If one follows a methodology to encourage balance in the vine, harvests ripe but not overripe, and balances the must for coextraction, the elements for graceful aging will result.
3
Building Structure
The Basic Tool Kit
So now we’re pregnant. We have just finished a discussion of bringing wine to the point of being ready to build structure, but we have not spoken of how to do it, only how to create the condition.
If you were making wine according to my recommendations, you would have taken certain leaps of faith and committed to a postmodern pathway, the details of which I have yet to explain. In the first two chapters, we touched on the basics of postmodern winemaking: its history, its general tenets, and its usefulness in growing and making ageworthy wines. I explored the role of good colloidal structure in aromatic integration, soulfulness, and longevity, and stated the principles necessary for obtaining the ideal building blocks for stable colloidal structure.
To prevent any confusion, I should pause at this juncture to clarify that when I employ the term structure, I intend it literally in reference to macromolecules such as tannins and proteins that form into colloids suspended in wine. There are many English-speaking connoisseurs, critics, and Masters of Wine who employ this term in a very different way. Their use does not address any physical arrangement in the wine itself but rather an aesthetic mapping of the measurable elements of balance, such as acidity, sugar, alcohol, and astringency, which work together in a pleasing and balanced manner. To them, a wine with good structure is one in which the elements together create a focused and harmonious whole, as might the characters in a well-spun narrative or the parts of a musical composition.
Tannins and other macromolecules that have an affinity for one another form into particles that can approach the size of a bacterial cell. Their size and shape affect wine’s aroma and texture. Sugar, acids, and alcohol, by contrast, are small molecules that are a part of the solution in which the tannin and protein colloids are suspended, and thus are not a part of these physical macromolecular structures.
The French oenologues with whom I have worked use the term structure in my physical sense as described above (indeed, that’s where I learned it), the other sense handled in French as éléments qui supportent les arômes. I suspect that along with many other imported terms such as grappe (bunch) and raisin (grape), Anglos long ago simply misapprehended their French acquaintances and gave birth to an English usage that differs in its particulars. I will argue for the predominance of my more literal usage, in which the structure exists in the wine itself and not as an aesthetic theoretical construct residing within human cognition.
If you got hooked by my advice, you’re now well invested in exploring an entirely different wine style and way of working. In this chapter, I will detail the techniques developed by Oenodev to craft good wine structure. As I warned you, these practices result in wines that may at times be rather unpleasant in youth, exhibiting hardness and reduction. Accordingly, I will, as promised, chart a path out of those thick woods.
These techniques are not a recipe, nor do they constitute the only path to good structure. Years ago I was treated by winemaker Boris Champy to an in-depth look at the techniques used to obtain integrative structure at Christian Moueix’s Dominus in Napa. Although their methodology did not, could not, touch on my system at any point, it was clear that our goals and our guiding aesthetic were the same. We had simply worked out different paths to similar ends.
My postmodern tool kit includes a suite of new membrane applications I helped develop over the past two decades. Reverse osmosis has proven a very handy asset in obtaining balanced wines of any desired ripeness, whether to remove diluting rainwater or to lower alcohol content in rainless climes like California. Its VA (volatile acidity) removal capability also provides a valuable safety net for low-sulfite wine production and in support of cellar strategies pursuing microbial balance. Ultrafiltration is a powerful new method for managing phenolics and for making concentrates useful for coextraction during fermentation.
These are potent tools, demanding elucidation. But not quite yet. I do not consider that my early work with reverse osmosis provided any clear window on the fundamental nature of wine, and a discussion of this and other membrane applications will have to wait for Part III, Technology, and chapter 18. For the most part, these weren’t really winemaking advances at all; rather, they are tools to liberate our work in the vineyard from its focus on brix, allowing us to achieve proper maturity and balance. They also attracted the attention of some very hip Frenchmen engaged in far more fundamental winemaking exploration. In this chapter, therefore, I present Oenodev’s élevage philosophy, which includes what I consider the core competencies of postmodern winemaking: oxygenation, lees work, and familiarity with the diverse functions of oak.
APOLOGIES AND EXCUSES
We are about to roll up our sleeves and sort through the nitty-gritty of the working model of postmodern winemaking. I invented almost none of this. My personal contribution is limited to having organized it into a useful construct.
Since I regard the working winemaker as my main audience, I am going to drag readers through some technical mud. I caution lay readers to hold your hopes of total comprehension lightly, as I intend to speak very specifically to a process that may be outside your experience—the actual making of wine. I will try to be as clear as I can, but if you fall off the hayride, just skip down and climb back on board.
Is the model precisely true? I doubt it. This is not a chapter full of facts, and I recommend the reader to approach it with an open mind and a large grain of salt. We are at a stage in understanding oxygen’s role in winemaking that might be described as prescientific—if one were, erroneously, to view science as a collection of established learning. We are at a point in the discovery process where we can use technical-sounding language to present hypotheses, but these are far from verification. I sometimes picture us postmodern types as spouting technical poetry.
I hope that we are like the centuries of natural philosophers who followed Linnaeus’s lead and compiled a biological taxonomy based on observable traits, long before there was any understanding of DNA or even genetics, or those generations of chemists who ordered the elements into a periodic table based on their behavior alone, in total absence of an atomic theory. In the early stages, ideas that later are commonly accepted may seem outlandish, even threatening.
Such ideas are, of course, mixed in among a lot of bushwah. In these circumstances, one tends to go with what works. What follows is a description of some winemaking procedures that work very effectively, together with some technical assertions that, even if untrue, provide a powerful predictive platform for working with structure.
Exploratory projects have a different feel from the scientific corroboration that comes later (see chapter 12, “Winemaking’s Lunatic Heroes”). Research funding comes not from academic sources geared to verification but from commercial elements that are entirely results-oriented and have little patience with controlled experimental protocols, let alone with publishing for their competitors’ eyes.
I hate to break it to you, but professional scientists are not generally equipped for discovery. Nobody sent Darwin to the Galápagos to investigate evolution. He earned his passage as a gentleman companion to the Beagle’s captain and, like Copernicus, withheld publication of his revolutionary ideas for decades.
I mention all this as a feeble excuse for the dearth of references that inform this important chapter. I do my best throughout the book to explain what led me to believe the assertions I make here. For now, though, it is enough of a challenge simply to articulate what they are.
“I WILL FEAR NO TANNIN”
I learned this mantra from Randall Grahm. In modern winemaking, excessive tannin is viewed as a problem best avoided by careful handling and sorting of fruit, use of gravity systems, gentle crushing, delicate cap management, and low-pressure pressing (if any). When these measures fail, the standard fix is a protein fining treatment (egg whites,