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3

Building Structure

The Basic Tool Kit

So now we’re pregnant. We have just finished a discussion of bringing wine to the point of being ready to build structure, but we have not spoken of how to do it, only how to create the condition.

If you were making wine according to my recommendations, you would have taken certain leaps of faith and committed to a postmodern pathway, the details of which I have yet to explain. In the first two chapters, we touched on the basics of postmodern winemaking: its history, its general tenets, and its usefulness in growing and making ageworthy wines. I explored the role of good colloidal structure in aromatic integration, soulfulness, and longevity, and stated the principles necessary for obtaining the ideal building blocks for stable colloidal structure.

To prevent any confusion, I should pause at this juncture to clarify that when I employ the term structure, I intend it literally in reference to macromolecules such as tannins and proteins that form into colloids suspended in wine. There are many English-speaking connoisseurs, critics, and Masters of Wine who employ this term in a very different way. Their use does not address any physical arrangement in the wine itself but rather an aesthetic mapping of the measurable elements of balance, such as acidity, sugar, alcohol, and astringency, which work together in a pleasing and balanced manner. To them, a wine with good structure is one in which the elements together create a focused and harmonious whole, as might the characters in a well-spun narrative or the parts of a musical composition.

Tannins and other macromolecules that have an affinity for one another form into particles that can approach the size of a bacterial cell. Their size and shape affect wine’s aroma and texture. Sugar, acids, and alcohol, by contrast, are small molecules that are a part of the solution in which the tannin and protein colloids are suspended, and thus are not a part of these physical macromolecular structures.

The French oenologues with whom I have worked use the term structure in my physical sense as described above (indeed, that’s where I learned it), the other sense handled in French as éléments qui supportent les arômes. I suspect that along with many other imported terms such as grappe (bunch) and raisin (grape), Anglos long ago simply misapprehended their French acquaintances and gave birth to an English usage that differs in its particulars. I will argue for the predominance of my more literal usage, in which the structure exists in the wine itself and not as an aesthetic theoretical construct residing within human cognition.

If you got hooked by my advice, you’re now well invested in exploring an entirely different wine style and way of working. In this chapter, I will detail the techniques developed by Oenodev to craft good wine structure. As I warned you, these practices result in wines that may at times be rather unpleasant in youth, exhibiting hardness and reduction. Accordingly, I will, as promised, chart a path out of those thick woods.

These techniques are not a recipe, nor do they constitute the only path to good structure. Years ago I was treated by winemaker Boris Champy to an in-depth look at the techniques used to obtain integrative structure at Christian Moueix’s Dominus in Napa. Although their methodology did not, could not, touch on my system at any point, it was clear that our goals and our guiding aesthetic were the same. We had simply worked out different paths to similar ends.

My postmodern tool kit includes a suite of new membrane applications I helped develop over the past two decades. Reverse osmosis has proven a very handy asset in obtaining balanced wines of any desired ripeness, whether to remove diluting rainwater or to lower alcohol content in rainless climes like California. Its VA (volatile acidity) removal capability also provides a valuable safety net for low-sulfite wine production and in support of cellar strategies pursuing microbial balance. Ultrafiltration is a powerful new method for managing phenolics and for making concentrates useful for coextraction during fermentation.

These are potent tools, demanding elucidation. But not quite yet. I do not consider that my early work with reverse osmosis provided any clear window on the fundamental nature of wine, and a discussion of this and other membrane applications will have to wait for Part III, Technology, and chapter 18. For the most part, these weren’t really winemaking advances at all; rather, they are tools to liberate our work in the vineyard from its focus on brix, allowing us to achieve proper maturity and balance. They also attracted the attention of some very hip Frenchmen engaged in far more fundamental winemaking exploration. In this chapter, therefore, I present Oenodev’s élevage philosophy, which includes what I consider the core competencies of postmodern winemaking: oxygenation, lees work, and familiarity with the diverse functions of oak.

APOLOGIES AND EXCUSES

We are about to roll up our sleeves and sort through the nitty-gritty of the working model of postmodern winemaking. I invented almost none of this. My personal contribution is limited to having organized it into a useful construct.

Since I regard the working winemaker as my main audience, I am going to drag readers through some technical mud. I caution lay readers to hold your hopes of total comprehension lightly, as I intend to speak very specifically to a process that may be outside your experience—the actual making of wine. I will try to be as clear as I can, but if you fall off the hayride, just skip down and climb back on board.

