here are plenty of heroes in this story. One is Randy Dunn, who is quite open in his praise of RO (Reverse Osmosis) and his condemnation of overripe fruit. Another is Michael Havens, who agreed in 2001, in the interest of openness and consumer education, to have his face plastered all over the The New York Times as an “outed” micro-ox practitioner. There are some journalist heroes out there, too. Some have supported the politically incorrect view that good wine is good wine, and those who can enhance distinctive terroir expression are welcome to their tools: Jamie Goode, Patrick Matthews, Derrick Schneider. Others lean to the conservative, but are tireless, rigorous and open: Eric Asimov, Alice Feiring.

There are villains, too. Some writers are widening the information disconnect between winemakers and wine buffs with all the good-hearted integrity of a Beverly Hills divorce attorney. Many paparazzi who have come to interview me, agenda in hand, tasted through my wines, and responded like any modern journalist when confronted with an inconvenient truth. They ignored it. Despite many compliments delivered in person, their lambastes of wine technology contain scarcely a word about my wines.

I make Eurocentric, balanced, distinctive, somewhat offbeat wines, which share the purpose of presenting alternative styles for California and thus don’t resemble the mainstream. They are not impact wines. They are harmonious, skillfully crafted wines of balance and harmony, each a unique expression of terroir. They age well.

Writers love to coax winemakers to be open. Then sometimes they nail them. When I started posting the particulars of techniques used for specific wines, it proved helpful in convincing Vinovation’s winery clients to explore style options outside the lockstep mainstream, but among the media, it has mostly made me a target. No points for honesty from this bunch. Since I consider inauthenticity the heart of the problem, it’s ironic to watch critics go for the throat when a winemaker tells the truth.

Likewise there are retailers who have joined the bandwagon, dropping wines they really like when they discover they are made by someone willing to be honest about their production methods. More dupes than villains.

I don’t know if that certain writer for the Wine Spectator who started it all in 2001 (and continues to rail against technology) has ever tasted my wines, though I sent him a flight. He won’t return my calls.

It is time for all players to start being straight. It feels to me like many journalists are afraid to put their weapons on safety and venture out from their entrenched positions. Ye passionate scribes: I implore you to make a rigorous accounting of your politics, and consider if the wine world might be better off if winemakers could speak freely of their work without attracting fragging from those who claim to revere their craft. It’s the downside of bounty. Unlike in my salad days, a flat-out crappy bottle of wine today is quite rare. The problems which commonly haunted wine lists twenty years ago – oxidized, sour, vinegary, or just incredibly funky – are scarce today. But the science and practical expertise which eradicated these problems have sown their own generation of complaints.

It’s a timeless irony. The problems we complain of today are actually children of the solutions we found to yesterday’s problems. Our malaise du jour? Much of this good clean wine is pretty doggone boring.

The Good, The Bad and the Funky

No doubt about it. Ninety percent of the wine we drink is supplied by ten percent of wineries, mostly big corporate outfits - commodity McWine in a dozen conventional styles - who deliver their product with scientific precision and industrial efficiency. For the most part, marketing departments at large wineries and the winemakers who work for them are astoundingly responsive to market demands. Most wine is a commodity that sells based on very specific parameters that have been honed over the last couple of decades. The simple fact is that unusual wines, wines of distinction, don’t sell very easily, so the mega-boutiques don’t waste time and money making them. For them, producing “interesting” wine equals fiscal suicide.

The remaining tenth is divided among thousands of small niche producers whose main problem is an honest point of distinction. It may be an extrinsic strategy: a cute dog on the label, a memorable tasting room experience, a promising appellation pedigree, or some other oddity unrelated to what’s in the bottle. But often as not, it’s intrinsic, i.e. in the bottle, a distinctive style which builds a following over time.

Anyone who hasn’t tried to do so can’t possibly imagine how much work it is to establish a new brand today. In truth, there is almost no receptivity for a new player outside the norm. You would think that all that web-kvetching about terroir would show up in the marketplace in a way that a guy could use to build a brand.

