In its prosaic thirst-quenching and food-pairing contexts, ordinary wine is useful; I have consumed thousands of these wines, and they have filled me with simple pleasure. They have helped me slough off the cares of the day and have added another layer of flavor to whatever I was eating. And they were forgettable. They did not connect me to the folks in the vineyard - covered against the hot sun, suckering and tying and thinning, nor to the winemaker in the cold and dark cellar, blowing warm air onto her hands so she could memorialize in her notebook what she was tasting.
These wines - and they are nearly all the wines made in the world - serve their gustatory purpose, fret their moment upon the palate, and are gone.
These wines…fret their moment upon the palate, and are gone.
But when the four horsemen of wine’s apotheosis: wood and acid and fruit and tannin, are riding in concert, they sally forth an abundance of organoleptic synchronicity and complexity that compels the lucky drinker into an esthetic state that advances to the sublime and tattoos the wine lover’s heart!
The Four Fundamental Components of Wine
The four fundamental components of all wines, each of which – in the right measure – is essential in a beautiful, balanced, and high-quality wine. For those literal-minded wine drinkers who rightly point out that there is no wood (or barrel aging) in your New Zealand Sauvignon Blanc, you can think of the W of WAFT™ as standing for the method that the grapes of your favorite wine are fermented and the vessel in which the sugar of fruit is converted to the alcohol of wine. Similarly, A can stand for both literal “Acid” and the sense of freshness and length the wine has, and the T for tannin or the wine’s structure.
All great wines contain a sense of inevitability to them. There is nothing about the wine you would change; each of the four fundamentals plays an organizing and intrinsic role in defining the whatness of that offering. The seamless integration of those wines relies upon this fragile balance for their existence. Even a small movement toward more extraction or bigness would destroy what makes the wine fundamentally beautiful and delicious.
Napa and Paso Robles Often Fail Fundamental test
Many of the “cult wines” I taste from Napa and Paso Robles fail this most fundamental of tests. Ever since the 1980s, the most influential critics anointed over-ripe, clumsy, imprecise Napa Cabernet as the sine qua non of quality. High scores led to increased sales which led to more wine being made in a style that eschews balance for a Caligulan excess that drowns harmony in a burlap sack.
California winemakers can legally add water and acid (most routinely - tartaric acid) to fermenting grape juice. This is done to try to add back a sense of cohesiveness and balance to juice that was harvested at too high a sugar level. This spoofulated wine is gooey and soft; pH levels (lower pH helps to maintain stability in wine, and these crisper wines are unwelcome hosts to bad bugs) rocket to nearly 4 (when 3.4-3.6 would be far more appropriate), providing a texture of melted chocolate. Gone is all the freshness and verve and aliveness that are hallmarks of good acid management and potentially delicious age-worthiness.
…a style that eschews balance for a Caligulan excess that drowns harmony in a burlap sack.
These wines aren’t great, but they are showy. And they are gobbled up by wine collectors because the critics said they are essential. Cathy Corison and Dunn; Mayacamas and Matthiasson, all make great wines from there so this is not an indictment of the place - Napa is gorgeous country and would have to have been created if it did not already exist. If I have a bone to pick with our northerly neighbor, it is that its influence is so outsized in the minds and palates of the gatekeepers of wine that it barely allows any differentiating oxygen into the room.
Any time a place has grown so large in terms of influence as to have its own “style,” you know that sameness and insularity cannot be far away. Esther Mobley, wine writer for the San Francisco Chronicle, wrote an article recently asking if Napa’s wines are becoming too much alike. I don’t think she fully answers her own thesis, but - again -
The balanced interplay of wood and acidity, fruit and tannin, become what wines mean
any region about which one would ask that question, has perhaps reached its apogee, and may be on its way to becoming, not a living, vibrant region, but - instead - a curio.
So to Balance, We Turn
The elements of Balance assume an importance, then, that is not just descriptive but cultural and (small r) religious. The equilibrium brought about by the deft interplay of wood and acidity, fruit and tannin, become what wines mean. These elements represent the winemaker’s need to create Beauty and feed an essential desire to take authentic care of people. Wines of Balance & Beauty look no further than their own itness for approbation. A winemaker I worked with years ago called wine a fashion business because it was always chasing the next hot thing. For the last thirty years (a blink in the history of wine) Napa profligacy has sat torpidly ascendant. We will continue to work, instead, for a more richly restrained and varied future.
The Four Horsemen of Wine's Apotheosis
Hi Steven! I have just posted a video concerning the fundamental philosophical revolution currently underway at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zhbwi0r4lBA&list=PLiLcxMj4yHDSN-DCKVA27Rindxj8iDB5n&index=4&t=75s.
It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you in trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so”
-oft attributed to Mark Twain
In 1983, I completed Enology studies at UC Davis and embarked on a winemaking career which culminated 30 years later in the publication of Postmodern Winemaking, Rethinking the Modern Science of an Ancient Craft.
My book explores what I learned over three decades that altered my notion of what wine is and how it ought to be made.