Is the model precisely true? I doubt it. This is not a chapter full of facts, and I recommend the reader to approach it with an open mind and a large grain of salt. We are at a stage in understanding oxygen’s role in winemaking that might be described as prescientific—if one were, erroneously, to view science as a collection of established learning. We are at a point in the discovery process where we can use technical-sounding language to present hypotheses, but these are far from verification. I sometimes picture us postmodern types as spouting technical poetry.

I hope that we are like the centuries of natural philosophers who followed Linnaeus’s lead and compiled a biological taxonomy based on observable traits, long before there was any understanding of DNA or even genetics, or those generations of chemists who ordered the elements into a periodic table based on their behavior alone, in total absence of an atomic theory. In the early stages, ideas that later are commonly accepted may seem outlandish, even threatening.

Such ideas are, of course, mixed in among a lot of bushwah. In these circumstances, one tends to go with what works. What follows is a description of some winemaking procedures that work very effectively, together with some technical assertions that, even if untrue, provide a powerful predictive platform for working with structure.

Exploratory projects have a different feel from the scientific corroboration that comes later (see chapter 12, “Winemaking’s Lunatic Heroes”). Research funding comes not from academic sources geared to verification but from commercial elements that are entirely results-oriented and have little patience with controlled experimental protocols, let alone with publishing for their competitors’ eyes.

I hate to break it to you, but professional scientists are not generally equipped for discovery. Nobody sent Darwin to the Galápagos to investigate evolution. He earned his passage as a gentleman companion to the Beagle’s captain and, like Copernicus, withheld publication of his revolutionary ideas for decades.

I mention all this as a feeble excuse for the dearth of references that inform this important chapter. I do my best throughout the book to explain what led me to believe the assertions I make here. For now, though, it is enough of a challenge simply to articulate what they are.

“I WILL FEAR NO TANNIN”

I learned this mantra from Randall Grahm. In modern winemaking, excessive tannin is viewed as a problem best avoided by careful handling and sorting of fruit, use of gravity systems, gentle crushing, delicate cap management, and low-pressure pressing (if any). When these measures fail, the standard fix is a protein fining treatment (egg whites, gelatin, casein, and isinglass), which one hopes will relieve astringency without stripping too much flavor.

The postmodern view is, I believe, an older one in which tannin is an asset, not a defect. The more, the better. This outlook arises from awareness of structural refinement techniques. In other words, skill.

Say you wake up one morning, and someone has unloaded a huge pile of bricks on your front lawn. Not a good way to start the day, right? After you simmer down, you hire some guys to haul them to the dump.

Or, if you’re a mason, you put an addition on your house.

Experience with élevage unlocks the possibility of harvesting at true ripeness, when tannins are at their meanest, and permits the winemaker to pursue full extraction and extended maceration without fear of bitterness or astringency. These are culinary skills, not far different from chocolate-making techniques.

TINY BUBBLES IN THE WINE

In the last chapter, I discussed the elements of vine balance, proper maturity, and good extraction necessary to imbue young red wines with the prerequisite materials for building a structure deep and fine enough to integrate aromatic elements such as oak, vegetal aspects, and microbial notes into a coherent, soulful “single voice” capable of imparting distinctive expression of the vineyard’s unique characteristics.

Breaking that chapter as I did may conceal the fact that the copigmentation colloids are not the same colloids that bring about aromatic integration. The former have been shown by Roger Boulton to be composed entirely of anthocyanins and cofactors, both monomeric and present in a one-to-one ratio.¹ Cofactors are simply a means for extracting color and some other lovely flavor elements, such as, perhaps, the spicy cinnamic acid derivatives, which are otherwise insoluble.

Newly fermented red wines begin their lives with aggressive, coarsely particulate tannins (I believe these are the copigmentation colloids themselves), which are sensed forward in the mouth, just on the tip of the tongue. We call these “green” tannins in imitation of the French tanin vert. In addition, young red wines often exhibit closed fruit aromas and reductive off-odors. This is a good thing. Like an infant’s temper tantrum, these disagreeable behaviors are signs of intense vitality that we can channel toward greatness.

Copigmentation colloids are unstable and do not remain in wine beyond the first year. Polymerization can occur in either of two directions, depending on the oxygen exposure the wine receives and the skill with which it is administered.

If kept away from oxygen, tannins will remain like cocoa powder—coarse, gritty, poorly formed aggregates that lack integrative properties and offend the entire palate, defects rather than assets. Such raw, undeveloped tannins are the hallmark of the reductive winemaking practices that modern winemaking ushered into France fifty years ago.

