Practicing GrapeCraft

Dear Mr. Smith:

I'm working on an article about the tools modern wine makers have at their disposal to make better wine. Vinovation seems like the company to talk to. I'd like to know if I could set up a time to interview you and/or other principals to learn about what Vinovation offers to its clients.

Thank you for your time, and I look forward to learning more.

 David

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Dear David:

I do believe you are barking up the right tree. I assume you have already prowled around the Vinovation.com website, but since it isn't intended for the non-technical, you may have gotten lost!  Let me take you through the basics from a layman's perspective.

The Smith family has dedicated itself to establishing what amounts to a Culinary Institute for winemakers.  Our notion is that the reductionist principles of scientific enology which our young winemakers are stuffed full of at University simply can't address the making of viscerally compelling wines.  Winemaking is a branch of cooking, not a science.  It's our job to put something delicious on the table which moves people the way other great cuisine does.  We call it "putting an opera in the bottle."  This takes more than theory; it takes technique.  That is what we teach. 

We call our philosophical school "GrapeCraft." The foods that move us this way –  lobster bisque, béarnaise sauce, chocolate–  are structured foods.  Wine may look like a simple solution, but it isn't.  We know this because the red wine (anthocyanin) pigments aren't soluble in 13% alcohol. What we are seeing isn't in solution; it's in tiny suspended colloids composed of color molecules and tannin molecules, coordinated together into little beads.  The tannins suspend and protect the color, and the color softens and enrobes the tannins so they are rich and smooth rather than harsh and nasty.

You can start to see why we speak of red wine techniques as similar to chocolate making.  We use our skills in the cellar to refine these tannins the same way a chef turns cocoa powder into something rich and profound.  We call this by the French name of "élevage" — the raising of horses or of children.  The term "ageing" doesn't cover it — this is NOT a passive process!  The tools for building structure include blending for phenolic balance, high finesse uses of oxygen (the wire whisk for our tannin "soufflé"), a knowledge of the seven functions of oak and how to employ them, the re-incorporation of lees, which is similar to the conversion of dark chocolate into milk chocolate.

None of this can be done if the grapes are not properly ripe — not to much and not too little.  Unfortunately, nature almost never cooperates to give us perfect sugar content when that moment happens.  Therefore we need a tool to finely adjust alcohol content later on.  For the French it's easy — they just throw beet sugar in everything ("chaptalization") because autumn rains assure that they have too little.  In the fair weather of California, we usually have too much.  That's why I developed a filtration technique to lower the alcohol to proper balance.  Now we can pick the grapes just on perfect flavor balance and still make delicate wines.

More on this subject on the WIneSmith website as it applies to our own wines at http://www.winesmithwines.com/winesmithwines/grapecraft.html.

For a more specific discussion of the details of the GrapeCraft philosophy and the specific tools and techniques we utilize, go to the graphical site http://www.vinovation.com/poster/poster_web.html and follow the links.  We have just completed revising this poster for the better understanding of non-professionals. 

In essence, all great cuisine is based on unique, distinctive flavors from careful, life-based agriculture which are presented with finesse through skillful technique.  The cook must understand structure and possess the artisanality to refine and harmonize the presentation, but he must also get out of the way and let the distinctive characteristics shine through. 

So there you have some homework.  I reckon you'll want more detail on how all this actually works, and I would very much like to get you some of our wines to taste — without that it's all hogwash, right? 

I am in South Africa on a consulting trip. If you prefer, let's set up a time to chat upon my return.

Best regards,

Clark Smith

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(Cont'd) as "Concerning Alcohol Sweet Spots"

Reproduced; submittal on Micro-oxygenation to Jancis Robinson’s Purple Prose:

Dear Jancis:

I thought to chime in on micro-ox as a devoted practitioner and consultant to other winemakers on the practice. I'd like you to entertain the possibility that this artisanal tool, invented by a French peasant vigneron to save Madiran tannat from being pulled up and replanted to merlot, thus an anti-globalization, offers the key to the resolution of the hangtime issues you've addressed so well recently.  Hangtime is an inexpensive but not very artful method much loved by winery CFO's because it robs the grower of weight, and which winemakers employ to soften tannins out of ignorance of more appropriate techniquse which together comprise a growing Postmodern school of winemaking. 

The result of excessive hangtime is wine with pruney flavors, excessive alcohol and little longevity.  There are much more gentle and sophisticated methods to refine the hard tannins which characterize properly ripe red grapes.  This can be accomplished by a skilled hand without oxidizing the wine and in doing so one can actually extend wine longevity by promoting color and tannin stability.

