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ОглавлениеIntroduction
I perceive today an ever-widening gap between winemakers and consumers. As in any marriage of long standing, we sometimes go for long periods without talking as much as we should, especially when changes are occurring that we can scarcely articulate. The fine folks who pay good money for wine are disconnected from wine production people, so distanced are wineries from their customers. Even at the winery, as winemaking matures as a business, visitors to the homes of the familiar brands are far more likely to encounter marketing and salespeople than actual winemakers.
The intimate relationship that is part of the promise and the appeal of an essentially artisanal industry also suffers from a growing distrust of winemakers, fostered by a mounting awareness of unexplained and suspicious-sounding winemaking technologies. What’s with all this manipulation? In our increasingly competitive world, winemakers, when heard from at all, tend to deliver soft soap that pegs our malarkey meter, and even in one-on-one conversation the boutique winemaker will often be less than frank about treatments the wine has undergone.
All too often, a technological path chosen for making the best wine is not divulged publicly. It is no simple thing today for winemakers to tell the truth. Under pressure from their marketing departments to produce that special something while appearing to do nothing, winemakers commonly chicken out, claiming to “do the minimum,” unaware that this apparent duplicity casts an odor of suspicion on our profession.
With a dizzying availability of wines of every stripe, it’s little wonder the buying public has turned to supposedly unbiased third parties to make their choices for them. Critics have assumed a powerful policing role despite, with rare exceptions, an absence of any serious winemaking training.
In the midst of this chaos, a revolution is taking place within the winemaking community. Precepts of the modern winemaking system we were all taught in school simply don’t support the making of the great wines the market demands, and as a result, some of our most successful winemakers have strayed quite far from conventional dogma.
My intention in this volume is to articulate concisely and systematically the new paradigm of winemaking that dominates the forefront of research and practice. Although this is an insider’s view of today’s wine industry and I speak to my fellow winemakers in our common language, I have chosen a style that is also digestible for the engaged lay reader driven by curiosity, supplying enough chemistry and microbiology background to clarify the conversation as generally as possible. In elucidating our new way of looking at wine, I hope to enable winemakers to articulate more powerfully the methods and tools they choose, and to elicit some sympathy on the part of the consumer for the devil of technology properly employed.
In each chapter, I focus on a specific arena of our work, teasing out the complexities and philosophical dramas that an experienced winemaker confronts. These different threads are all part of one cloth. The Postmodern Winemaking movement seeks to reconnect with winemaking’s ancient aesthetic, much of which was inadvertently left behind in the technology revolution following World War II. I hope that what emerges is a new vision of the winemaker’s task and a clearer understanding of what wine really is.
Since the text is addressed to the practicing winemaker, the eavesdropping lay reader will encounter enological terminology that may be unfamiliar. Whenever possible, I have expanded my explanations to make technical winemaking concepts available to a broader audience without derailing the discussion’s logical flow. The reader who feels left behind despite these efforts is directed to the appendixes, which include a brief summary of winemaking basics and a glossary short enough that it can be read from beginning to end in one sitting (I recommend the online version). Your best move, when these fail, is to seek out a real production winemaker and quiz her over a glass of her best.
Because even for professionals the principles presented here compose an unfamiliar picture, I have found it useful to repeat certain notions in the text to facilitate a global view. I hope I have struck a tolerable balance between excessive redundancy and leaving too few breadcrumbs.
WHAT IS POSTMODERN WINEMAKING?
How can he remember well his ignorance, which his growth requires, who has so often to use his knowledge?
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
In the past few years I have been employing the term postmodern to refer to the paradigm shift in winemaking that I have observed and in some ways instigated. In my experience, postmodernism is not well understood in its general sense; instead, it gains meaning mostly through its diverse manifestations. Consequently, colleagues often wonder what connection could possibly exist between this new winemaking school of thought and other expressions with which they are familiar such as postmodern painting, architecture, theater, film, music, and philosophy.
