wine like Blue Nun was as world-changing as color television.
Not to be outdone, Bordeaux installed its own stainless steel, refrigeration, inert gas, and sterile filtration, creating new possibilities for fresh white wines and as many problems for reds when oxygen was declared its bogeyman. In The Taste of Wine,1 University of Bordeaux Oenology Faculty Director Emile Peynaud wrote in 1955 that “oxygen is the enemy of wine,” a “blunt definition” unfortunately often quoted out of context. Technical progress banished the old guard from the caves, replaced by followers of Peynaud’s solution chemistry–based scientific enology.
The modern approach spread from Germany first to Bordeaux and then across the ocean in the late 1950s. It sounded like a good idea at the time. In retrospect, it has become clear that using Riesling techniques on Cabernet led us away from red wine’s soulful, integrative properties. The 1961 Bordeaux vintage is still tough drinking even today. Who knew?
It was to take half a century before people once again recognized oxygen’s power to elaborate and refine structure. Without this knowledge, wines of normal maturity exhibited excessive reduction, malformed tannins, poor aromatic integration of vegetal, oak, and microbial notes, and unfortunate aging behavior. By the 1970s, the châteaux were coping by pressing fermentations early and stripping tannins with aggressive egg white fining, which resulted in drinkable styles that lacked depth. In the 1980s, Australia’s flying winemakers introduced extended hang time techniques to the South of France; this overcame reduction problems through field oxidation, leading to fruit-forward quaffs that enjoyed a fad in the United Kingdom and the United States.
The poor longevity of ultra-ripe experiments in the 1990s at prestigious properties in Bordeaux and Barolo, coupled with a sea change in enology from solution-model thinking to an appreciation of tannin structure through research undertaken at Montpellier, Bordeaux, and AWRI (Australian Wine Research Institute), led producers to consider a return to prewar practices.
In the late 1980s, the idea that good tannin structure was capable of integrating aromas began to be explored two hours south of Bordeaux in the tiny hamlet of Madiran, where modern vinification techniques had wrought disaster. If the postmodern movement has a father, it is a peasant vigneron named Patrick Ducournau, who toiled to discover what had gone so terribly wrong with the region’s traditional tannat variety. These huge, tannic wines had become incredibly dry, harsh, and prone to overt expression of microbial defects. His neighbors were busily tearing their tannat vines out and globalizing to merlot.
It was Ducournau’s genius to recognize the real problem: without the use of controlled oxidative polymerization, the art of building structure had been lost. Protecting tannat from oxygen was killing the wines. His development of micro-oxygenation was the first step toward reviving a methodology of élevage, a suite of practices devoted to the “raising up” of refined structure capable of supporting integration and soulfulness. The complete package eventually included an advanced understanding of the use of lees and a complete rethinking of the role of barrels.
THAT’S NO SOLUTION
Scientific enology starts with the idea that wine is a chemical solution. This simple, seemingly obvious statement guides all phases of modern winemaking. It also happens to be false.
Solution-based thinking has shaped our view of wine and how we work with it by bringing to bear the powerful tools of analytical chemistry, chemical engineering, and sensory science. If wine is a solution, its sensory properties derive from the concentrations of substances dissolved in solution. The greater its concentration in the liquid, the more intense that substance’s odor and taste. If this relationship is exactly linear, the solution is said to behave “ideally.”
If wine is a solution, the goal of grape growing must be to maximize good flavors and minimize bad ones. We have only to identify the substances involved and determine which are positive drivers and which are negative. More fruity, less veggie, and so forth.
If red color is dissolved in solution, the way to extract more of it from the skins is to work the cap in a gentle way, which maximizes color but prevents excessive harsh tannin extraction. High alcohol is viewed as increasing the solubility of red pigment.
Tannin is viewed as the price we have to pay for flavor, so we press as gently as possible (or just use free run) to minimize harshness and allow the palate access to fruity flavors. Everything in winemaking becomes about selective extraction.
If excessive harsh tannin is dissolved in wine, the way to decrease its sensory effect is to remove it through selective fining, taking care to minimize concomitant decreases in color and flavor.
If wine is a solution, it can be sterile filtered without changing its sensory properties, removing particulates without affecting the solution.
In general, solution theory leads to an analytical (sometimes called “reductionist”) view that wine flavor is the sum of its pieces. Off-aromas are connected directly to root causes: horsey aromas require more microbial control; excessive woody notes lead us to use older barrels or shorter durations; veggie aromas mean pulling more leaves to minimize shade. To manage the whole, you manage the pieces. You break wine into its sensory constituents (using the Aroma WheelTM, for example) and figure out ways to amp up the good stuff and dial down the bad stuff. That’s quality improvement.
In the postmodern view, every one of these beliefs is injurious to wine quality.
There have long been hints that the solution model doesn’t work. Early anomalies included the sparing solubility of anthocyanins, wine’s red color compounds, reported by Pascal Ribéreau-Gayon in 1974.2 Beyond a light rosé color, it seems, red wine is theoretically impossible. My ultrafiltration work begun in the early 1990s showed that anthocyanins, which have molecular weights of around 300, will not pass through a filter with a porosity of 100,000.
“Ideal” solution behavior predicts that the concentration of a compound in solution corresponds to its aromatic intensity. But when we micro-oxygenate Merlot, its bell pepper aroma decreases without any change in its pyrazine content. Why do pyrazines, Brett characteristics, and oak components, even in very high concentrations, sometimes marry benignly in the aroma, yet in other wines stick out as annoying defects?
The solution model was a powerful starting point, one that led California winemakers out of a wilderness of largely defective wines in the ’60s to our present world of nearly defect-free wines. But aesthetically, we have hit the wall.
I may be going out on a speculative limb here, but I am convinced that wine used to be a lot more exciting. I believe that postwar modernization has cost us fifty years of clean and comparatively soulless wines. I believe that what we are drinking today is not the compelling beverage the Romans used to stabilize their empire. Those were free-range wines. Today, we hover over our wines like helicopter parents, shielding them from the essential experiences that develop depth, character, and strength.
Neither boomers nor millennials have experienced wine as Stevenson’s “bottled poetry” or Ben Franklin’s “proof that God loves us and desires us to be happy.” When I first encountered these quotations in the ’70s, I thought they were a bit over-the-top. There was no way to know for sure if wines had something more special in Stevenson’s and Franklin’s day, or if the rhetoric was simply of a different age. We are as ignorant of such wines today as the East Bloc, with no one old enough to remember prewar capitalism, was of free enterprise.
But today, if you look hard enough, there are many examples of postmodern wines that convincingly bear out these extravagant phrases. We will meet in future chapters a host of postmodern winemakers,