One of the worst offenders was the tannat of Madiran. Here in the late 1980s a desperate vigneron, Patrick Ducournau, in cooperation with Michel Moutounet at INRA Montpellier, worked out methods for harnessing tannat’s reductive strength as a force for good. He named his invention microbüllage (literally, “micro-bubbling”), which has come into English as “micro-oxygenation.”

By definition, MOx involves continuously dissolving pure oxygen gas into wine at a rate equal to or less than its uptake capacity. Yes, Virginia, wine gobbles up oxygen. Poof—gone! And in doing so, it can convert its vitality into structure the same way a wire whisk whips egg whites up into a meringue. Newborn reds can take up oxygen and build structure a thousand times faster than they will when they are old. It’s not unusual for a new tannat to consume oxygen at one hundred times the rate a barrel supplies.

The main purpose in bringing oxygen to a new red wine is to stabilize color. The red anthocyanin pigments that give wine its hue also have the property of capping tannins, restricting their length by terminating their polymerization. Thanks to Dr. Vern Singleton of UC Davis, we have a pretty good understanding of how this works, and I have devoted the entirety of chapter 6 to his vicinal diphenol cascade reaction, a fascinating mechanism at the heart of wine aging.

It is essential for wine collectors to know the difference between the aggressive tannins that mark deteriorating wines from the equally aggressive tannins found in young wines that will improve.

Nonoxidative polymers are compact and regular but do not efficiently incorporate anthocyanins as “bookends,” with the result that excessive tannin lengthening occurs, leading to aggressive cooperative binding to salivary protein, as depicted in chapter 2, figure 2. The mouthfeel of nonoxidative polymers is initially smooth and low in volume, but as they lengthen they become dry, grainy, and dirty, occurring all over the mouth, including the cheeks and under the tongue. This evolution is commonly associated with browning, oxidative aromas and precipitation. We call these “dry tannins,” from the French tanin sec.

Instead of the long, dirty, dry tannins we get when we withhold oxygen, oxidative polymerization, done right, produces finer colloids composed ideally of short polymers (oligomers) of 5–7 units in length, daisy chains of phenolics with anthocyanins on both ends. Groups of perhaps fifty of these appear to come together to form stable colloids that don’t progress further. These have a fine texture and excellent aromatic integration properties.

Oxidative polymers possess freely rotating linkages and are less compact than are nonoxidative ones, resulting in a larger perceived volume in the mouth and an aggressive hardness, a sheetlike grippiness, entirely on the top of the tongue, that causes it to stick to the roof of the palate (tanin dur, or hard tannin). Over time, as lees proteins and other side reactions coat the tannins, blocking salivary protein interactions, these hard, grippy tannins begin to melt at the back of the tongue, eventually softening completely, producing a velvety impression and a great deal of aromatic integration (tanin fondu, or melted tannin). This softening process may take quite a bit of time. Oxygenated wines are aggressively tannic in youth compared to their untreated counterparts, often coming to resemble them after about two years, after which the MOx wines steadily improve while untreated wines begin to dry out.

Blasting in oxygen in short bursts is not MOx, and actually has reverse effects, breaking down structure rather than building it, in the same way that blackening a steak is different from simmering a pot roast in a slow cooker.

MOx is the centerpiece of a whole system of élevage. This French term compares the “raising” of a wine to the active process of raising a child. The MOx approach to élevage includes a sophisticated knowledge of oak functionalities, press wine blending, lees timing, and temperature effects.

School of Hard MOx

Even for those with no love for MOx’s creepy high-tech reputation in the Luddite press, or who simply prefer to stick to conventional techniques, experience with oxygenation is nevertheless essential to a full understanding of the bizarre, paradoxical nature of wine itself. Simultaneous with its structure-enhancing effects, MOx is, in essence, an oxidative titration: a snapshot of a given wine’s reactive capacity. That’s a very useful thing to know, and to know how to influence.

Antioxidative power is a rapidly moving target, different for every wine. A burly young Cabernet Sauvignon deprived of oxygen is a bull in a china shop; a tender young Sauvignon Blanc subjected to a young Cabernet’s appetite for oxygen has as much chance as a toddler in an Ultimate octagon—yet a couple years after vintage, an extended-hang-time Cabernet may be just as feeble. Without a grasp of these disparate realms, well-considered cellar stewardship is an illusion at best. (See chapter 7 for the challenges of reductive vigor.)