In your dreams, maybe. It’s really weird to spend all day trying to shoehorn a damned good Euro-centric Cabernet Franc or Chablis-styled Chardonnay onto crowded retail shelves and then to come home to an Internet forever moaning about sameness and “anywhere-ness.” Us small winery guys keep wondering: When are you terroir-istes gonna quit yer yackin’ and start spending some money?

Selling Your Vision

What most small producers long for is instant celebrity. A 90+ Parker score is like winning the lottery. Like actors, musicians, and pro baseball pitchers, a select few are chosen for stardom. But as with ghetto kids desperately honing their hip-hop routines or their three-pointer shots, very few winemakers who bank on being *Discovered* avoid disappointment.

What’s left is, to me, the fun part of the industry. Life on the “D” List is where most actors, musicians and small wineries scratch out a living. We do it by making wines which are always more interesting than our corporate counterparts. It’s a people business. I gain my clientele one person at a time. Relationships and shoe leather.

When you make your living one-on-one, you mustn’t fib to folks. They can tell, and that means you’re wasting your time. These days, we all wear a shell to protect us from the constant barrage of hype that is our culture, and only genuine, authentic passion can break through. To create a lasting memory, you gotta come from the heart.

But nowadays being straight with wine lovers has become a dicey proposition.

In the Seventies, the whole California wine industry outside of Gallo and Italian Swiss Colony was in this category. It was a wonderful time, when the California wine industry was famous for its spirit of openness and collaboration, which had consumers pouring over Brix and pH data, helping us unravel Bacchus’ secrets. Nobody really knew what they were doing, so we were all actively engaged in learning from one another, and everyone was very honest and open.

Today’s small guys are packed in cheek by jowl. None of them are in it for the money. For ego, for adventure, for artistic or financial freedom, but nobody’s getting rich. An endless supply of artisans of every conceivable stripe.

Trouble in Paradise

All good wine? Not on your life. But the proliferation of well made wines that consumers can choose from is greater than ever before. Like books, there’s something for everybody, but nothing is suited to all. Widespread experimentation with new styles and techniques means some wrong turns, for sure, but that’s just part of the fun. If they’re smart, John and Jane Consumer will draw on a passionate and dedicated retailer to sort through this huge and complex menu, using a personalized dialogue tailored to their tastes and budget (something that far surpasses the services of a published critic). They can also pick up tips on the Internet and from their friends. It’s a blast! With the broadest availability and the highest quality standard of all time, any consumer or critic who can complain about the current state of the wine market is pretty darned hard to please.

Retailing, on the other hand, isn’t an easy job. The average small wine shop carries between 200 and a thousand wines. That’s around one percent of the market. So it’s hard work to taste and reject 99 wines out of a hundred. For sommeliers with a list of 100 wines, it’s worse. I’ve been at this game full out since ’72, and I still can’t order wine intelligently in a restaurant. It’s simply impossible to keep up.

With perhaps 80,000 wines in U.S. commerce, how do these pros thin the herd? Since the big liquor chains carry the expected stuff, small hand-sell shops specialize in the obscure, the distinctive, the surprising value. In searching for undiscovered values, how does one sift through and emerge with the gifted new terroir genius who hasn’t yet hit the big time? Many don’t enter competitions, or get ignored there as being too offbeat. Distributors aren’t much help. Like agents, they are pushing what they have, usually heavy on the superlatives.

Well, there’s no easy answer. But a growing movement which I favor is to look for “natural wine.” Wine untouched by the evils of 20th Century technology.

Trouble is, strictly speaking, that doesn’t really exist. At all. OSHA won’t even let you operate a winery without electricity, and why would you wish to? So the rabid conversation now taking place on the web is about which tools are robbing distinctiveness and, in Eric Asimov’s words, replacing “somewhere-ness” with “anywhere-ness.”

Cooking Up Goodness

In today’s ridiculously competitive marketplace, winemakers are squeezed hard to come up with the stand-out, knock-your-socks-off, fall-out-of-your-chair-good wine. In pursuit of this laudable goal, some go too far, and offer wines which shout a bit too loudly for attention.

