and machine calculations for our predictions. If we build machines that grind out accurate predictions, can we then claim these as prizes of science, when in truth they are not really within our grasp?3 The experiential imponderable: that which is either fundamentally mysterious or otherwise unknowable. Scientific understanding works from underlying generalities, so it is not experiential in nature. It can state how to construct a major chord but cannot explain why it is cheerful while a minor chord is melancholy. It can explain why the rain precipitates but cannot capture the apprehension of autumn’s first rainfall under an ancient elm with a special someone.
These lyrical, disorderly, unscientific phrasings point to a different kind of truth, a human truth, the apprehension of which is critical to the human condition and not at all the business of science. The actual experience of drinking wine falls into this category and cannot be published, posted, or televised.
The postmodern respect for diversity is also a characteristic of our craft. Each winery is its own separate world, which is what makes them so much fun to visit one by one on a day’s outing.
I offer no formulations for making wine, nor do I advocate any particular tools. Although I describe the use of oxygen (chapter 3), barrels and oak alternatives (chapter 4), alcohol adjustment (chapter 17), many uses of membranes (chapter 18), flash détente (chapter 19), and yeast inoculation (chapter 23), I present these for winemakers to consider in their own unique situations, as items in their tool kits, and for lay readers better to understand what they are and why we might use them.
If critics are no longer trusted as arbiters of right action, postmodern practitioners need to explain their reasoning in making their winemaking choices. I recommend that you never use a tool that you are unwilling to disclose. This is really what is meant by manipulation. If you know a wine will improve by lowering its alcohol content with reverse osmosis, be a mensch (you too, ladies) and own up to it, explain yourself—and make the better wine. Until we stop sweeping our best work under the rug, we will forever be under the lash of poorly informed, ill-intentioned paparazzi.
My own bent is neoclassical. I make very Pauillac-like Cabernet Sauvignon; Cabernet Franc in a style somewhere between Graves and St. Emilion; a minerally Chardonnay that I call Faux Chablis; and a sulfite-free Roman Syrah. I pick my grapes ripe but not overripe and will, if needed, lower alcohol content, usually below 14%, with reverse osmosis. I generally like to structure my reds with Phase 1 micro-oxygenation. My goals are to show that California grapes are very well suited to European styles and that they are capable of great longevity if properly balanced.
Not all postmodern thought seeks to recapture the wisdom of the ancients, but in wine there is every reason to attempt to do so. Winemaking is far, far older than our knowledge of chemistry and microbiology, and no inquiring mind can remain incurious about what our antecedents knew that we have lost.
Indeed, the most radical and exciting activity in winemaking today is the rediscovery in post-Soviet Georgia—where the technique originated—and other hot spots as widespread as Friuli and Brooklyn, of the ancient method of burying, for many months or even as long as a decade, sealed clay qvevri (giant earthenware vessels) filled with white grapes, skins, seeds, and stems.
The premodern classic eras in which European appellations established their characteristics are creative bedfellows with postmodernism’s challenges to contemporary convention. Like grandparents and grandchildren, they are united against a common enemy.
You have already seen my definition of postmodern winemaking: “the practical art of connecting the human soul to the soul of a place by rendering its grapes into liquid music.” I know this sounds limp-wristed at first glance. My goal in this book is to persuade the reader to embrace this definition as a down-to-earth working mandate that directs our daily endeavors.
A final key element of postmodern thought is a willingness not to know. It would be a sad waste of time for me to attempt to replace the fallacies of my modern forerunners with pontifications of my own. I am quite sure that this book contains nothing that is “true” in the modern sense. As the postmodern pragmatist Richard Rorty famously observed, “Truth is simply a compliment paid to sentences seen to be paying their way.”6 This does not mean that the postmodern practitioner holds all points of view to be equally valid. One goes with what works. Truth is looked for in local functionality rather than in some universal objective reality.
The winemaker’s goals are not perfectly aligned with academic realities such as grants, tenure, and peer credibility. Chapter 12 acknowledges the debt owed by rationalists to the crackpot visionaries who have done the exploratory heavy lifting that has always preceded organized research.
Far from discarding the scientific tradition that has brought us so much knowledge and power, I seek to incorporate its most useful findings and approaches, the ones that prove coherent with our human goals. This book is not intended as a declaration of war on modern enology, or a wine technologist’s apologist diatribe against those earnest voices speaking out for Natural Wine, but rather as a love letter to all those who toil in and around winemaking, and an invitation to every person who has read this far to jump into the deep end. My hope is to convey a perspective that illuminates for each reader a path to your own truth and, more important, a useful model for making sense of the messages that wines themselves may transmit in connecting winemakers and wine lovers.
PART ONE
Principles
1
The Solution Problem
Progress has never been a bargain. You have to pay for it. Sometimes I think there’s a man who sits behind a counter and says, “Madam, you can have a telephone, but you’ll lose privacy, and the charm of distance. Mister, you may conquer the air; but the birds will lose their wonder, and the clouds will smell of gasoline.”
—Jerome Lawrence and Robert Edwin Lee, Inherit the Wind
Louis Pasteur’s 1857 discovery of yeast as the mechanism of fermentation ushered in a century of discovery in the new science of enology, replacing the trial-and-error approach of traditional winemaking. In 1880, research stations in Bordeaux and Davis, California, were established to apply the fruits of scientific advancement to modern winemaking.
The advent of electricity altered traditional winemaking forever. So welcome were the advantages in lighting, labor savings, and refrigeration that one would be hard pressed today to name a winery without electricity anywhere in the world. As time-honored methods and equipment were rapidly discarded, a holistic system painstakingly developed over millennia was abandoned in the wink of an eye.
As easy as it is to praise the advantages of these sweeping changes, there was a downside.
Replacing empirical systems with theoretical methods devalues hundreds of years of specific knowledge and practice, tending to bring a squeaky-clean sameness to all wine. Before electricity, much greater care and attention was devoted to every step of the winemaking process.
When twentieth-century tools such as stainless steel, inert gas, refrigeration, and sterile filtration became widely available for the first time just after World War II, a modern winemaking revolution exploded out of Germany. A completely new way of making Riesling—fresh, sterile-filtered, completely without oxidative characters—rapidly became the standard for white wine making throughout the world.
It is hard today to appreciate the impact of this new type of wine. Sterile filtration came about as a product of nuclear energy, for the first integrity-testable filters
