Wine. It seems like such a simple thing. Pick some wonderfully ripe grapes, crush them, press them, sit back, and watch magic happen. After all, you need only sugar, yeast, and some flavor and color compounds suspended in water. These basic elements are all found in grapes when they come out of the vineyard. The yeasts will feast on the sugars, turn them to alcohol, and voila, you have wine.
Ah, if it were only that simple. Consider this. Over 1000 phenolic compounds alone, which contribute to the wine's color, flavor, and mouthfeel have been detected in wine. Besides these there are the other naturally occurring building blocks of grapes such as amino acids, organic acids, sulfites, vitamins, minerals, and pectins. Then new aroma compounds such as esters are created by hundreds of chemical reactions during fermentation, ageing, and maturation. When all goes well, as it has for millennia under the right conditions and guidance, the result can be and astonishingly heavenly beverage. Yes, all this has occurred through natural processes for thousands of years with minimal human intervention, without reverse osmosis, microoxygenation, or various additions such powdered tannins, acids, or oak chips. Has anything ever gone wrong in this natural process? Oh yeah. Wine can gone wrong at any point in it's complex creation, starting with bad weather, pests, and disease in the vineyard. Then, bacterial spoilage, uncooperative yeasts, the wrong cellar conditions, and the list goes on.
This, of course, raises the question: Why not use all the modern technology available to help these natural processes along so nothing goes wrong, and if it does, fix it? After all, the bulk of wine made today relies on technological intervention and does so quite successfully. But does it? What exactly is the measure of success when it comes to wine? Are today's wines really better than those of, say, 60 or 70 years ago? I suppose that will always be a point of argument and an open question. I for one, and many other like-minded wine lovers can only answer it in context of the wines that are available to us today. What I do know is that I am not a fan of about 70 to 80 percent of the quality wines (excluding the stuff that comes in a box, bag, or unnaturally voluminous bottle with a handle) that are available today. I generally find them boring. No variation. Too much one-dimensional fruit and little else. When there is something else, invariably it is oak. Lots of oak, as if infusing wine with oak gave it power and complexity. This is, sadly what people know of wine today. No wonder when I ask the average casual wine drinker out there what they like in a wine they invariably bring up only two terms: dry, meaning oak, and sweet, meaning fruit. When I then introduce these same people to the naturally produced, terroir driven wines I like, they almost always respond with utter astonishment. 'I didn't know wine could taste like flowers.' 'What do they do to get that nice herbal flavor in there?' 'I never liked red wine, but now I do, because this actually tastes exciting.' 'This isn't sweet, but I really like it. I'm going right down to the wine store to buy more.' 'This is dancing in my mouth.'
So, I come back around to my question. Is most of the quality wine made today better than it was before the days of wholesale intervention in the vineyard and manipulation in the wine-making process? After all, I rarely hear casual wine drinkers tell me that they can't stand the wines they drink. And, quite frankly, before I discovered the delights of naturally produced wine I was quite happy drinking whatever uninspiring reds or whites where put in front of me. I simply liked wine and accepted that it pretty much fell into those two color categories and beyond that it was all pretty much the same. At the time, I have to admit, I really didn't see this as a problem. I even marveled how amazingly consistent most wines were not only in style but in quality. I found it interesting how rare it was to find among the vast sea of mass-produced wine a major fault that would render a bottle seriously off-putting, as I understood this to be a much more frequent occurrence with the wines of days gone by. But was I inspired by the wines I was drinking? Did they excite me? Did they transport me to another realm (and I'm not talking about the effects of alcohol)? For the most part I have to say no. The point came however, in my personal oenophilic evolution, when I tasted wines that blew me away. I remember the first time I opened a perfectly delicate, floral, slatey, alive bottle of, what I now know to have been a Biodynamically produced Alsace Riesling, and thought to myself: "Yes! This is different. Now I know what wine can be!" Not too long afterwards I drank my first truly transcendental red, which happened to be a wonderfully complex, naturally produced Sierra Foothills Syrah. Unfortunately I didn't know at the time what it was that made me like these wines more than the vast majority I was drinking. I had to find these transcending experiences by trial and error until, many years later, I made a fortuitous discovery. I started to read the producer websites of the wines I particularly loved, and soon found that most of these producers shared a back to nature approach in their vineyards, and a minimal intervention philosophy in the cellar.
To be continued...
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