“I have the simplest of taste. I’m always satisfied with the best.”
Oscar Wilde
My mother needlepointed this for me years ago and it is now hanging to the left of the sink in my kitchen. It was a running joke between us. When I was in college, she claimed I had Champagne tastes on a water budget. So, the wine business where I have spent the last 44 years was a natural landing place for me. As a winemaker those tastes could be indulged without judgement.
Hi, and welcome. In this first posting I would like to let you know what I am up to. My first goal is to publish in serial form the book on wine that I’ve written over the last several years. A moderately detailed description of the book follows. I will be posting a chapter every week over the next six months beginning promptly. Here is a brief summary of the book. If it sounds interesting to you the preface and introduction will follow.
Many points of view and voices have explored the world of fine wine. Merchants and other commercial interests historically provided the dominant narrative. Academics and wine critics per se have also contributed over the centuries. Strangely, the winemakers themselves have had little to say – at least in print. Especially on the subject of technique, the makers have been largely silent. The handful of books published in recent years by winemakers have tended to be anecdotal in nature. Most of the books that address technique have been textbooks aimed solely at squarely towards specialists. These academic texts most often written by scientists are intimidating if not inaccessible to the lay reader. This book is different – it is a book about the craft of winemaking described in detail by a lifelong practitioner and acknowledged expert.
My goal is to describe in detail the major facets of wine tasting, grape growing, and winemaking in straightforward prose largely free of jargon and without presuming that the reader has scientific training. This book is not intended to be a manual, but there is much practical advice and knowledge based on my more than four decades of hands-on wine growing.
The book is divided into three sections. The first section deals with tasting and flavor. This section addresses our basic biology of tasting as well as technique from the professional point of view. There has not really been a good lay accessible presentation of wine flavor and tasting since Emile Peynaud’s The Taste of Wine published in English in 1987, and sadly long out of print.
I believe that of the three this section will have the largest appeal to the general reader. Tasting is an area that most of us take for granted. Expanding our knowledge of it can increase its pleasure, and techniques developed by professionals can be adapted to improve an amateur’s experiences while tasting.
This aspect of wine is also my central passion and the area of my greatest academic knowledge. I have taught this subject at the university level both as an introductory and as an advanced class. The introductory course contained students with no background in Chemistry or other wine science and it is for them I developed a commonsense way of talking about this often-daunting field of inquiry.
The second section of the book is concerned with growing grapes for fine wine and its intersection with winemaking. This is an aspect of the craft that is often neglected even by winemakers themselves. The craft of winemaking takes seven to ten years of devoted attention to acquire. This
is quite a lengthy apprenticeship, but understanding the vineyards which support the wines take much longer. It is a lifelong endeavor.
This section on winegrowing contains specifics of the seasonal tasks and their linkage to winemaking. It also goes into some depth on broader philosophies of farming such as organic, sustainable, etc. One cannot discuss agriculture during this period of climate crises without taking the effects of a warming environment into account. There are many references to this throughout the section and in a sad way it is a unifying theme. A warming world is an existential risk for fine winemaking in its traditional locations.
The final chapter of this section examines terroir. Many people besides myself consider this the most beautiful question in wine. Terroir is in some ways the link between winegrowing and winemaking. Wine writing and wine criticism are also intimately linked to discussions of terroir.
The final section of the book addresses winemaking itself. Winemaking is in many ways like cooking. Though with wine the dish can be in the oven for a year or more. The same skills and desires that make for a good cook serve the winemaker equally well. Obsessive attention to detail and a passionate engagement with process and product are essential. One must have a zealot’s belief in the world of the senses.
Winemaking technique however is unique to each vineyard and vintage. Because of this, it is quite difficult to give any universal advice that will work for every situation. The most accurate analogy I have come up with is that being a winemaker is a bit like being a professional ballroom dancer. You know and have practiced all of the dances, but each vintage and every new vineyard is a partner you’ve never danced with before. So, despite your skills you still have to stay light on your feet and do what you can in order to bring out the best in your partner. A winemaker that follows a rigid recipe is a bad winemaker. Winemaking offers few final answers. Rather as the vintages roll by, it continues to pose more and more beautiful questions.
