demonstrably valid, vaccination representing a prime example. The wholesale adaptation of this principle to every natural system, as the Biodynamics evangelist Nicolas Joly extols in his lectures, does indeed seem both simplistic and risky. But this is wine—essentially playful, seldom a matter of emergency. Before we declare scientific martial law banning new ideas, we had better have a clear and present danger. In my judgment, no imminent threat exists except to contemporary science as Mr. Know-It-All, in which case I fear that, until they come to get me, I must declare for the other side. I defend the concept of homeopathy not so much because I entirely accept it, but more because its mere mention makes modern scientific blood boil.
The experience fine wine affords, for which we shell out the big bucks, does not arise through scientifically delimited natural processes controlled by technical best practices; rather, it is a dance between specific, unknowable ecological particulars (climate, soil, microbiology) and the peculiarities of human perception that are brought to bear when the cork is drawn, all orchestrated through the invisible guiding hand of the winemaker. This is the postmodern view.
Postmodern winemaking seeks to deconstruct the embedded myths that shape modern winemaking but fail to serve winemakers well. These pedagogies include the application of the solution model, the direct link between chemical and microbial composition on the one hand and flavor on the other, and the use of component aromatics as preference drivers for quality.
In his penetrating review of the manuscript of this book, Ravenswood founder Joel Peterson asked an excellent question: “Do we really have to give up the Enlightenment to move ahead?” My answer is yes, I’m afraid we do. By this I do not mean abandoning the tools of skeptical inquiry, experimentation, and hypothesis verification; we do, however, need to foster an awareness of the limitations of these techniques. We must question the whole notion of objective universal truths, and even cast a skeptical eye on their value. We have every reason to be suspicious of the capacity of the human mind to comprehend and conquer nature. What evidence do we really have that knowledge expands and progress is certain? The Enlightenment anticipated a gain in clarity as we approach universal truths. Postmoderns instead see growing paradox as we knit together a picture of how things are, as in the case of the wave/particle duality in atomic physics.
The UC Davis–spawned Aroma WheelTM is a familiar example of modern enology’s reductionist attempts to manage sensory impact by dissecting aromas into their constituent pieces. There is no evidence that varietal characters or any other constituent aromas are compelling drivers for lovers of structured reds. For Riesling and Muscat, surely the flowery linalool and geraniol terpenes drive sales—the more, the better. One can point to vanillin (an oak extractive) as a hook for novice red wine fans. But these are regarded as cheap tricks in the big leagues, where an inarticulable profundity in great reds is what has connoisseurs reaching for their wallets, just as with the great unpasteurized cheeses of France and Italy.
Flavors of terroir receive much ink in reviews, evoking the intense joy that comes from being shown deep places in one’s own soul. Embodying a unique communion of taster and place, such flavors—whether of a fine red wine, an earthy Guatemalan coffee, or a perfectly spiced Thai soup—evoke profound connection, of being thoroughly known by someone far away. But these aromas are by nature unique, never to appear on a standard wheel.
The appreciation and evaluation of wine, the subject of chapter 24, presents intricate intellectual challenges that baffle novices and can perplex the most experienced professional. We cannot judge a wine unless we know the tradition in which it was made, yet to maintain objectivity, judges taste double-blind and are not told if a particular Chardonnay, for example, is from a nationally distributed brand of half a million cases or a tiny lot sold only out of a tasting room in an obscure location.
Postmodern philosophy offers useful tools for peering into the wine tasting process, concerning itself very much with perception, art, and language. Novice wine drinkers have a very different, one might say, a purer, sensory experience of what is in the glass than trained professionals do. As they try more wines, they naturally accumulate a growing vocabulary to parse their experience as they connect, through their own invention and through instruction, colors and flavors with sources such as varietal characteristics, oak, microbial activity, and aging. When tied to a wine genre, usually sprung from a European antecedent, this language may allow agreement with other tasters and a capacity to rate quality in the context of accepted style rules.
But these are human cultural constructs that quickly come to dominate perception itself. In appellations with well-established style traditions, wines are experienced through the lens of local custom. As with English speakers in rural Scotland, New Jersey, or the Deep South who do not perceive themselves as speaking with accents, the locally familiar becomes invisible.
It is only when compared to other regions that the local becomes colorful or eccentric. Just as television-speak occurring as a global unaccented standard renders local dialects peculiar, quaint, or even unintelligible, so today have globally distributed “expected” styles of Merlot, Chardonnay, and Riesling restricted the commerciality of small local producers in climatically unique areas. Global styles are not the pinnacle of quality; they provide consistency at the risk of a boring uniformity that has led to a recent appetite for diversity. Sorting among these wines with no fixed standards to guide us is a considerable challenge from which established reviewers such as the Wine Advocate and the Wine Spectator have, for the most part, shrunk from leadership. The coming-of-age of a surprising panoply of well-made wines from regions throughout the New World calls for a shift to a postmodern mind-set that respects and celebrates diversity. The theme of the birthing pains of New World identity is explored more fully in chapter 24.
Hans-Georg Gadamer’s hermeneutics concerns itself with the way language arises as individuals experience art in a social context and maps the interplay of experience, thought, and language, threading a path that accepts both the objective reality of Enlightenment thinking and each individual’s unique creative interaction with that reality. The wine exists, but each person’s experience of it is unique, subject to personal interpretation, the opinions of peers, and the context, sometimes sterile, often romantic, in which it is served. Without question, the surest way to appreciate a wine is to share a glass with the winemaker at its place of origin.
LEVELS OF UNKNOWING
Jean-François Lyotard proclaimed in his seminal work, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, that “postmodernity is not a new age, but the rewriting of some of the features claimed by modernity, and first of all modernity’s claim to ground its legitimacy on the project of liberating humanity as a whole through science and technology.”4 I have drawn much from my scientific training at MIT and Davis and receive regular thanks from winemakers for having applied it to the general benefit of our industry. I want to state definitively that I am entirely in favor of the courageous, skeptical inquiry that science represents. I am not anti-science, any more than I am anti-Christmas, but I am saddened by the commerciality and autocracy that today characterize both. I love enology and would like to see its practitioners clean up their game. I am anti-hubris and anti-arrogance but pro-humility and pro-inquiry.
The proper place for science in postmodern winemaking is in service to the winemaker’s true purpose: to bottle something that when opened months or decades later satisfies human appreciation. It is clear that science has made tremendous advances, but still it must be admitted that our glass of knowledge is far from half full. Our ignorance can be parsed into three categories.
1 Uncollected information: that which we know we don’t know but have yet to discern, investigate, or verify.
2 Invisible ignorance: that which we have not the language even to ask questions about, let alone delve for answers to, restricted as we are by our fixed way of thinking. Richard Feynman said that to see the limitations of current science we need look no further than the mysteries of fluid flow in a pipe.5 Physicists will tell you that their work is so bizarre that the mind really cannot