Since postmodernism is by its very nature polymorphous, such confusion is to be expected. For readers wishing to gain a working understanding of the movement as a whole, I recommend A Primer on Postmodernism by Stanley J. Grenz, a concise map of postmodernism’s origins, principles, mind-set, and diverse embodiments.
All winemaking is a fundamentally postmodern sort of endeavor, touching inevitably on many key postmodern notions: the manifestation of Nature both in wine’s production and its appreciation, a broad diversity of localized style goals, the primary importance of collaborative groups, and the relativity of truth. Fine wine is a theater in which deconstruction occurs naturally and modern scientific practices are inadequate to guide extraordinary work. One cannot avoid becoming immersed in environmental concerns in the growing of wine grapes. A winery is a team, and an appellation is a tribe. Truth worth knowing is largely local rather than universal, for wines vary widely from place to place in the characteristics that are expected and extolled—a great sherry is a terrible Riesling.
Wine is formless, assuming the shape of its container, but it interacts with its containers, both the barrel and the glass, in complex ways. Its message is pure experience conveyed without language. Just as any theatrical performance is unique and ephemeral, the qualities of any particular wine are neither universal in appeal nor fixed in time. Defining and quantifying wine quality has proven extraordinarily elusive, and its complex chemistry has yet to be thoroughly characterized and rationalized.
But I am getting ahead of myself. Here I will provide a basic grounding in postmodern thinking and then spotlight, one by one, a variety of postmodern principles that have guided my wine production consulting work and compelled in this book its ever-shifting focus on assorted topics.
ORIGINS AND PRINCIPLES
From its roots in the experimental music, theater, painting, and architecture of the late 1960s counterculture, postmodernism has come to pervade all walks of life and fields of endeavor. Its sundry and sometimes contradictory manifestations derive in part from its origins as a rejection of modernism, which caused it to range out from that central dogma in various directions.
At its core, postmodernism questions the modernist optimism that fueled the Enlightenment, when Francis Bacon declared that knowledge is power and Descartes proposed his idealized vision of the rational skeptic, essentially today’s trained scientist. Armed with generalized laws such as Newton’s mechanics, this dispassionate and unbiased hero is charged with shaping an ever better world by uncovering Nature’s secrets and exercising dominion over her. Four hundred years later, we are beginning to sense that this plan is not working out so well for us.
In our lifetimes, a cavalcade of technological missteps—nuclear proliferation; destruction of the ozone layer; the meltdowns at Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, and Fukushima; failures of the works of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers; wholesale global species extinctions; and the continuing erosion of the right to privacy all come to mind—have led emerging generations to lose faith in the infallibility of science to competently coordinate technological central planning. Postmoderns seek instead to move beyond rationalism as the sole determiner of what is true, beautiful, sustainable, and good. More room is allowed for intuitive leaps, the wisdom of myth, and the workings of natural forces that we neither control nor fully grasp. If the inner city is the symbol of modern power over nature, the virgin forest symbolizes postmodern cooperation with Nature, including respect for her power to manifest complex, balanced ecologies that are robust, sustainable, and aesthetically appealing with scant help from humankind.
One problem with Descartes’s vision of the ideal rationalist is that pitfalls inevitably await any human ego steeped in decades of training and study. I worked so hard; surely I must know something! In principle, we should be able to count on Descartes’s ideal skeptic to be as skeptically rigorous inwardly as outwardly. He must also be unswayed in his evaluations by considerations of endowment funding, tenure, or personal exigency and immune to loyalties and enmities.
He must, in short, know himself. But this is seldom the case. Such training happens over in the humanities, way across campus.