Two decades after Ducournau’s discovery, nobody doubts that micro-oxygenation is here to stay. Seemingly outrageous claims about taming tannins, integrating vegetal aromas, stabilizing color, controlling reduction, and replacing or outdoing barrels are now an accepted part of the winemaking fabric. Winemakers increasingly view oxygen the way a carpenter treats a power saw—as a dangerous but essential tool to be treated with care and respect.

The challenge is no longer to prove it but somehow to do it, and do it right. No small task. MOx provides a window onto the weirdness that is wine. Its implementation takes quite a bit of getting used to, almost like moving to some foreign land.

The Three Faces of MOx

Micro-oxygenation practices are divided into three phases, each with a different purpose (see table). Phase 1 work occurs when the wine is at its most responsive, and is the central focus of postmodern work because it takes advantage of the fleeting opportunity to harness the wine’s youthful energy to transform its structure into something stable and refined. As I explained in the last chapter, oxygenation behaves homeopathically, initially increasing O₂ uptake capacity, paradoxical as that sounds.

Phase 1 is usually avoided altogether by conventional winemakers because it requires intensive training and involves substantial risks for the unschooled. It also ties up tanks, increases the time required for aging, and often causes young wines to show poorly for a time.

Phase 2 work is done post malolactic (ML), just after SO₂ addition, to refine and civilize tannins and partially quench reductive strength prior to barreling down. It is also effective for wines not destined for barrels, in conjunction with oak alternatives. This is the MOx most commonly employed in California, a far cry in its results from Phase 1. However much large wineries may wish to replace barrels with tanks by introducing oak alternatives and oxygen, tank-treated wines must also be given an opportunity to off-gas tanky aromas, a tricky problem that MOx does not address. It is my own custom to move wines to neutral cooperage after Phase 2 structuring.

Phase 3 is performed after barrel aging, when the wine may have become too delicate to continue in wood but still needs a tannin “haircut.” Commonly, the pithy, untoasted oak tannins of new barrels take a year or two of wine penetration into the stave to begin to extract, and thus can disrupt a maturing wine’s harmony at just the wrong time. A couple of months in tank receiving half or a quarter of a barrel equivalent can restore roundness and grace. Phase 3 is also employed to knock down reductive strength prior to bottling, particularly in preparation for bottling under screw caps, which do not supply a burst of oxygen as corks do by virtue of their compression when inserted.

MICRO-OXYGENATION’S THREE PHASES

Shopping Equipment

As with a kitchen appliance, picking out micro-oxygenation equipment begins with identifying your goals. The stove or food processor that’s right for you depends on whether you are Masa’s or McDonald’s.

That said, as winery expenditures go, MOx equipment is quite a bargain, topping out at about $2,000 per tank system. My advice is to buy the best. High-performance MOx gear is one of the best deals of any capital investment you can make for increasing quality.

The original MOx units were stripped-down experimental prototypes. These have proven inadequate for serious full-plant installations, where pennies saved in investment can cost many dollars of inconvenience. Today’s systems enable hyper-ox, macro-ox, micro-ox, cliqueage, and sulfide treatment, all from the same diffuser. Internet-based control panel displays can link to lab and sensory databases and fixed sensor inputs for temperature, dissolved oxygen (D.O.), and so forth, enabling adjustment and troubleshooting from any location, including your iPhone. That said, the wisest initial purchase is usually a high-end small unit on which you can build your skills.

Your key choice is the diffuser. For post-ML Phase 2 work, just to soften aggressive tannin for early release or to polish the rough edges imparted by an average-quality oak alternative, many wineries (foolishly, I think) choose a low-end model with a stainless diffuser. Bear in mind that this type of equipment is not suitable for pre-ML Phase 1 work for structure enhancement, color stabilization, and aromatic integration. For Phase 1 work, the tiniest possible bubble size is critically important. Membrane-type diffusers have the added benefit of providing a built-in continuous bubble-point integrity test.

Most large conventional wineries have already adopted Phase 2 MOx wholesale. If your intent is to produce clean, affordable wines in a factory setting, you probably know all you need to know about this primitive form of micro-oxygenation. Yes, tanks can replace barrels, and tannins can be softened using even the cheapest MOx equipment on the market. For you, the big news is that the experimental prototype systems of a decade ago have been replaced by professional plant-integrated systems that interface with your existing process control, lab, and sensory databases, placing the control panel on your browser instead of atop the catwalk.

But don’t kid yourself that this type of work reveals anything about wine’s nature. The skills involved in Phase 1 micro-oxygenation are entirely different from straightforward Phase 2 work. Thinking of MOx as a way to rush wines cheaply to market is like thinking of your Lamborghini as a really good flashlight. Which it is. But this misses the point of a high-performance vehicle.

