Browse Category

essays

The Brewer’s art

[pig’s rear end]Grapes can be thin-skinned. So can critics. To their great credit, winemakers usually aren’t. As with any other producer of a critique-able product or work, they’re the constant recipient of feedback, both good and bad. The good can go to one’s head, the bad to one’s heart, but the majority of winemakers take it pretty much in stride, accepting the fundamental truism that taste in all things is personal.

Oh, there are some exceptions. Angry rebuttals in the press, lawsuits, dogs set upon visiting critics as they exit their rental car. I’ve had a few run-ins myself. And even the most mild-mannered winemaker can be pushed beyond their limits by what they perceive to be a particularly egregious slight.

But at least critics know to expect this sort of thing, given what they do. Consumers don’t. It didn’t used to matter, but in this evolving age of many-to-many communication, the consumer who voices an opinion becomes as much of a potential target for retribution as any critic. Perhaps even more of one; a winemaker may not wish to burn a bridge to a powerful critic, but an everyday consumer might be dismissed without a second thought.

Not long ago, the denizens of one of the web’s various wine fora got into a discussion about Brewer-Clifton, a well-known producer of pinot noir and chardonnay from California. As with any robust discussion, there was both positivity and negativity, and a full range of opinions was aired. But I’m sure no one expected what happened next.

“You have received this notification from Brewer-Clifton because you are a registered user or you or some other registered user requested some information for you from our store.

Dear [name redacted],

Your profile at Brewer-Clifton has been deleted.”

This reads as it looks. Step one: criticize Brewer-Clifton in public, or at least appear to do so. Step two: get dropped from their mailing list.

Putting aside the dubious sensibility of shedding customers in a flailing economy, Brewer-Clifton had three choices when faced with public criticism. One, ignore it (the path chosen by almost everyone in the wine world). Two, respond to it (a path with its time-sucking and image-destabilizing dangers; only those with quick wits, faster fingers, and a taste for the arena usually survive this sort of thing unscathed). Or three, punish their critics.

Did they choose wisely? Not in the view of some of those dropped, some of whom hadn’t even criticized the winery or the wines, but instead had been critical of the scores accorded the wines by famous critics. As one dropped customer objected:

“Of course, I was not referring to BC or their wines as ‘a complete joke’ but rather referring to The Wine Advocate’s lazy review [of] their wines.

It’s important to note, after the fact, that those deleted have reportedly been reinstated. But what went on here is worth examining a little more closely, because it has fairly profound implications for the open and collaborative world of wine commentary into which we are decisively moving.

What was behind Brewer-Clifton’s move? Simple pique. Read for yourself (both excepts edited for clarity):

So I decided to call Steve Clifton to see if this was the case. He returned my call about ten minutes later and indeed confirmed that my post was the reason. Steve went on to explain to me that these kind of posts on wine boards are extremely hurtful, and that because it’s a bottle of wine doesn’t mean that there aren’t real people behind the scenes, and if I don’t like the wines why should I be on the list?

“A complete joke” is what led Greg Brewer to terminate me from Brewer-Clifton’s mailing list. He felt like if I, or anyone really, thought the wines of Brewer-Clifton were a complete joke then why would that person want to be, or deserve to be, on the mailing list?

As pointed out by some, including one of the above-quoted victims, everyone was within their rights here. People were free to say anything they wanted about Brewer-Clifton, short of actionable defamation. Brewer-Clifton was free to drop anyone from their mailing list, for any reason they could come up with. And in an earlier world of wine communication, that’s where the story would have ended. Except, of course, we’re no longer in that world.

As it turned out, everyone else knew what Brewer-Clifton was up to while it was happening. Some, even those that counted themselves fans of the winery and their wines, weren’t too happy, and their relationships with both soured. In the end, despite the reinstatements, the move counts as a minor PR disaster for the winery, for they have now set as an apparent condition of receiving their wines that one may not engage in public conversations that the winery principals find disagreeable.

I, for one, reject that standard, and while I don’t enjoy Brewer-Clifton’s wines, I do appreciate wines from the related Palmina label. This new situation calls my support into question, and I am most certainly less likely to choose those wines in the future. The winery is free to act as they will, and so am I, by my lack of future support. (As a consumer only; a critic’s responsibilities are somewhat different.)

But all these personal acts of retribution and counter-retribution are insignificant in the face of the greater danger they pose to the very nature of many-to-many wine communication. The new paradigm has positives and negatives, but one of the of the unquestioned benefits is the free flow of a wide stream of information. Whether for good or ill, someone with information is going to bring it in front of the public.

In the world that Brewer-Clifton apparently seeks, this flow of information can no longer be trusted. People may post their experiences with Brewer-Clifton’s wines (or the winery itself), but they may now only post positive reports, lest they risk losing their access. The information stream is tainted. It is no longer reliable, which is always a danger, but in fact it is now worse: it is actively untrustworthy.

Think about what this means for an entity like CellarTracker, which trades on its community of tasting notes and ratings. Think anyone who values their presence on the Brewer-Clifton mailing list is eager to post a negative review or score now? Don’t count on it.

The effect will be no different than if one of the winery principals or their hired guns were to “spike” the database with hyped-up notes and ratings…an action which I suspect few would endorse. But in a sense, I suppose Brewer-Clifton has done something awfully clever here. Because rather than fouling the waters themselves, and paying the price, they’ve gotten their customers to do it for them.

Which makes it all the more important that they, and any other winery that tries the same trick, suffer equivalent public shaming. It’s the only defense the consumer has against such practices.

Bottles made of sand

[mustang & vines]The current state of the wine business is enough to drive anyone to drink. Consider, for instance, this report from France:

French wine and spirits exports fell by almost a quarter in the first half of 2009…Champagne sales plummeted by 45% in value with Bordeaux declining 24%…Burgundy exports fell 30%

That last number might also be slightly elevated by the ongoing, and as yet not convincingly solved, premature oxidation issue affecting some of the region’s whites, but I suspect the majority of it is a simple matter of (over)supply vs. (under)demand.

In Champagne, however, they have a plan:

With sales falling, producers may be ordered to leave up to half their grapes to wither on the vine in an attempt to squeeze the market. Merchants are pushing for an historic reduction in yield as they seek to ensure that champagne remains an expensive luxury. “Everyone agrees that production has to be cut because no one here wants to see prices fall,” an industry insider said.

I suppose some might be moved to a fair bit of offense at the naked avarice of the folks who make Champagne, but I’m afraid I’m too cynical to be upset at this sort of thing anymore. And it is a good business/marketing decision, given what they sell is no longer wine (more on that in a moment).

But the news isn’t all bad. Referring once more to French wine:

The vin de pays category was less badly affected, while vin de table grew by 1.2%.

This matches what I’ve heard from retailers and restaurateurs: people are still buying alcohol, they’re just spending less when they do. But still, those drops in Champagne, Bordeaux, and Burgundy are dramatic. Aren’t these in-demand luxury products, with a worldwide audience and a steady stream of new buyers?

Yes. Therein lies the problem. Champagne, and to a slightly lesser extent Bordeaux, are not – in the market’s imagination – wines any longer. They’re luxury goods. They’re sold on their names and admired for the same reason, probably more than they’re admired for the contents of the bottles. Don’t believe me? Heed the source:

“Champagne is the drink of dreams and of parties,” [Patrick] Le Brun [chairman of the Syndicat Général des Vignerons de la Champagne] wrote in La Champagne Viticole, the trade magazine. “Its image, its universe are endangered when the term ‘crisis’ is associated too often with it.”

Note the absence of any talk of Champagne’s gustatory qualities. It’s all about the image, the prestige, the “event.”

This is a situation certain regions have engineered themselves. In boom times, it helps their sales, and – especially in Champagne – it neatly separates desirability from quality, making the former rather than the latter the driver of popularity (were that not so, people wouldn’t buy so much mediocre Veuve Clicquot). But as we’re now seeing, there’s a downside. People might remain true to a beloved beverage during hard times. But a status symbol? Those can be replaced, or abandoned, with ease.

On the other hand, not everyone suffers in a downturn:

The South African wine industry could face wine shortages within five years if sales continue to rise at the current rate, a leading South African producer has warned. In 2008, total exports increased 12% to a record 405 million liters but vineyard planting has not kept pace with increasing demand. Merwe Botha, financial director at Distell told decanter.com, “We need to look at the demand and supply situation. There are signs that in the next five years the industry could face shortages in supply. Producers have been under severe pressure because of margin and cash flow problems so they have not planted as much as they should have,” he added.

This was a topic of much angst last year when I visited South Africa. The ten-rand-to-the-dollar exchange rate that made the trip a ridiculous bargain has, for a while now, helped the wines make significant inroads into territory that once belonged to Australia, New Zealand, and California. But the too-cheap prices received by the producers have a significant downside, one that’s been plaguing South American countries as well: the money to plant (or replant, a significant issue facing a good number of South African growers), the money to upgrade facilities, and the money to work the market simply doesn’t materialize, even though the bottles themselves might be flying out the cellar door.

