that call on us to ponder new experiences are not the rage. Yet these wines represent the core aesthetic that makes wine special. Distinctive wines of place carry the torch (we might call these the “hmmmm . . .” style or perhaps the “Aha!” style) for the entire wine industry, and without them, we might just as well drink vodka. They don’t run with the traffic, and that is their appeal. When you serve them, expect way more head scratching than giggling.
While Internet chatter about the importance of this type of wine far exceeds the public’s interest as expressed in dollars spent, it’s the genre most winemakers get in the game to make, and also their path to being taken seriously by sommeliers and critics. And although these are not the grocery store commodity wines that move all those boxes, distinctive wines-of-place produced in tiny quantities in every corner of North America today make up the overwhelming majority of wine labels.
I like the term wines of discovery for these wines, whose purpose is not to shoot your basket but rather to make you dribble down to their end of the court. Here you are in the age of convenience, encountering wines that need age. Balls. Now you have to go out and rent cellar space.
The test of time is an important dimension of these wines of discovery. The pursuit of enhanced maturity allows us to choose between making vins de garde, which achieve greatness after extensive aging but are troublesome in the cellar, and vins d’impact, well-behaved young musts that require little attention and are easily bottled in youth but lack longevity and distinctiveness.
Every wine has a trajectory in time. If wine were baseball, a fruit-forward vin d’impact would be a pop fly, compared to a line drive reserve-style vin de garde. Generally, the better a wine tastes in youth, the shorter its life expectancy. Every winemaker would love to produce wines that drink well both in youth and with age, and widening the arc of a wine’s trajectory is certainly the winemaker’s Holy Grail. It is also an attempt to defy gravity.
The wise winemaker chooses the wine’s purpose early on. Choices favoring one or another style begin in the vineyard years before harvest, starting with its location and varietal selection and culminating in harvest maturity decisions. In recent years, many techniques have been developed in both the vineyard and the cellar that can push wines into early affability or instead increase longevity and profundity. With skill, and to a limited extent, it is possible to do both.
The aim of postmodern winemaking is to capture what Nature has put in a vineyard’s grapes and present it with grace and balance. As a branch of cuisine, winemaking, the ultimate slow food, has much in common with the making of sauces, because the soulfulness of flavor integration is a result of refining its structure. Granted, wine is not an emulsion like mayonnaise: the particles that make up the structure of a wine are not tiny beads of oil but instead are made up of phenolic chains that aggregate into tiny globs called colloids. But in both cases, the particles’ shape and size affects their power to integrate flavors. For this reason, wine’s texture is strongly related to its aroma.
Control of tannin polymerization is a central postmodern skill. Small, stable colloids not only impart finesse and soulfulness in youth, but they also prolong wine’s longevity. Poorly formed tannins precipitate readily over time. When this happens, just as in the curdling of a sauce, aromatic integration is lost. Elements previously married become individually apparent, resulting in wine that seems over-oaked, vegetal, or Bretty. Wines with well-formed structure can carry much higher concentrations of these aromatic elements without offending the nose.
The willful formation of structural integrity by the winemaker is termed by the French élevage, and successful wines are said to have race, or good breeding. Like all good cooking, élevage methods require training and attention to detail. Good structure begins in the vineyard with vine balance.
Winemakers will always say they do the minimum. Try that on your three-year-old. Still, a good winemaker, like a good parent, strives to become invisible. The final product must sing its song of place, and the skill of the winemaker, like that of a good piano tuner, should go unnoticed.
CONNECTING THE DOTS
Over the past two decades, a picture of the nature of wine structure has slowly emerged that we will explore throughout this book. While much of this mental construct lacks direct confirmation, the same could be said for many embodiments of modern science such as the Periodic Table of Elements, which lacked direct evidence in its first hundred years. It has been my privilege since 1997 to work closely with Patrick Ducournau’s OenoDev group, based in Madiran (Hautes-Pyrénées), who painstakingly knit together a working hypothesis that guides postmodern practice by combining empirical observations of many thousands of wines with recent advances in phenolic chemistry, largely centered at Montpellier under Michel Moutounet and Véronique Cheynier but also involving the Australian Wine Research Institute’s Tannin Project and work at UC Davis by Roger Boulton on copigmentation and polymerization studies by his colleague Doug Adams, all founded on Vernon Singleton’s life’s work on phenolic oxidation, the focus of chapter 6.
I was able to contribute to this brain trust Vinovation’s trials with ultrafiltration, through which we obtained direct evidence of noncovalent bonding that empowered investigations of colloidal behavior in red wine. Through my consulting work, I have also had the opportunity to road test the emerging theory by working with hundreds of winemakers and thousands of wines over the past decade and a half.
I am the first to concede that this view of wine structure is little more than a useful working construct, but I have found in it substantial utility for guiding winemaking decisions. Scientific verification is not the engine of progress in winemaking today; it is the caboose. As in any cooking technique, empirical successes initially drive theory. What follows, therefore, is probably not true in all its elements. But there is no doubt of its usefulness as a guiding schema.
BUILDING BETTER WINE
Tannins already exist in the ripe berry skins and seeds as polymers. Much attention has been focused on the ingenious and laborious work done at Montpellier on the degree of polymerization (DP) that exists in grape skins and seeds. But these polymers are unlike those we are trying to build in finished wine. As soon as they hit the highly acidic grape juice, they break down into monomers, which collect into colloids, later reassembling into wine polymers through a variety of pathways. Anything we might learn about grape tannin polymerization is lost in the chaos of fermentation. Over months and years, these monomers reassemble like Lego blocks, forming two kinds of permanent chains (nonoxidative and oxidative) with very different sensory properties.
Nonoxidative polymers have a soft, nonintrusive mouthfeel in young wine but tend to continue growing until they become harsh and eventually insoluble, falling out of the wine. We don’t like these polymers.
Fine colloidal structure depends on the promotion of early polymerization while at the same time preventing it from getting out of hand. It turns out that the key to good structure is a good concentration of red anthocyanin pigment. Color caps off tannins, leading to wines with more finesse. In effect, the more color that is present, the shorter the resulting polymers and the finer the colloids (figs. 2 and 3). Driven together by the polarity of water, these chains aggregate into colloids whose size is related to the chain length of its constituents.
If oxygen is delivered to a young red wine, a different kind of polymer results that is more expanded. In much the same way a wire whisk creates meringue from egg whites, skillful introduction of oxygen to young red wine creates a mouth-filling, light structure that is stable and can form a foundation for soulfulness and graceful longevity. That’s why the Aztecs taught the the Spanish explorer Cortés the use of oxygen (“conching”) to convert cocoa powder into chocolate, still a standard practice in the finest Belgian shops (yes, that chocolate waterfall in Willy Wonka’s Chocolate Factory really exists!).
In
