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Preface

The heresy of one age becomes the orthodoxy of the next.

—Helen Keller, “Optimism” (1903)

I have been making and selling California wine since 1972. When first I drove into the Napa Valley, I encountered a billboard that quoted Robert Louis Stevenson: “. . . and the wine is bottled poetry.” For me, that was a little over the top. I thought, “Sure, I like wine, but ‘bottled poetry’? Give me a break.”

I have since come to believe that this statement sprang from more than the flowery prose customary in his era; that the wines of Stevenson’s time were actually altogether different from ours. The modernization of winemaking in its every aspect has left us with clean, solid wines of greater consistency than ever. But they are missing something.

I hope not to bore you, my reader, while I briefly recount the professional journey that led me to this conclusion.

In 1971, I dropped out of MIT and came to California. After six years selling wines at a well-stocked East Bay retailer, I spent the next thirteen making wine in the modern way. I started off dragging hoses for three years at Veedercrest Vineyards, and in 1980 enrolled at the University of California, Davis, where I learned the principles of modern scientific enology. In 1983 I began applying those principles at the R.H. Phillips Vineyard, where the Giguiere family and I took the fledgling winery from 3,000 to about 250,000 cases in seven years.

At Phillips, I set up an extensive small-lot vinification and sensory lab and, with a series of hardworking UC Davis interns, began delving into quality enhancement in the nascent Dunnigan Hills region, presenting at the American Society for Enology and Viticulture a series of seven papers on vineyard variables affecting wine quality, based on the reductionist methodology I had learned at Davis.

A simple example. We were making White Zinfandel that had more of a canned tomato soup aroma than the fresh strawberry notes I was seeking. Accordingly, I conducted a series of small-lot duplicate trials to test a variety of vineyard variables and winemaking procedures, presenting the resulting samples to a trained panel in a double-blind setting, asking the panel to rate the samples for the aromas they found as defined by the two standards I supplied: fresh strawberries and Campbell’s tomato soup. Compiling the scores and running ANOVA (analysis of variance) statistical analysis, we determined significant differences due to both greater grape maturity and four hours of skin contact, which led to substantial improvement in the following years.

But toward the end my stint at Phillips, I began to hit a wall. I considered that I had learned how to make very good white wines, but my reds were, well, pathetic. Even when I sourced excellent syrah fruit from Estrella River and old-vine mourvèdre from Oakley, the wines had no sex appeal. A trip to South Australia only disheartened me further. I admired the plush, deep, finely knit structure and provocative, soulful qualities of their Cabs and Shirazes—and realized I had absolutely no idea how it was done.

So I did what any journeyman winemaker would do who wants to perfect his craft: I opened up a consulting firm. I had the incredible good fortune to be taken on by the Benziger Family and their winemaker (and spiritual guide), Bruce Rector, as my primary client. Like Phillips, the Benzigers’ Glen Ellen line was growing very rapidly, and Bruce needed to outsource several R&D projects.

These projects were to become the foundation for everything I’ve done since. The first was an elaborate feasibility study on what was to become the Glen Ellen Learning Center, for me a crash course in teaching, learning, collaborating, and innovating. Second was the making of an International Claret, a global project in which I worked with the Australian Richard Smart, the Chilean Alejandro Hernández, and Pascal Ribéreau-Gayon, our project chief and director of the enology faculty at the University of Bordeaux. This project opened up for me a whole new understanding of tannins, high-pH winemaking, and red wine site selection and viticulture, besides polishing up my high school French.

The third project was the pursuit of a decent nonalcoholic wine, a dream conceived by Bruno Benziger shortly before his death, for which he had purchased a reverse osmosis (RO) filter. In nonalcoholic wine, we could work outside the federal restrictions for standard wine that forbid flavor additives, and thus I was permitted for the first time in my winemaking career to fool around with flavors.

We would choose a bland base wine and use the RO to remove all its alcohol. If it was a Chardonnay, we might then add essences like apple, pear, pineapple, and butter; if a Merlot, we might add cassis, orange peel, and vanilla.