Winemaking like cooking is strongly influenced by both technique and style. The winemaking chapters are the most technical section of the book, and though couched in plain language, winemakers, both amateur and professional, will benefit the most from it.
Preface
In his extended essay on Garner’s Modern American Usage David Foster Wallace coins the term “discourse community”.[1] He defines it as the group who are passionate enough about a subject to have something worthwhile to add to the discussion. In his case the passionate subject was grammar and language usage. In the case of this book the intended audience is the discourse community of wine.
This community includes my peers who produce wines - the extended family of winegrowers throughout the world. Those who have, like me, made vineyards and wine the foundation of their lives. Winemakers taste with a particular focus because their judgements result in actions that change the wine. It is not a disinterested taste. When tasting wines made by others, they are frequently incapable of suspending judgement about how they might have created a different if not necessarily better wine. They usually at the same time retain sympathy for their fellow practitioners and the difficulties inherent in the craft. Winemakers taste with what can seem at times a savage negativity. They taste daily in search of defect or infelicity. This is particularly true when they are judging the products of their own hands. They have to ignore the plentiful positive aspects of any wine and focus on preventing or eliminating the negative.
There is a level of understanding of wine that only comes from making it. This is true in other creative endeavors as well. Some time ago, the car designer Nuccio Bertone was asked to name the most successful car designs. It should be noted that Bertone himself was the designer of some of the most heartbreakingly beautiful cars of all time. He said, “In matters of taste and the emotions it is best not to be too definite, and it is not always the mother’s most beautiful child who is loved best. Also, there is often more to learn from a designer’s failures than from their successes”. His response is both illuminating and modest - a sure sign of a master’s confidence. It is a testament to his good manners, a corollary of his good taste that he omits to name any actual cars or designers in his response. Much of the same feeling applies to wine and their creators. I have been asked by non-wine people countless times, “What is your favorite wine?”. There is of course no answer. Of course, differences in quality between wines exist from both a quantitative and qualitative point of view. However, out at the working faces of the discipline where the daily decisions are made; it is the questions of taste and style that carry the day.
Winemaking improvements are based upon the knowledge gleaned from past practitioners. Each generation of winemakers is indispensable and vitally important. Future winemakers will erect their wines on the foundation we are laying during our lives. Their wines will be better than ours. Just as the wines of today are better than the wines, I first encountered as a neophyte taster in the 1970’s. The living memory of winemaking rarely exceeds fifty years. Most wines themselves are even shorter lived. This is the reason why I believe it is important to chronicle the techniques of today; and the justifications that underlie them.
Besides winemakers, this book is also addressed to other wine professionals who may be curious to see wine from the producer’s perspective. No one knows a wine more deeply than the one who made it, both its successes and failures. Yet, in the public dialog today the producer’s voice is one of the most muted. Through the 19th and much of the 20th century the producer was an acknowledged expert. The depth of knowledge they possessed carried weight. This is no longer the case. Starting in the 1980’s the discussion began being dominated by critics from outside the business of wine. This trend has continued and strengthened since.
I have no issues with criticism per se. One of my passions is the fine arts, painting in particular. Some of my greatest insights and pleasures in the world of the visual arts have come from reading art criticism and aesthetic analysis. As a lifelong literati and aficionado of the long form essay, I have gleaned countless treasure from literary criticism as well. I regret to say I do not find similar pleasure in reading the vast majority of wine criticism. Perhaps a painter or writer might say the same about criticism in their fields, but I think not. I suspect that the near universal adoption of numerical grading of wine on a 100-point scale is partly to blame for the dearth of good critical writing about wine, but this cannot be held solely to blame.
At the most basic level this book is meant for those who love wine, and love what it adds to a civilized life. I began my life in wine as a wine drinker. I believe as the ancient Greeks did that, “who does not love wine does not love life.” Like many I was baffled and fascinated by the plethora of bottles facing me in the shops and the restaurant wine lists. To this day the same fascination remains. Because of the near infinite complexity of its forms and their expressions the study of wine is one of life’s great antidotes to boredom.