Drunk in translation

[hansa ad]Jumping into the deep end of an orange-colored pool, it turns out, draws notice and comment, some of it even from non-wine geek circles. Which means that an audience not already familiar with the text is asked to take a similar leap, nose first, into the self-referential and semi-lunatic world of wine description.

It’s a scary universe, and understandably some are disapproving (.pdf). Others, though, are merely perplexed. As one correspondent asked over email:

Do you have a page someplace on the blog that gives you the “code” for certain words – like, when you say that something tastes of “metal and charred orange, maybe even a bit of ash.” I know some of this is evocative, but is there a “dictionary” of understood wine/descriptive terms?

There are several answers to this. One is that there are, indeed, attempts to formalize wine verbiage: the U.C. Davis tasting wheel, for example, or this chemistry-laden approach. Neither has met with much success or enthusiasm among the note-taking (and note-reading) community. Why not? Not having done a survey, my suspicion is that people find it both restrictive and a little boring. Detailing the wonders of a wine is an act of personal expression; using details supplied and constrained by others is not. And anyway, those who prefer cognitive shorthand likely prefer the shortest hand of all: points and other ratings.

Another answer is that most of what one sees in a tasting note is pure subjectivity. There are objective things to be said, but they’re limited in what they can describe to some very basic chemistry, structural outlines, and the identification of actual flaws. Without chemical analysis, we’re left with the world where one taster’s “black raspberry jam” is another’s “smoked strawberry seed with black truffle,” and who’s to say which is right? Both and neither, probably.

But I think the best answer is that it doesn’t matter. Most tasting notes are written as much for the person writing them as they are for anyone else. And even those produced for an audience contain a lot of information that’s of very marginal value. For example, how often do you go to your local wine purveyor and ask, “might you have a wine that tastes of pineapple and indelicate slashes of papaya skin, with a suave finish?”

I can hear the crickets already.

Aside from a few basic assessments – the wine’s overall size; the relative levels of things like oak, acidity, and tannin; placement on an aging curve – most of what comprises a tasting note is, from a strictly utilitarian standpoint, fluff. Those who view a note as a list of descriptors with which one should attempt to find agreement have the wrong idea. It’s not about everyone finding blackcurrants or Earl Grey tea, it’s about communicating the experience of drinking the wine.

That’s a distinction not everyone grasps, so let me expand upon that at a little more length. When I tell you, via a tasting note, that a wine tastes like X, Y, and Z, your natural reaction will be to look for X, Y, and Z in the wine. In other words, you have read me as suggesting what you should think about the wine. From your ability, or inability, to find these specific characteristics, you will likely then draw a conclusion about your own tasting abilities (if you’re a novice), my tasting abilities (if you’re more experienced), or the compatibility of our palates (if you’re a reader looking for utility). This is no longer a dialogue about the wine, but rather a dialogue about you, me, and our proficiency at tasting and communication. And what does that have to do with wine?

Ideally, a note does not merely provide a grocery list of ingredients which the reader may then check off in their comparative sample. I find it much more interesting for a note to communicate not just the wine’s qualities and components, but how the note-writer responded to the wine (and not just a qualitative judgment, either). For example, consider this note:

Josmeyer 2001 Pinot Gris “Le Fromenteau” (Alsace) – Pristine and mineral-driven, fruited with crisp pear and ripe apple, and seasoned with just a bit of salt. (No, really…there’s a hint of salinity that I’ve never found in an Alsatian pinot gris, though it’s fairly common in certain coastal whites.) Neither fat nor aggressive. The finish is long, suggesting hints of the spice that will emerge with more age. While this is drinking well now, were I to own any I’d wait a while, because it’s still holding back, and because the crystalline minerality that’s slowly being revealed is a little more zirconium than diamond at the moment.

Objective traits of the wine, if any, are absent from this note. The length of the finish could be considered a semi-objective assessment, perhaps, but it’s not like I’ve provided a specific duration. There’s also a contextualizing phrase (the bit about salinity not being typical for Alsatian pinot gris), which is as much about bringing external knowledge to the note as it is about the wine in question. The rest of the note can be divided into two parts: descriptors, and comments on the experience. The former are easily identified. The latter are little more difficult to sift from the text.

Easiest to understand are the last two sentences, which could be summarized thusly: the wine’s too young, and aging will reveal a more interesting minerality and spice (that, one may read between the lines to learn, is something to be expected from this wine). The rest is simply a matter of repositioning perspective. “Neither fat nor aggressive” means essentially the same thing as “possessing balancing acidity and moderate intensity,” which is a form one would much more often find in tasting notes, but recasts that communication as being about the experience of the wine rather than an essential property of the wine. Similarly, “pristine” could be reworded as “clean” (or “fault-free”), but also suggests something unsullied that’s beyond the mere absence of chemical or biological faults. These thoughts are, for me, more important to communicate than a list of fruits, minerals, and structural elements.

Thus, and to (at long last) answer my correspondent, I’m fairly indifferent to whether or not “metal,” “charred orange,” or “ash” have specific and one-to-one translatable meaning for the reader. I certainly don’t think I or anyone else would suggest to people that beverages that taste of actual metal, charred orange, and ash would be popular, or even palatable; wine descriptors such as these are meant to be read as “the suggestion of…” rather than real ingredients. I’m much more interested in saying: this wine is not a fruity, friendly, familiar beverage like many you (and I) have had. It is not easily approachable…in fact, it’s rather difficult. It’s probably not a wine for the timid or novice drinker, as the aromas and textures are decidedly out of the ordinary. If that has been communicated – and I think those particular terms pretty much have to communicate something along those lines – then the note has achieved its purpose, whether or not a future taster finds all, or even any, of those elements in their own glass.

Alsace rolls the Deiss

[sommerberg rainbow]Alsace: France, but efficient. The Germanic influences run deep – the cuisine, the shape of their traditional bottles, the names of both people and places – and, usually, they’re helpful in directing the often unfocused, occasionally counter-productive French impulse of dissent and divergence.

Sometimes, however, they’re not. The problem seems to be especially severe when it comes to crafting the region’s (comparatively) new wine law. For example, the rush to designate grand crus fundamentally and permanently hobbled the effort, with borders politicked into meaningless expansion and unsupportable round-numbered-ness. And now, this. An (alleged) attempt to change the very nature of Alsatian wine, from one centered on the variety to one centered on the site but to the exclusion of the variety.

Not having been privy to the INAO’s internal deliberations, I can’t say whether producers’ fears on this count are justified. I can say that the idea is ludicrous, and if enacted would send the region’s wines back into the Stone Age, in terms of brand identity and, more importantly, sales.

What’s wrong with a little site designation? Nothing, of course, and certainly current Alsatian wine law both allows and encourages it. But the spiritual model for such site designation, at least in France, is Burgundy, and it’s a region with an important difference from Alsace: the grapes are singular and can be assumed just by the color of the wine. In Alsace, there’s no indication what a Schoenenbourg sans variety might be, and little historical precedent to suggest a preferred answer.

The driver of this bus full of hooey is the inimitable Jean-Michel Deiss, who – it must be disclaimed – makes wines I don’t particularly like. He has gradually moved his domaine from one making the usual range of varietally-designated wines to one specializing in site-designated blends, and in the process I think he’s lost both the wines’ essential balance and – somewhat ironically – the terroir signatures he craves. But my feelings about his wines are irrelevant; if he thinks he’s expressing terroir with his blends, he’s certainly welcome to continue. And in fact, Alsace wine law was modified to allow him and others to do this very thing. (Deiss argues that this is a return to tradition, rather than a new step. As with most such claims of historical precedent, it’s necessary to cherry-pick the “traditional” era’s span of years, because there are precedents for both his argument and the counter-argument.)

The problem seems to be that, having succeeded in taking his place within the expanded wine law, he now wants to move that law definitively into his corner. I can only suppose that he feels this would be a marketing advantage for him, because I cannot see any other reason for wanting or advocating for such a change, except perhaps overweening arrogance about the exclusive correctness of one’s position (which, it’s worth remembering, would not be an entirely unusual pose for Deiss).

But rather than further personalizing the debate, lets examine it on the merits. Would Alsace benefit from abandoning its dependence on varietal labeling, a practice nearly unknown elsewhere in France (except among low-cost table wines)?

[stork & stew]First, the organoleptics: as anyone who’s tasted Alsatian blends knows, one of the significant difficulties is the dominant character of several of the potential blending grapes. Gewurztraminer, unless picked very early, tends to bury everything else with its lurid perfume, weight, and tendency towards sweetness and/or alcohol. Muscat is lighter, but the aromatics are inescapable and obscure much else in the wine. Pinot gris brings spicy fat that texturally dominates. And while riesling provides laser-like acidity, its nearly unparalleled ability to express minerality cannot stand in the face of fatter partners.