Modern confidence in rationality is vulnerable to an additional pitfall. In the sciences, it’s a thin line between the rationalistic axiom that all understanding is, in principle, accessible to the human mind and the conclusion that what is inaccessible is unreal or even fraudulent. Otherwise rational and dispassionate winemaker colleagues have devoted endless hours to websites such as biodynamicsisahoax.com—a phenomenon explored in chapter 21, “Science and Biodynamics.” My argument in that chapter is that no outside observer is in a position to take a solid stance on biodynamic winegrowing, either pro or con, and I make no such attempt myself. I have much bigger fish to fry.
Postmoderns question that human ingenuity can, or even ought to, be dominant in guiding our lives and works down a path of inevitable progress. In contrast to a faith in the boundless resilience of our home planet, which led moderns to hang portraits of belching smokestacks in their corporate boardrooms, postmoderns see the Earth as fragile and vulnerable, with the extinction of the human species very much in play. The postmodern vineyardist, more specifically, is a steward of Nature rather than her master, seeking to foster a balanced ecology of unfathomable complexity rather than a simple monoculture that may be easy to manage but is vulnerable to opportunistic pathology and disappointing in terroir expression.
What’s done is done. Postmodern winemakers are generally not Luddites seeking to turn back the clock. Winemaking typically takes place in very tough circumstances, and we prefer to keep our technical options open. By and large, we seek to work within the conditions of modernity, incorporating what is useful while moving beyond the hubris of the modern mind-set. To paraphrase 1 Corinthians, postmodernism believes all things and hopes all things. Few winemakers want to give up electric lights, pH meters, stainless steel, or Google, but we do increasingly reexamine the hidden impact of these conveniences. (See chapter 16, “Pressing Matters,” for a humorous postmodern fable along these lines.)
Modern scientists view themselves as having shed allegiance to myth and superstition and believe that they have been trained to see the world rationally, as it “actually” is. After decades of dedicated study, they feel qualified to answer press inquiries, testify in legal actions, and serve on government task forces as reliable, dispassionate experts in their fields.
Postmoderns, in contrast, assert that science draws its legitimacy from myths of its own: the capacity of the rational mind to comprehend the natural world, the inevitability of progress, the universality of Nature’s laws, and the power and freedom inevitably gained by knowledge of them. In addition, every expert is seen as having an ax to grind, often tied to grant money, corporate patronage, or legal retainer. Knowledge is not seen as always good. Many would gladly return to a time before we obtained knowledge of the atom’s secrets or biology’s terrorist potential.
In their skepticism of modern science, postmoderns aspire to break down the wall between the professional and the amateur. In this book, I strive to address both groups by using language that is as simple as possible, but no simpler, respecting both the lay reader’s intelligence and the need for clarity, even seduction in my prose. I have often found that it is much easier for laypersons to relate to such postmodern winemaking concepts as structure, mineral energy, and soulfulness than it is for many professionals. Wine lovers are in fact often astounded to learn that these holistic terms are in professional disrepute, while concrete sensory component descriptors (e.g., berry, citrus, tar) are considered more relevant in academic circles.
APPLICATIONS TO WINEMAKING
In the eleven chapters of Part I, I articulate my own picture of postmodern winemaking, largely in technical language, though I’ve done my best to make my thinking accessible to a broad lay audience. For readers who have not made wine before, I recommend beginning by reading Appendix 1, “Winemaking Basics.” All readers should keep in mind the “Glossary of Postmodern Terminology” as well, particularly the interactive online version, for insight into technical expressions. There is merit in reading the online glossary from beginning to end, A to Z, taking advantage of the links.
In the following discussion I will elucidate the winemaking applications of postmodern techniques, including construction, deconstruction, and juxtaposition. In addition, I will explore the application to winemaking of such postmodern themes as environmentalism, collaboration, localized and transient truths, subjectivity, holism, transparency, authentic scientific inquiry, and courageous uncertainty.
Many postmodern art forms juxtapose disparate worldviews, often interweaving elements of high technology with classical aesthetics. Scandalously, my own work is characterized by a willingness to apply winemaking’s new power tools, some of which I invented, to the making of classic European styles, for which I am affectionately known in Natural Wine circles as Doctor Evil.