But it didn’t work. The flavors didn’t blend. We ended up with what tasted like a bland base with a bunch of flavor notes sticking out as bizarrely as spiked hair. This was my first hint of the true nature of wine that this book discusses. I would spend a decade scratching my head before I understood the problem.

I now know that what was missing was the aromatic integration that good wine structure supplies. There was nothing wrong with the technology; rather, because the base wines weren’t made artfully, they could never accept the flavors and meld them together into a soulful singularity.

My work with RO was to earn me several patents and formed the basis of Vinovation, a wine technology company I established with Rick Jones in 1992 and operated until 2008, by which time we had over a thousand clients and had expanded our research to a wide variety of membrane technologies (see chapter 18). More interestingly, we attracted the attention of Patrick Ducournau, founder of the French innovator Oenodev, who assigned his right-hand man, the remarkable Thierry Lemaire, to train us in their system of structural élevage, which includes micro-oxygenation, lees work, and a sophisticated understanding of oak. These fundamentals are the basis of postmodern winemaking (PMW) and are summarized in chapters 1 through 6.

In 1993, I got interested in applying what I had begun to learn to the making of California wines according to European principles. Simply put, this involved less emphasis on impactful aromatics and more on texture and balance. Launching the tiny brand WineSmith, I focused on Cabernet Franc, the most challenging of the Bordeaux varietals, which Pascal once confided was better suited to California than Bordeaux (“In Bordeaux,” he told me, “it’s so refined, it forgets to exist”). In 1999, I expanded into Pauillac-style Cabernet Sauvignon, and in 2001 I began with Stephen Krebs at Napa Valley College to make minerally Chardonnay that I called Faux Chablis and a sulfite-free Roman Syrah from Renaissance Vineyard in North Yuba County, exchanging grapes for consulting with Gideon Beinstock (see chapter 13).

These wines showed me that Stevenson’s description of wine as bottled poetry was not a flowery fantasy but plain reportage.

Post–World War II winemaking has seen more changes in production practices than the previous eight millennia combined. We are led to believe that on the whole, this is surely a good thing. But to call it progress requires that what was gained outweighs what was lost.

This calculation is not straightforward because gains tend to upstage losses. While the benefits of innovations are easy to see, what we have forgotten is, well, forgotten. Out of sight, out of mind.

However sweeping their impact, adaptations to fleeting changes in conditions don’t constitute durable value. Cassette tapes and Super-8 video were a big deal in the ’80s, but they held no lasting lessons. We have begun to see that the whiz-bang innovations of the twentieth century centered largely on exploiting suddenly abundant resources such as oil, stainless steel, aluminum, copper, and so on—all temporary circumstances. History will judge if we spent these resources wisely by whether we created lasting value or merely squandered them on short-term prosperity.

Contemporary Americans lead lives of unparalleled leisure and convenience. But have we built to last? The miracle of modern antibiotics may well be a fleeting bubble, outstripped by the superbugs these drugs encourage. A discovery like Gore-Tex or the silicon chip is worth a hundred Hoover Dams that may lie crumbled and useless a century hence.

Modern innovations in electricity, microbiology, and chemical engineering have facilitated powerful and profitable changes in winemaking, but as the demands of sustainability loom large, we may regret our failure to preserve old knowledge. When the oil dries up, we may soon wish we remembered more about horses. Chapter 17’s hilarious account of tail-chasing in wine press design reveals much about the modern developmental process, which often seems unencumbered by the thought process.

Modern science is slow to correct its own follies. Scientists have banished Pluto on the grounds that it deviates from current theories of planetary formation. In so doing, they have misappropriated the word planet, twisting it from its original sense of “celestial wanderer.” That is to say, planets deviated from the then-prevailing cosmology. Ironically, scientists now seek to banish the ninth planet from this company on the basis that it deviates from current theories of planetary formation. Equally comic is the misapplication of dilute aqueous theory to the making of fine wine, which has misinformed our inquiry into quality for the past half century.

Postmodern winemaking calls apparent progress in modern enology continually into question, and in so doing resurrects some key notions that have gotten lost in the shuffle:

 Wines depend upon good structure for their soulfulness. The deviation from our cherished solution-based chemistry model is a pretty good working definition of quality.

