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.

A Master of Wine visits the winery

Monday I was visited by an earnest and energetic MW who dragged her hapless but cheerful husband and son to my winery for a chat about the evil things I do and how on earth I can go on living with myself.  Well, she was a lot kinder than that, but I did sense her concern. 

She felt she needed to see the offending equipment up close.  This proved a very good idea, for as her hubby remarked, it’s just a pump and a stack of filters and what’s the big deal?  I said I didn’t know either, but maybe they’d like to taste some wine.

So we spent a while looking at the round, fine structure we get through micro-oxygenation on our rather massive WineSmith Cabernet Sauvignon, and deliberating whether that was more interesting than the leaner but more energetic Cabernet Franc.  I switched the overhead lights off to show how different they taste in a dionysian low-light environment, that in which reds were mostly consumed before Edison. 

Then we went barrel tasting and I showed off our three vintages of sulfite-free Roman Syrah – some of our most exquisite wines ever, and really the pinnacle of GrapeCraft, requiring all the elements for success: mineral energy from living soil, optimum ripeness (good grippy unresolved tannin), good must nutrient condition without additives so we get a healthy fermentation to a nutrient desert, aromatic integration through a refined oxygenated structure, and microbial equilibrium in the cellar.  The result has enormous soulfulness.  If we do everything else the same but add sulfites, we get a wine like a beautiful house with nobody living in it. This kind of winemaking is like climbing Mt. Everest without an oxygen mask – only an expert or a fool would attempt it.

In the end she asked me what advice I had for MW’s in all this.  I mentioned two things.  First, we need critics to tell us whether we are doing our job.  This is not the same as telling us how to do it, a subject about which the MW course prepares one not at all.  Instead, winemakers really need to hear whether their work has lifted your soul – they’re too close to the work and can’t tell for sure when they’ve nailed it.  They need to know when you find a style annoying, and that certain people actually care whether a wine falls apart in the cellar. 

Second, MW’s need to promote inclusivity.  Rather than tout your personal glory and secure your employment by befuddling those around you, be an ambassador for having fun with wine, and above all, get average people to trust their own taste.  Get them to look forward to the next new wine as if it were a novel they hadn’t read, not the same experience over and over.  Wine is an adventure, a perpetual tour throughout global space and time as varied as music or cuisine.

People worship the opinions of critics because they’re afraid to form their own.  At a cocktail party in Annie Hall, a woman’s voice can be heard offering up “Well, I finally had an orgasm, but my psychiatrist said it was the wrong kind…”  This is what consumers fear – to get caught loving a wine that’s considered really junk.  MW’s need to reassure those they serve that it’s actually hard to louse it up.  If you liked it, that was definitely good.