our lifetimes, a cavalcade of technological missteps—nuclear proliferation; destruction of the ozone layer; the meltdowns at Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, and Fukushima; failures of the works of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers; wholesale global species extinctions; and the continuing erosion of the right to privacy all come to mind—have led emerging generations to lose faith in the infallibility of science to competently coordinate technological central planning. Postmoderns seek instead to move beyond rationalism as the sole determiner of what is true, beautiful, sustainable, and good. More room is allowed for intuitive leaps, the wisdom of myth, and the workings of natural forces that we neither control nor fully grasp. If the inner city is the symbol of modern power over nature, the virgin forest symbolizes postmodern cooperation with Nature, including respect for her power to manifest complex, balanced ecologies that are robust, sustainable, and aesthetically appealing with scant help from humankind.
One problem with Descartes’s vision of the ideal rationalist is that pitfalls inevitably await any human ego steeped in decades of training and study. I worked so hard; surely I must know something! In principle, we should be able to count on Descartes’s ideal skeptic to be as skeptically rigorous inwardly as outwardly. He must also be unswayed in his evaluations by considerations of endowment funding, tenure, or personal exigency and immune to loyalties and enmities.
He must, in short, know himself. But this is seldom the case. Such training happens over in the humanities, way across campus.
Modern confidence in rationality is vulnerable to an additional pitfall. In the sciences, it’s a thin line between the rationalistic axiom that all understanding is, in principle, accessible to the human mind and the conclusion that what is inaccessible is unreal or even fraudulent. Otherwise rational and dispassionate winemaker colleagues have devoted endless hours to websites such as biodynamicsisahoax.com—a phenomenon explored in chapter 21, “Science and Biodynamics.” My argument in that chapter is that no outside observer is in a position to take a solid stance on biodynamic winegrowing, either pro or con, and I make no such attempt myself. I have much bigger fish to fry.
Postmoderns question that human ingenuity can, or even ought to, be dominant in guiding our lives and works down a path of inevitable progress. In contrast to a faith in the boundless resilience of our home planet, which led moderns to hang portraits of belching smokestacks in their corporate boardrooms, postmoderns see the Earth as fragile and vulnerable, with the extinction of the human species very much in play. The postmodern vineyardist, more specifically, is a steward of Nature rather than her master, seeking to foster a balanced ecology of unfathomable complexity rather than a simple monoculture that may be easy to manage but is vulnerable to opportunistic pathology and disappointing in terroir expression.
What’s done is done. Postmodern winemakers are generally not Luddites seeking to turn back the clock. Winemaking typically takes place in very tough circumstances, and we prefer to keep our technical options open. By and large, we seek to work within the conditions of modernity, incorporating what is useful while moving beyond the hubris of the modern mind-set. To paraphrase 1 Corinthians, postmodernism believes all things and hopes all things. Few winemakers want to give up electric lights, pH meters, stainless steel, or Google, but we do increasingly reexamine the hidden impact of these conveniences. (See chapter 16, “Pressing Matters,” for a humorous postmodern fable along these lines.)
Modern scientists view themselves as having shed allegiance to myth and superstition and believe that they have been trained to see the world rationally, as it “actually” is. After decades of dedicated study, they feel qualified to answer press inquiries, testify in legal actions, and serve on government task forces as reliable, dispassionate experts in their fields.
Postmoderns, in contrast, assert that science draws its legitimacy from myths of its own: the capacity of the rational mind to comprehend the natural world, the inevitability of progress, the universality of Nature’s laws, and the power and freedom inevitably gained by knowledge of them. In addition, every expert is seen as having an ax to grind, often tied to grant money, corporate patronage, or legal retainer. Knowledge is not seen as always good. Many would gladly return to a time before we obtained knowledge of the atom’s secrets or biology’s terrorist potential.
In their skepticism of modern science, postmoderns aspire to break down the wall between the professional and the amateur. In this book, I strive to address both groups by using language that is as simple as possible, but no simpler, respecting both the lay reader’s intelligence and the need for clarity, even seduction in my prose. I have often found that it is much easier for laypersons to relate to such postmodern winemaking concepts as structure, mineral energy, and soulfulness than it is for many professionals. Wine lovers are in fact often astounded to learn that these holistic terms are in professional disrepute, while concrete sensory component descriptors (e.g., berry, citrus, tar) are considered more relevant in academic circles.
APPLICATIONS TO WINEMAKING
In the eleven chapters of Part I, I articulate my own picture of postmodern winemaking, largely in technical language, though I’ve done my best to make my thinking accessible to a broad lay audience. For readers who have not made wine before, I recommend beginning by reading Appendix 1, “Winemaking Basics.” All readers should keep in mind the “Glossary of Postmodern Terminology” as well, particularly the interactive online version, for insight into technical expressions. There is merit in reading the online glossary from beginning to end, A to Z, taking advantage of the links.
In the following discussion I will elucidate the winemaking applications of postmodern techniques, including construction, deconstruction, and juxtaposition. In addition, I will explore the application to winemaking of such postmodern themes as environmentalism, collaboration, localized and transient truths, subjectivity, holism, transparency, authentic scientific inquiry, and courageous uncertainty.
Many postmodern art forms juxtapose disparate worldviews, often interweaving elements of high technology with classical aesthetics. Scandalously, my own work is characterized by a willingness to apply winemaking’s new power tools, some of which I invented, to the making of classic European styles, for which I am affectionately known in Natural Wine circles as Doctor Evil.
In my WineSmith Roman Syrah project, which Jamie Goode referred to in his insightful blog, wineanorak.com, as “the surprising juxtaposition of wine technology and natural wines,”1 I utilize high-tech tools as needed in order to make sulfite-free reds of wonderful aromatic expression and remarkable longevity. These tools include reverse osmosis (see chapter 18), which facilitates balanced wines of perfect ripeness and maximum antioxidative power and is useful to trim occasional volatile acidity. In creating a refined structure that can integrate microbial aromatics and stabilize tannins, I then routinely employ micro-oxygenation (MOx) (see chapter 3) in reds just after fermentation in order to exploit the very phenolic reactive power true ripeness imparts.
Any winemaker will tell you that serious discussions about wine begin and end in the vineyard. That is where the magic happens. It is the winemaker’s job, through skilled artisanal effort, to become invisible, the better to clear the way for the influences of provenance that are the sources of regional character: climate, soil, altitude, latitude, cultivar, vineyard practices and local social traditions.
I think winemakers get a bad rap. Yes, it’s our job to appear invisible, to stay out of the way of natural expression, but that involves a very intensive sort of doing nothing. The artisan, though ignorantly despised for his stealthy conjurings, remains the secret agent without whom all is lost, for it is through the skillful winemaker that apparently naked flavors of place become manifest in the glass with the same apparent ease and weightlessness that years of effort lend to the graceful, seemingly effortless fluidity of the prima ballerina. Naturalness in wine is an illusion borne of much study and struggle, and winemakers ought to be proud of what they do instead of pretending to do nothing.
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