Somebody has coined a word for this kind of wine: “Spoofulated.” Over-manipulation. Fiddling around with a wine to pump it up, score ratings and wow consumers at the expense of its natural terroir expression. The issue at hand is the extent to which winemakers, or any other chefs, are entrusted with preserving place and laying aside cheap thrills to protect nature..

Winemaking isn’t a science. It’s just a branch of cooking where we use a calendar instead of a timer – the ultimate Slow Food. Putting something distinctive and visceral on the table is the challenge with which every chef deals daily. As in all cooking, distinctive terroir expression suffers from overspicing. That doesn’t mean all cooking is bad. You just need to have respect for the native flavors of your raw materials.

A recurring theme in the constant complaining about spoofulation is that recent technological-sounding techniques (many of which my company provides to a thousand wineries) are somehow connected to this over-manipulation syndrome. There’s never much of an explanation as to why this would be so, but it’s clear that practices like reverse osmosis and micro-oxygenation are under suspicion. And of course the standard line which any winemaker will tell you is that he does the minimum.

But the paradox is that sometimes doing “nothing” requires a lot of manipulation and technology. Sushi is a case in point. What could be a more pure expression of raw materials? Yet to deliver it fresh to your plate takes much art, skill and technology.

Patching up problem wines is surely preferable to dumping them down the drain. Doctoring defects by sneaking in mega-purple, residual sugar or gobs of oak certainly robs wine (in this case crappy wine) of its distinctive characters. So be it. But when perfectly sound wines are deemed deficient because they don’t fit our statistical consumer profile or lack sufficient impact, then the nip and tuck is as tragic as breast implants.

Are these fiddlings detectable by the consumer or even the expert critic? Well, sometimes. I remember my first great wine love – the ’70 Clerc Milon. Snagged two cases and set into a bottle every month or so. By the twenty-fourth cork, I couldn’t bear the stuff, and that’s how I learned about the excess of the barrel. Everybody loves vanilla – that’s deep in our DNA – but eventually you gag on the stuff. I came to realize that I’d fallen for all flash and no substance.

It’s a well-known cheap trick. Good critics and retailers try to save their vulnerable clients from such blunders. But what about the truly artful dodge that fools the pros? It’s not nice to fool Mother Nature, and I suspect that the invisible fake is the most irksome of all to our intrepid wine police.

Honesty Matters More Than Process

Put yourself in the winemaker’s shoes. Winemakers are under tremendous pressure to perform unrealistic feats, and they want a complete set of tools to please consumers every time. Aren’t you just supposed to make delicious, wholesome, interesting wine?

Apparently not. Very vocal elements of the gatekeeper community also want to control the means we use to achieve these goals. Not what’s in the bottle, but whether it got there by methods which a wine critic or retailer can comprehend and approve.

Actually, that sounds pretty reasonable. More than ever, wine consumers need professional guidance through the dizzying maze of offerings available in today’s market. These pros study their butts off to develop palate training for the baffling array of wine genres against which all wine is judged. But when winemaking practices change, there can be trouble, because hidebound traditionalism is useful to critics in sorting the good from the great, and it’s hard to keep score when the rules keep changing. Oh please, Lord, not a new playbook! Since wine is organic, a new technique always needs to pass the ageability test. Extended hangtime is an example of a technique that brings out the fruitiness in young wines but also causes them to fall apart early.

Nevertheless, we are often able to move ahead together. When gatekeepers support change in the wine industry, it can happen quickly and smoothly. The transition to screwcaps, as untraditional a transformation as one could name, is going swimmingly because every retailer and sommelier understands the need and there is no opposition except among consumers who miss the “pop.” Done deal.

But faced with the increasing pressure to garner scores and maintain consistency, wine production in the last twenty years has responded by developing a great number of new tools and tricks. Winemaking is just a form of cooking, the ultimate Slow Food, and one could say precisely the same thing about restaurants, where Sous-Vide-Cuisine, foam technology and liquid nitrogen are now the rage. But a crucial difference is that in winemaking, we left the trade out of the loop. Wines got way better, thanks very much.