One might think that careful blending could lead to wines with an interesting tension and balance, but the evidence is rather the opposite…only a very few sites (like the Kaefferkopf) seem to provide the terroir necessary to bring the various grapes into harmonious balance. Elsewhere, the result is much as one might expect: gewürztraminer with a disjointed spike of riesling crispness, muscat fattened by pinot gris to the diminishment of both grapes, convoluted messes of all four (or more) grapes that taste like lousy gewürztraminer, and so forth. Despite Deiss’ mission, and with one exception (pinot blanc and auxerrois), the grapes of Alsace tend not to play well with each other, as they do Châteauneuf-du-Pape or Bordeaux. The exceptions are delicious, but they’re most decidedly exceptions. And a wholesale expansion of the practice of multi-variety blending seems unlikely to prove counter to the prevailing trends.

Second, there’s the marketing challenge, which would be considerable. As Pierre Trimbach once opined in response to the semi-recent push for a raft of premier cru vineyard designations (and I’m paraphrasing, though just a bit), “that’s just what Alsace needs…another fifty unpronounceable Germanic names that no one knows anything about.” His words could almost apply to the site designations now in existence. The myriad lieux-dits which few have even heard of aside, even the majority of the established grand crus aren’t exactly household names. The known sites – Sommerberg, Brand, Rangen, and so forth – have qualitative reputations well-based in history, but they’re famous now because of the skill and fame of the producers that utilize their grapes, not because of the sites themselves. (Want evidence for this? Consider the Rosacker. It’s the source of Alsace’s most celebrated wine, yet few outside the region know its name, because that wine – Trimbach’s Clos Ste-Hune – doesn’t mention the grand cru anywhere on the label.)

I’m glad that the INAO relented from its overly-rigid stance and allowed Deiss and others the option to make site-designated blends if they wish. Options are good, albeit sometimes contrary to the French regulatory mindset. But to institutionalize site over variety in a region where the latter is traditional, and where the majority of such blends will end up tasting like bad gewürztraminer and carry confusing multi-syllabic names?

Dumb. Really, really dumb. This roll of the Deiss will come up snake-eyes.

Natural science

[netted grapes]Clark Smith is an articulate guy. And there’s an odd schizophrenia to his eloquence; at times, he’s passionately defending the full suite of modern technological interventions that have made his name and his fortune, while at other times he’s lauding the primacy of the vineyard.

In this, he’s more right than many of the partisans on either side…both the ones who’ve never met an intervention they couldn’t excuse, and the ones whose winemaking ideal is impossibly utopian. And I say this as someone who is, with fair frequency, an enthusiastic endorser of the natural/traditional side of things.

In a recent issue of Wines & Vines, Smith gave voice to an inevitable outcome of this ongoing tension:

In the ’70s, there used to be a clear, open channel of communication with the press and with wine buffs in general, but winemakers got insular. There are now fully 50 times as many wines on the market as there were 30 years ago, and the resulting heated competition has shut down the sharing of knowledge. Instead, today you scrape for every advantage. Winemakers thus tap eagerly into technological innovations from, say, the biomedical field or NASA. These have come so fast that it is difficult for even seasoned pros to keep track, let alone school the public and the romantic press corps. Amidst all this change, there is a growing realization that the modern principles we learned in school aren’t adequate to the task of making great wine, and this has added confusion to deciding just what the post-modern path should be. So winemakers are really confused, just when a revolution in social media is demanding clear, honest answers.

This sort of transparency is something I’ve called for in the past. That it meets with resistance from concocters of industrial beverages is no surprise, but I’ve received significant pushback from those who’ve little to hide, and also – even more surprisingly – those who hide nothing. The usual protest is that transparency will, as one winemaker put it, “open [us] up for criticism.”

The thing is, that’s already happened. Arguments about techniques, sometimes more than the wines that employ (or deliberately don’t employ) them, rage across the world of wine discussion…in print, online, and in person. So the time to worry about the possibility of criticism has passed. It’s here. And now it must be dealt with.

Open secrets

What wine-related matters would benefit from the bright light of revelation? Ingredients, certainly…something Bonny Doon has already addressed. One of the great misapprehensions about wine is that it’s all just grapes and maybe some yeast, while others of a more suspicious bent hear “ingredients” and start thinking about artificial flavorings and all manner of nasty chemical additives. Wines of each type do exist, certainly, but there’s a vast middle ground of things added to wine that are, by almost any definition, quite traditional and well-established, like acid, or sugar. The availability of this information would remove the stigma of mysteriousness for people who, having just learned that most winemaking is not peasants foot-stomping tubs of grapes, are driven to question as blindly as they’ve accepted in the past.

But also, techniques. The modern winemaker has a lot of tools in their arsenal. Some are quite old and well-established, some are modern ways to accomplish the same result, and others are on the cutting edge of scientific winemaking. Some are deformative in expected ways, others are deformative on the sly. Some fix problems, others create new problems (which can sometimes, in turn, be fixed by other methods). Some are the outgrowth of a philosophy, including the philosophy of using as few as possible (or, for some idealists, none), some are employed as last-ditch damage control, and others are applied as a regular part of a rigid process.

Every technique has its supporters and detractors, but none is inherently good or bad, except as viewed through the lens of a winemaking philosophy. The problem is that, in the absence of transparency, the consumer is often left to develop their own philosophy based on insufficient, and sometimes even completely wrong, information. For example, the majority of Smith’s former clients hide the fact that they used his services. Why? Because there are some that consider those techniques to be of a special category of deformation, and those companies don’t want to deal with the possibility of negative publicity. The thing is, the actual number of people fundamentally offended by some of the technologies is fairly small, but by cloaking everything under a cloud of obfuscation, the result has been a wider net of suspicion falling on the entire wine industry…a suspicion now held by a greater number of people than would have actually cared, were the details supplied to them from a non-partisan source. The only escapees are those whose philosophy is rigidly spelled out, those already assumed to be using any and all techniques available to them (the industrialists), and the very few who have the courage to hide nothing.

Bent finger-pointing

So the transparency that Smith calls for is laudable and, at this point, necessary to restore rationality to the discussion of winemaking science and philosophy. However, that Smith has issued the call for such transparency is a little problematic. First because much of his business has been built on a lack thereof, and second because he cannot help but grind personal axes in the process. For example, elsewhere in his statement, he goes awry when he personalizes the debate:

More than ever, consumers have become inspired to love wine as the “one pure thing” unaltered by 20th century fiddling. The lack of straight talk from winemakers has spawned a whole generation of Internet piranhas who make a living devouring ill-prepared winemakers, the poor saps. These predators have learned they can trade on the public’s growing fears of technology in winemaking’s sacred ground. While wine lovers may not agree at all with these sensationalists, they can’t help being drawn to their rhetoric. The public needs to create an entrée for honesty before most winemakers will come clean. That’s beginning to happen with real journalists like Jamie Goode and Eric Asimov writing without an ax to grind. So heroes like Randy Dunn and Michael Havens are now willing to speak openly.

Oh dear. Those poor, poor winemakers, who sound awfully set-upon by the bloodthirsty “internet piranhas.” It sounds unendurable, but it’s mostly untrue.

It’s not that Smith’s carnivorous fish don’t exist, though someone who wasn’t deeply immersed in the battle himself might more fairly and reasonably call them advocates for a philosophical position, rather than some insulting name. And it’s not even that they’re incapable of the occasional bout of rhetorical savagery – who isn’t? – or that they are always fair – who is? – or even that they all make sense. It’s absolutely true that some advocacy is unfair, badly communicated, and outright incorrect. But Smith rides this fence too hard; either it’s his ox being gored, or it isn’t. He can’t simultaneously claim special aggravation as the target of attacks and the pretense of objective distance. And in any case, those he believes to be his tormenters…aren’t.

In examining why Smith is pointing an accusing finger at the wrong target, it’s necessary to ask where the “natural wine” advocates come from. Did the cohort of philosophically rigid interlocutors that annoy Smith so much spring fully-formed from the ether? No. They arose as a response to an existing dichotomy in the world of wine, one in which the majority of winemaking either embraces or is unconcerned by matters of technological meddling, and in which exists a small but very vocal opposition from winemakers who espouse positions of (occasionally extreme, occasionally not) traditionalism and naturalness. It is their work – their wines, which exist as evidence for their counter-argument to the modern norm – that gives rise to a segment of the professional and enthusiast commentariat that are the media-saturating advocates for the wines, and as a result the philosophy. This is no different than an encounter with great Barolo giving rise to enthusiasm and advocacy for Piedmontese nebbiolo, it’s just newer, and thus seems more jarring…especially by those who were unaware of the existence of, or have reason to be antagonistic to the promotion of, an alternative to the norm.

Thus, the “problem” for defensive winemakers isn’t the commentary on natural wines, it’s the natural wines themselves, and also their most passionate advocates: their winemakers. Did they not exist, and in ever-growing number, there would be little or no media advocacy to worry about.