Most University professors who train California winemakers do not teach technique because they are themselves ignorant of it.  They prepare our artists by training them as scientists.  But winemaking has more in common with music making than with science — it's really just a type of cooking.  Just as the best musicians and cooks concentrate on technique rather than theory, the making of delicious wine requires an intimate knowledge of how wine actually behaves and responds.

When the traditional winemaker was shown the door as part of post WWII modernization, the pre-scientific skills of tending and raising wines were mostly lost.  The art of élevage, that is, the refinement of wine in the cellar, is not taught in our schools, who hold mostly that oxygen is the enemy of Cabernet equally as with Riesling.  We are only now learning that the introduction of stainless steel and inert gas into Bordeaux along with these German scientific enology ideas was what brought about the fiasco of the 1961 vintage, which instead of being the vintage of the Century resulted in wines of astonishing dryness which are still undrinkable today.  

The vineyard is the source of all goodness in wine, just as only the chicken can lay an egg.  But we don't ask the chicken to cook the omelette, and the vineyard has too much variability and unpredictability to be a good place to accomplish the intricate work of élevage.   There comes a time to pick and do the work more proper to the cellar.

The hangtime approach was made popular by our Australian fellow travelers who use it with great skill to make soft, friendly wines for early consumption in an industrial cellar.  These wines "make themselves," as opposed to French reserve methods which begin with wines my Aussie colleague labeled as "mean-spirited," requiring much skillful care and attention in the cellar.  But the presence of active, grippy tannin is the essential starting point for great wine.

As you have noted, winemakers over the globe are challenging their own notions of how wine works by experimenting with micro-ox and other postmodern techniques, and they are finding that they are able to fine-tune their structural and textural goals just as the Incas taught the Belgians three centuries ago to use oxygen to refine cocoa into the visceral confection we call chocolate. 

Far from homogenizing and standardizing wine, skilled postmodern technique allows each vineyard's characteristics to emerge from a structure which integrates aromas like oak and Brettanomyces into background notes which complement the vineyard character.

These winemakers are shy to speak of their new knowledge simply because MOx is mostly scorned by the sensationalist press, which, by demonizing this useful tool, is not helping.

I applaud your open mind and restrained but active studiousness.  The time will come when those First Growths you want us to name will themselves speak proudly of their craft.  Meantime I shall continue to record the Modern/Postmodern debate at www.winecrimes.com.  Enjoy.

GrapeCraft point of view on “Mondovino”

The American distributors of “Mondovino” chose the heart of
California wine country (the Santa Rosa Rialto Theatre) as an early venue for the film, but oddly, I was the only person in the theatre that Saturday night despite the internet fanfare.  As a wine production consultant myself, I was disappointed by our local apathy. There was much in the film's inferred criticism of the state of the industry that rang true for me.  I certainly have observed that corporate agendas can displace (sometimes forever) precious local traditions just because by virtue of their own uniqueness they didn’t sync up with the current style in vogue.  If the film makes some viewers expand their aesthetic to include an exploration of these alternative styles, then it was worth making.I also concur that any powerful critic, be it Parker or The Spectator, can only add to the problem of de-terroir-ization when the public buys wine based on its extrinsics instead of its real quality.  When that critic endorses a producer, appellation or other extrinsic, that endorsement becomes a commodity people have to pay for along with the wine.  That’s not the critic’s fault; it’s a craziness of the buying public.   The core problem is consumer timidity to be their own connoisseurs.  They end up buying the hype rather than the experience.  These days the hypelands of California, France and Italy are largely in the insurance biz rather than the wine biz.  Critics are powerful because consumers distrust wineries to deliver good value, and as long as they think they need a wine police to defend them against unscrupulous fat cat wineries, they will purchase insurance instead of wine, and the price/quality ratio will escalate, increasing the need for third party review. 

