Practicing GrapeCraft,
Napa Style
by Clark Smith
The Napa Valley is no longer in the wine business -- it is now in the expensive wine business.
And the prices aren't just marketing flim flam. Each of us has had a moving, visceral
experience that hooked us into this game.
So what motivates wine lovers to shell out $10, or even $100, for a beverage?
In the 20th Century, scientific reductionism, a technique which divides a problem
into manageable pieces, has attempted to crack the code of wine quality.
The U.C. Davis approach, popularized as the Aroma WheelTM school of sensory science,
has attempted to manipulate wine flavor through viticultural and enological experiments,
seeking to enhance the "good" aromas and minimize the "bad."
But can we through dissection really enhance a wine's ability to lift our soul?
Is the beauty and viscerality delivered by a wine -- or a cuisine or a piece of music -- really
improved by manipulating the pieces?
I don't think so. I contend that reductionist winemaking yields fruity,
varietally-correct alcoholic soda-pop which doesn't ring anybody's bell at much over ten bucks.
A symphony orchestra doesn't get a standing ovation because the best instruments
played loudest. But integrated into a single voice, even a hushed voice, its
sound can convey a moving, visceral event to a whole audience.
By exploring 20th Century enology's profoundly erroneous view of fine wine and our current
departure from it, I hope to provide even the novice reader some insight on the fundamental
changes taking place in winemaking today.
Throughout the last decade, an onslaught of published papers out of France,
Australia, and now UC Davis have explored the discovery that wine is capable
of macromolecular structure, and that its color, texture and aroma depend
largely on deviations from "ideal" behavior.
These "non-idealities" are brought about by the presence of suspended colloids
such as the manno-protein complexes (derived from yeast lees) in whites and
tannin/anthocyanin-based aggregates in reds. Quality benefits of these structures
include increases in body, finer texture, flavor finesse, aroma integration,
longevity and stability.
Simultaneous with these discoveries has emerged a more holistic view of the
winegrowing process and an appreciation of true ripeness independent of grape
sugar brix.
"Elevage" is the French term for the active enhancement of wine structure
through tools such as micro-oxygenation, lees bātonage and sophisticated
uses of oak. Thanks to innovative French advances in techniques, we are
rapidly mastering effective use of these tools to refine mouthfeel,
decrease the coarseness and harshness of tannin, and to integrate aromatics.
Once wineries gain proficiency in these techniques, they can switch their
strategy away from fining (to remove tannin) towards refining the tannin to
add body and richness. Once tannin becomes much more positively useful, we
start looking around for more.
Growing Greatness
In great years, Cabernet Sauvignon expresses in Bordeaux a depth,
refinement and distinction which compelled the New World to plant
it so eagerly. Yet most Bordeaux, excepting the best properties in
the best years, fails to ripen, soften, and gain aromatic expression.
We are coming to understand that except in ideal conditions, Bordeaux fruit
is lacking in the color, flavor and tannin essential for proper structure.
New techniques like juice concentration are addressing these climatic challenges.
But there is something special about Bordeaux. Most New World cabernet will
ripen so it offers fruit and fatness, but falls short of Bordeaux in stature.
Its living soil is the source of its distinctive terroir expression and mineral depth.
Few places combine ideal ripening conditions with distinctive terroir.
Napa Valley is one of these, and is further blessed with an innovative spirit
and openness to learn new techniques which currently places it at the zenith of
enological prowess. One such tool is the use of reverse osmosis to fine-tune
alcohol content in wine from high sugar grapes.
What makes Napa unique among great regions is this combination of natural blessings
and innovative openness. Technical manipulation is less important here than in any
other serious region. Yet here it is employed freely and openly to fine-tune the nuances.
The End of Filtration As We Know It
You had to be crazy not to filter. That's the line I was taught in winemaker school.
A few fringe maniacs were bottling without filtration, but a real professional didn't
take the chance, because done right, filtration doesn't harm wine.
Ten years ago, any winemaker you asked the purpose of filtration would have named A)
clarification and B) microbial stability. A decade or two in the future, these uses
of filtration may be as unknown in wineries as they are today in dairies.
My Random House Dictionary defines fil-ter as: "n. 1. any substance through which
liquid is passed to remove suspended impurities or to recover solids." The 20th
Century enologist's view of wine filtration contains the embedded notion that wine
is a liquid, so anything suspended in wine is an impurity, the removal of which
can only increase its purity.
Wine began to be viewed as an "ideal" alcohol-water solution containing dissolved
flavor chemicals as a theoretical off-spring of the famous "dilute aqueous"
chemistry model developed by German scientists in the late 1800's. It is not a
traditional view of wine. And it turns out, for red wines, to be quite wrong.
If wine is a chemical solution, then filters can only harm wine by adsorbing
dissolved flavors. Winemakers are suddenly learning that this is the least of
our worries.
The application of ideal solution chemistry to wine has lead to a huge edifice of
"scientific enology." Thinking about wine in this way allowed Germans to refine
their techniques and produce exquisite aromatic varietal whites. Here are the
rules: pick aromatic fruit cold, press gently, exclude air, suppress microbes
outside selected pure strains, polish clean, sterile filter.
But these same rules produce red wines which do not handle their tannins well
and otherwise fail to resemble "bottled poetry."
Enology's dirty little secret for the last fifty years has been that red wine
is, well, scientifically impossible. Anthocyanin pigments are almost insoluble
in 13% alcohol, and not even the right color. We've long known that something
was terribly wrong with our model. Now, at last, we are beginning to open our
ears to our true traditional brethren: the great chefs.
Cooking Up Goodness
Belgian chocolate makers figured out hundreds of years ago how to tame tannins.
The problem is the same -- take a bunch of nasty, insoluble, compounds and knit
up something delicious.
For bitterness and astringency, the cabernet grape has nothing on the cocoa bean.
Yet master chocolatiers manage to produce from these materials a finely textured
richness which supports, rather than masks, the fruity flavor essences they select.
They accomplish this through techniques which employ oxygen, fats and oils, and oak
flavors such as vanilla to transform raw tannins into a dense, velvety structure
which integrates flavors. The goal is to integrate all the elements together and
present to the palate a mouth-watering symphony of delicious flavors which is
united like musical chords. As these thick, rich textures coat our palate, the
flavor chord somehow touches our soul, and our chest tightens in communion.
Pure emotion transmitted to our muscles and held kinesthetically is sometimes
referred to as "viscerality." Who has not experienced these feelings? Most
people will pay a lot of money to experience them again, especially if flowing
reliably out of a bottle along with good food and pleasant conversation.
You cannot filter chocolate. What does this teach us about the making of
serious wine?
Putting An Opera in the Bottle
I am convinced that the essence of deliciousness is personification. Like music,
great wine has got to have soul. Stevenson was right -- wine really is bottled poetry.
It must evoke passion, resonate and articulate beyond words a goodness that
touches us deeply.
If we are to create this perception, our wines must offer rich, fine structure
which supports a single, integrated aromatic voice. Wine's structural properties
are essential to its greatness. This is a new school of Practicing GrapeCraft,
a post-modern school of winemaking whose imperatives are:
A) make wine as if it were chocolate,
B) give science a back seat when it's time to
blend up deliciousness, and
C) taste, talk, tune, taste, and taste.
In addition to his role as winemaker for WineSmith, Clark Smith is
Co-Owner(with brother Brian) and Senior. Enologist for the wine production consulting firm,
Vinovation, Inc., as well as an instructor at Napa Valley College and U.C.Davis Extension.
Readers can learn more about Practicing GrapeCraft by visiting www.grapecraft.com
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