[cowc exterior]The best defense is a good offense

So what’s the path forward? Still transparency, after which an honest debate can take place, Yet all too often the actual debate takes the form of a defensive crouch, expressed as a “yeah, but what about…” argument and often employed by winemakers, who respond to questioning of their methods with veiled accusations about others’ methods. There’s a good point buried within this argument, one which examines the value judgments in considering (say) reverse osmosis to be fundamentally deformative, but chaptalization to be more or less OK. But the defense fails in two rather basic ways. First, it is unresponsive, and merely returns accusation with counter-accusation. Second, and worse, it assumes either ignorance or hypocritical motivation on the part of the questioner. Yet not all who question are hypocritical; some distrust chaptalization and reverse osmosis in equal measure, and others are innocent in their ignorance of the philosophical difference. As detailed earlier, it is the very lack of transparency – a situation exacerbated by this tennis match of volleyed accusations – that creates misunderstandings by which reverse osmosis and chaptalization are judged by different philosophical standards that have little foundation in reality.

What would be preferable is an argument that allows for, or defends, ingredients and techniques the same way the natural wine cohort does: with the wines themselves as the star witnesses. “Here is wine A, made with technique 1 but eschewing 2, 3, and 4. Here is wine B, made with all four techniques plus ingredient X. Here is wine C, made with those four techniques but without ingredient X. Which do you prefer?”

There will be those who will like and dislike wines in ways that go beyond organoleptics – usually for reasons philosophical – and that’s a justifiable response. There will also be those who would not dream of choosing on any basis other than taste, and that’s no less justifiable. And there will be a third group that will learn something about the intersection of nature and man, and how the choices enforced and made by each are reflected in wine. Armed with that knowledge, and a transparency about how other wines compare, they will be able to make more informed choices about new wines they might like or dislike, and why. And winemakers will no longer have to atone for the unproven sins of their brethren, but will represent their products for what they actually are. In this scenario, everybody wins.

So why is there such resistance to this notion? As before, the motivations of the true industrialists are clear: they fear rejection if their actual practices are made public. (A fear that is certainly overblown given that most consumers don’t really care how wine is made, but are only concerned with a personal quality/price ratio.) But the greater problem is that this is a battle for micro-shares of potential consumers in a highly saturated market, and as with any such battle a lot of it is fought by waging a propaganda war. What’s important in such a campaign is not that the consumer knows, but rather that he believes…in a carefully constructed myth of “hand-selected” grapes that have never been touched by a hand, in the benefits of new oak barrels to a wine that has never seen wood that didn’t come in chip or liquid form, in the primacy of a named plot of land without regard to the quality of the actual products of that land, in the traditions of pastoral farming at a winery that owns no grapes, in the need to preserve land from the meddling of foreign corporate interests so it can be gobbled up by domestic corporate interests, in a hodge-podge of scientifically-unsustainable mysticism and nonsense that presents itself as more-holistic-than-thou, and in the ability of one person to carefully nurture an “artisanal” wine produced in industrial quantities while doing a simultaneous nurturing job for several hundred other clients around the world.

Testing one’s meddle

Whenever winemakers or wine drinkers start talking about “intervention” – a catch-all term for winemaking practices, but usually employed to mean only that subset of practices the speaker doesn’t like – the counter-argument comes, again, in the form of a game of counter-accusation and reductio ad absurdum. “Isn’t all winemaking intervention?” Well, yes, of course it is; wine can come into existence through absolute non-intervention (grapes and ambient yeast, a wound on one of the grapes sufficient to connect sugar to yeast and start fermentation, causing other grapes to split and add themselves to the fermentation, etc.), but it can’t end up in a container that way, and it isn’t anything one would want to drink if it could.

But no one who brings up intervention is arguing for that, and I doubt anyone ever has, so said response is more than a bit of a straw man. Advocates of the philosophy sometimes (perhaps unfortunately) called non-intervention don’t actually mean non-intervention, they mean less intervention, and even the hardliners only mean least-intervention. Not a recipe as rigid as any industrialist’s, but a mindset by which the preferred choice at a given stage in grape-growing or winemaking is not to “do something,” but to do as little as possible (with nothing as the philosophical ideal) in response to that choice. To claim a lack of difference between these practices and the free exercise of oenological wizardry is sophistry, and rather weak sophistry at that.

But that’s just the philosophical side. Many of those who argue for less intervention do it for reasons that have little or nothing to do with philosophy, and more to do with organoleptics: in general, they prefer the way wines made with less intervention taste. For such people, the usual straw man arguments achieve even less traction, because they’re interested not in intervention as a general category to be embraced or avoided, but in knowing which wines are more likely to satisfy their palates than others.

Drink the debate

So, having – like so many other industries – lost full control of the podium to the uncontrollable scrum of the internet, the battle has joined over who gets to hold the microphone that’s now roving through the audience. The sort of nonsense iterated above is no longer met with blind acceptance from all quarters, and so – to the blindsided – this must now be the fault of the bloggers. Words and numbers on a bottle are increasingly called to back up their claims with results, not merely with ad campaigns, and so this is now to be blamed on wine fora. Wines that “must” be made a certain way are now challenged by wines of comparable or superior quality that are not made that way, and so this must be the fault of some wine writing harridan.

If the battle is to be fought this way, the lesson of countless others like it is that those who refuse to participate with honesty and as much openness as they can muster will lose. Not because their potential arguments lack merit, but because the internet always “wins” this sort of tussle…and also because they will have failed to actually engage the arguments themselves, ceding ever-larger portions of the field to those who argue from the foundation of a philosophy rather than the needs of marketing.

Here, for example, is a long series of passionate arguments for (and occasionally against) natural wine. There’s some incredible writing there, and some less so, but what jumps out at me is a strong reliance on wines as foundations for the debate…or, in some cases, the entirety of a given argument. And these wines-as-arguments succeed because they’re open books in terms of conception and process. Someone can taste one, know everything about its guiding philosophy, and judge the merits of both. That’s the direction we need to go, but we need everyone participating in the discussion.

Someone much more interested in snarky but unproductive brevity than me probably could have boiled this entire post down to “Clark Smith should stop whining.” But no, that’s not really the point. The thing is, he isn’t going to win this fight via verbal artillery. What he should do is let his wines, and others, speak for themselves. Because articulate or not, wine makes a more compelling and complete argument for a philosophy than Smith ever could.

Forever small

[tombstones]Wine is about many things, and one of them is loss. You drink a bottle, and then it’s gone.

Forever.

Sure, there’s another version next year, but it’s not – and can’t be – the same. Eventually, every wine runs out or runs down; the last glass is swallowed, or the bottles that remain fade to an unnoticed death in some dusty corner. When the wine’s insignificant, or a mere commodity, such passings go largely unnoticed. But when it’s something special, something tangible is lost.

Forever.

The wine world recently lost two rather special people. Jean Hugel was the first, and that loss was more personal for me than the other, because of my deep and abiding affection for the wines of Alsace.

Some, familiar with the wines of perhaps the most famous of all Alsatian houses, might ask how that could be. Hasn’t Hugel underperformed of late? Sometimes, yes (with exceptions), though of course opinions differ. Perhaps significantly, their decline has often been expressed as a lack of vigor, a premature fading, an absence of life. The wines, as they must, reflect the man.

But no, the respect I have for, and the debt I owe to, “Johnny” Hugel is grander than issues of individual wine quality. He (along with the Trimbachs) made the name of Alsace in the United States, and many other places as well. Without his tireless promotion, I wouldn’t know, own, or love these wines. Within Alsace itself, no number of encomiums can measure his influence.

The second loss was Paul Avril, of Clos des Papes. I’d wager that for all the love shown to this often-extraordinary property, few knew the name of the proprietor. I only met Avril once (and knew neither gentleman well), but to spend time with either was to be in the presence of living passion made manifest.

Others have said what there is to say about what these losses mean to the world of wine, to their regions, and to their families. But I’d like to take a moment to point out something they shared. Something that is being lost in our modern world of superstar winemakers, self-reverential marketing, and gratuitous consumption.

Clos des Papes had its signature wine, their Châteauneuf-du-Pape (in two colors), and on those sometime pricey bottlings was their reputation built. But there was also the little wine. Explicitly so, in this case: Le petit vin d’Avril was a vin de table that sold for very little money. No, it was not the best wine in the world, or even in its category. But that was never its intent.

Hugel’s showcase wines were its late-harvest bottlings, relatively rare and fabulously sweet, but then there was the classic blend they called “Gentil” …often as pleasant a wine as could be had for anything approaching its price.

When we think about the giants of wine – and certainly, Hugel and Avril were giants – we tend to think about their longevity, their influence, and most of all their bottled monuments. But in the quiet hour after their passing, spare a thought for the wines that reflected that quiet. Drink their epic works in tribute, but spare a glass for their humblest offerings as well. They wouldn’t have made them if they didn’t intend just that.