In my WineSmith Roman Syrah project, which Jamie Goode referred to in his insightful blog, wineanorak.com, as “the surprising juxtaposition of wine technology and natural wines,”1 I utilize high-tech tools as needed in order to make sulfite-free reds of wonderful aromatic expression and remarkable longevity. These tools include reverse osmosis (see chapter 18), which facilitates balanced wines of perfect ripeness and maximum antioxidative power and is useful to trim occasional volatile acidity. In creating a refined structure that can integrate microbial aromatics and stabilize tannins, I then routinely employ micro-oxygenation (MOx) (see chapter 3) in reds just after fermentation in order to exploit the very phenolic reactive power true ripeness imparts.
Any winemaker will tell you that serious discussions about wine begin and end in the vineyard. That is where the magic happens. It is the winemaker’s job, through skilled artisanal effort, to become invisible, the better to clear the way for the influences of provenance that are the sources of regional character: climate, soil, altitude, latitude, cultivar, vineyard practices and local social traditions.
I think winemakers get a bad rap. Yes, it’s our job to appear invisible, to stay out of the way of natural expression, but that involves a very intensive sort of doing nothing. The artisan, though ignorantly despised for his stealthy conjurings, remains the secret agent without whom all is lost, for it is through the skillful winemaker that apparently naked flavors of place become manifest in the glass with the same apparent ease and weightlessness that years of effort lend to the graceful, seemingly effortless fluidity of the prima ballerina. Naturalness in wine is an illusion borne of much study and struggle, and winemakers ought to be proud of what they do instead of pretending to do nothing.
We have come a long way from the ridicule and marginalization that initially greeted Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring in 1962. Millennials entering our industry today insist that environmentally friendly practices such as Integrated Pest Management can and must be the rule. While I am disappointed by many details of organic certification for U.S. wines, as I discuss in chapters 5, “Vineyard Enology,” and 8, “Speculations on Minerality,” I support the notion of living soil and believe that such vineyards not only support environmental concerns but also make better wine. I go on to propose the adoption of a similar philosophy in the cellar in chapter 10, “Integrated Brettanomyces Management.”
While I find that these “better wines” have more palate energy and dimensionality, are more resistant to oxidation, and hold up longer in the cellar, they also have their own special problems, which I discuss in chapter 7, “Redox Redux.” They are better in a technical sense, in the way that an athlete has a better body. But wines resulting from organic practices are not to everyone’s taste, and thus are in no universal sense ideal.
IDEAL WINES
Postmoderns question the utility and virtue of generalized universal truth discovered through rational inquiry and manifest in formulas, equations, and laws. Modern enology has been organized into a set of fundamental best practices that enable wines in commerce to be more dependable than ever before in history. Large corporate wineries with the marketing muscle to enter the three-tier distribution system (producer to distributor to retailer to consumer) are now able to put on retail shelves tremendous volumes of Merlots, Chardonnays, and Pinots that feature precise and consistent flavor profiles.
The triumph of modern standardization is that Annette Alvarez-Peters, chief wine buyer for Costco and one of the six most influential people in the wine world according to Decanter magazine,2 was able in 2012 to opine, quite correctly, that wine in Costco is a commodity no different from toilet paper. “In the end, it’s just a beverage. Either you like it or you don’t.”3
Costco restricts its offerings to 300 brands, less than a tenth of a percent of the wines on offer nationwide, with $1 billion in sales annually. Another force in U.S. wine sales is the mega-distributor Southern Wines and Spirits, which dominates U.S. distribution with fewer than 10,000 labels, a mere 5% of the total selection approved for sale by the U.S. Alcohol and Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau (TTB). These wines succeed in the three-tier system largely to the extent that they precisely fit the standardized model for flavor and packaging associated with their standard wine type. If they are “interesting,” they fail. Enologix, a highly paid Sonoma-based wine database enterprise, thrives through advising wineries how to scientifically reverse-engineer Wine Spectator scores, instructing winemakers how to make standardized wines that will garner top reviews.
