May 2 2007
Remember when you were at that college party at 4:00 am? Few, very few stragglers are left in a foggy machismo haze, clinging to the bravado of draining the keg? The detritus of an evening sweaty and cramped in a friend of friend’s basement litters the ground. In the background the clamorous bellow of the soused is echoing in your head as some knuckleheads try to tie together the shreds of a philosophical debate that doesn’t have an answer.
Your head hurts and you have made it to the point in the evening where you have been simultaneously over-served and begun your hangover--without the benefit of any respite in between the end of your evening and the beginning of your morning. Aspirin and water seems like a good idea.
I feel like that—I have started my hangover, but I haven’t gone to sleep yet. Soooo tired. Must rest.
This technology/terroir debate can do that to a man.
A week or two back I blogged in a post found here about the blogging fury that started with a couple of Eric Asimov posts on technology in wine. Appellation America subsequently took up the conversation in a two-part article by Alan Goldfarb and gave a final postscript by respected wine writer Dan Berger.
Mercifully, (and hopefully) the Clark Smith, technology “Frankenwine” conversation will go into hibernation for 6 months or so, or at least long enough for Alice Feiring to write a book touting natural and non-interventionist wines.
My take on the entire technological intervention (Micro-oxygenation, alcohol reduction, etc) debate was that I couldn’t form an opinion because I hadn’t yet tasted any wine that I knew had been manipulated.
So, I bought some vino from Clark Smith and his label WineSmith—a Syrah, a Faux Chablis and a Cab Franc.
I now kind of get Smith’s philosophical musings about being a cook and using ingredients to create a dish, as the below excerpt indicates:
“If you haven’t had an education in what wine is and how it can be worked with, then you’re basically bottling cocoa powder because you don’t know what the Aztecs taught the Belgians – how to transform cocoa powder into chocolate; how to transform something nasty into something profound.
“It’s like when you open up your window one morning and look out on your front lawn (and) somebody’s dumped 25 tons of bricks,” he says in one of his many digressions. “Most guys will just call up a trucking company and have them load the bricks up and take them off to the dump. Now you’ve got your front lawn back. But if you’re a mason, you put an addition on your house and you say, ‘thank you very much.’
“If you know how to work with the raw material to build a structure, you don’t strip it out of the wine. You use it to make wines that have much more presence and much more depth and much more longevity.”
The Syrah, especially, straight out the bottle had a nice, well developed peppery nose--varietally correct. From popped cork to my gullet inside of 60 seconds, the Syrah drank like it had been decanted for three hours. It offered integrated tannins and a full explosion of flavors—it was very soft, velvety, enjoyable.
Even the Faux Chablis tasted less like a Chardonnay from the Napa Valley College student vineyard and more like a nice Chablis—with a steely undercurrent.
And while both wines are pleasant drinkers, they just don’t seem normal.
In the Dan Berger article he notes:
Last year on a trip to Australia (my 14th), one of the top wine makers in Australia said, “Look, there is just no substitute here for time. Micro-ox is a great technique for [tannin management in] low-priced wine, but you’d never want to risk doing it with anything like fine wine.”
A second Australian wine maker told me that micro-oxygenation is a fine technique to reduce tannins in cheap wines, but that the process tries to speed up the polymerization of tannins and can leave a fine wine lacking some of the stability wine makers prefer for wines that will be aged—which is the goal of many fine wines.
Ultimately, I view this technology vs. terroir debate through the mental filter that wines that age, fine wines with forbidding young tannins, will probably be exposed for the use of MicroOX over the long haul and consequently they won’t use the technique, or will use it in an understood, transparent kind of way.
It seems to me, in a speculative manner, that some of the cult cabs that are immediately drinkable, but also can be laid down for a few years surely use MicroOX to soften the tannins.
To me, it seems that the Syrah from WineSmith would not be good for anything but short-term gratification. For lesser quality wines I can see where it has its merit. This is the difference between art and pop culture—the difference between a something designed for immediate consumption like a tabloid magazine versus a literary book. There’s room for both, it just depends on what floats your boat.
And, as most of us know, when we chase short-term gratification, a hangover of some sort usually entails. Maybe those bellowing and soused students can take up the debate …
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