For one day, the last great Clos des Papes touched by the hand of Paul Avril will be consumed. Eventually, the last Hugel-inspired selection des grains nobles will fade into a sweet sunset. And there will be those that will mourn their passing. But the simple wines, the daily wines – whether theirs or those that follow – will remain.

Forever.

Drink it forward

[press & amphora]I have some guests from France this week, and as is my usual practice I intend to serve them no French wines over the course of their stay. This time, however, I’m going to be a little more challenging than usual.

Most of my French friends and relatives are not wine geeks. They like it, they drink it with enthusiasm, they can comment intelligently on it when asked, but it’s not something they care or talk about away from the table. Not so the husband in the current pair, who – while he does not rise (or fall) to the level of oenophilic obsession required to, say, have more than one blog on the subject – likes to trot out his best stuff whenever I visit them, and who has a slightly more eclectic range of tastes than is typical among that particular set of friends.

So this week, I’m inspired to push the boundaries a bit. And the biggest push will probably come from one of the so-called “orange wines,” perhaps from someone like Radikon or Zidarich: an extended skin-contact white, cloudy and tannic, with an aromatic and structural palette likely to be completely unfamiliar to them (certainly, the grapes and regions involved will be). In planning this, I found myself wondering what my expectations were for such an experiment. Because, of course, there’s at least an even chance that they’ll find whichever wine I serve far too weird to enjoy, in which case this becomes a very expensive failed experiment (these wines, as their advocates know, are not exactly cheap).

Wine travel (that is, travel at least in part for the specific purpose of tasting wine) nearly always results in just this sort of encounter. Unless one adheres only to the tried-and-true, which seems an awfully restrictive way to approach such a diverse subject, there will eventually be a wine that first leads not to questions of good vs. bad, but of essence and intent. “What were they thinking here? Is this how the wine is supposed to taste?”

For some – me included – this is an essential, valuable, and often wonderful facet of wine exploration. And it doesn’t even matter all that much whether or not I actually like what I’m tasting, though weeks of slogging through bottles and barrels for which I don’t care would be a taxing experience. The tangible benefit is the experience, the palate-broadening encounter with something that’s actually new. (Even though many of the wines that engender this reaction are actually more akin to something old, like Gravner or Bea.) Often, the most difficult part of contemplating such wines is finding a vocabulary to describe them. I look back over all my Radikon notes, for example, and wonder at the near-complete disconnect between allegedly-identical bottles; is it the wine, or is it me? I’ve come to conclude that it’s a little bit of both, viewed through the lens of an imperfect language, in an ongoing effort to achieve some sort of actual understanding.

With this in mind, I’ve realized I have to let go of the hope – or even the notion – that my friends’ eyes will light up with excitement (as mine often do) when they taste whatever oddity I decide to serve them. Unlike the winemaker, I’ve no inherent interest in convincing others of the merits of the wine. After all, I’m not selling it. All I can do is transfer the experience…“drink it forward,” if you will…and I’m going to have to be content with that. Whatever happens after that is up to them, not me.

And if, as seems quite possible, they don’t like it? More for me. There’s no bad here.

Untangled & unencumbered

[wrestling statues]There’s a saying borrowed from academe that’s broadly applicable to the world of wine chatter, which I’ll paraphrase:: “the reason the arguments are so intense is that the stakes are so small.” And so the tempest in a decanter created by a pair of blog posts (here and here, some aftermath here and here) isn’t all that surprising. This is about as juicy as wine scandals get: accusations of hypocrisy, of ethical breaches, of abusive moderation, of plain old jackassery, all laid at the altar of the high priest of wine criticism…maybe someone should film it with a shaky hand-held camera. Perhaps with a few gratuitous shots of flatulent dogs.

It’s an interesting conflict, no doubt, but the more worrisome component of the controversy is the shaky foundation on which it rests. In the comments that follow the two blog posts, and on the linked forum thread, there’s a persistent but passionately-expressed insistence that the root of the problem is bias, whether actual or potential.

This is ridiculous.

I’ve written about this before, and at length. And while this will be an opportune moment to revisit some of those arguments, the current brouhaha offers an additional perspective.

Note: this essay deals primarily with critics, not with writers in general. I’ve explained the difference in detail here, and almost all wine communicators engage in both, but a shorthand way to differentiate the two is: writers inform, critics judge. Bias, even if one accepts the argument that it is bad, is largely irrelevant when considering the primary work of the writer. If interesting or useful information has been communicated, then the writer has succeeded, whether or not bias plays a role.

Are biases disqualifying? It’s very easy to answer this one: if they are, then there can be no such thing as a critic, because everyone has biases. Everyone. Preference is as natural a human quality as breathing. To be sure, self-awareness is necessary; beware the critic who tells you that they lack bias, because they’re lying to you and – more importantly – to themselves. Transparency is equally crucial. With the widespread adoption of the internet, the only actual limit on it – the lack of a ready venue in which to be transparent – has been eliminated. It would be to the benefit of everyone if all critics made a habit of publishing their biases for all to read. For they most certainly have them.

But this is a bit of a diversion. People who complain about bias aren’t, believe it or not, actually concerned with bias. They’re concerned with entanglement and encumbrance. For example, there’s obviously no functional problem with a critic who prefers Zind-Humbrecht to Trimbach as a result of their internal biases, but there is a problem with one who either is, or believes herself to be, unable to express the opposite viewpoint due to personal or economic pressure. It’s completely natural to prefer Sancerre blanc to Marlborough sauvignon blanc, but it’s potentially* problematic if that preference is compensated outside a journalistic revenue stream, and it’s even worse if that compensation is anticipatory.

[Colleoni statue]*I say “potentially” in the first case, because it isn’t clear that all forms of compensation would be problematic. Accepting an invitation to speak at a world conference on sauvignon blanc would seem to be OK. Accepting an invitation to speak before the Society for the Promotion of Sancerre is probably still OK, as long as there’s no attempt to control the critic’s message for the purposes of marketing. Accepting an invitation to write marketing copy for the Society for the Promotion of Sancerre? Most definitely problematic under some ethical schemes, though the society’s use of the critic’s published work for that purpose would obviously be fine, subject to the rules set down by the critic’s publisher and the principles of fair use and copyright as they exist in the relevant realms.

For those who haven’t thought much about the issue, the obvious solution is to remove all potential sources of entanglement. In other words, a sort of enforced asceticism, though with free-flowing alcohol. Pushed to its ideal (that is, purest) form, that would mean cutting off ties between the critic and all winemakers, importers, marketers, distributors, sommeliers, retailers, restaurateurs, other critics, etc.

The problems with this level of retreat from real life are obvious. From a practical standpoint, the acquisition of wines to criticize (especially hard-to-source wines) becomes very difficult without contacts in the industry, and the acquisition of knowledge with which to better-characterize the objects of criticism becomes nearly impossible. (There’s an expansion of that argument here.) A cynic will wonder how often requiring quasi-monastic professional existences – especially when the divorce is from the field that a critic loves so much they’ve decided to make it their life’s work – is successful in preventing lapses. Consider: much of the fun of wine is sharing it with like-minded enthusiasts. Must the critic eschew relationships with enthusiasts who have themselves become entangled with any commercial aspect of wine? It would seem the safest bet, because entanglements can exist via third parties, yet who makes wine their career other than its greatest enthusiasts? Lacking the ability to make contact with other enthusiasts, the critic’s life is a lonely one indeed. Loneliness can lead to resentment. And isn’t active resentment of the subject of criticism a far more dangerous bias than having lunch with Olivier Humbrecht?

Ah, but what about restaurant critics, one might ask? Some (certainly not all) cloak themselves in anonymity, avoid all situations at which they might encounter chefs or restaurant owners, and dine on their publisher’s dime (although these days, said recompense rarely covers the entirety of a critic’s work). What’s wrong with that model?

First of all, restaurant critics are the only critics asked to take these steps on a regular basis. In no other field of criticism is this level of separation, and in fact outright deception, required or expected. Second, anonymity rarely works for long (if at all), as the photos of allegedly unknown critics hanging in restaurant kitchens all over the world will attest. And third, does anyone think that restaurant criticism is a clear order of excellence above and beyond that of other fields? If the answer to that question is anything other than an enthusiastic “yes,” maybe it’s worth questioning how much value enforced separation and rigid constraints bring to the consumer.

A caveat: I’m not arguing that there isn’t obvious potential value in anonymity (which is just a particularly obvious version of enforced separation), as anyone who remembers Ruth Reichl’s visits to Le Cirque knows. But the value of pretend invisibility is limited, both by time and by effect. Of far, far more importance is that the critic be good. Being anonymous will not help a lousy critic become more useful to the consumer. Nor will being free of all possible potential conflicts of interest.