 As in all other foods, a complex natural ecology provides distinctive and soulful character to our wines that we could never hope to manufacture. Distinctive flavors of place require a living soil nurtured through a cautious approach to herbicides and pesticides.

Unlike the naive and poorly informed Natural Wine movement, postmodern winemaking is not “hands off.” To put natural flavors first requires diligent application of intelligent observation and informed action. Winemakers must work very hard to become invisible.

ORGANIZATION

The book consists of twenty-five chapters, two appendixes, and a glossary. It is largely based, with publishers’ permissions, on material compiled from my monthly columns in Wines and Vines magazine and articles published by AppellationAmerica.com and Practical Vineyard and Winery magazine, reworked to include a lay audience.

In this volume, my task is to articulate to my fellow winemakers the guiding principles of a new view of our work. But the language is plain English, because it is essential to make this discussion accessible to a broader readership. Tragically, today’s consumer environment has become hostile to an honest discussion of production winemaking. Winemakers lie low while the Luddite paparazzi fire live ammo over their heads. Honesty is nowhere to be found, and platitudes like “We do the minimum” are standard fare.

Winemakers are earnest, hardworking men and women who are never in it for the money. They deserve respect for walking the hard walk from critics who merely talk the easy talk. But to survive in today’s competitive environment, most choose to do one thing and say another: to work like dogs and give nature the credit. By allowing wine lovers to eavesdrop on our conversation, I hope that together we can coax these heroes to begin speaking proudly and openly of their real work. I want to thank lay readers for your curiosity and courage in picking up this volume, and to encourage you to hang with me when the discussion occasionally flies over your head.

This book is organized in four parts: Principles, Practice, Technology, and Philosophy.

The initial chapters explore the principles of postmodern winemaking, beginning with the surprisingly limited degree to which wine’s aesthetic properties derive from its composition. As with architecture, the properties that please us are less a function of the number of bricks than the manner in which they are arranged. I next address soulfulness and longevity, knitting together the secret life of wine colloids by touching on critical factors in each stage of winegrowing, with analogies from the kitchen. In the subsequent chapters, I examine the decisions the winemaker must make concerning fruit maturity, the conduct of fermentation, the oxygen regimen, oak influences, and bottling choices. These remarks culminate in their application to microbial management and a practical discussion of minerality, followed by an opening into the realm of the human psyche that every winemaker must address, however mysterious its portents.

The four chapters on practice are devoted to the work of some extraordinary practitioners. Every postmodern winemaker proceeds in a different way. It would be fair to call PMW an aesthetic without a manual. No particular set of instructions or ethical stands is recommended, save that winemakers ought to make consistent products and tell the truth. In many cases, winemakers experiment with such techniques as micro-oxygenation and ultrafiltration as a means to comprehend and verify for themselves what wine really is rather than to use them in commercial practice.

The four chapters on technology elucidate winemaking innovations of the past two decades, their value to winemakers, and their impact on the marketplace. Many of these are membrane applications for the introduction of which I am justly notorious. But while these tools are used by large corporate wineries to make clean, standardized wines, they are also employed by many thousands of small artisans (WineSmith included) to produce sound, well-made wines with distinctive character of place. Lest I be thought disingenuous for bemoaning the narrowing of style that my own innovations have helped to create, I must argue that these technologies are not responsible for the sameness at Safeway, any more than a hammer is an architect.

Distinctive wines of place still need to be sound and balanced. As Jamie Goode and Sam Harrop say in Authentic Wine, “Vigilance [is necessary] to prevent wine faults that obscure sense of place” (3). I have contributed to making cleaner wines by developing tools to remove excessive alcohol, volatile acidity, dry tannins, Brettanomyces character, and vegetal aromas. In many California wines, true ripeness is accompanied by excessive brix, leading to high alcohols that obscure sense of place. Alan Goldfarb remarked that my 12.9% “Faux Chablis” exhibited more terroir character but was less authentic than its hot, bitter original 14.8% version. I think that this is insightful but that Jamie and Sam’s advice is closer to the mark. If I had picked at 21° brix, I would never have gotten the lemon-oil aromas I was seeking, any more than the French should hang their grapes until they raisin in order to avoid chaptalization. Nor should they tear out their splendid vineyards and plant elsewhere. Instead they should get the grapes ripe and then take steps to balance them in a way that showcases the flavors of place.

