views.
From two decades of postmodern retrospection, an aesthetic construct has emerged that not only holds the solution model to be false, but considers the extent to which a wine deviates from “ideal” behavior to be a pretty useful working definition of quality. Solution model behavior is not just incorrect; it is undesirable.
In the movie Annie Hall, Woody Allen’s character tells an old joke: “A guy walks into a psychiatrist’s office and says, ‘Doc, my brother thinks he’s a chicken.’ ‘Well, bring him in and we’ll put him on the couch and cure him,’ says the shrink. ‘I’d like to, Doc, but I need the eggs.’” This is the position of the winemaker with modern training who might consider letting go of the solution model. If manipulating concentrations isn’t effective, what will be the new way of working? The answer starts with a new language that interconnects the concepts of a structural model of wine and addresses the very human goals at the core of winemaking. In the rest of this chapter, I present the language distinctions that embody this alternative perspective.
To begin with, it takes some getting used to the idea that it’s okay that we don’t actually know what we’re doing.
FUNDAMENTAL MYSTERY
The new view begins by accepting that enology has fundamental limitations. As useful as modern winemaking has proven in eliminating gross defects, it has done little to promote excellence. Its central tenet is that a clean wine will show varietal character. This is fine for Muscato, but when it comes to great reds—pardon me while I yawn.
Winemaking is really just a branch of cuisine—the ultimate slow food. Our job is not to explain but to delight. If music is any indication, the ways of the human psyche are often unpredictable and quite nonlinear (see chapters 11 and 25 for more on these ideas). In chapter 21, I’ll explore the hilarious clash of Biodynamics and science to illustrate this theme more thoroughly.
AROMATIC INTEGRATION, REFINED STRUCTURE
A 2005 review by Roy et al. in Materials Research Innovations hammers home the point that the properties of systems depend less on their composition than on their structure.3 In Japanese samurai swords, hard and soft steel are folded like puff pastry until there are millions of layers in the blade, resulting in steel that is flexible yet holds an edge. A lump of coal, a graphite tennis racket, and a diamond are all 100% carbon, but their sensory properties are entirely different because of how the atoms are structurally arranged. Consider the house you live in. The agreeability of your home’s architecture depends less on how many bricks it contains than on the way they are put together.
Structured foods like bisques, reduction sauces, and emulsions are at the core of great cuisine. Aromatic integration is how sauces work, and why the saucier is the most important chef in a French kitchen. A great béarnaise doesn’t smell of tarragon, mint, fresh onion, and vinegar; it just smells like béarnaise. The finer the emulsion, the more surface area between the fatty beads of butter and the aqueous phase that surrounds them, so in a great sauce there can be square miles of interactive surface in a tablespoon. The result is aromatic integration, because the intimate contact of fatty and aqueous regions provides close contact for the diverse flavor components.
I like to think of wine structure as similar to that of a samurai sword. Swords need two conflicting properties: the ability to hold an edge (conferred by the hardness of high-carbon steel) and the flexibility not to chip and break (conferred by soft, low-carbon steel). Around seven centuries ago, Japanese swordsmiths hit on the idea to weld together both kinds of steel, which resulted in a bar that could be sharpened on one side and had a flexible back. Then they found that a better blade, one that had both properties, could be made if they flattened and folded the blade several times. A blade with four folds, for example, would have sixteen (24) layers. The finest blades had as many as four million layers, held an edge forever without sharpening, and were also unbreakable.
In structured wines, similarly, tannins, anthocyanins, and other aromatic ring compounds, which are almost insoluble in solution, aggregate into colloids—tiny beads of various sizes and compositions. It is this fine colloidal structure that allows interaction between the aqueous and phenolic regions in a wine, blending the aromatic properties as if the wine were home to all things.
Winegrowing choices at every stage have profound consequences for the textural and integrative properties of these colloids, as well as their stability. The way the wine feels on the palate, the soulfulness of the aroma, and its longevity in the cellar are all determined by the wine’s colloidal structure. (The brilliant work of Patrick Ducournau and his colleagues at Oenodev in developing tools and methodologies to enhance structure is described in chapters 3 and 4.)
The fineness of a great sauce is the source of our word finesse. Wines with finesse feel good. Their unified flavors are able to touch us deeply by soothing the thalamus in the midbrain, creating a sense of harmony, peace, viscerality, and profundity. (The phenomenon of harmony and its strongly shared nature is explored more fully in chapter 11.)
Figure 1 depicts in cartoon form the notion of aromatic integration. The first panel shows how a modern white wine works. Winemaking techniques that minimize tannin content result in an alcoholic solution containing apolar terpenes and esters that are hydrophobic. The polarity of the water drives these compounds into the aroma. The lower the alcohol, the greater the aromatic expression. By contrast, red wines contain a confusing excess of aromas: varietal fruit and vegetal elements, nuts and phenolic aromas resembling herbs, tea and cocoa, oak constituents, and microbial by-products (such as the horse sweat aroma of Brettanomyces) depicted in panels 2–4. These are largely composed of benzene ring and other double-bonded ring structures that are driven into the aroma by water, resulting in a cacophony of conflicting scents.
A properly formed tannin colloidal structure is capable of providing a home within the wine for these aromatic compounds. The shorter the tannin chains, the finer the colloids and the greater the interactive surface area for intercollating these compounds due to their affinity for ring-stacking among the tannins, as shown in panel 5. The result is an aroma that is primarily varietal fruit, with oak, vegetal, and microbial notes in a supporting role as muted, integrated elements (panel 6).
FIGURE 1. Aroma projection in whites compared to aromatic integration in structured reds.
HOLISTIC APPROACH
In the postmodern view, better wine doesn’t result from adjusting intensities. We do not seek to pump up the positive Aroma WheelTM attributes and suppress the negatives. Instead, we try to merge all the wine’s flavors into a coherent whole, like a well-conducted orchestra producing a unified, soulful voice.
It is a useful technique in modern science to pull a phenomenon apart into its constituent pieces, a technique called “reductionism” (not to be confused with “reduction,” which is the converse of oxidation and is often employed to refer to sulfides and “closed” characteristics in wine aroma). Reductionism has come to dominate modern enology at many levels, from monoculture in the vineyard to draconian microbial eradication in the cellar. Simpler systems are easier to grasp and manage, but they do not necessarily yield preferable results.
Wine sensory scientists have attempted to define wine quality through reductionism, often mapping specific aromatic “drivers” of competing products and matching consumer preference groups within quadrants (www.tragon.com/news/articles.php). But wine’s virtues are greater than the sum of its parts. The notion of high performance is best investigated by driving your Porsche, not by examining its disassembled parts laid out on your driveway. The interaction of all elements results in a whole whose functions cannot be predicted except