Given all this, it seems obvious that the real question is not whether a critic has biases, or even if there are entanglements and encumbrances, but to what extent they affect the work. This, incidentally, is why revelation and transparency are more important than impossible-to-achieve independence; the reader can, with knowledge that contextualizes a critic’s work, make an informed judgment as to that work’s worth. Thus, a compromised critic will not escape detection, even if consumers’ reaction to that knowledge will differ. More importantly, a judgment as to a critic’s quality will be made primarily on the quality of the work, rather than suspicion and rumors of actual, perceived, or imaginary conflicts. What matters is not why a critic lauds a wine, but that said praise is of utility to the consumer. (This is all laid out in greater detail here.)

[sagrada familia crucifix]And now, the new perspective on this well-worn (at least by me) issue that I promised several hundred paragraphs ago. It’s useful to ask whence the motivation to demand absurd levels of purity comes. I think it comes from a fundamental understanding of what critics do. They are, very simply, paid to opine. That’s it. They may, in the course of their opinion-mongering, do other things – which is why most critics are more properly identified as hybrid critics/writers – but when they’re paid to be a critic, they’re paid to critique. To render judgment. To offer an opinion.

Opinions, judgments, critiques…they’re all 100% subjective. Full stop, end of story. There may indeed be greater value in informed opinion, but the inherent subjectivity of a critical judgment is unassailable. I don’t think that some consumers understand this. There often appears to be a belief – and reading the comments in the above-linked blog posts and forum threads shows that this belief is widespread, though (revealingly) no one can agree on the specifics – that there is some sort of “more objective” version of an opinion that is made less likely by the existence of bias or entanglement. This, too, is nonsense. The opinion swayed by externalities is no more or less subjective than the pure and honest one, even though it’s different. So if there’s a desire for less subjectivity, it’s a futile one, because what’s asked is impossible. All the consumer can expect of the critic is to tell the truth and to say what she actually thinks.

In addition to an ongoing conflation of two conflicting ideas (objectivity and subjectivity), there’s a misunderstanding of the preparation and mindset fundamental to the non-accidental critic. Accusations of inexorable bias (“certainly a critic can’t judge wine X fairly if they’ve had lunch with the winemaker”) rest upon a foundational assumption that the critic is unaware of these potential sources of conflict, that they will inevitably come as an insoluble surprise to the critic, and that they will thus lead to unavoidable compromise. This assumption is particularly insulting as it appears to think or expect very little of critics. Any smart critic knows all this going in. Any ethical critic has thought about, is thinking about, and will continue to think about these issues and their chosen responses to them. Any good critic will make it clear to both consumer and source where their boundaries are. Again, transparency helps: while critics are revealing their biases, they should also detail their practices.

A sensible consumer would not presume a predilection towards corruption. Instead, they’d conclude that a critic has thought about these issues and deals with them on a daily basis. That to the extent possible given the realities of her career, she will try to act ethically and honestly. That she will not lie to consumers in order to gain advantage over them. That she will not act unethically in order to gain advantage from her suppliers or her publishers. And so forth. These conclusions will be tested and retested in an atmosphere of natural suspicion, to be sure, but it is rather obnoxious to assume, without evidence, that a predilection to unethical behavior is beyond a critic’s control. One does not create a being of pure ethics by encaging that being in some sort of procedural deprivation chamber. The motivation to ethical behavior cannot be imposed from without, but must be generated (and regenerated) from within. If externally-imposed ethics were entirely or even largely effective, there would be some societal evidence thereof. There’s not, except to the contrary.

Another note: publications most certainly can impose their own ethical restraints on critics. This is a contractual arrangement, voluntary in both directions. But these days, they’re more often an attempt to address the concerns of the consumer, not the work itself, for all the reasons I’ve detailed above.

In fact, most critics would laugh – albeit with a certain sadness – at the assumption that their loyalties could be bought, no matter what anyone else suspects. By taking on the role of a critic, they’ve taken on the potential (and inevitable) conflicts even before they’ve published a single word of criticism. They’ve accepted that they must deal with those who will attempt to corrupt them and those who will always believe them corrupt. And they’ve understood that their work will be judged in such a way that subverting their judgment to external influences can only damage their integrity and their reputation. Critics who have sold out – and they exist – always pay some sort of price. But it’s unfair to make ethical critics pay it along with them in a futile attempt to satisfy impossible preconditions.

As I’ve said with more precision in my essays on ethics, objectivity, and independence, the search for a visible armor of incorruptibility is a hopeless one. Not only because ethical behavior is an internal, rather than external, property of the critic, but because it’s not what the consumer actually wants. The most ethically monastic critic is not necessarily the best critic, and vice-versa. Surely what the consumer really wants are skill, efficacy, and utility. The endless focus on bias, on entanglement, and on the appearance of or possibility for conflict distracts from the key question a consumer must ask of any critic’s work: is it useful?

Update: The always-eloquent Jancis Robinson, who is (aggravatingly) better at what we do than any of the rest of us, offers her own thoughts on this issue. And I note with some pleasure that, for the most part, she appears to agree with me.

The meme remains la même

[biking sculpture]The future of wine writing is not blogging.

OK, so now that I’ve pissed off just about everyone likely to be reading this, let me explain…

The world of wine, and especially the world of wine writing, benefits from a multitude of voices. There’s no doubt of this. One of the least important but still sad effects of the ongoing (though long-inevitable) decline and fall of newspapers is the loss of the wine coverage that usually precedes their demise. Winemaking regions derive special benefit from vibrant, locally-focused coverage, but there’s plenty of value to be found elsewhere. In my own market of Boston, for example, there’s barely any wine writing to be found. Nationally, Food & Wine no longer has a wine editor. (Why not just call it Food?) I could go on…

Many think the “2.0” version of the web, long in ascendance if not always in fulfillment of its hype, will replace what’s been lost. There are reasons to doubt this, which I’ll iterate in a moment. But more importantly, this lays the burden of hope on the wrong recipients. Blogs (or tweets, or whatever else that might follow) aren’t going to replace newsprint wine writing. But bloggers might.

Confused yet?

In terms of creating a collaborative, multi-directional wine experience – the promise usually trumpeted by proponents of Wine 2.0 – bloggers are actually rather late to the party. Wine fora have played in this realm for a long time: alt.food.wine, the wine communities on CompuServe and Prodigy, the original Wine Lovers’ Discussion Group, the Mark Squires forum (now part of the all-powerful eBob empire), and on and on.

Over the many years of their existence, a few things have been learned about the potential advantages and disadvantages of much-hyped 2.0 era. For example: while some of the fora were “communities of equals,” others worked on the expert model. The latter proved to be the stickier of the two concepts. The former are especially prone to splits, offshoots, declines, and all the normal trends and lifespans of online communities, while the latter provide a consistent draw, even as participants come and go. It’s now clear that to hold a community together over the long term, it helps to have a draw aside from the community itself. For while a community can provide great value (especially given quality contributors), the seemingly inevitable human desire for authorities has remained more powerful. This is a slightly dismaying outcome, but the numbers don’t lie.

Corollary to this, both types of forum tend to attract and/or develop their own authorities, and from this a second lesson can be drawn. Authorities are a mixed blessing, because while they bring elevated value to a community’s knowledge, they skew the discourse of the community from many-to-many towards several-to-many or one-to-many. Moreover, they’re especially prone to lead an exodus as that authority grows, for reasons both good (a desire to monetize their utility) and less so (conflict between competing authorities). People point to blogs and other, newer media as an exercise in social communication, but what’s the actual draw of a successful blog? First and foremost, it’s the authority or authorities that helm it. Without them and the audience they create, the community that coalesces and participates would form elsewhere. And were the community uninterested in authorities, they’d be on a community-of-equals wine forum. Since the numbers show that they’re not, there’s good reason to believe that, whatever they say, they’re still interested in some sort of authority…maybe not as the entirety of the meal, but at least as the centerpiece of the dish.

Additionally, while the value of fora is often professed to be the collegiality of its participants, their actual success or failure relies more on the more tangible benefits it provides (which, in the case of wine communities, means information about specific wines, regions, producers, and businesses). Collegiality is unhelpful when no one can answer a question, and as a result people naturally gravitate towards communities of greater expertise. That swell of numbers is followed by an increase in tangible value, which in turn attracts greater numbers, and so forth. Similarly, a decline in information leads to a decline in participation, and vice-versa. Wine fora have not proved immune to Darwin. Again, the lesson that can be drawn by blogs and other divergent forms is that while collegiality, community, and population matter, it’s the quality of information that matters most.

But the success of a blog is not measured by its population, at least not in the way a forum’s success is. Yes, success is measured by traffic – and comments matter – but the physical format of a blog places far greater importance on an original post than the comments that follow. Most of the really successful blogs are one-person shows, more or less. In comparison to a wine forum, then, a blog is actually less egalitarian by its very design, whatever the intent or motivation of the host. (Twitter is a little different, but comes with certain inherent limitations of its own.) So again, we return to the essential element: the blogger him- or herself. As Johnny Carson once said regarding the success or failure of late night talk shows, it’s not about the style or the guests, “it’s about the person behind the desk.” He could have been talking about blogs.