But for some critics, these new methods are irritating. I think they’re mostly annoyed that recent technical progress wasn’t more open. The industry’s character has become much more secretive over the last couple of decades for reasons which I’ll explore below. In the ‘80’s and ‘90’s, it was 'don’t ask, don’t tell'. Now a cycle of distrust has driven innovative winemakers further underground as critics’ complaints become more shrill.

A Series of Sweeping Transitions

Much of this discord can be attributed to a series of sweeping transitions which occurred simultaneously over the last two decades and have altered wine’s context utterly. Here are six.

1. Increased competition: In California, like nowhere else, winemaking innovations and philosophies can take root and thrive very rapidly, manifesting themselves in successful brands which can come into being and gain global acceptance almost overnight. The technical and economic aspects of style pioneering are inseparable, and their interplay is the essence of winemaking. Particularly in the New World, the struggle to establish new brands and vineyards depends on rapid quality development in order to compete against long-established European benchmarks.

When I was retailing in the 1970’s, there were fewer than 100 wineries in California, and Jackson’s carried just about everything there was. Today that’s impossible. There are now 2,000 wineries in California, with as many more out of state, and tens of thousands of imports. This month, the U.S. Federal Label Approval count topped 100,000. Even the largest selections can include just one wine in fifty. The great Jack Davies told me in 1980, “Clark, knockin’ ‘em dead is a dyin’ art.” I don’t care if you’re the top cult Cab in Napa, now you sweat for every advantage you can scrape up.

2. Technological revolution: This intense competition has created winemakers who are eagerly listening for new quality improvement capabilities. Coincidentally, rapid advances in medicine, food engineering and other fields have provided new tools at a rapid rate. Just as doctors need to study hard to keep apace of the underlying function, benefits and risks associated with emerging advances, winemakers can sometimes barely keep up, let alone school the press.

3. Paradigm shift in enology: This technical avalanche hits the industry at a time when there is also a conceptual revolution taking place within enology. The post WWII advent of scientific enology inspired new wineries to reject antiquated practices and to introduce hygiene and scientific measurement into our age-old craft. The ultimate result was defect-free consistent quality. But is wine today the “bottled poetry” Robert Louis Stevenson spoke of?

While modern enological techniques give us beautiful Riesling and Sauvignon Blanc, the same techniques give us red wines which lack soulful expression. That is because modern concepts of oxygen exclusion, gentle pressing and sterile bottling are best suited to wine styles in which arrested development is a virtue: fresh whites and some light reds. When phenolic elaboration is required, these tools hinder more than they help, particularly in large vessels.

The increasing sophistication and competitiveness of the 21st Century wine marketplace imposes demands on our winemaking skills, well beyond cleanliness and drinkability. The adaptation to wine of the dilute aqueous theoretical model of solution chemistry has dominated enology for fifty years. It has become increasingly clear in the last decade that this model is seriously incomplete. In fact, the extent to which a red wine deviates from “ideal behavior” may be a good working definition of quality. The soulfulness of Grand Vins de Garde derives from the structure of the wine more than its composition. The capability of fine tannin colloids to integrate aromatic components of vegetal, oak and microbial sources, in defiance of dilute aqueous predictions, is now being recognized.

In addition, oxygenation’s capability to measure and alter the reductive strength of wines has exposed the central role of this aspect of enology, with tremendous implications for grape growing and wine ageing. At first studied with relation to tannin reactivity, it has turned out that reductive strength phenomena cannot be fully explained without also taking into account the effect of viticultural principles such as phenolic metamorphosis during ripening and the effect of organic farming practices on wine’s natural immune system.

4. The New Consumerism: A Social Revolution in Ethics: The new Internet has given a whole generation of aficionados unparalleled access to information and intensive discussion on every aspect of wine. In his wonderful exploration Wikinomics, Don Tapscott and Anthony Williams characterizes the imperatives of the new consumer : “Rather than being passive recipients of mass consumer culture, the Net G are a generation of scrutinizers. They typically can’t imagine a life where citizens didn’t have the tools to think critically, exchange views, challenge, authenticate, verify or debunk. They also tend to value openness, collaboration and collective social responsibility.” Unlike Generation X, the Millennium Generation is discovering and buying a lot of wine. Blogger penchant for openness and frank, passionate discussion has led them to focus on good guys and bad guys. This is a disaster for old school obfuscation, but an opportunity for winemakers who are willing to talk straight.