There is nothing postmodern about the technologies I present here, and this book is not a justification for them. They can be misused. But open discussion of them is very postmodern, and is, I believe, the key to getting wine lovers the same degree of comfort with them that they have with stainless steel, electric lights, and the countless familiar manipulations such as picking, crushing, and pressing.

For such a discussion to occur, my single voice will not suffice. What is needed is an open forum in which winemakers from the largest to the tiniest tell their own stories concerning these tools. I have provided such a forum at PostmodernWinemaking.com.

Winemakers are both blessed and cursed by the limelight we enjoy. If we live in glass houses, at least we are not ignored. It seems too much to ask that critics stick to the work for which they are qualified—to report and judge what they find in the glass. Like football fans, critics are unrestrained in their opinions and advice, often with little reference to the realities that professionals face every day. If a vineyard does not yield perfect alcohol balance, it should be torn out, a celebrated Natural Wine advocate recently proclaimed, thereby condemning in a few keystrokes all the vineyards of France.

Much of the conversation about innovation in winemaking centers not on whether the new tools work but on whether we will go to hell if we use them. While I too distrust anything with a power cord, I find much of this diatribe rather insubstantial—seeking to persuade through emotional appeal rather than reasoned argument. Many of the players in these discussions are more interested in selling books or padding their page-view revenues than in a serious and balanced exchange of ideas. My purpose in the final section on philosophy is to provide distinctions and perspectives that can inform more profitable deliberations about real issues.

In chapter 22, I challenge the studied reluctance of Natural Wine advocates to place on themselves any tangible definition, seeking through vagueness to hold together a constituency with widely disparate objectives. Certifications such as organic, biodynamic, and kosher, for all their faults, are at least precise, and provide winemakers something specific to shoot for beyond mouthing platitudes.

While scientific enology has virtually eliminated spoilage, it has failed to inform the making of interesting wine. Having dispensed with its easy problems, winemaking has become a theater in which we can stretch our philosophical muscles and learn to grapple with mystery. Many of our best minds have turned their attention to an investigation of biodynamic winemaking, despite its shaky foundations. The delicious controversy surrounding its advent illustrates the inefficacy of reductionist science to organize inquiry into holistic realms, the subject of chapter 21. Perhaps the most valuable outcome in this area will be to refine science’s enthusiastic skepticism toward the appreciation of complex systems as they exist rather than the manner by which they came about.

Postmodern winemaking is science in service to art. The aim is human pleasure, soul to soul. Organized knowledge is not our goal, and formulated wines inevitably fall short. The same subtleties that inform both the performance and the appreciation of a musical piece are present in the process in which winemakers are privileged to partake—that of bringing a vineyard’s expression to the glass.

While Nature herself is the author of every wine, it is the winemaker’s job to present the timbres of terroir in a fashion that resonates in the taster’s breast, guided in doing so by our mutual humanity. Nothing is more exquisite than to be deeply known by another through an offering, be it a Syrah or a symphony, that touches us beyond mere words.

I conclude in the last chapter with a defense of my own working hypothesis: that wine is, for all intents, usefully regarded as liquid music. Its capacity to embody the spectrum of emotional modalities, to exhibit harmony or dissonance that we collectively apprehend, and its power to transport us from care and circumstance are the properties that wine and music share. Attention to nuance guides the best work of the gifted winemaker no less than the virtuoso musician.

Each chapter concludes with take-home messages—points drawn from the discussion that I believe are of particular importance.

The thoughtful reader will not find himself constantly nodding his head in these pages. I am often told, “I like your writing, but I don’t agree with everything you say.” I should hope not. If you are constantly in accord with my assertions, I have wasted my time. Just as in every line of musical melody, resolutions in postmodern thinking are always the child of the tension of discord.

A few notes about usage. Varietal wines are capitalized throughout; varietal grapes are not. Foreign words are italicized the first time they are used. I have taken the liberty to capitalize such semiformal movements as Biodynamics and Natural Wine. Reflecting the strong role of professional women in my industry, the gender pronoun is alternated.