[man blowing glass]The trajectory of successful bloggers is, largely, a common one. From tentative and overtly humble beginnings, with success and greater access comes greater authority, a willingness to take risks and be controversial (or a deliberate choice to do so; controversy is always good for traffic) from the perspective of an outsider, and finally an assumption of authority and controversy from the perspective of an insider, as an acknowledged authority. (Sometimes, this leads to problems, but not always.) The progression from voice-in-the-wilderness to authority and leadership is a change that happens to the blogger, not the blog, and will be reflected in an historical survey of the posts. For those whose primary publication outlet is a blog, it’s nearly always true that early entries will be modern, blog-style posts (pithy, link-ridden), but that later entries look an awful lot more like traditional print columns. They’re longer. They’re more authoritative and declarative. They educate or provoke, but at greater length, and yet with less elaborate justification for each point of potential controversy; authority is assumed by the writer. Sometimes, actual journalism – research, sourcing, fact-checking – creeps in, born of both desire and necessity.

This is all to the good, by the way. There’s a place and a future for the sound bite format, to be sure, but as a different kind of webslinger once learned, with power comes responsibility. This is no less true for bloggers than it is for journalists in other media. In fact, the maturation of the wine blogosphere demands this evolution if it is to supplant or be coequal with, rather than aspire to, the power of other forms of media.

These days, the most successful bloggers of all get to move on. Not that they abandon their blogs (though some do), but rather that they gain access to other media. Newspapers (such as they are in these times), magazines, even books…the final step in new media success is often measured by joining the old.

Or at least, that has been true up until now, and may continue to be true for a while yet. In the future? It’s hard to say, especially given a rapid rate of technological and societal change. My suspicion – and it’s based on little more than a hunch, though one founded on several decades of experience in different forms of new media – is that it will change. New media will develop its own measures of success that render irrelevant those of the old media. (This, I hasten to add, is hardly an original thought on my part. Though it may be an overly optimistic one.)

So why, then, do I say that the future of wine writing is not the blog, but rather the blogger?

As noted earlier, there’s hardly a difference between the most successful wine blogs and the most successful print wine columns; other than the physical format, they look and act pretty much the same (and of course, most print columns are read online anyway). The one major difference is that almost all blogs lack an editor. Editors can be a mixed blessing, to be sure, but as the format continues to mature, the lack of them is going to be an issue for someone. Controversy is all very exciting, but inaccuracy (and worse, defamation) can be permanently damaging, and sooner or later someone’s going to pay a price for doing something that a good editor would never have let them do.

But the thing with professional editing is that it costs money. As, it’s important to add, does wine blogging. At the very least, someone has to pay for server space and traffic. Then, as authority and success brings their accordant responsibility, the need of a blogger to explore their subject more deeply and/or broadly increases; this, too, is not without cost. Ads help, but as everyone in new media knows, they’re rarely remunerative enough to support the rigor of actual journalism. Until that changes, blogging remains primarily a hobbyist’s pursuit…which, incidentally, is exactly the situation print wine writing has found itself in for some time. Only a tiny, tiny number of bloggers and print wine writers can actually support themselves by writing about wine. However, there’s a difference: as more and more print writers disappear, things actually improve for the few that remain, but as the number of bloggers increases, competition for already-insufficient ad money will only escalate.

[sagrada familia detail]For any new media to take that last step to dominance of a category, someone’s going to have to pay for it. For now, a combination of ads and crossovers to old media are the patchwork covering the problem. That won’t continue. Will bloggers continue or improve their work, even if they’re losing money? Maybe some will, out of altruism or thanks to a hefty personal supply of otherwise-sourced funds (a/k/a a “real job”), but the lack of remuneration is no less damaging to the category than it is in the print world. First because it makes valuable authority available only to the otherwise wealthy (the effects of which can be seen rather clearly in the world of print wine criticism; just count the number of lawyers and doctors), and second because it reduces the quality of discourse by putting a cap on the necessary breadth and depth of knowledge that brings enlightenment to wine writing, whatever the medium. Authority matters. Knowledge matters. Experience matters. None are free.

The success of the blogs-and-beyond world of wine coverage has been presaged by the fractalization we’ve already seen among critics. What started with just a few voices entrusted with the vast general-interest audience has become a growing chorus of focused coverage from dedicated enthusiasts: Allen “Burghound” Meadows, Peter Liem, Parker’s new gang of hires, and so forth. This will continue, and more importantly will broaden to include writers, rather than just critics. Blogging in particular is ill-suited for comprehensive criticism of the type to which we’ve become accustomed, but it’s perfectly-suited for writing. Which is, by the way, what most of the best wine bloggers do, in lieu of standard criticism.

That said, blogs aren’t comprehensive. In fact, they can’t be; no one authority can, in our dizzying modern world of wine. A fanatical single-subject blogger may be able to provide quality coverage of that subject (whether it be a region, a grape, or some other field of interest), but it’s more likely that a subject of interest to a given audience must be surveyed across a wider selection of blogs. And if, as is even more likely, the audience has other interests than that single subject, this task increases. A connection must be made between blogs and their potential audience, but – like editing – marketing costs time and money. It is one thing to read Peter Liem’s blog for interesting Champagne commentary. It is a very different thing to read fifty blogs in search of similar information. And it is yet another thing to read 100 blogs in search of commentary on the full range of wines and subjects that interest an audience. Almost no one has that sort of time, especially – as noted earlier – as the content in which they’re interested broadens, deepens, and lengthens thanks to the ever-increasing skill of the bloggers.

This is why blogs themselves aren’t the future. The success of old media wine journals and most of their new media successors is intimately connected to their one-stop-shopping format, in which all available content is presented in a single location (be it physical or digital). But the necessary and desirably-expanding cloud of bloggers, all with something interesting to say, is – from a practical standpoint – impossible for anyone but the unemployed to find and follow, even with the best aggregators and filters.

Choices will have to be made. And those choices will be made based on the interest and authority commanded not by the blog format, nor by the appeal of new media or 2.0-era community coalescing around content, but by the source of the content: the bloggers themselves. In fact, the very expansion of authoritative blogging that leads to this revolution will act in opposition to its collaborative aspects, for given that time is inherently limited, a reader that chooses to participate is giving up an opportunity to read something else, and vice-versa.

In other words, the larger part of the audience will flock to authority, just like they’ve always done, and the focus will be more on that authority than on communitarian corollaries. The ever-evolving network provides interesting and worthwhile tools that old media lacks, but it does not change this fundamental principle. Fully collaborative environments exist and are of unquestioned appeal – at the very least, they’re better than their lack – but people still want their gurus. As before, the numbers don’t lie.

Or, as I believe someone may once have said: plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.

Coming up blanc

[poor fruit set at stony batter]A big tasting was put on by New Zealand Winegrowers, and the results are below. Part two is on pinot noir, part three covers riesling, and everything else is in part four. Notes are of the hit-and-run variety, due to the format, so read what follows with the necessary suspicion.

By way of disclosure, they loaded us up with Island Creek oysters, which would normally predispose me towards positivity. On the other hand, I only ate about two dozen, which isn’t even a running start for me.

Palliser Estate 2008 Sauvignon Blanc (Martinborough) – Dense. Gooseberry with a significantly smoky component…or is it sulfur? Maybe a bit of both. Tropical fruit rinds and minerality (grey-toned), this wine is a little on the corpulent side. (3/09)

Monkey Bay 2008 Sauvignon Blanc (Marlborough) – Light green pepper, asparagus, sweet greenness continues on the finish. A diagonal wine. Ultimately insignificant. (3/09)

Matua Valley 2008 Sauvignon Blanc (Marlborough) – Gooseberry, a little papaya, and a Styrofoam finish (which is, blessedly, short). (3/09)

Nobilo “Regional Collection” 2008 Sauvignon Blanc (Marlborough) – Clean. Watery. Green and yellow citrus rinds, plus grapefruit. Underripe and dilute. (3/09)

Babich 2008 Sauvignon Blanc (Marlborough) – Sugared apple, pineapple. A goofy toy wine, not to be taken seriously. (3/09)

Allan Scott 2008 Sauvignon Blanc (Marlborough) – Papery. Qualitatively, somewhere between innocuous and awful. (3/09)

Oyster Bay 2008 Sauvignon Blanc (Marlborough) – Seashell, green apple. Intense. Short finish. Not bad. (3/09)

The Crossings 2008 Sauvignon Blanc (Marlborough) – Dry exposed rock. Grassy. Ungenerous. Very mineral-driven, with a long finish. An uncompromising style. (3/09)

Stoneleigh 2008 Sauvignon Blanc (Marlborough) – Vivid pineapple, ripe green apple, grass. Sour plum wine on the finish. Weird. (3/09)

Saint Clair “Vicar’s Choice” 2008 Sauvignon Blanc (Marlborough) – Clean, linear. Papaya, but not sweetly tropical. Light- to medium-bodied. Good, but only just. (3/09)

