The Perfect Wine

Well, here you are reading what you might have expected to be a review of a Grand Cru Burgundy, or perhaps an exposition on a great old vintage of Latour or Margeaux, ruminations about a heavenly bottle of Cote Rotie I sampled while dining in Vienne, or at least some intersting new factoid about the much acclaimed '47 vintage of Cheval Blanc.  If you came to this article expecting any of these, my sincerest apologies, because you will certainly be disappointed!

If, however, you have ever dreamed of creating the perfect wine yourself, and enjoy kicking those kinds of thoughts around, then stick around.  You might just find this silly exercise interesting, because what I will set out to do here is to engage in a little reverie of just that sort.  I am going to build, at least in theory, the perfect wine.  Not the perfect wine by anyone else's or any acknowledged standard, but the perfect wine for me.  I often think to myself that I have missed my calling, and that if I had the proverbial chance to go back and do it all over I would pack my knapsack and wander off to UC Davis to learn the finer points of viticulture and enology.  Then I could ply my wares at some little upstart winery, making kick-ass terroir-driven wine.  But alas, here I sit in reality, well past the age where such flights of fancy have a chance of assuming substance.  Therefore,  my only recourse is to blog my dream, holding the vague hope that some day I will muster up the time, money, and energy to Crushpad it into existence on some minute scale.  Side note:  If nothing else, I think I have just created a new verb.

The first question I would have to ask myself before creating this perfect wine would be what I want this wine to do.  First and foremost this will have to be the kind of wine that evokes emotions, that smells of life, of nature, of sunshine; the kind of sunshine that makes you cry, not because it is bright, but because its beauty  and clarity make you think deeply about life, bringing  into relief the happy memories and letting you quietly ponder the sad.  It would be a wine that paints a picture through its alluring aromas; the smell of the sun's early morning rays glancing off pearls of dew as I walk through a damp wheat field.  It would transport me to a fall orchard with its heady savor of decaying leaves and fallen fruit, the wind rustling through the last of the clinging foliage, and the song of a few straggling birds gathering nourishment for their impending journey.  It would set me down on an ocean shore on a calm starry night with no sound but the crashing, lapping, moon-lit waves and the distant barking of a dog.

I would not want this wine to shout at me.  There would be no screaming guitars or driving drumbeats to disturb my reverie.  There are wines for that, but this would not be that wine.  This would be a wine that conjures up the soothing strains of a Schubert or Beethoven string quartet, or perhaps the contemplative melody of a Chopin Nocturne.  It would create the soundtrack for reverie about past love gained and lost, happy moments spent with my children, incredible people and places encountered in my travels, and all those other things that make life rich, beautiful, and worth living.

To accomplish all this, this perfect wine would have to be one suited to my tastes.  It would have to excite my senses through its uniqueness and aliveness.  It would speak of the place the grapes were grown, both of nature and the people who grew them.  It would be delicate and powerful at the same time, showing elegant nuances of fruit and flowers undergirded by the pungent seasonings of the earth and the environment form which it drew its life force.  Where would I plant the vineyards that could produce such a perfect wine?  From a technical aspect, there would be three or four candidates for my wine's prospective terroir all along the Pacific coast of the United States.  But I would want this to be a wine that came from an idyllic spot that I consider exceptionally beautiful, and that in an ideal year, would offer excellent conditions for my grape of choice.  So where would this vineyard be, and which grape would I plant there?  It would be Pinot Noir grown on a gentle slope fringed by pine trees in Oregon's Willamette valley.  My little vineyard would be alive with goats and sheep to provide natural fertilizer.  It would be abuzz with beneficial insects and birds to safeguard my ripening grapes.  There would be complementary plantings of herbs flowers, and cover crops to add to the soil's vitality.  A few apple and pear trees would add their special energy to my little plot of land as well.

Now on to the more mundane, technical stuff.  Not that I claim to have any particular knowledge or experience in any of this, but I will go with my gut here.  I will have to use whatever little shreds of knowledge I have about wine-growing and making to create something that will bear my unique stamp.  It may not result in a perfect wine in any classic sense, but when I drink it I will know that it is alive, unique, and that it is my wine.  Ideally my grapes will come from old vines that have been severely pruned to yield no more than about 25 hectoliters per hectare.  My fruit would be allowed to attain a state of full physiological ripeness to express their optimal aromatic and phenolic concentration.  Thus, a long, relatively cool growing season would be an absolute prerequisite to ensure full ripening without overdeveloped sugar levels and resulting high alcohol, as well as good acidity.  The grapes would be hand-harvested over whatever period is necessary to ensure the best possible selection and to avoid berry damage.  It goes without saying that my vineyard would be free of all chemical herbicides, pesticides and fertilizers.

In the cellar, my main aim would be to create a wine that is more than anything authentic and allows for incredible development of perfume and texture in the bottle.  After the harvest the grapes would be carefully and gently transported in small crates and go directly to press. In order to bring out and preserve the natural delicate fruit character, about 80% of the grapes would be de-stemmed by hand before pressing.  A four to six  day cold-soak would be followed by twelve to fifteen days of fermentation using only indigenous yeasts to ensure a true varietal and terroir expression.  This would be followed by a period of natural malolactic fermentation and 12 months of ageing in French oak barrels, 80% neutral, 20% new.  My aim would be to create a wine with no more than 12.5% alcohol.  It would be bottled without filtration or fining using only gravitational flow to move from vat to barrel to bottle.  I would then sample a bottle every six months and follow the exciting process of aroma and texture development for several years to come, with the satisfaction of knowing that this is my own perfect wine.

Well, there it is: my perfect wine.  Though the vineyard may never be reality, some day the Crushpadding just might.  Until then I have the consolation of thousands of incredibly good wines from all over this great big beautiful planet to sample and share with you.  So for now that is exactly what I intend to continue doing.  I hope you will continue to come along for the ride and to dream and maybe some day realize your own dreams whatever they may be.