If you’re looking for diversity, you will have to get in your Prius and seek it out. Despite rumors of its impending demise, there is another, separate wine industry with perhaps one hundred times the labels and one-hundredth the sales volume. But you have to go there.
Postmoderns focus on truths that are local, particular, and transient, and on honoring diversity and pluralism. What industry could more vividly embody these notions than the multiplicity of individual vineyards throughout the world? In vino veritas. Each terroir has its own truth, its own story to express in its own way. My work with AppellationAmerica.com’s Best-of-Appellation evaluations program seeks to compile a Blue Book that articulates the regional characteristics of all 312 appellations in North America so that we can move beyond varietal labeling to a consciousness of the vast variety of available choices. Our goal is to foster a growing comfort level with such delights as Sandusky Gewurztraminer and Iowa Frontenac Port.
The last thing that a postmodern wine should do is conform to expectations. Nowhere is the specific more vital than in the making of wines of distinctive terroir expression. That is the antithesis of the modern corporate winemaker’s job description, but for the 99% (okay, maybe it’s only 98%), the small and struggling wineries on the D list that have no chance at national distribution, it represents the only hope for salvation.
The division between modern corporate commodity winemaking and boutique postmodern distinctive terroir expression is not doomed to persist. Retail channels will adjust once consumers begin to demand the same access to the diversity of New World styles as they do for European wines, where flavors of place hold sway. No one would liken a St. Emilion to a Chinon simply because they are both Cabernet Francs. In the same way, Long Island Merlots may earn a separate shelf space alongside those of California, and the Chardonnays of Napa, the Santa Cruz Mountains, and Lake Erie may come to be independently displayed and understood.
RELATIVITY AND QUANTUM EFFECTS
Postmoderns reject the notion of the objective observer. Particle physics, with its uncertainty principle, contingent realities, superstring theory, multiverse, and quantum leaps, was the first of the modern sciences to cross over into postmodernism, abandoning half a century ago any notion of mechanistic objective observation. The Enlightenment viewpoint just doesn’t carry any water in this discipline. The existence of universal truth and objective reality are not prerequisites for functionality, and you’ve got to admit that physics seems to have muddled along pretty well without them.
Rejecting both the existence and the value of objectivity allows us to shed the pejorative connotations of subjective experience. Strictly speaking, for an experience to be subjective means merely that it is perceived by humans. But this pure sense has been perverted in modern parlance, and when we say, “That’s just subjective,” we mean to imply a finding that is random, unknowable, and unverifiable. Yet when all experience is understood to be subjective, we are compelled to look for patterns and areas of agreement—which music and chaos theory’s fractal images alike illustrate to be quite striking and beautiful.
The postmodern view is that the experience of a wine is not actually in the bottle; rather, wine resonates in tandem with its consumer according to the environment of consumption. This interaction possesses features of resonance, harmony, and dissonance that are strongly shared and for which predictive strategies can be employed. This is the art of serving wine.
One of the greatest intellectual challenges of postmodern philosophy is to reconcile, on the one hand, the notion that everything is connected to everything else, with the equally firm principle, on the other, that every experience is unique. This is accomplished by abandoning the reductionist false friend that moderns so often employ: division of experience into manageable little pieces that can be studied, then reassembled in a sort of plug-and-play philosophy. Insistence on working only with whole experiences frees the investigator to explore patterns within complex systems, often with unexpected results such as the well-substantiated existence of harmonious “sweet spots” obtained by altering alcohol content as little as one-tenth of one percent, a topic introduced in chapter 11, “Harmony and Astringency,” and developed in chapters 18, “The New Filtrations,” and 25, “Liquid Music.”