As this book is intended primarily for professionals the level of detail may at times prove tedious to the amateur. I have tried my utmost to avoid jargon and to express myself in the plainest possible language. Yet, it is well to keep in mind what Richard Henry Dana states in his introduction to Two Years Before the Mast, “There may be in some parts a good deal that is unintelligible to the general reader.” Dana believed that by leaving in the esoteric details of the world he was depicting the imagination and curiosity of the reader would be stimulated. I have similar hopes. Technical terms when they cannot be avoided or explained within the context will be italicized when first used, and definitions of them can be found in the glossary.
In closing I would like to quote Winston Churchill, an infamously liberal wine imbiber, who said, “I have taken more out of wine than wine has taken out of me.” I agree wholeheartedly. In many ways this book is my attempt to give something back to wine for all that the things it has given me; a profession, a life, friendships and love, many wondrous bottles, some beautiful insights, but more importantly than answers - it has continued to provide an almost limitless number of ever more beautiful questions.
[1] “Democracy, English, and the Wars over Usage” Harper’s Magazine April 2001. This fascinating essay will delight those who revel in footnotes and test the patience of those who do not.
Introduction Nurture and Nature
“Neither in environment nor in heredity can I find the exact instrument that fashioned me, the anonymous roller that pressed upon my life a certain intricate watermark whose unique design becomes visible when the lamp of art is made to shine through life’s foolscap.”
Vladimir Nabokov[1]
Structuring our thinking into opposing dichotomies is an almost universal and nearly irresistible intellectual urge. The puzzle of the relative influences of nature and nurture in human development is a prime example of this. Are we the result primarily of our genetics, or of our family environment? This binary approach has limits, and few of us are actually capable of drawing a bright line between the natural and the cultivated. Avoiding the rhetorical trap of believing that these are opposed to each other is more difficult still. In reality they work together. It is not nature versus nurture, but rather nurture working through nature. One’s natural traits will not thrive without being nurtured. What holds true for us is true for wine as well. And how could it be otherwise since wine is an offspring of human ingenuity.
Much of what I am concerned about might be dismissed as mere semantics[2]. Semantics, however, should not be belittled or avoided. Far better to passionately embrace it. Language is the unique attribute which makes us human. Without language we would still be but a primate hunting and gathering in equatorial climes.
Immediately difficulties arise when we consider the concept of nature. A clear and commonly accepted definition of the word natural does not exist in the context of wine or food. Despite this difficulty the word is ubiquitous in current wine writings. Advertisers and the media are also quite fond of it. They realize that natural resonates with the consumer, and cynical appropriation is their response. Winemakers are more leery of this word. It is vague to a fault, and the odor of hype clings to it. Unfortunately, no universally accepted alternative has supplanted natural. Many alternative words such as legitimate, ethical, transparent, terroir driven, or typical all have something to be said for them. But none seem likely to replace natural. It is likely that this corrupted, or more precisely co-opted word will continue to be used for lack of a more concise one. I believe that it should be used sparingly, with qualification or explication.
Wine is artificial. I mean this in a positive not a pejorative sense. Wine is the product of artifice or craft. Without knowledge and skill, it cannot exist. It does not exist in nature. It demands much nurturing. Yet, like us, it participates in and is a part of nature. The natural or biological world has been evolving for 3 to 4 billion years, an unfathomably deep gulf of time that encompasses one third of the life of the universe. We humans raised our heads 400,000 years ago. Specific evidence indicates wine has existed for about 10,000 years. This coincides with the beginning of agricultural settlements, and the development of the written word[3]. Wine did not appear as a natural spontaneous event throughout the vast span of biological evolution. We must conclude from this that wine is a product primarily of culture, which is to say nurture not nature. Along the spectrum of nature and nurture, wine most certainly falls heavily on the nurture side.
The birth of the scientific understanding of wine occurred in the mid- 19th century. This is only five full generations of winemaking given that the average winemaking life is 40 vintages. Several hundred generations of winemaking preceded any scientific knowledge about wine. Winemakers as a result have a deeply embedded respect for traditional craft and empirical knowledge.