Wineries that have turned the corner to postmodern methods generally place a premium on quality over image and are able to shift a few marketing dollars to skilled wine production labor to ensure that the winery’s credibility resides in every bottle. Any size is possible, even large volumes. Rule One is stay close to the wine. Rethink your assumptions, trust your senses over your theories, and go with what works. Because MOx is weird and counterintuitive, smart wineries generally budget for a bit of coaching from an expert for the first couple of years at least.

THE DEVIL IN THE DETAILS

Setting up for Phase 1 micro-oxygenation involves a fair degree of prior planning and adjustment of standard crush protocols. Treatment is ineffective when wines are cloudy or cold. Suspended particulates such as yeast and grape solids are powerful oxygen scavengers. Fortunately, a good diffuser run at 60 ml/L/month will often clarify a burly young Cabernet in forty-eight hours. Not so for a wimpy Pinot Noir, however. The rich get rich and the poor get poorer. ML suppression is important to maintaining clarity, so SO₂ at the crusher is commonly bumped to 45–50 parts per million (ppm) to slow its onset.

FIGURE 5. Empirical temperature dependence of oxygen uptake reactivity.

It is pointless and dangerous to run oxygen outside the ideal range of 59–65°F. The engine of oxygenative structuring I mentioned above (Singleton’s vicinal diphenol cascade reaction, fully explored in chapter 6) is extremely temperature-sensitive, with reactivity plummeting by 70% at 50°F. That means a warm wine can absorb almost four times as much oxygen at 59°F as it can when chilled to 50°F (fig. 5). A single degree’s difference changes everything in a cellar. Here again, oxygen trials dramatically reveal essential information for winemaking in general, explaining, for instance, the common occurrence of volatile acidity in the cold cellars of Burgundy and Oregon.

Unless you have heatable glycol, keeping your tanks in the proper range is a challenge. Pumping through heat exchangers doesn’t work very well, as stirring up solids renders treatment ineffective. Drum heater belts are an inexpensive fix, able to hold a 4,000-gallon tank 15°F above ambient temperature with 1,000 watts of house current.

The lighter the wine and the farther the tannin/color ratio veers from 4 to 1, the trickier MOx treatment becomes. Big Cabernets and Petite Sirahs are easy to work, and often beg for it. Pinot Noirs should be avoided by beginners, and even Zinfandels tend to be very tricky. Blending in press wine is often very useful, and well-selected oak products can supplement deficient wines by providing cofactors as well as oxygenative phenolics (see chapter 4).

DRIVING WITH YOUR TONGUE

Ducournau developed a system for monitoring MOx treatment through frequent tasting. Sulfides or aldehyde are the primary indicators that the O₂ rate should be adjusted up or down, supplemented by the openness of fruit expression. Tannin evolution is followed from green to hard to firm to round to melted.

FIGURE 6. Example record of micro-oxygenation of a 2000 Cabernet Sauvignon. Each column represents a day of treatment. Along with treatment rates and changes, sensory scores are recorded on a five-point scale. Excessive aldehyde suggests reducing treatment rate, while the presence of sulfides indicates the rate can be increased. Tannins evolve from green to hard to firm to round to melted. Diminution of uptake capacity at Day 8 is caused by temperature drop below 59°F, causing temporary aldehyde production, which was absorbed once the wine was warmed. Onset of ML is indicated by an increase in turbidity and pH. Over the course of three weeks, this wine absorbed fifty times what a barrel would give it. Pronouced integration of vegetal aroma is typical.

I have encountered amazing resistance from Californians to piloting MOx by palate. They want numbers. But a wine’s behavior cannot be reduced to a few instrumental parameters, any more than we would wish to navigate a car without being able to see out the windshield. I believe the source of this resistance is that palate training is sadly lacking in California’s academic institutions.

In any case, instrumental parameters such as dissolved oxygen have yet to prove an acceptable substitute for the human palate. I think that’s good news. Woody Allen said, “Ninety percent of life is just showing up.” Oxygenation forces us to show up for our wines, learn their ways, and discuss and guide their evolution on a frequent, even daily basis, continually focusing on where the wine is and what our intentions are. Annoying as it is, this approach inevitably leads to better wines and better winemakers. Get over it.

I would love to include here complete instructions on how to drive the tannin bus, but the time is not ripe. In fact, MOx is really weird, and it will take seven more chapters before I am ready to present you with the terminological keys to the MOx city. Not until chapter 11 will I be able to provide a complete description of tannin sensory distinctions and their evolution. Meanwhile, figure 6 shows a typical MOx tracking sheet.