5. Failure rate for technology: Gung-ho for “progress” a century ago, folks of all ages are now equally suspicious of new technologies. You can’t really blame ‘em. There’s plenty of evidence in our culture that technology corrupts natural beauty. Geez, don’t get me started. Our homes are violated by telemarketing computers, junk e-mail and cable TV pop-up ads. Our quaint and locally unique old downtown shops are now almost entirely replaced by cookie cutter strip malls that are identical the world over. And not much room for Fred Astaire and Noel Coward in today’s Hollywood, which has pretty much settled on the high tech Big Film as its specialty – the same old retooled plot excuse for explosions and mayhem seems to have proved a more reliable box office draw than virtuosity, original dialogue and story line.

Oowee, it makes me mad. Let’s beat up the next winemaker we come across. After all, wine is the One Pure Thing, stomped by virgins and untouched by science. Osmosis-Smozmosis. “Micro-Ox my wine, I rearrange yo face.” These are the innocent passions of the media-spawned wine newbies, and God love them for it.

But the problem isn’t the tools we use. The ticky tacky houses in Malvina Reynold’s song don’t all look just the same because of the hammers and saws used to build them, but because they were banged out fast and cheap for a one-size-fits-all market mentality. Tools aren’t the issue. Who hasn’t ruined breakfast with a microwave? But does that mean Wolfgang Puck shouldn’t be allowed to own one? Countless great films attest to the value of video cameras, yet cable is mostly junk, because junk sells and it’s cheap to make.

6. Critiquing the Critics: Critical wine review has undergone a metamorphosis since the days of openness. The old guard – Jerry Mead, Gerald Asher, Robert Finegan, Nate Chroman, Robert Balzar, Alexis Lichine, Hugh Johnson and Michael Broadbent – were all friends to the industry who saw their role as popularist connectors who seldom uttered a discouraging word. This industry-friendliness took them all down when consumers realized that they supplemented their lousy paychecks from the entertainment budgets of wineries.

In the Eighties, these gentlemen were replaced by a more lucrative business model in which Robert Parker, the Wine Spectator and Connoisseur’s Guide established their credibility by peppering their issues with the occasional damning score or down-turned glass. Violence sells, be it pro sports or prime time.

Thrashing and bashing has long been the province of food and theatre critics. It is a peculiar imbecility of our culture that the willingness to go for the kill shot is somehow perceived as a hallmark of objectivity. In point of fact, mean-spirited sensationalism carries a bias far more insidious than the patronization of yore, since, like a good attorney, the journalist-provocateur sees no obligation to present facts inconvenient to his case. Like the nightly news, today’s wine blasts seek more to alarm than to inform.

The Question of Sameness

A common claim among today’s scribes is that technology makes wines taste the same. Wine technology fall guy that I am, I can scarcely have a conversation with anybody in the trade without this issue emerging. I think my own wines prove otherwise. But when I’m open about the new tools I’ve employed, concerns immediately surface about eradicating distinctive terroir expression.

In a way, they are right. Technology has certainly robbed us of the spoiled wines that we regularly encountered in the ‘70’s. These were certainly more distinctive and varied: high VA, stuck fermentations, malolactic in the bottle, geranium tone, and aldehydes were well-known benchmarks we almost never see today. Darn.

Believe it or not, there are some very vocal proponents of imbalance in the name of naturalness. Alice Feiring comments in NY Times post, “Call me a silly girl, but if it was a hot year, I want to taste the heat. A wet one? I want to taste it. High acidity? Low acidity? Give me the best a winemaker can do. A fine winemaker can always make something fascinating. Vintage subtleties are part of the wine passion. I do not want ‘corrected’ wine.”

