean actor to the lecture hall, and is never boring. 

Michael doesn’t run with the traffic in sensory circles, and has for decades attempted to set the record straight about taste perception by digging into the literature to expose the shallow roots of the Basic Tastes theory.   Most scientists will tell you that until recently, studies had shown that there are four basic tastes into which the tongue discriminates all stimuli (not counting texture, which is touch, and volatile flavors, which are actually retro-nasal aromas).  Some have added a fifth, umami or meatiness.  Michael that there is not nor ever was a shred of evidence for basic tastes.  His own research reveals that there are hundreds, perhaps thousands of tastes: potassium doesn’t taste like sodium, sulfate is a little bitter and a little salty and a little umami, and so forth.  Poor fellow has been crying alone in the wilderness for decades while lecturers and authors go right on harping on Basic Tastes — so much for scientific progress.

Dr. O’Mahoney offered up a fascinating discussion of human sensory foibles.   His talk hadn’t changed much since I first heard it 24 years ago, but neither has his subject.  Through optical illusions and other perceptive illustrations, he showed how the mind adjusts perception to enhance what it thinks is true.  Sometimes we fool ourselves through attributes in our hardware; other times our personal experiences program us to respond differently from our fellows.

Mike was flanked by three other notables, who together presented a picture of the nature of human perception which contained some disturbing, and to my mind, somewhat misleading observations if taken by themselves, hence this blog:  Dr. Charles Wysocki of the Monell Chemical Senses Institute, the very entertaining author and anthropologist Lionel Tiger (who coined the term “male bonding” and gave us The Pursuit of Pleasure, a seminal book on behavioral positives), and Gallo’s consumer czarina, Jennifer Wiseman, who organizes consumer behavior in Gallo’s direction with crisp professionalism.  

Dr. Wysocki, who has vast experience with smell and taste, demonstrated how different each of us is in our specific anosmic fingerprint – the pattern of smell “deafness” to individual chemical compounds each of us possesses.  When you marry those notions with O’Mahoney’s, you can easily end up with a depressing picture of making wine that’s generally considered delicious as a hopeless attempt to shoot baskets in the dark.

This does not reflect my experience. We’ve done our “sweet spot” trials on thousands of wines, and we find very strong agreement on what is harmonious.  Most of the time there are multiple sweet spots, hence two or three allowable possibilities for a style to market. But which are the harmonious possibilities and where the dissonant, harsh, aromatically impure wines position themselves is something on which we get very good agreement.

When I am adrift in such a philosophical sea as this concerning a question about wine, when I need to get sanely grounded, I ask myself the identical question about music.  Do we all have different hearing acuities?  Absolutely!  Does our varied experience teach us to react differently to auditory stimuli than others might? Sure. Like when a car backfired and my roommate raised in Connecticut ran to the window while the one from Newark dove under the table.  And for certain, we all have different musical style preferences.

But when the piano is a bit out of tune, everybody leaves the bar – most without knowing why.  Everybody gets it that a major chord is happy and a minor chord is melancholy.  And that the two played together give you not sweetness but dissonance.  We all carry special detailed knowledge of what is harmonious, and we don’t need to be taught.  That knowledge is very strongly shared.

So it seems there are different sorts of preference.  Sweet spots and tuned pianos are a sort of primal harmonic preference which is non-experiential and strongly shared.  Within the realm of tuned up instruments, style preference appears to be subject to whim and experience. 

Take heart, ye winemakers, ye musicians, ye cooks.  You need not have your taste buds surgically removed nor your ears cut off to do your best work.  Those pleasant distracters are the portals to your soul, and provide a critical first step on the road to pleasing others.