The concept that the natural or savage state is the more perfect and noble began with Enlightenment thinkers such as Rousseau. To this day some maintain that the natural is superior to the manipulated or sophisticated. This is patently false in the case of wine. Nonetheless there persists a belief that the more natural the wine the better. Recall that 4 billion years of natural evolution passed without wine existing. Only the rise of agriculture and civilization allowed wine to be created. Yet somehow today we have reached a point where intervening in a wine’s development is thought to make it less pure, less wholesome, and less complex. This is largely untrue. In my experience, the more active the winemaker is the purer and more delicious their wine will be. My first mentor in winemaking and best friend, Mike Richmond[4], has a quip that addresses this conceit. He says, “Man makes wine, God makes vinegar.” His avowed atheism only adds pungency to this aphorism. Substitute the word Nature for God and his witticism sums it up neatly.
The nurturing or art of wine begins in the vineyard. The vines which produce wine are far, far removed from their natural progenitors. Over many millennia individual vines were selected and cultivated for characteristics superior to wild grapes. The thousands of varieties of grapes and wine which exist today were brought about through selection. Which is a human intervention. Yes, wild, or natural grapevines still exist. No, they do not make good wine. This process of selection continues to this day both within and between varieties. Within a variety the selection of a single vine is termed clonal. Clones are chosen for their unique genetic characteristics and then propagated in preference over others. Historically vines were also selected for their lack of disease. Almost universally grapevines are grafted onto rootstock. This both protects them from soil borne disease and adapts them to specific soil conditions. Grafting onto rootstocks certainly does not exist in nature.
There is little that is wild or natural in a vineyard besides the birds that fly over it. The geometrically linear vine rows themselves are one of the most orderly and formal of landscapes. I recall driving through the vineyard covered hills of the Carneros with Charles Chevalier, Lafite’s winemaker. He observed that, “vineyards are the most beautiful landscaping, so orderly and exact.” I agreed. It delighted me to think that this man who had spent a lifetime looking at vineyards continued to find them beautiful as landscape. Voltaire has his protagonist Candide conclude, “We must cultivate our garden”. Cultivation is such an apt word for it, implying as it does civilization and all its rewards.
The appreciation of wilderness landscapes is, on the other hand, a relatively recent taste. Until the eighteenth-century depictions of mountains and forests were considered barbaric. The wild or natural was associated by most with madness and fear.[5] There is an inherent desire for order that is part of civilization. The cultivation of gardens including wine gardens speaks to our desires to create Edenic ideals. The general taming of nature in the 19th and 20th centuries created a nostalgia for wilderness, and the notion that the natural was superior to the cultivated. In winegrowing a return to an ideal naturalness is impossible. Because it never existed to begin with.
The attentive reader will have no doubt already surmised that I am an interventionist. [6] I begin with a clear vision of what I wish my wines to taste like. And I possess the techniques and tools to achieve these flavors within the constraints of the vintage’s nature. It is a poor craftsman who doesn’t understand and utilize the tools available to him. Nonetheless, I am also conservative or traditional in two senses. Firstly, as an environmental conservative, and secondly in the sense of employing time tested techniques over modern technologies. I believe that there is an unspoken yet well understood ethics involved in the production of fine wine. I believe that there are techniques which are not appropriate for fine wine even if they are perfectly legal[7].
Distinguishing between the voguish term natural and more precise terms such as biological, or environmental is helpful. The term natural is overused and poorly understood. It has become so vague a catchall in modern parlance that it should mostly be avoided like the plague.
Winemakers are careful, conservationist, and protective of their most basic resource, the land. Before the terms sustainable, green, or organic came into common usage, many wine farmers were practicing it already. The wine farmer spends his days with his vines and wishes to protect his own health first and foremost. I do not know any group of agriculturists who are more careful to avoid contamination of their crops. Because they realize that wine’s transparent nature will expose any taint or corruption.
I hold the greatest respect for the complexity, beauty, and fragility of the biological environment we all partake in. Much of my academic and intellectual life has been devoted to understanding biology. My desire to create complex wines has its genesis in a fascination with biology’s complexity, depth, and mystery. But the only part of the biome that creates wine is man, and I feel obliged to defend the right of the creator to shape the outcome of the process.