Eric Asimov, a more balanced voice, nevertheless takes it for granted that less is more when it comes to artisanal wines:

“The conflict, as I see it, comes with winemakers who claim to believe that their wares are art, who say they believe in terroir and all the associations that go along with wines that convey a sense of place. These wines ought to be made naturally, without major technological reshaping. They are not intended to appeal to the broad populace, but to be distinctive.”

My favorite corollary of Murphy’s Law states “Nothing is impossible for the man who doesn’t have to do it himself.” The real truth is that wines, and I mean all wines, become distinctive through artifice. That’s what winemakers do, don’t you know. The conversion of grapes into that stuff in your glass is a major technological reshaping every time.

Winemakers must not abandon this moral high ground to non-practitioners. Like any chef, the artisanal winemaker is charged with transforming raw groceries into an offering which displays their special attributes to best advantage. Distinctive flavor expression comes first, but for Pete’s sake, this is wine, not fresh grapes. Even at its leanest, the transformation from grapes to grand vin is hands down the most manipulative of cooking processes.

In my view, if we focus on means instead of ends, we won’t make much progress towards naturalness. Banning the steadycam won’t make film more artsy. In fact, somebody please send one to Jon Nossiter. Taking black mascara off the shelves at Walgreens won’t convince women to present their natural, unpainted selves in public. The real enemy is artlessness, not evil machines and methods. Lackluster wine is just bad cooking.

When Alan Goldfarb came to interview me, he articulated an interesting distinction. I showed him my “Faux Chablis,” a French-style Chardonnay bottled at 12.9 percent alcohol with good minerality and distinctive aromatic expression. I also showed him the wine prior to alcohol adjustment at 14.8% alcohol – bitter, hot, and aromatically null. He remarked quite rightly that the alcohol-reduced wine had truer terroir expression, but that the unadjusted wine, which he did not prefer (few do) was more authentic. Bingo.

I find for the most part that consumers are more concerned with what’s in the bottle than the winemaker’s methods. But OK, there is an element that does care about process, and they deserve access to the facts.

Ruling on the Rules

Whatever importance the niche currently has, winemakers would love to tap into the Natural Wine movement as a game with rules – a specialty like certified organic wine or kosher wine. Right now everybody’s saying, “Yeah, sure, I’m natural, I do the minimum” but there are no standards, no teeth. Kosher winemaking rules may be completely nuts, but by God, they are written down, right there in the Torah. Goyim may not look upon the wine. Working with two rabbis on a kosher project was a laugh riot, and it was weird for me to wrap duct tape around those clear plastic hoses. But hey, I had to giggle - it’s in the book.

Natural wine doesn’t have this clarity of definition, and that has turned every producer into a bullshit artist.

Alice Feiring had the good grace to supply me with her tentative personal list of proscriptions for natural winemaking, which I think reasonably represents the position of many concerned citizens. In AF approved wines, the important elements are:

*Wines made from grapes planted on interesting soils and climates, not farmed chemically, irrigated or picked at over ripeness.
* No added yeast or nutrients.
* No enzymes
* No bacteria
* No added tannin
* No added chemicals
* No wood ‘product’ (wood is used for élevage, NOT for flavor)
* No acidification
* No chaptalization
* No alcohol adjustment
* NOTHING should be added that is not from the grape itself
* No texture manipulation (MOX)
* No reverse osmosis (unless needed to ‘save’ a vintage)
* Sulfur used in the minimum, and preferably from natural sources.

What the heck. Let’s work towards a certification mark for Alice’s fellow travelers. Then we could get some economics going. Do X, get money ... this winemakers understand. They are not acquisitive souls, but they do have bills to pay, and generally have dug themselves into sizeable financial holes. How to make a small fortune in the wine business? Start with a large one.

The notion that restricting winemakers’ options will force them to make better wine is certainly silly. But it’s cynical as well. These men and women are my colleagues, my clients and my friends, and they deserve more respect from their supposed fans. They didn’t get into the biz for the money, and they generally agonize about process a lot more than armchair critics are in any position to appreciate.

Like a pop singer, you gotta work every day to balance self expression against what sells. Screwballs like me buck the system, trying to make a go of it with fringe experiments like Faux Chablis and Roman Syrah – fortunately, not my day job.