These problems go away wherever local shops give good advice and consumers are able to evaluate their own real experiences with wines.  Sensible consumers must develop personal relationships with local purveyors who can custom pick wines for them one-on-one.  This is a process a national reviewer cannot possibly provide (unless you believe everybody's tastes are alike, in which case why pursue diversity?)  Reviewers can assist by encouraging consumers to make their own choices.  This begins with trusting winemakers and taking an interest in their art, even when its development is a work in progress or has goals outside the mainstream.  More discussions of style and technique can put the decisions back in the hands of winemakers and shift the confidence of marketing departments to champion their own in-house artists instead of mimicking their competitive cluster. A concentration of journalistic power can likewise aggravate the problem of globalized sameness when those critics are seen by winery marketing departments to prefer strongly a vinification style that trades away distinction for brawn.  The film sets up a dichotomy of terroir vs wine structure which has true elements for me.  In the 70’s a lot of California wineries were putting petite sirah in their pinot noir because the consumer didn’t understand the variety.  Similarly in the ‘80’s, Domaine Dujac led a movement to get more extraction from burgundies which experienced a backlash when the producers found their terroir differences in the various vineyard properties they offered were disappearing.These problems didn’t emerge as much in Bordeaux, partly because those houses only sell one product, unlike in Burgundy or Germany where a house offers wines from several terroirs.  In addition they are working with high tannin varieties which in my opinion responded very poorly to the gross changes in vinification techniques which occurred after WWII.  The introduction of U. Bordeaux-based scientific enology (stainless steel, inert gas, packaged yeast, etc.) led directly to the problem of the 1961’s – dry, graceless monsters which never did come around.  So the problem in a place like St. Emillon in the last 50 years wasn’t how to protect the terroir, but how to get it back.  

Jumping to my own turf of wine “technology,” I think the film was intellectually weakest in its portrayal of micro-oxygenation.  After all, Patrick Ducournau developed the technique in defense Madiran tannat, which was being pulled out in the ‘80’s in favor of merlot, so its roots are really anti-globalization.  Rossiter misunderstands that micro-oxygenation isn’t modern, it’s post-modern, a step back to the older traditions which created flavor integration and complexity through natural fermentation, aeration, bâtonage and other élevage techniques, much of which know-how has been lost.   Now, I wasn't there, but it seems unlikely that Michel Rolland would have given so much time to Jonathan Nossiter without taking time to explain WHY he is using micro-oxygenation, but this is left unclear in the movie. You would think he would have allowed Rolland to tell his story as he did with the Mondavis.  It's quite revealing that he did not do so.  I bet his footage deflated his demonization of it, so he left it out.   Properly applied, MOx is very effective to increase structure, refine tannin, integrate aromas, stabilize color, balance reductive strength and increase longevity.  I think it's an exciting and powerful tool, and far from making all wines taste the same, allows their unique characteristics to emerge.  We advocate it for big wines like cabernet sauvignon and syrah as an alternative to long hang time.  On the other hand, it usually isn’t a useful technique in many of the bastions of terroir: Bourgogne, the Loire, or Germany because the wines are too fragile.  

 It seems silly to ally such a tool with the political trends he portrays.  If his complaint is sameness, overuse of oak hits the mark better. 

So I'm advocating that the market should decide based on what the wine delivers, not how it got that way.  Critics are at their most helpful when they focus their discussion on results in the bottle.  The new élevage techniques are part of a post-modern school that isn’t yet very widely understood by winemakers and critics, let alone filmmakers.

Concerning alcohol “sweet spots”

Mr. Smith,

Thank you very much for your thought-provoking response. I did spend time looking through the Vinovation website, and I also picked up the recent _The Science of Wine_ by Jamie Goode to get some medium-level descriptions of the processes.

I'm just beginning the research for this article, so I'm not yet on deadline. I'd be happy to set up a time to chat when you get back from South Africa. I live in Oakland, so I can easily arrange to come up to Vinovation to talk to you. 

 Would it be possible to attend a sweet spot tasting? I realize your  clients consider this a sensitive area, and I'm happy to sign nondisclosure/confidentiality agreements if they're nervous about being fingered in the press. I just want to get a sense of what the  tasting process is like. 

 I assume each wine has a different set of sweet spots? 

 How different do the wines taste? Or to put it another way, could you  spot a Vinovation client in a blind tasting? Maybe because of the  characteristics of the structure? 

 Do you have a sense of how well Vinovation wines age? How gentle is  the "sweet spot" process? 

 I'm trying to grasp how other wines fare without your consulting. You  mentioned chaptalization, but do European wine makers just add a  known quantity of sugar that always brings them to the "right" alcohol  based on yeasts and brix (or Baume, I guess). And if the "right"  alcohol varies from wine to wine, how do they know how much to add.  And what do the CA wineries that aren't your clients do? 

 In other words, good wines do come out of France without adding sugar  to the grape must, and you pointed out that few of the vineyards can  generate "natural miracles." So what explains the discrepancy? 

 Can you point me to the research about brix vs. phenolic maturity? 

As always, thanks for your time and thoughts.

David

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Dear David:

Thank you for your emailed queries.  Thank you also for the time you have obviously invested in thinking over the matters we discussed.