Attention to holistic systems guides the viticultural modeling of Bob Wample and David Gates (see chapter 15). A willingness to work outside the rationality box has supplied many of our field’s key discoveries, which I explore in chapter 12, “Winemaking’s Lunatic Heroes.” In chapter 21, “Science and Biodynamics,” I discuss in particular an eccentric path inexplicably chosen by many souls admired for their shrewdness and perspicacity. I confess that I have a chip on my shoulder here concerning the oft-asserted modern claim that homeopathy has no scientific basis, the refutation of which ties together Biodynamics, micro-oxygenation, and Singleton’s vicinal diphenol cascade in a delightful postmodern thematic juxtaposition, a sort of running joke throughout the book. My goal in all this is not to defend Biodynamics or homeopathy per se but to open the minds of scientists.
The legitimacy of homeopathy (that is to say, a challenge to a system by a small amount of a harmful substance, which the system learns to resist) is a pet peeve among modern scientists, held in about the same regard as astrology. Yet we have plenty of examples where a homeopathic approach is demonstrably valid, vaccination representing a prime example. The wholesale adaptation of this principle to every natural system, as the Biodynamics evangelist Nicolas Joly extols in his lectures, does indeed seem both simplistic and risky. But this is wine—essentially playful, seldom a matter of emergency. Before we declare scientific martial law banning new ideas, we had better have a clear and present danger. In my judgment, no imminent threat exists except to contemporary science as Mr. Know-It-All, in which case I fear that, until they come to get me, I must declare for the other side. I defend the concept of homeopathy not so much because I entirely accept it, but more because its mere mention makes modern scientific blood boil.
The experience fine wine affords, for which we shell out the big bucks, does not arise through scientifically delimited natural processes controlled by technical best practices; rather, it is a dance between specific, unknowable ecological particulars (climate, soil, microbiology) and the peculiarities of human perception that are brought to bear when the cork is drawn, all orchestrated through the invisible guiding hand of the winemaker. This is the postmodern view.
Postmodern winemaking seeks to deconstruct the embedded myths that shape modern winemaking but fail to serve winemakers well. These pedagogies include the application of the solution model, the direct link between chemical and microbial composition on the one hand and flavor on the other, and the use of component aromatics as preference drivers for quality.
In his penetrating review of the manuscript of this book, Ravenswood founder Joel Peterson asked an excellent question: “Do we really have to give up the Enlightenment to move ahead?” My answer is yes, I’m afraid we do. By this I do not mean abandoning the tools of skeptical inquiry, experimentation, and hypothesis verification; we do, however, need to foster an awareness of the limitations of these techniques. We must question the whole notion of objective universal truths, and even cast a skeptical eye on their value. We have every reason to be suspicious of the capacity of the human mind to comprehend and conquer nature. What evidence do we really have that knowledge expands and progress is certain? The Enlightenment anticipated a gain in clarity as we approach universal truths. Postmoderns instead see growing paradox as we knit together a picture of how things are, as in the case of the wave/particle duality in atomic physics.
The UC Davis–spawned Aroma WheelTM is a familiar example of modern enology’s reductionist attempts to manage sensory impact by dissecting aromas into their constituent pieces. There is no evidence that varietal characters or any other constituent aromas are compelling drivers for lovers of structured reds. For Riesling and Muscat, surely the flowery linalool and geraniol terpenes drive sales—the more, the better. One can point to vanillin (an oak extractive) as a hook for novice red wine fans. But these are regarded as cheap tricks in the big leagues, where an inarticulable profundity in great reds is what has connoisseurs reaching for their wallets, just as with the great unpasteurized cheeses of France and Italy.
Flavors of terroir receive much ink in reviews, evoking the intense joy that comes from being shown deep places in one’s own soul. Embodying a unique communion of taster and place, such flavors—whether of a fine red wine, an earthy Guatemalan coffee, or a perfectly spiced Thai soup—evoke profound connection, of being thoroughly known by someone far away. But these aromas are by nature unique, never to appear on a standard wheel.