Goldwater 2008 Sauvignon Blanc Wairau Valley (Marlborough) – Intense gooseberry with lacings of asparagus. Crystalline. Rich but with sufficient acid, and thus balanced. Finishes greener than it starts. Good. (3/09)

Nautilus 2008 Sauvignon Blanc (Marlborough) – Simple. A little sweet, a little green. Banana candy finish. (3/09)

Villa Maria “Private Bin” 2008 Sauvignon Blanc (Marlborough) – Electric green fuzz, clean green apple skin. Tight. Classic, but stretched thin. Not bad. (3/09)

Drylands 2008 Sauvignon Blanc (Marlborough) – Ripe red fruit, papaya, mango, and something that almost approaches lychee in its lurid stickiness. Way too sweet. (3/09)

Montana “Brancott” 2008 Sauvignon Blanc “Reserve” (Marlborough) – Cedar, ripe yellow plum. Soft, with a pinched midpalate, then expands. Very long, turning more expressive as it lingers, with a bitter edge emergent. This is a very polished style, perhaps too obviously so. (3/09)

Croney “Three Ton” 2008 Sauvignon Blanc (Marlborough) – Mango sorbet. Juicy. Finishes weirdly bitter. (3/09)

Kennedy Point 2008 Sauvignon Blanc (Marlborough) – Green dust and paper. Flat. Dull. (3/09)

Saint Clair 2008 Sauvignon Blanc (Marlborough) – Intense pea and green bean aromas. Vivid. Fattens on the finish. (3/09)

Spy Valley 2008 Sauvignon Blanc (Marlborough) – Neon green aromas, ripe grapefruit, plum. A bit sweet. Nice enough, but meaningless. (3/09)

Vavasour 2008 Sauvignon Blanc (Marlborough) – Very solid with some quartz at the interior. Ripe, structured, and intense. Good. (3/09)

Kim Crawford 2008 Sauvignon Blanc (Marlborough) – Sweet mandarin orange, mango, plum. Extremely tropical. I don’t care for this style any more than the capsicum-infused alternative. (3/09)

Nobilo “Icon” 2008 Sauvignon Blanc (Marlborough) – Sophisticated and suave. Crystallized minerality, leafy. Not green. Good weight. Finishes a little flat, though. Just OK. (3/09)

Matua Valley 2008 Sauvignon Blanc “Paretai” (Marlborough) – Green pea and black pepper do battle with ripe tropical fruit. There’s greenness, as well. The finish is weirdly sour, but until that point the wine’s good enough. (3/09)

Saint Clair 2008 Sauvignon Blanc Pioneer Block 1 “Foundation” (Marlborough) – Vibrant, pure, and intense. Green mango, grapefruit, light orange. A slight bit of stick on the finish, but otherwise classic and very good. The class of the 2008s, for sure. (3/09)

Whitehaven 2008 Sauvignon Blanc (Marlborough) – Pea soup with artificial sweetener; here are all the old flaws, presented in a modernistic, sludgy package. And in what universe does this deserve a $23 suggested retail price? (3/09)

Woollaston 2007 Sauvignon Blanc (Nelson) – Red fruit, black-hearted minerals. Incredible intensity. Very lightly sweet-seeming. Long. Huge. Impressive. One might even say tumescent. (3/09)

Dashwood 2007 Sauvignon Blanc (Marlborough) – Thin, papery, and innocuous. (3/09)

Wither Hills 2007 Sauvignon Blanc (Marlborough) – Greener than it has been in other vintages. Grass, leaves, and coal dust on the finish. Eh. (3/09)

Isabel 2007 Sauvignon Blanc (Marlborough) – Slate, cedar, and a fine particulate texture with laser-like intensity. Extremely impressive. (3/09)

Staete Landt 2007 Sauvignon Blanc (Marlborough) – Very mineral-dominated. grassy, with green apple skins. Long. Good. (3/09)

Villa Maria “Cellar Selection” 2007 Sauvignon Blanc (Marlborough) – Intense, long, and ripe, with purity and balance. Hints of black fruit. The wine glows. (3/09)

New Zealand’s enthusiastic bid for market dominance with sauvignon blanc is often remarked upon, but I think this has it backwards; it is sauvignon blanc that dominates New Zealand, and not in an entirely good way, either. Plantings have grown from just over 2000 hectares in the year 2000 to just under 12,000 in 2008, and exports have grown along similar lines: from 20 million liters in 2004 to almost 70 million liters in 2008.

It might be more useful to view those numbers in context. Over the 2004-2008 period, sauvignon blanc plantings roughly doubled (6 to 12 thousand hectares), while total plantings of all grapes only increased 66%. That’s a country losing its identity to a grape. Yes, there’s pinot noir to consider, but most of that discussion takes place in another price category, and thus I will save it for a later chapter.

But if New Zealand as a whole has to worry about this, Marlborough in particular has already lost its battle. A staggering 91% of all New Zealand sauvignon blanc comes from this one region. I think that, for many consumers, New Zealand = Marlborough = sauvignon blanc…which has a certain marketing appeal for producers who fit all three categories, but some ominous inertia for anyone looking to sell something else, especially from Marlborough.

This is not to say that Marlborough hasn’t shown an ability to produce appealing wines from this grape, though I think the picture is less clear than it was a decade ago. There are, in general, three styles that flow from the region. The first is the classic, green-dominated, somewhat abrasive style that made the region’s name, which at its best has an exciting tactility, and at its worst (underripe fruit overwhelmed with pyrazines) tastes exclusively of bell peppers and tinned vegetables. The second is the overcompensation for the first style: ripe, tropical fruit with residual sugar and an unwelcome loss of acidity. Of these two dominant styles, the first is better at getting attention, but the second is better at keeping it.

The third style is still a definite minority, and not where the big money is to be made, but where a slim hope for defining Marlborough sauvignon as something other than a commodity lies. Some producers are playing with techniques – native yeast ferments, oak regimes, lees stirring, sémillon blends – with very interesting results. Others are exploring sub-regional bottlings, though only a few are drilling down to the single-vineyard level as yet. Some are chasing minerality, which (on the evidence) is at least achievable from some sites. But in all cases, the goal is to make a sauvignon blanc of individual quality and character, in contrast to the practitioners of the two dominant styles, who are pursuing a predefined market in predetermined ways.

While the unfortunate dalliance with making sub-$10 sauvignon blanc seems to be over by international economic default (only one wine – the Dashwood – comes in below that price, and it’s one of the two worst wines of the tasting; I just don’t think it’s possible to make worthwhile Marlborough sauvignon blanc at that price point, and if it was, Villa Maria and Brancott would already be doing it), the problem is now at the other end.

The majority of these wines are over $15, though few of them perform at that level. Several are at or over $20, and while there are some successes, they aren’t as universal as they should be. Qualitatively, there’s a lot of middle-of-the-road wine here. I think an important caveat to that is that this lineup is decidedly shifted towards the mass-market, lower-end versions of Marlborough sauvignon blanc, and a more comprehensive survey would include many wines that exhibit the very character and class that I’m labeling the “third style” a few paragraphs upstream. Most of the wines are more-or-less drinkable, no more, and no less. They’re commodities. There’s nothing wrong with that – commodity wines are the bulk of the wine industry – but it’s a low foundation on which to build an identity as a wine-producing region. If Marlborough is to grow, it will need to expand that identity beyond large-production sauvignon blanc.

Part of this, too, may be the limitations of sauvignon blanc as a grape. I wouldn’t argue, as some would, that it’s not capable of greatness, but rather that the evidence suggests that such greatness is limited to very few sites and even fewer producers. Sauvignon blanc has a lot more inherent character than chardonnay, which makes it a better choice for commodity wines, but as a result requires a greater effort to elevate it above its station.

But let’s get back to quality. Looking at this list, a number of abject failures stand out, and more than a few of them are among the cheapest wines in the tasting: Matua Valley, Monkey Bay, Nobilo “Regional Collection”, Babich, Allan Scott, Nautilus, Drylands, Kennedy Point, Spy Valley, Dashwood, and Whitehaven. That last one earns special mention for carrying a $23 suggested price and still being awful. But what strikes me most about this list is the popularity of the wines on it; these are the labels one sees in every store and on every wine list. That’s unfortunate.

The successes? I’d put those in two categories. First, the mass-market and under$20 successes: Oyster Bay, Saint Clair “Vicar’s Choice”, Goldwater, Villa Maria “Private Bin”, Vavasour, Staete Landt, and Brancott “Reserve” (the latter is a surprise, since it has underperformed for quite a few vintages previous to this one).

Then there are the “stars” of the tasting. From the top down: Villa Maria “Cellar Selection”, Isabel, Saint Clair Pioneer Block 1, and Woollaston. But, one may wonder, why is “stars” in scare quotes? Because while I’d happily buy and drink any of these wines, none is paradigm-defining or truly world-class. The days of excited whispers about Marlborough sauvignon blanc – “hey, have you tasted Cloudy Bay? – are long gone. What’s going to replace them? We’re still in the process of finding out.