You would be welcome to attend a sweet spot trial at any time.  Perhaps the time coordination logistics and the confidentiality aspect would best be addressed by your attending some trials I need to do on my own wines: I have a pinot noir, a cabernet and a sur lies chenin blanc coming up which I'll need to fine-tune in the last half of May.  Let me know two or three days which might work for you and I'll pick one to schedule for.

I don't actually think this whole area is a terribly big deal. All wines require fine-tuning just as all other cooking requires the chef, just at the end, to "adjust seasoning."  There are hundreds of ways to do this.  Even in a single vineyard, single varietal situation, a good winemaker will divide the harvest into sub-lots which are treated differently — different maturities, different yeasts, different oak — just to provide blending options later on.  Alcohol adjustment is just another example.  Scientific enologists often don't take this approach, preferring to adhere to their theoretical notions of purity of varietal character, minimum manipulation and so forth rather than to roll up sleeves and apply technique to an harmonious and focused product.  This inattention is evident at the preponderance today of technically unflawed but utterly uninteresting wines on the market.

I don't mean to besmirch the pursuit of scientific investigation.  But I do question whether we've really gotten anywhere except to acquire bad habits in our thinking.  Science today seems to think itself arrived at certainty rather than engaged in inquiry.  In studies of the nature of wine it reveals its inquiry to be barely its infancy, and largely headed in the wrong direction.  Sweet spotting exposes two of its key paradigms as demonstrably bankrupt. 

The first is the application of the dilute aqueous model, in particular the linear correlation of the concentration in "solution" of wine constituents to "drivers" of sensory aroma and taste intensity such as fruitiness and sweetness.  As you'll see, it just doesn't work like that.  The analogy to musical tuning as opposed to dissonant noise comes closer to the mark. 

The second is the stress on sensory acuity — supertasters, differing salivary rates, bitterness thresholds, specific anosmic profiles — as proof that wines are perceived differently by different people.  But   everybody agrees where the sweet spots are and also how they characterize themselves.  Moreover, in between them there is general agreement that the wines are disharmonious — more astringent, less sweet, less focused.  We really have no idea what's going on, but these effects are clear.

The strong agreement on what's harmonious and what's dissonant is good news for winemakers.  Like a musician needs to believe that the emotional communication power of music is universal, the winemaker needs to know that tuned up is tuned up for everybody.  Like any other cooks, winemakers need to adjust the sauce with confidence.

Alcohol sweet spotting has fascinating special value as a probe into wine's true nature simply because it is so simple to adjust and because it has little flavor of its own.  Its relative purity allows it to demonstrate with greater clarity than other blending techniques the nonlinearity and universality of wine balancing.  Conversely, from an artistic standpoint, it is comparatively  mundane.

When we do a sweet spot trial, we reduce the original wine (via our recombinatory reverse osmosis permeate distillation process) to somewhere below where we think we want to end up.  Then we blend the original wine in, or we bump the alcohol back up by adding back high proof alcohol, either way laying out fifteen or twenty wines which are different only in their alcohol content and separated by 0.1% alcohol.  For example, we might take a 15.0% chardonnay and look at the range of 12.5% to 14.5%, 21 wines lined up: 12.5, 12.6, 12.7…14.4, 14.5%. You'd think the wines would just gradually get better, then worse.  That never happens.  There are marked differences in "harmoniousness."  You see maybe one wine in siz that is focused.  The rest  are astringent and unbalanced.  Kind of like the unfocused, defect-free wines you usually see on the market.  The differences are pretty obvious.

Could an expert pick out such wines?  Well, perhaps on occasion a zinfandel possessing ripe, round tannins or a viognier with well-developed honeysuckle aromas but without the expected hotness might lead one to speculate that the technique had been employed.

As for its gentleness, It actually involves very little processing and by any standard of wine treatment, that is if one were to compare the effect of, say, pad filtration, cold stabilization, or bentonite or egg white fining, it is certainly less deleterious to flavor than these normal and accepted treatments which attract less attention.

There doesn't seem to be any way to predict where the sweet spot will show up. 

On the other hand, we do have names for the styles we often see. We talk about the "jammy, in-yo-face CaliforniaZin" vs the "SuperTuscan" sytle the same wine can exhibit at lower alcohol: less forward fruit but more refinement and length.  In Chardonnay we often see the "California Montrachet," the "Mersault style" and the "Faux Chablis style."

It is also predictable that high alcohol wines will be hot, bitter, and low in fruity aromas, while low alcohol wines tend to be thin, salty, and possessing what we call acid-based astringency.  And we usually see these same characteristics in the wines one tenth of a percent above and below the sweet spots.

