and marginalization that initially greeted Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring in 1962. Millennials entering our industry today insist that environmentally friendly practices such as Integrated Pest Management can and must be the rule. While I am disappointed by many details of organic certification for U.S. wines, as I discuss in chapters 5, “Vineyard Enology,” and 8, “Speculations on Minerality,” I support the notion of living soil and believe that such vineyards not only support environmental concerns but also make better wine. I go on to propose the adoption of a similar philosophy in the cellar in chapter 10, “Integrated Brettanomyces Management.”
While I find that these “better wines” have more palate energy and dimensionality, are more resistant to oxidation, and hold up longer in the cellar, they also have their own special problems, which I discuss in chapter 7, “Redox Redux.” They are better in a technical sense, in the way that an athlete has a better body. But wines resulting from organic practices are not to everyone’s taste, and thus are in no universal sense ideal.
IDEAL WINES
Postmoderns question the utility and virtue of generalized universal truth discovered through rational inquiry and manifest in formulas, equations, and laws. Modern enology has been organized into a set of fundamental best practices that enable wines in commerce to be more dependable than ever before in history. Large corporate wineries with the marketing muscle to enter the three-tier distribution system (producer to distributor to retailer to consumer) are now able to put on retail shelves tremendous volumes of Merlots, Chardonnays, and Pinots that feature precise and consistent flavor profiles.
The triumph of modern standardization is that Annette Alvarez-Peters, chief wine buyer for Costco and one of the six most influential people in the wine world according to Decanter magazine,2 was able in 2012 to opine, quite correctly, that wine in Costco is a commodity no different from toilet paper. “In the end, it’s just a beverage. Either you like it or you don’t.”3
Costco restricts its offerings to 300 brands, less than a tenth of a percent of the wines on offer nationwide, with $1 billion in sales annually. Another force in U.S. wine sales is the mega-distributor Southern Wines and Spirits, which dominates U.S. distribution with fewer than 10,000 labels, a mere 5% of the total selection approved for sale by the U.S. Alcohol and Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau (TTB). These wines succeed in the three-tier system largely to the extent that they precisely fit the standardized model for flavor and packaging associated with their standard wine type. If they are “interesting,” they fail. Enologix, a highly paid Sonoma-based wine database enterprise, thrives through advising wineries how to scientifically reverse-engineer Wine Spectator scores, instructing winemakers how to make standardized wines that will garner top reviews.
If you’re looking for diversity, you will have to get in your Prius and seek it out. Despite rumors of its impending demise, there is another, separate wine industry with perhaps one hundred times the labels and one-hundredth the sales volume. But you have to go there.
Postmoderns focus on truths that are local, particular, and transient, and on honoring diversity and pluralism. What industry could more vividly embody these notions than the multiplicity of individual vineyards throughout the world? In vino veritas. Each terroir has its own truth, its own story to express in its own way. My work with AppellationAmerica.com’s Best-of-Appellation evaluations program seeks to compile a Blue Book that articulates the regional characteristics of all 312 appellations in North America so that we can move beyond varietal labeling to a consciousness of the vast variety of available choices. Our goal is to foster a growing comfort level with such delights as Sandusky Gewurztraminer and Iowa Frontenac Port.
The last thing that a postmodern wine should do is conform to expectations. Nowhere is the specific more vital than in the making of wines of distinctive terroir expression. That is the antithesis of the modern corporate winemaker’s job description, but for the 99% (okay, maybe it’s only 98%), the small and struggling wineries on the D list that have no chance at national distribution, it represents the only hope for salvation.
The division between modern corporate commodity winemaking and boutique postmodern distinctive terroir expression is not doomed to persist. Retail channels will adjust once consumers begin to demand the same access to the diversity of New World styles as they do for European wines, where flavors of place hold sway. No one would liken a St. Emilion to a Chinon simply because they are both Cabernet Francs. In the same way, Long Island Merlots may earn a separate shelf space alongside those of California, and the Chardonnays of Napa, the Santa Cruz Mountains, and Lake Erie may come to be independently displayed and understood.
RELATIVITY AND QUANTUM EFFECTS
Postmoderns reject the notion of the objective observer. Particle physics, with its uncertainty principle, contingent realities, superstring theory, multiverse, and quantum leaps, was the first of the modern sciences to cross over into postmodernism, abandoning half a century ago any notion of mechanistic objective observation. The Enlightenment viewpoint just doesn’t carry any water in this discipline. The existence of universal truth and objective reality are not prerequisites for functionality, and you’ve got to admit that physics seems to have muddled along pretty well without them.
Rejecting both the existence and the value of objectivity allows us to shed the pejorative connotations of subjective experience. Strictly speaking, for an experience to be subjective means merely that it is perceived by humans. But this pure sense has been perverted in modern parlance, and when we say, “That’s just subjective,” we mean to imply a finding that is random, unknowable, and unverifiable. Yet when all experience is understood to be subjective, we are compelled to look for patterns and areas of agreement—which music and chaos theory’s fractal images alike illustrate to be quite striking and beautiful.
The postmodern view is that the experience of a wine is not actually in the bottle; rather, wine resonates in tandem with its consumer according to the environment of consumption. This interaction possesses features of resonance, harmony, and dissonance that are strongly shared and for which predictive strategies can be employed. This is the art of serving wine.
One of the greatest intellectual challenges of postmodern philosophy is to reconcile, on the one hand, the notion that everything is connected to everything else, with the equally firm principle, on the other, that every experience is unique. This is accomplished by abandoning the reductionist false friend that moderns so often employ: division of experience into manageable little pieces that can be studied, then reassembled in a sort of plug-and-play philosophy. Insistence on working only with whole experiences frees the investigator to explore patterns within complex systems, often with unexpected results such as the well-substantiated existence of harmonious “sweet spots” obtained by altering alcohol content as little as one-tenth of one percent, a topic introduced in chapter 11, “Harmony and Astringency,” and developed in chapters 18, “The New Filtrations,” and 25, “Liquid Music.”
Attention to holistic systems guides the viticultural modeling of Bob Wample and David Gates (see chapter 15). A willingness to work outside the rationality box has supplied many of our field’s key discoveries, which I explore in chapter 12, “Winemaking’s Lunatic Heroes.” In chapter 21, “Science and Biodynamics,” I discuss in particular an eccentric path inexplicably chosen by many souls admired for their shrewdness and perspicacity. I confess that I have a chip on my shoulder here concerning the oft-asserted modern claim that homeopathy has no scientific basis, the refutation of which ties together Biodynamics, micro-oxygenation, and Singleton’s vicinal diphenol cascade in a delightful postmodern thematic juxtaposition, a sort of running joke throughout the book. My goal in all this is not to defend Biodynamics or homeopathy per se but to open the minds of scientists.
The legitimacy of homeopathy (that is to say, a challenge to a system by a small amount of a harmful substance, which the system learns to resist) is a pet peeve among modern scientists, held in about the same regard as astrology. Yet we have plenty
