I have encountered amazing resistance from Californians to piloting MOx by palate. They want numbers. But a wine’s behavior cannot be reduced to a few instrumental parameters, any more than we would wish to navigate a car without being able to see out the windshield. I believe the source of this resistance is that palate training is sadly lacking in California’s academic institutions.
In any case, instrumental parameters such as dissolved oxygen have yet to prove an acceptable substitute for the human palate. I think that’s good news. Woody Allen said, “Ninety percent of life is just showing up.” Oxygenation forces us to show up for our wines, learn their ways, and discuss and guide their evolution on a frequent, even daily basis, continually focusing on where the wine is and what our intentions are. Annoying as it is, this approach inevitably leads to better wines and better winemakers. Get over it.
I would love to include here complete instructions on how to drive the tannin bus, but the time is not ripe. In fact, MOx is really weird, and it will take seven more chapters before I am ready to present you with the terminological keys to the MOx city. Not until chapter 11 will I be able to provide a complete description of tannin sensory distinctions and their evolution. Meanwhile, figure 6 shows a typical MOx tracking sheet.
PLEASE LEES ME
Finally, I want to touch on the use of lees in building structure. Here again, timing is everything. In Phase 1 micro-oxygenation, lees gobble oxygen and suppress phenolic reactivity. They can also adsorb precious anthocyanins (the key to good structure) as well as promote their enzymatic destruction, with the result that wines dry out and fall apart.
I think of lees as being like egg yolks and tannins the egg whites from which we will make a soufflé. To begin with, the yolks must be separated out and set aside while we turn our attention to the whites, whisking them into a rich, light meringue. Once we have the structure built, we fold the yolks back in for a rich fatness. In the same way, we first oxygenate tannins into a mouth-filling, refined structure. Just as the presence of yolk prevents the formation of meringue, early lees stirring prevents oxidative tannin structuring and destroys color. Only after the structure is complete and the pigments have been incorporated may the lees be incorporated through frequent stirring. In big wines, this process may actually allow the wine to take up the entire mass of fine lees after two or three years in barrel.
After the gross lees have been discarded, fine lees may rest on the bottom of the tank or barrel, or they may be held in separate cooperage, where they are stirred and oxygenated to minimize the formation of sulfides until ready for use. Lees must be matched to the wine involved, as Cabernet lees will ruin a Pinot, while Pinot lees will deplete a Cab.
In wines that have dried out, oxygen will only make things worse, but lees can bring such wines back from the brink by coating coarse edges. Lees of the current vintage can prove useful for freshening and softening older wines on the verge of collapse.
LIFE IN MICRO-HELL
After two decades in the cellar, the controlled introduction of oxygen has taught us several lessons. First of all, structural MOx work does not tend to hasten the bottling date. In general, wines are strengthened and stabilized, often demanding extra age, but they are also more expressive and better balanced than the same wines untreated.
Plan on investing three to five years in full implementation of MOx. The first year, concentrate on developing your basic MOx technique, typically with a single unit, ideally guided by an experienced practitioner. In the second year, you can apply this technique to diverse wines and styles and begin to learn about early blending and the complexities of oak and lees management. Only after you’ve got all this down can your winery’s physical transformation begin, as you grapple with vintage variations and follow bottle evolution over time.
MOx does not lessen a winemaker’s workload. Instead, it pushes us to invest extra time but with generous dividends in wine quality and winemaking acumen. It was, to say the least, interesting for me to discover, thirty years into my career, that practically everything I thought I knew about red wine was wrong. Keeps you young, I guess. Learning high-performance MOx is such a pain in so many ways that you will certainly hate it. But you’ll also love what it teaches you.
Part Two of this book includes portraits of two fully evolved postmodern winemakers, Gideon Beinstock (chapter 13) and Randall Grahm (chapter 14), both of whom have worked extensively with MOx—indeed, Randall was the first on this continent to work with it. Yet neither currently employs it, as I do, as a routine aspect of the yearly work. Their reasons contain wisdom and bear reflection. Gideon finds that while oxygen offers a tool for softening his relentless mountain tannins and rampant reduction, the palate architecture that oxygen produces restricts access to the depth of his Cabernets. Randall offers that while he may use it again, for now he wants to understand how his new grenache plantings will evolve on their own.
Neither of these giants has eschewed MOx because it interferes with his Natural Wine image. The technique, though, seems to appear on every blogger’s hot list of forbidden manipulations. I think that’s because winemakers use it but prefer not to talk about it. This disingenuous use of technologies lies at the heart of the Natural Wine movement’s complaints. A key tenet of postmodern practice is this: Never use a technique or additive that you aren’t willing to disclose and defend. Since this cannot be accomplished within the confines of a wine label, www.postmodernwinemaking.com provides links to websites that organize voluntary disclosure, discussion, and education regarding matters of concern to consumers. I encourage every reader to use the site to establish common ground.
TAKE-HOME MESSAGES
I believe the postmodern view is an ancient one in which tannin is an asset, not a defect.
Micro-oxygenation is, in essence, an oxidative titration: a snapshot of a given wine’s reactive capacity.
A wine can absorb almost four times as much oxygen at 59°F as it can at 50°F; a single degree’s difference changes everything in a cellar.
Wines vary three orders of magnitude in their antioxidative vigor. The same wine that in youth can absorb one hundred times the oxygen a barrel can give it will in a decade be capable of less than a tenth of a barrel’s uptake.
4
The Seven Functions of Oak
When asked what I mean by postmodern winemaking, I settled, after much thought, on the following definition: the practical art of touching the human soul with the soul of a place by rendering its grapes into liquid music.
This apparently airy statement has proven its worth time and again as a practical working vision. In this chapter, I’d like to illustrate its use in working out a satisfying philosophical position in an area of great aesthetic turmoil for today’s winemakers. Let me start the ball rolling by asking flat-out a very loaded question: If presenting authentic flavors of origin is our primary goal, what, if anything, is the proper role of oak in postmodern winemaking?
A growing number of Natural Wine advocates have a simple answer: Oak has no such role. But these purists include few actual winemakers. My favorite corollary of Murphy’s law states that nothing is impossible for the man who doesn’t have to do it himself. Indeed, when it comes time to actually do the job, ultratraditionalist Georgian winemakers fermenting their wines in buried clay vessels called qvevris often resort to wood to perfect their big reds. Even their legendary Friuli disciple, Josko Gravner, comes out of qvevri with his amazing whites and ages them for an additional six years in large neutral oak.
Even U.S. federal regulations, which are no treasure trove of winemaking wisdom and guidance, distinguish wine from beer and other beverages through the basic principle that wine has no ingredients—oak flavor being one legal exception. Barrels got grandfathered in as a