To some extent, we all end up chickening out. Just to pay the bills, we are sometimes reduced to kicking out White Zinfandel or the Basic Napa Cabernet that tastes exactly like the rest. I believe that the real root cause of sameness is intentionally centrist marketing strategies, which pander to established mega-niches and trendy appellations.

The reality is that winemaking choices are ruled by a democracy in which you vote with dollars. Heads up, ye geeks: hard core wine buffs are disadvantaged in this contest because they have no product loyalty. They like to sample a different wine every day, so they don’t support brands very well even when they love them. If you want your voice to count, you gotta enroll your less adventuresome friends, who just want to buy good wine by the case.

Familiarity Breeds Complacency

The strange thing about Alice’s list is the omissions: electricity, stainless steel, refrigeration, inert gas, sterile filtration. None of it traditional, just post WWII innovations. Nobody argues that pumping over is better than punching down, or that gravity feed is inferior to pumped transfers. These are conveniences, not quality improvements. Why isn’t the internet full of criticism of these powerful and dangerous technologies?

Because they’re familiar. New tools are always obnoxious, while the familiar always seems safe. Then you find out margarine is poison. We all grew up with electricity, and have lost touch with how truly weird it really is. It changed every aspect of winemaking and empowered many truly bad practices which persist today. Our kitchens are full of stainless steel, and we think of it as inert, harmless. But it’s an absolute barrier to oxygen and to microbial equilibrium. Does this protect wine or stifle its development? It sure as heck isn’t traditional!

After a while we get used to things. What could have been scarier in 19th Century France than the introduction of isinglass? Sacré bleu - throw fish bladders in the wine?! But today this practice is considered très chic – the finest of fining agents, reserved for those who care enough to spend the very most. Still, in the last ten years, we’ve begun to question the whole notion of fining. A skillful winemaker looks for more tannin, not less. More bricks to build the structure. Randall Grahm reports his mantra: “I will fear no tannin.”

The weirdness factor is a lousy yardstick. We live in very odd times, and the things we consider normal today are pretty damn peculiar by any traditional standard. And “normal” is not necessarily for the better. Personally, I don’t think it’s healthy that we spend all our waking hours in bright spaces, be it sunlight or electric light. I believe the mind needs the restful moodiness of firelight and starlight, which all humans enjoyed in their evening hours until a hundred years ago. And I’m convinced that the best wines were more soulful before we got proficient at cleaning them up. Weirdness is a slippery slope – faxes, CDs, laptops, iPods have gone from weird to familiar to boring in a brief moment. Today’s winemaking innovations will do the same.

For the lion’s share of winemakers, that transition is complete. So we have an information gap between winemakers and critics. That’s not a bad thing. Critics are not supposed to have the depth of winemaking expertise required of practitioners. They couldn‘t do their job well if they did. They are supposed to represent the consumer and see wines with a beginner’s mind. But they need to realize that this leaves them in a tenuous position to pass judgment on techniques.

Where’s the Beef?

In an information vacuum, you’d think the press would reserve judgment. Inflammatory rhetoric ain’t helping the situation, because winemakers duck and cover. Instead, I’m on trial on two counts: Alcohol Adjustment (via reverse osmosis) with malice aforethought, and Micro-Oxygenation in the first degree.

Charitably, I could opine that Ms Feiring’s characterization of reverse osmosis filtration as producing “sludge” simply reveals that she doesn’t understand what RO does. Think it through. Wineries pay Vinovation to turn 2,500 wines a year into sludge? Not. We simply reduce their wines from obnoxious levels of alcohol. Where’s my Medal of Honor? In this same information vacuum, Alice’s beloved “natural” Burgundies are routinely beet-sugared to the same 13+ percent alcohol balance, without any obligation to report it to her. Would you?