Your instinct about chaptalization in Europe is, I think, correct.  Proper harmonious balance isn't normally achieved.  That's OK, though.  They just have to find another means to fine tune the wine.

For a great reference on the non-connectedness of brix/baume/oechle/sugar content vs true maturity, get:

Australian Journal of Grape and Wine Research, Vol 6, No. 2 Proceedings of Symposium on Reproductive Biology in Grapevines.  This is sort of my bible on this topic. 

Relating to ageing, empirically we often see that the same wine aged at different alcohols ages differently. Experiments on Zinfandel by Carole Shelton and at Murphy Goode on Merlot showed that higher alcohol wines develop more raisiny aromas.  We don't know why.  There may be a relation to the considerable suppression of dialectic constant at higher alcohol, but the effects are larger than one would expect from a shift to 14.5% to 13.5% as in Carole's trials.  Colloids are a lot less stable at higher alcohol, and this may also relate.

Regarding MOx, it is clear from large numbers of trials that wines properly structured with oxygen have considerably more longevity than their conventionally made counterparts, which tend to dry out, precipitate structure, brown, and push aromas of veggies, oak and Brett while the MOx'd counterparts are still holding together well.

Hope this helps.  Let me know.

Best regards,

Clark

PS  I'm still looking around for that old Wine and Food Companion on pairing wine and oysters — must be buried in the garage somewhere, but I'll keep you in mind to receive a copy whenever it gets unearthed.

Enologix compared to Vinovation

Dear Mr. Smith:

In the context of tools that wine makers can use these days, Enologix has gotten a lot of press.  I'd love to hear your take on what he's doing, and how that differs from Vinovation (which I ask just to enhance my own understanding).  Is he a competitor?  A different universe?

 Fran from Phoenix

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Dear Fran:

Permit me a heavy sigh.  I guess I understand why people connect us with Enologix, but it's another universe.  I suppose people's connection is that both of our activities somehow evoke the same buzz words: "science," "technology," and "weird."  But that's where the similarity ends.

Leo McCloskey has succeeded brilliantly in attacking directly the fundamental requirement of corporate enology: to reverse engineer Spectator scores.  If I were Capitol Records, I'd want to computer generate Bonnie Raitt, or at least discern the drivers that make her who she is, so I could spot the next one and maybe create one I own.  This is what Leo coaches.  He has over 70,000 wines in his database, so even though the theoretical tail isn't supposed to wag the dog, the sheer size of his history probably gives some useful predictive power. 

The UC Davis folks hate his guts and call him a charlatan, and I think this is grossly unfair.  They dabble less skillfully and with less commercial success in the same forbidden areas, and comport themselves like they own the high ground.  But the corporate cash jockeys have mostly voted with their dollars in Leo's direction. 

I think of Leo's best use as a way for high level winery officers who can't control matters at the level of technique to look in on their winemakers and see if they are passing the digital sniff test.  Of course, another way would be to taste their wines…

What Leo does is utterly unrelated to our approach.  We are just coaches of technique, like a voice coach, a trainer at the gym or a cooking coach for a top chef.  We don't believe in generalities: technique needs to be tailored to the needs of the practitioner and the materials available. 

Leo's approach says you need certain raw materials to make great wine.  We agree, and if the winery is way off base in this area, Leo can help.  But 10,000 bricks do not constitute a house.  We control the architecture.  Leo can tell whether the car is on the pavement; we coach driving technique.  Leo doesn't actually provide any tools at all, just computer generated theories.

Another difference between us and Leo is that while we endeavor to be as open as possible about everything we do and believe, Leo’s system is rooted in a secret “black box” approach.  That’s his choice, and it doesn’t make him a quack.  It’s hard to validate his analyses, but it’s also hard to steal his system.  In our case, we’re ties up in suing an unscrupulous infringer, VA Filtration, because of our openness.  But I’m not sorry to be able to speak freely about what we do.

Our two companies don't compete in any way.  Leo doesn't offer any services or products.  We don't score wines.  The things he measures aren't affected by the things we do.  He counts bricks.  We build houses.

Clark

PS  It is seldom mentioned that before Leo went for the “black box” approach, he published the definitive article in the Journal of the American Society for Enology and Viticulture (1977, maybe?) a simple how-to protocol on an enzymatic method for measuring malic acid quantitatively in wine, and moreover showed how to do it with a cheap visible light spectrophotometer, saving wineries half the cost to implement.  Following malolactic fermentation with real numbers became a huge step forward for winemakers, and few appreciate Leo’s generous gift.