The appreciation and evaluation of wine, the subject of chapter 24, presents intricate intellectual challenges that baffle novices and can perplex the most experienced professional. We cannot judge a wine unless we know the tradition in which it was made, yet to maintain objectivity, judges taste double-blind and are not told if a particular Chardonnay, for example, is from a nationally distributed brand of half a million cases or a tiny lot sold only out of a tasting room in an obscure location.
Postmodern philosophy offers useful tools for peering into the wine tasting process, concerning itself very much with perception, art, and language. Novice wine drinkers have a very different, one might say, a purer, sensory experience of what is in the glass than trained professionals do. As they try more wines, they naturally accumulate a growing vocabulary to parse their experience as they connect, through their own invention and through instruction, colors and flavors with sources such as varietal characteristics, oak, microbial activity, and aging. When tied to a wine genre, usually sprung from a European antecedent, this language may allow agreement with other tasters and a capacity to rate quality in the context of accepted style rules.
But these are human cultural constructs that quickly come to dominate perception itself. In appellations with well-established style traditions, wines are experienced through the lens of local custom. As with English speakers in rural Scotland, New Jersey, or the Deep South who do not perceive themselves as speaking with accents, the locally familiar becomes invisible.
It is only when compared to other regions that the local becomes colorful or eccentric. Just as television-speak occurring as a global unaccented standard renders local dialects peculiar, quaint, or even unintelligible, so today have globally distributed “expected” styles of Merlot, Chardonnay, and Riesling restricted the commerciality of small local producers in climatically unique areas. Global styles are not the pinnacle of quality; they provide consistency at the risk of a boring uniformity that has led to a recent appetite for diversity. Sorting among these wines with no fixed standards to guide us is a considerable challenge from which established reviewers such as the Wine Advocate and the Wine Spectator have, for the most part, shrunk from leadership. The coming-of-age of a surprising panoply of well-made wines from regions throughout the New World calls for a shift to a postmodern mind-set that respects and celebrates diversity. The theme of the birthing pains of New World identity is explored more fully in chapter 24.
Hans-Georg Gadamer’s hermeneutics concerns itself with the way language arises as individuals experience art in a social context and maps the interplay of experience, thought, and language, threading a path that accepts both the objective reality of Enlightenment thinking and each individual’s unique creative interaction with that reality. The wine exists, but each person’s experience of it is unique, subject to personal interpretation, the opinions of peers, and the context, sometimes sterile, often romantic, in which it is served. Without question, the surest way to appreciate a wine is to share a glass with the winemaker at its place of origin.
LEVELS OF UNKNOWING
Jean-François Lyotard proclaimed in his seminal work, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, that “postmodernity is not a new age, but the rewriting of some of the features claimed by modernity, and first of all modernity’s claim to ground its legitimacy on the project of liberating humanity as a whole through science and technology.”4 I have drawn much from my scientific training at MIT and Davis and receive regular thanks from winemakers for having applied it to the general benefit of our industry. I want to state definitively that I am entirely in favor of the courageous, skeptical inquiry that science represents. I am not anti-science, any more than I am anti-Christmas, but I am saddened by the commerciality and autocracy that today characterize both. I love enology and would like to see its practitioners clean up their game. I am anti-hubris and anti-arrogance but pro-humility and pro-inquiry.
The proper place for science in postmodern winemaking is in service to the winemaker’s true purpose: to bottle something that when opened months or decades later satisfies human appreciation. It is clear that science has made tremendous advances, but still it must be admitted that our glass of knowledge is far from half full. Our ignorance can be parsed into three categories.
