Sometimes, Too Much of a Good Thing is Too Much

 

Eric Asimov posted this great article recently in The New York Times.  Eric has a wonderful ability to get to the point and tease out what needs to be said.  I particularly lit up while reading the last paragraph.

“Count me among those who find little to love in the overbearing flavor of oak. Yet the effects of aging a wine in oak barrels extend far beyond flavoring. Oak allows a subtle, minute interchange of air, which can affect the texture of wine and improve its ability to age. Using older, neutral barrels or bigger barrels can do this without the garish veneer of aromas and flavors. In the end, the problem is not oak, but how winemakers use it.”

Asimov, Eric. “5 Words Not To Fear.”  The New York Times. Jan 15, 2013

There really are no short cuts to making really delicious, interesting wine.  There is certainly some dumb luck that can come in handy from time to time (there are vineyards that in certain years do seem to practically make themselves – love those years!!).  But, year in and year out I think it is important to meet the grapes where they are, to truly strive to see what it is they need to express their full potential in that particular vintage without regard to preconceived notions of what constitutes “good” wine.  Brilliant wine comes in an astonishing array of styles, textures, aromas and flavors. 

The two laziest tricks in a winemaker’s bag are too much oak and too much sugar.  And that is not to say there are not incredible, wonderful, world class wines that have a massive oak influence or that retain a certain amount of sweetness.  There are countless examples of both.   It is when these attributes are imposed on a wine blindly to make it bigger or more attractive to critics or to hide flaws (perhaps most commonly – the flaw of being a boring wine), that they are tools misused. 

Having spent some time this weekend at the San Francisco ZAP festival ,one of the biggest wine tastings in the country, I walked away with a fear that we as a wonderful, creative and vibrant industry run the risk of chasing each others short term successes into a copycat mentality that will ultimately lead to widespread mediocrity.  To chase the past is a recipe for irrelevance.  The fad of today is not likely the great wine of 5 years from now.  We must make the very best wines we as individual wineries are most capable of making from the vineyards we have the privilege to work with. 

The two most notable wines I tasted this weekend were a monstrous Dry Creek Zin chock full of tannin, oak, and some sweetness; A HUGE wine that yet maintained complexity and grace.  The second was an almost fragile Zin made in a Beaujolais style; bright, aromatic, and perfumed.  So slight it was like a gentle whisper among much shouting.  Completely opposite and equally delicious.   We need be careful not to miss the beauty in the glass in front of us, even if it is a kind of  beauty we were not looking for nor expecting.      

 

Harvest 2012 - What the Heck Was That?

I’ve always loved a good story.  And believe you me the wine world is full of them.  As a young winemaker I took every opportunity I could to listen to older, more experienced winemakers, grape growers and winery owners wax on about harvests past, production techniques and farming traditions.  But, the story told over and over again that I never quite bought was “The Harvest When All the Grapes Got Ripe at the Same Time”.  It has several different incarnations, but, basically the plot goes something like this:

  

“Ahhh yes,  Nineteen  something, something  that sure was a year!  We waited and waited for the grapes to get ripe and boy when they finally did, it all happened at the same time AND the crop was enormous.  Every tank, barrel, bin, coffee cup, and bucket was full of grapes.  The winery was bursting at the seams.”

Having never really seen a harvest like this over the years I had come to believe that the old timers might be romanticizing the old days a bit.  Frankly I thought they were a little full of it.

Turns out they weren’t. 

2012 was the most intense, unpredictable, overwhelming harvest I have experienced in 17 years of playing with grapes.  What normally takes  8 – 10 weeks to accomplish we did in a little over 5.  Our cellar crew; Steve, Chris, and Steven worked day in and day out from dawn to dusk.  Fields where we expected 10 tons were producing 15 instead.  Vineyards that normally ripen 3 – 4 weeks apart from each other were ripening on the same day this year.  Every tank, barrel, bin, coffee cup, and bucket was full of grapes.   The resulting wines are now starting to show themselves and quality is looking really good.  But, boy was it one for the record books and a story I will be telling years from now.

Just like the rest of the old guys……

Perfume and Wine: Capturing the Ethereal in Words

“Do not be seduced by celebrities, by clever ad campaigns, by beautiful bottles or boxes, by high price tags, by exclusivity, by lush official descriptions, by exotic ingredients, by promises.  Believe your nose only.  Do not wear a fragrance just to wear a fragrance.  Make sure it is better than nothing.  And if you love something, buy two bottles, because the next time the thing might be changed or gone.”

From the Introduction, Perfumes the A – Z Guide

     

I love wine.  I love writing.  I hate writing tasting notes.  Not so much hate as bore myself to death while writing them.  After 15 years and thousands of them, the descriptions start to feel repetitious and the format bland and worn out.  That is not to say they do not have value, one can learn much about a wine or get to know it better by reading well done tasting notes by a capable taster.  But, the translation of a sensory experience into a comprehensible literary expression is a difficult task.  So it was an unexpected and entirely enchanting experience to be given an encyclopedic guide to perfume (Perfumes, the A – Z Guide by Luca Turin and Tania Sanchez) that turns out to be some of the freshest and most entertaining sensory writing around.  They do an incredible job of not just describing the thing (in this case perfume) but capturing both the essence and the context of the experience.   And as with movie reviews, the bad reviews are even more fun that the good ones.  For example: 

Gaultier2 (Jean Paul Gaultier) G2 pursues a barbershop smell of baby powder, a musk with milky-floral sweetness, yet played in an uncomfortably high register, oily-green smelling and indigestibly antiseptic.  I found it nauseating.    

  

Now tell us how you really feel…..

This book along with this great column from Matt Kramer at the Wine Spectator’s website were great reminders that in writing about wine (or perfume) what we should be trying to capture is not a snapshot of the thing itself but the effect of that thing; how it makes us feel.  That is how we look at it when we are making wine, so perhaps we should be talking about it the same way.  It allows for a much greater breath of analog and association and a heck of a lot more fun to read (and write).