So I did what any journeyman winemaker would do who wants to perfect his craft: I opened up a consulting firm. I had the incredible good fortune to be taken on by the Benziger Family and their winemaker (and spiritual guide), Bruce Rector, as my primary client. Like Phillips, the Benzigers’ Glen Ellen line was growing very rapidly, and Bruce needed to outsource several R&D projects.
These projects were to become the foundation for everything I’ve done since. The first was an elaborate feasibility study on what was to become the Glen Ellen Learning Center, for me a crash course in teaching, learning, collaborating, and innovating. Second was the making of an International Claret, a global project in which I worked with the Australian Richard Smart, the Chilean Alejandro Hernández, and Pascal Ribéreau-Gayon, our project chief and director of the enology faculty at the University of Bordeaux. This project opened up for me a whole new understanding of tannins, high-pH winemaking, and red wine site selection and viticulture, besides polishing up my high school French.
The third project was the pursuit of a decent nonalcoholic wine, a dream conceived by Bruno Benziger shortly before his death, for which he had purchased a reverse osmosis (RO) filter. In nonalcoholic wine, we could work outside the federal restrictions for standard wine that forbid flavor additives, and thus I was permitted for the first time in my winemaking career to fool around with flavors.
We would choose a bland base wine and use the RO to remove all its alcohol. If it was a Chardonnay, we might then add essences like apple, pear, pineapple, and butter; if a Merlot, we might add cassis, orange peel, and vanilla.
But it didn’t work. The flavors didn’t blend. We ended up with what tasted like a bland base with a bunch of flavor notes sticking out as bizarrely as spiked hair. This was my first hint of the true nature of wine that this book discusses. I would spend a decade scratching my head before I understood the problem.
I now know that what was missing was the aromatic integration that good wine structure supplies. There was nothing wrong with the technology; rather, because the base wines weren’t made artfully, they could never accept the flavors and meld them together into a soulful singularity.
My work with RO was to earn me several patents and formed the basis of Vinovation, a wine technology company I established with Rick Jones in 1992 and operated until 2008, by which time we had over a thousand clients and had expanded our research to a wide variety of membrane technologies (see chapter 18). More interestingly, we attracted the attention of Patrick Ducournau, founder of the French innovator Oenodev, who assigned his right-hand man, the remarkable Thierry Lemaire, to train us in their system of structural élevage, which includes micro-oxygenation, lees work, and a sophisticated understanding of oak. These fundamentals are the basis of postmodern winemaking (PMW) and are summarized in chapters 1 through 6.
In 1993, I got interested in applying what I had begun to learn to the making of California wines according to European principles. Simply put, this involved less emphasis on impactful aromatics and more on texture and balance. Launching the tiny brand WineSmith, I focused on Cabernet Franc, the most challenging of the Bordeaux varietals, which Pascal once confided was better suited to California than Bordeaux (“In Bordeaux,” he told me, “it’s so refined, it forgets to exist”). In 1999, I expanded into Pauillac-style Cabernet Sauvignon, and in 2001 I began with Stephen Krebs at Napa Valley College to make minerally Chardonnay that I called Faux Chablis and a sulfite-free Roman Syrah from Renaissance Vineyard in North Yuba County, exchanging grapes for consulting with Gideon Beinstock (see chapter 13).
These wines showed me that Stevenson’s description of wine as bottled poetry was not a flowery fantasy but plain reportage.
Post–World War II winemaking has seen more changes in production practices than the previous eight millennia combined. We are led to believe that on the whole, this is surely a good thing. But to call it progress requires that what was gained outweighs what was lost.
This calculation is not straightforward because gains tend to upstage losses. While the benefits of innovations are easy to see, what we have forgotten is, well, forgotten. Out of sight, out of mind.
However sweeping their impact, adaptations to fleeting changes in conditions don’t constitute durable value. Cassette tapes and Super-8 video were a big deal in the ’80s, but they held no lasting lessons. We have begun to see that the whiz-bang innovations of the twentieth century centered largely on exploiting suddenly abundant resources such as oil, stainless steel, aluminum, copper, and so on—all temporary circumstances. History will judge if we spent these resources wisely by whether we created lasting value or merely squandered them on short-term prosperity.
Contemporary Americans lead lives of unparalleled leisure and convenience. But have we built to last? The miracle of modern antibiotics may well be a fleeting bubble, outstripped by the superbugs these drugs encourage. A discovery like Gore-Tex or the silicon chip is worth a hundred Hoover Dams that may lie crumbled and useless a century hence.
Modern innovations in electricity, microbiology, and chemical engineering have facilitated powerful and profitable changes in winemaking, but as the demands of sustainability loom large, we may regret our failure to preserve old knowledge. When the oil dries up, we may soon wish we remembered more about horses. Chapter 17’s hilarious account of tail-chasing in wine press design reveals much about the modern developmental process, which often seems unencumbered by the thought process.
Modern science is slow to correct its own follies. Scientists have banished Pluto on the grounds that it deviates from current theories of planetary formation. In so doing, they have misappropriated the word planet, twisting it from its original sense of “celestial wanderer.” That is to say, planets deviated from the then-prevailing cosmology. Ironically, scientists now seek to banish the ninth planet from this company on the basis that it deviates from current theories of planetary formation. Equally comic is the misapplication of dilute aqueous theory to the making of fine wine, which has misinformed our inquiry into quality for the past half century.
Postmodern winemaking calls apparent progress in modern enology continually into question, and in so doing resurrects some key notions that have gotten lost in the shuffle:
Wines depend upon good structure for their soulfulness. The deviation from our cherished solution-based chemistry model is a pretty good working definition of quality.
As in all other foods, a complex natural ecology provides distinctive and soulful character to our wines that we could never hope to manufacture. Distinctive flavors of place require a living soil nurtured through a cautious approach to herbicides and pesticides.
Unlike the naive and poorly informed Natural Wine movement, postmodern winemaking is not “hands off.” To put natural flavors first requires diligent application of intelligent observation and informed action. Winemakers must work very hard to become invisible.
ORGANIZATION
The book consists of twenty-five chapters, two appendixes, and a glossary. It is largely based, with publishers’ permissions, on material compiled from my monthly columns in Wines and Vines magazine and articles published by AppellationAmerica.com and Practical Vineyard and Winery magazine, reworked to include a lay audience.
In this volume, my task is to articulate to my fellow winemakers the guiding principles of a new view of our work. But the language is plain English, because it is essential to make this discussion accessible to a broader readership. Tragically, today’s consumer environment has become hostile to an honest discussion of production winemaking. Winemakers lie low while the Luddite paparazzi fire live ammo over their heads. Honesty is nowhere to be found, and platitudes like “We do the minimum” are standard fare.
Winemakers are earnest, hardworking men and women who are never in it for the money. They deserve respect for walking the hard walk from critics who merely talk the easy talk. But to survive in today’s competitive environment, most choose to do one thing and say another: to work like dogs and give nature the credit. By allowing wine lovers to eavesdrop on