This situation is no scandal. I am here to tell you that the adjustment of alcohol is as valuable and as trivial as adjusting the salt in a soup. Winemakers have a right, and perhaps an obligation, to make use of this tool when it makes better wine. The French method of beet sugar addition for this purpose, practiced for approximately 40 percent of classified Bordeaux and Burgundy, is not excoriated, and neither should our firmly established filtration practice which harmlessly removes alcohol – surely on higher ethical terroir than Dr. Chaptal’s secret additive. Given the four-figure market for First Growths and Grand Crus, there is little chance that French wines will ever be required to come clean on their labels by stating “Contains Beet Sugar.”

So What? Chaptal was no devil, and French wines are better because of him. Similarly, in the New World, I believe that most consumers are quite happy to have properly ripe flavors with balanced alcohol. So are most winemakers. So shoot me.

More about Micro-oxygenation in a later article. For now, let’s clear up a simple misunderstanding. It’s ironic that the proponents of traditional wine grew up in the age of scientific enology, and have little experience with methods employed in the 6,000 years prior. Thus Alice Feiring must be forgiven for her speculatons on ageing:

“Just to pick up the MOX issue; if it worked? Fine. The machine is very low-tech, but for me, it drastically changes the nature of a wine by smoothing out its tannins and thusly robbing the wine of its future. This is a terrible thing for those of us who love older wines, who love to see those tannins evolve. To paraphrase myself, a MOx’ed wine is like a hand that has never done any work. Its character has been erased.”

This is a reasonable concern, and seems an obvious indictment of MOX. If young reds are made without oxygen and contain enough tannin to age, they are harsh and bitter in youth, right? But Alice isn’t aware that this is a defect of modern winemaking. Five minutes in Madiran tasting oxygenation experiments from the ‘80’s showed me how traditional wines behaved before all the tools of reductive winemaking were available. It turns out that properly administered youthful exposure to air does not rob longevity, but instead increases it substantially.

Who knew? Check out my 2004 Crucible This is a wine that will go the distance and develop for easily two decades, but is also enjoyable now. That’s not impossible.

Putting It All In Context

Randall Grahm opines in The Science of Wine:

“If a producer makes a vin d’appellation then there is an implicit contract that he or she enters into, effectively promising to produce a wine of some degree of typicité, which I suppose would also include the characteristics of the vintage. If that producer utilizes certain techniques to wipe out vintage characteristics, even though he or she is perhaps producing a wine that most punters would prefer, I believe that winemaker is acting in bad faith. In the New World, where experimentation is encouraged and expected, the prime directive is to make the best wine.”

There was a time, now long past, when Europe was a laboratory, chock full of experimentation with new styles. The result was a whole series of extreme spoofulations such as concentration through hang time and rot, barrel ageing (with its triple threat of foreign flavoring, oxygenation and reverse osmosis concentration), spirits fortification, fining with animal products, lees contact, in-bottle fermentation, chaptalization, and on and on. The traditional wines we now venerate were yesterday’s shockers: Amarone, Sauternes, Port, Sherry, Bordeaux, Champagne, ... Good for them. God save us from the grapes of Champagne vinified au natural.

Now it’s the New World’s turn to contribute some innovations, so far very modest by comparison. And yes, we’re making some blunders in our first days – petroleum agriculture, excessive hang time, getting lost in theories and numbers – which the market will sort out. But mostly we’re making such good wine that there is little of substance to complain about.

The Politics of Cosmetics

A shocking good read which bears on our subject is Beauty Secrets, The Politics of Appearance by Wendy Chapkis. In it, women of every description grapple with what they can show and what the world will accept, just as we do with our wines. “Mommy, why do you have a mustache?”

I think I speak for most men that on the one hand, we are philosophically on the side of come-as-you-are. Still, for myself, I not only support a woman’s right to choose her looks, but I’m also sensitive to the public pressures to conform. If cosmetics are to be used, I’d say the prime directive is invisibility, and that’s the principle that guides my winemaking. But more often than I’d comfortably admit, I really enjoy the outwardly spoofulated bustiere and spiked heels of an Amador Zin on steroids.

I think there is room in this world for all these choices to make an appearance. Natural Wine lovers have no cause to panic that centrism will eradicate their world. Nobody is dying out there of wine manipulation. What’s missing is honesty, and I assure you there would be a lot more of that if we would all just relax.