any writer benefits from a supportive family, few are as fortunate to receive technical insights in their chosen field as I have been from my now-deceased clinical psychologist wife, Susie Meyer-Smith, and from my talented systems engineer brother and partner, Brian Smith.
Introduction
I perceive today an ever-widening gap between winemakers and consumers. As in any marriage of long standing, we sometimes go for long periods without talking as much as we should, especially when changes are occurring that we can scarcely articulate. The fine folks who pay good money for wine are disconnected from wine production people, so distanced are wineries from their customers. Even at the winery, as winemaking matures as a business, visitors to the homes of the familiar brands are far more likely to encounter marketing and salespeople than actual winemakers.
The intimate relationship that is part of the promise and the appeal of an essentially artisanal industry also suffers from a growing distrust of winemakers, fostered by a mounting awareness of unexplained and suspicious-sounding winemaking technologies. What’s with all this manipulation? In our increasingly competitive world, winemakers, when heard from at all, tend to deliver soft soap that pegs our malarkey meter, and even in one-on-one conversation the boutique winemaker will often be less than frank about treatments the wine has undergone.
All too often, a technological path chosen for making the best wine is not divulged publicly. It is no simple thing today for winemakers to tell the truth. Under pressure from their marketing departments to produce that special something while appearing to do nothing, winemakers commonly chicken out, claiming to “do the minimum,” unaware that this apparent duplicity casts an odor of suspicion on our profession.
With a dizzying availability of wines of every stripe, it’s little wonder the buying public has turned to supposedly unbiased third parties to make their choices for them. Critics have assumed a powerful policing role despite, with rare exceptions, an absence of any serious winemaking training.
In the midst of this chaos, a revolution is taking place within the winemaking community. Precepts of the modern winemaking system we were all taught in school simply don’t support the making of the great wines the market demands, and as a result, some of our most successful winemakers have strayed quite far from conventional dogma.
My intention in this volume is to articulate concisely and systematically the new paradigm of winemaking that dominates the forefront of research and practice. Although this is an insider’s view of today’s wine industry and I speak to my fellow winemakers in our common language, I have chosen a style that is also digestible for the engaged lay reader driven by curiosity, supplying enough chemistry and microbiology background to clarify the conversation as generally as possible. In elucidating our new way of looking at wine, I hope to enable winemakers to articulate more powerfully the methods and tools they choose, and to elicit some sympathy on the part of the consumer for the devil of technology properly employed.
In each chapter, I focus on a specific arena of our work, teasing out the complexities and philosophical dramas that an experienced winemaker confronts. These different threads are all part of one cloth. The Postmodern Winemaking movement seeks to reconnect with winemaking’s ancient aesthetic, much of which was inadvertently left behind in the technology revolution following World War II. I hope that what emerges is a new vision of the winemaker’s task and a clearer understanding of what wine really is.
Since the text is addressed to the practicing winemaker, the eavesdropping lay reader will encounter enological terminology that may be unfamiliar. Whenever possible, I have expanded my explanations to make technical winemaking concepts available to a broader audience without derailing the discussion’s logical flow. The reader who feels left behind despite these efforts is directed to the appendixes, which include a brief summary of winemaking basics and a glossary short enough that it can be read from beginning to end in one sitting (I recommend the online version). Your best move, when these fail, is to seek out a real production winemaker and quiz her over a glass of her best.
Because even for professionals the principles presented here compose an unfamiliar picture, I have found it useful to repeat certain notions in the text to facilitate a global view. I hope I have struck a tolerable balance between excessive redundancy and leaving too few breadcrumbs.
WHAT IS POSTMODERN WINEMAKING?
How can he remember well his ignorance, which his growth requires, who has so often to use his knowledge?
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
In the past few years I have been employing the term postmodern to refer to the paradigm shift in winemaking that I have observed and in some ways instigated. In my experience, postmodernism is not well understood in its general sense; instead, it gains meaning mostly through its diverse manifestations. Consequently, colleagues often wonder what connection could possibly exist between this new winemaking school of thought and other expressions with which they are familiar such as postmodern painting, architecture, theater, film, music, and philosophy.
Since postmodernism is by its very nature polymorphous, such confusion is to be expected. For readers wishing to gain a working understanding of the movement as a whole, I recommend A Primer on Postmodernism by Stanley J. Grenz, a concise map of postmodernism’s origins, principles, mind-set, and diverse embodiments.
All winemaking is a fundamentally postmodern sort of endeavor, touching inevitably on many key postmodern notions: the manifestation of Nature both in wine’s production and its appreciation, a broad diversity of localized style goals, the primary importance of collaborative groups, and the relativity of truth. Fine wine is a theater in which deconstruction occurs naturally and modern scientific practices are inadequate to guide extraordinary work. One cannot avoid becoming immersed in environmental concerns in the growing of wine grapes. A winery is a team, and an appellation is a tribe. Truth worth knowing is largely local rather than universal, for wines vary widely from place to place in the characteristics that are expected and extolled—a great sherry is a terrible Riesling.
Wine is formless, assuming the shape of its container, but it interacts with its containers, both the barrel and the glass, in complex ways. Its message is pure experience conveyed without language. Just as any theatrical performance is unique and ephemeral, the qualities of any particular wine are neither universal in appeal nor fixed in time. Defining and quantifying wine quality has proven extraordinarily elusive, and its complex chemistry has yet to be thoroughly characterized and rationalized.
But I am getting ahead of myself. Here I will provide a basic grounding in postmodern thinking and then spotlight, one by one, a variety of postmodern principles that have guided my wine production consulting work and compelled in this book its ever-shifting focus on assorted topics.
ORIGINS AND PRINCIPLES
From its roots in the experimental music, theater, painting, and architecture of the late 1960s counterculture, postmodernism has come to pervade all walks of life and fields of endeavor. Its sundry and sometimes contradictory manifestations derive in part from its origins as a rejection of modernism, which caused it to range out from that central dogma in various directions.
At its core, postmodernism questions the modernist optimism that fueled the Enlightenment, when Francis Bacon declared that knowledge is power and Descartes proposed his idealized vision of the rational skeptic, essentially today’s trained scientist. Armed with generalized laws such as Newton’s mechanics, this dispassionate and unbiased hero is charged with shaping an ever better world by uncovering Nature’s secrets and exercising dominion over her. Four hundred years later, we are beginning to sense that this plan is not working out so well for us.