PLEASE LEES ME

Finally, I want to touch on the use of lees in building structure. Here again, timing is everything. In Phase 1 micro-oxygenation, lees gobble oxygen and suppress phenolic reactivity. They can also adsorb precious anthocyanins (the key to good structure) as well as promote their enzymatic destruction, with the result that wines dry out and fall apart.

I think of lees as being like egg yolks and tannins the egg whites from which we will make a soufflé. To begin with, the yolks must be separated out and set aside while we turn our attention to the whites, whisking them into a rich, light meringue. Once we have the structure built, we fold the yolks back in for a rich fatness. In the same way, we first oxygenate tannins into a mouth-filling, refined structure. Just as the presence of yolk prevents the formation of meringue, early lees stirring prevents oxidative tannin structuring and destroys color. Only after the structure is complete and the pigments have been incorporated may the lees be incorporated through frequent stirring. In big wines, this process may actually allow the wine to take up the entire mass of fine lees after two or three years in barrel.

After the gross lees have been discarded, fine lees may rest on the bottom of the tank or barrel, or they may be held in separate cooperage, where they are stirred and oxygenated to minimize the formation of sulfides until ready for use. Lees must be matched to the wine involved, as Cabernet lees will ruin a Pinot, while Pinot lees will deplete a Cab.

In wines that have dried out, oxygen will only make things worse, but lees can bring such wines back from the brink by coating coarse edges. Lees of the current vintage can prove useful for freshening and softening older wines on the verge of collapse.

LIFE IN MICRO-HELL

After two decades in the cellar, the controlled introduction of oxygen has taught us several lessons. First of all, structural MOx work does not tend to hasten the bottling date. In general, wines are strengthened and stabilized, often demanding extra age, but they are also more expressive and better balanced than the same wines untreated.

Plan on investing three to five years in full implementation of MOx. The first year, concentrate on developing your basic MOx technique, typically with a single unit, ideally guided by an experienced practitioner. In the second year, you can apply this technique to diverse wines and styles and begin to learn about early blending and the complexities of oak and lees management. Only after you’ve got all this down can your winery’s physical transformation begin, as you grapple with vintage variations and follow bottle evolution over time.

MOx does not lessen a winemaker’s workload. Instead, it pushes us to invest extra time but with generous dividends in wine quality and winemaking acumen. It was, to say the least, interesting for me to discover, thirty years into my career, that practically everything I thought I knew about red wine was wrong. Keeps you young, I guess. Learning high-performance MOx is such a pain in so many ways that you will certainly hate it. But you’ll also love what it teaches you.

Part Two of this book includes portraits of two fully evolved postmodern winemakers, Gideon Beinstock (chapter 13) and Randall Grahm (chapter 14), both of whom have worked extensively with MOx—indeed, Randall was the first on this continent to work with it. Yet neither currently employs it, as I do, as a routine aspect of the yearly work. Their reasons contain wisdom and bear reflection. Gideon finds that while oxygen offers a tool for softening his relentless mountain tannins and rampant reduction, the palate architecture that oxygen produces restricts access to the depth of his Cabernets. Randall offers that while he may use it again, for now he wants to understand how his new grenache plantings will evolve on their own.

Neither of these giants has eschewed MOx because it interferes with his Natural Wine image. The technique, though, seems to appear on every blogger’s hot list of forbidden manipulations. I think that’s because winemakers use it but prefer not to talk about it. This disingenuous use of technologies lies at the heart of the Natural Wine movement’s complaints. A key tenet of postmodern practice is this: Never use a technique or additive that you aren’t willing to disclose and defend. Since this cannot be accomplished within the confines of a wine label, www.postmodernwinemaking.com provides links to websites that organize voluntary disclosure, discussion, and education regarding matters of concern to consumers. I encourage every reader to use the site to establish common ground.

TAKE-HOME MESSAGES

 I believe the postmodern view is an ancient one in which tannin is an asset, not a defect.

 Micro-oxygenation is, in essence, an oxidative titration: a snapshot of a given wine’s reactive capacity.

 A wine can absorb almost four times as much oxygen at 59°F as it can at 50°F; a single degree’s difference changes everything in a cellar.

 Wines vary three orders of magnitude in their antioxidative vigor. The same wine that in youth can absorb one hundred times the oxygen a barrel can give it will in a decade be capable of less than a tenth of a barrel’s uptake.