I just finished reading Hugh Johnson's "The Story of Wine." I highly recommend it to anyone. It's a playful and thorough trek through the history of wine from the ancients to the present day. As you probably know, this man does his homework. And Lord, he can write. Every sentence is a delight.
Right at the start of the book, Hugh says “the polite definition of wine is ‘the naturally fermented juice of fresh grapes.’" He goes on to say, “a more clinical one is ‘an aqueous solution of ethanol with greater or lesser traces of sugars, acids, esters, acetates, lactates, and other substances occurring in grape juice or derived from it by fermentation.’"
Well, right the first time Hugh.
The basis of my new understanding derives from the discovery that wine is not a chemical solution. The unhappy belief that it is leads us into error, not least because it holds back winemakers from making great wine.
The Gospel According to Modern Enology
With ideal solution behavior, wine is just as Hugh Johnson says, a bunch of chemicals dissolved in an aqueous solution containing ethanol.
Various aromatic compounds dissolved in that wine will have a range of volatilities according to Henry’s Law, each with a concentration in the headspace where we smell it in proportion to the concentration in the liquid wine.
The implications for winemaking are that we manage aromatics by controlling the composition of the wine.
For example, if we want more fruit and less veg, we have to take some action to manage the composition. We farm for flavors, working the canopy, crop load, irrigation, nutrients and harvest date to minimize pyrazines and maximize fruity aromatics.
Vinification concentrates on selective extraction. Let’s maximize the good stuff such as desirable flavors and minimize the bad stuff such as harsh tannins. Techniques include very gentle crushing, gentle cap management, gentle pressing and delicate handling. Increase the extraction of color by using high alcohol as a solvent.
We prevent oxidation by keeping air away from the wine at every stage to preserve its freshness and fruit. We control sulfides with copper treatments.
We'll use protein fining agents to remove harsh tannins. These also strip the wine, so we take special care to minimize the hit to aroma and color by doing extensive trials with numerous combinations of fining agents. Selective extraction.
Because we regard unmanaged microbiology as an existential threat in the bottle and a clear and present danger in the cellar, we employ draconian sanitation procedures in the cellar and sterile filter into bottle.
Our goal is to lock in clean varietal fruit, suspended in development so the wine will preserve itself over its intended shelf life.
That’s No Solution
Postmodern methodology considers every one of these practices as misguided. It turns out that the deviation from Hugh’s ideal solution behavior is actually a good working definition of quality.
We recognize that well-made red wine is a two-phase system: the polar aqueous phase where acids, sugars and other polar compounds are dissolved, and the tiny apolar tannin-color colloids that naturally aggregate.
Since they contain stacks of phenolic ring structures, aromatic ring compounds will want to hang out (intercalate) inside the structure. Pyrazines (bell pepper) and volatile phenols (Brett), and oak compounds like guaiacol (smoke), vanillin and cinnamates (spice) that will be pulled down into the structure of the wine.
The wine will no longer obey Henry's Law.
Note: When I talk about structure, I’m discussing a physical macromolecular architecture present in the wine. This has nothing to do with what MWs talk about the balance sucrosity, acidity and astringency, a cognitive structure in your perceptive brain. Colloidal structure is really THERE, not just in your head.
What does that mean for wine? Well, properly structured wines display varietal fruit in the center of the aroma, supported by all of these aromatically integrated phenols, pyrazines and so forth that are taking a back seat, acting in support to add richness and complexity to the aroma.
The properties of the well-structured wine include refined textures so we don't have a harsh wine.
The finer the colloids, the more they support flavors rather than masking them. This understanding is captured in the French word finesse, which means “grace” (as it does in English), but also “fineness of texture.”
If we have a proper structure, tannins won't precipitate, so these characteristics will persist for decades, resulting in graceful longevity.
We are not managing aromatics simply by controlling composition. We're controlling the structure. Don’t just farm for flavors, farm for building blocks: anthocyanins, co-factors, and tannin precursors.
No selective extraction. We want all the tannin we can get -- guts, feathers and everything -- because we know how to put that together into a refined architecture.
I love the mantra I learned from Randall Grahm, "I will fear no tannin.”
The co-pigmentation colloids that we want are more stable at low alcohol. Who knew? We avoid over-ripeness.
Healthy anti-oxidative power controls Acetobacter. Brett can be outcompeted by a healthy microbiome such as you might foster in your garden or your body.
Instead of copper, an oxidation catalyst, we use enological oxygen to incorporate sulfides into the structures, transforming stink into silk. Miraculous!
A sterile filtered wine can never be great. A beneficial microbiome will develop profound soulful bottle bouquet.
Our goal is not to make a clean wine, frozen in its development, but rather a wine that's set up to have a natural development of aromatic greatness.
While Natural Wine’s blundering explorations help map location of land mines in the terrain of a Postmodernist revolution, they scarcely lead the way. In determining best élevage practices, their dogmatic extremist is about as useful as Christian Science research on effective medical protocols.