1 Uncollected information: that which we know we don’t know but have yet to discern, investigate, or verify.
2 Invisible ignorance: that which we have not the language even to ask questions about, let alone delve for answers to, restricted as we are by our fixed way of thinking. Richard Feynman said that to see the limitations of current science we need look no further than the mysteries of fluid flow in a pipe.5 Physicists will tell you that their work is so bizarre that the mind really cannot grasp it; instead we retreat into mathematics and machine calculations for our predictions. If we build machines that grind out accurate predictions, can we then claim these as prizes of science, when in truth they are not really within our grasp?
3 The experiential imponderable: that which is either fundamentally mysterious or otherwise unknowable. Scientific understanding works from underlying generalities, so it is not experiential in nature. It can state how to construct a major chord but cannot explain why it is cheerful while a minor chord is melancholy. It can explain why the rain precipitates but cannot capture the apprehension of autumn’s first rainfall under an ancient elm with a special someone.
These lyrical, disorderly, unscientific phrasings point to a different kind of truth, a human truth, the apprehension of which is critical to the human condition and not at all the business of science. The actual experience of drinking wine falls into this category and cannot be published, posted, or televised.
The postmodern respect for diversity is also a characteristic of our craft. Each winery is its own separate world, which is what makes them so much fun to visit one by one on a day’s outing.
I offer no formulations for making wine, nor do I advocate any particular tools. Although I describe the use of oxygen (chapter 3), barrels and oak alternatives (chapter 4), alcohol adjustment (chapter 17), many uses of membranes (chapter 18), flash détente (chapter 19), and yeast inoculation (chapter 23), I present these for winemakers to consider in their own unique situations, as items in their tool kits, and for lay readers better to understand what they are and why we might use them.
If critics are no longer trusted as arbiters of right action, postmodern practitioners need to explain their reasoning in making their winemaking choices. I recommend that you never use a tool that you are unwilling to disclose. This is really what is meant by manipulation. If you know a wine will improve by lowering its alcohol content with reverse osmosis, be a mensch (you too, ladies) and own up to it, explain yourself—and make the better wine. Until we stop sweeping our best work under the rug, we will forever be under the lash of poorly informed, ill-intentioned paparazzi.
My own bent is neoclassical. I make very Pauillac-like Cabernet Sauvignon; Cabernet Franc in a style somewhere between Graves and St. Emilion; a minerally Chardonnay that I call Faux Chablis; and a sulfite-free Roman Syrah. I pick my grapes ripe but not overripe and will, if needed, lower alcohol content, usually below 14%, with reverse osmosis. I generally like to structure my reds with Phase 1 micro-oxygenation. My goals are to show that California grapes are very well suited to European styles and that they are capable of great longevity if properly balanced.
Not all postmodern thought seeks to recapture the wisdom of the ancients, but in wine there is every reason to attempt to do so. Winemaking is far, far older than our knowledge of chemistry and microbiology, and no inquiring mind can remain incurious about what our antecedents knew that we have lost.
Indeed, the most radical and exciting activity in winemaking today is the rediscovery in post-Soviet Georgia—where the technique originated—and other hot spots as widespread as Friuli and Brooklyn, of the ancient method of burying, for many months or even as long as a decade, sealed clay qvevri (giant earthenware vessels) filled with white grapes, skins, seeds, and stems.
The premodern classic eras in which European appellations established their characteristics are creative bedfellows with postmodernism’s challenges to contemporary convention. Like grandparents and grandchildren, they are united against a common enemy.
You have already seen my definition of postmodern winemaking: “the practical art of connecting the human soul to the soul of a place by rendering its grapes into liquid music.” I know this sounds limp-wristed at first glance. My goal in this book is to persuade the reader to embrace this definition as a down-to-earth working mandate that directs our daily endeavors.
A final key element of postmodern thought is a willingness not to know. It would be a sad waste of time for me to attempt to replace the fallacies of my modern forerunners with pontifications of my own. I am quite sure that this book contains nothing that is “true” in the modern sense. As the postmodern pragmatist 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.
