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.

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.

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.