Discussions of human development often contrast the role of nature or genetics versus nurture. But in reality, these operate on each other within a complex continuum. Nature dominant in one aspect, nurture driving another, and many influenced by both. You would not have civilized humans or societies without both. The same holds true for wine. The soil, the climate, the yearly fluctuations of weather provide the variations of environment. Man must provide the response to this fluctuating environment, the upbringing or nurture. The French have thought long and deeply about wine culture. They call a certain phase in the wine’s life its eleve. Like many great wine terms, there is no exact English equivalent. It shares a root with the English word elevate. The closest translation as it is used in wine is upbringing or education. The concept of raising or educating a wine as you would a child resonates with me. There is a reason that it is common worldwide for winemakers to refer to their wines as their children with the same mixture of love and pride and of course at times exasperation.
My pride in my knowledge of how to improve or educate wines is deeply felt. This knowledge is among my most prized possessions. Unlike property or cash, it cannot be taken from me. This intellectual capital has been slowly accumulating for four decades, and it will inform every aspect of this book. So too will my understanding of the biological world. Making wine allows one to participate in both the environment of the vineyard and in the complex microbiological and chemical mysteries of the wine. Within its limits, the dichotomy of nature and nurture is a valid way to approach wine. The early taxonomists in their attempts to classify and identify complex groups of plants and animals often used dichotomous systems. These systems of two choices in some ways mirror the way we make many decisions. In observing myself and other winemakers it is often a yes/no process that moves us along the complex decision tree required to produce wine.
There is no one way to organize information in a field as complex as winemaking. I have chosen to break this book into broad sections that more or less mirror my own progress through wine knowledge. I will begin with wine flavors, their perception, and the judging of wine sensorially. This section will be of the most interest to the general reader. It addresses our direct sensual connection with wine. Drinking wine is the bond that connects all who love wine.
Next, I will address winegrowing. I will discuss winemaking last. The separation of winemaking from grape growing is an artificial one as they are so intimately linked. Most good winemakers are also skilled in grape growing. But, for organizational purposes, they will be considered separately. It is also true that studying the vineyard and its dance with the passing seasons is a process that both never ceases and is ever fresh. These two sections are primarily intended for wine professionals, especially winegrowers.
[1] Speak, Memory Everyman’s Library, 1999
[2] The attribution of meaning to words.
[3] The beginning of visual art is more ancient. The 40-50,000-year-old cave paintings demonstrate the ability of pre-agricultural humans to create vivid and accurate representations of the world. This argues for the early development of abstract thinking. But there is no indication that these hunter gatherer societies made wine. It seems that wine had to wait for agriculture to develop.
[4] Mike Richmond is a longtime California winemaker and personal friend. He gave me my first job in the wine business at Acacia in 1979, for which I am eternally in his debt.
[5] Kenneth Clark’s Landscapes into Art (1949) is where I first discovered this. This wonderful book is one of the finest among his many contributions to Art History. Everything he published is worthwhile reading in my experience.
[6] I was pleased to discover that the painter Titian’s motto reflects this belief as well. It was NATURA POTENTIOR ARS – roughly translated as, “Art is more powerful than nature.”
[7] David Lattin and I would often discuss this subject during the dozen years we worked together at Acacia. Our conclusions were that regulations about wine technologies should be specific to their price points. Inexpensive and ordinary table wines should be allowed any and all technologies in their production as long as they were healthy. The more expensive fine wines should be more strictly limited in the techniques that were allowed. To some extent European wine law has attempted to address this, but not very specifically. US wine law is mute on the subject, and likely to remain so.
Chapter Three which I'll publish a week from Tuesday explores this and other aspects of the topic of grading and judging wines in depth.
I (Tom Rinaldi) was fortunate enough to work with Mike Richmond in 1976 at Freemark Abbey...he helped to create a wine ("Eidelwine") that was botrytised ("Noble Rot") ...apricots and honey, dessert wine...and the first time I tried it, the wine was "infected" by fruit flies that have a unique (awful) aspect to the nose....thought that was botrytis!! He admonished us, and we learned a lot from there on!