Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Clark Smith
Read between
February 18 - March 12, 2020
wine is, for all intents, usefully regarded as liquid music. Its capacity to embody the spectrum of emotional modalities, to exhibit harmony or dissonance that we collectively apprehend, and its power to transport us from care and circumstance are the properties that wine and music share.
How can he remember well his ignorance, which his growth requires, who has so often to use his knowledge? —Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
Fine wine is a theater in which deconstruction occurs naturally and modern scientific practices are inadequate to guide extraordinary work.
A winery is a team, and an appellation is a tribe.
Wine is formless, assuming the shape of its container, but it interacts with its containers, both the barrel and the glass, in complex ways. Its message is pure experience conveyed without language. Just as any theatrical performance is unique and ephemeral, the qualities of any particular wine are neither universal in appeal nor fixed in time. Defining and quantifying wine quality has proven extraordinarily elusive, and its complex chemistry has yet to be thoroughly characterized and rationalized.
In my WineSmith Roman Syrah project, which Jamie Goode referred to in his insightful blog, wineanorak.com, as “the surprising juxtaposition of wine technology and natural wines,”1 I utilize high-tech tools as needed in order to make sulfite-free reds of wonderful aromatic expression and remarkable longevity. These tools include reverse osmosis (see chapter 18), which facilitates balanced wines of perfect ripeness and maximum antioxidative power and is useful to trim occasional volatile acidity. In creating a refined structure that can integrate microbial aromatics and stabilize tannins, I then
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I think winemakers get a bad rap. Yes, it’s our job to appear invisible, to stay out of the way of natural expression, but that involves a very intensive sort of doing nothing.
Naturalness in wine is an illusion borne of much study and struggle, and winemakers ought to be proud of what they do instead of pretending to do nothing.
My work with AppellationAmerica.com’s Best-of-Appellation evaluations program seeks to compile a Blue Book that articulates the regional characteristics of all 312 appellations in North America so that we can move beyond varietal labeling to a consciousness of the vast variety of available choices.
Postmoderns reject the notion of the objective observer. Particle physics, with its uncertainty principle, contingent realities, superstring theory, multiverse, and quantum leaps, was the first of the modern sciences to cross over into postmodernism, abandoning half a century ago any notion of mechanistic objective observation.
when we say, “That’s just subjective,” we mean to imply a finding that is random, unknowable, and unverifiable. Yet when all experience is understood to be subjective, we are compelled to look for patterns and areas of agreement—which music and chaos theory’s fractal images alike illustrate to be quite striking and beautiful.
The postmodern view is that the experience of a wine is not actually in the bottle; rather, wine resonates in tandem with its consumer according to the environment of consumption.
The experience fine wine affords, for which we shell out the big bucks, does not arise through scientifically delimited natural processes controlled by technical best practices; rather, it is a dance between specific, unknowable ecological particulars (climate, soil, microbiology) and the peculiarities of human perception that are brought to bear when the cork is drawn, all orchestrated through the invisible guiding hand of the winemaker. This is the postmodern view.
Without question, the surest way to appreciate a wine is to share a glass with the winemaker at its place of origin.
I am anti-hubris and anti-arrogance but pro-humility and pro-inquiry. The proper place for science in postmodern winemaking is in service to the winemaker’s true purpose: to bottle something that when opened months or decades later satisfies human appreciation.
You have already seen my definition of postmodern winemaking: “the practical art of connecting the human soul to the soul of a place by rendering its grapes into liquid music.”
“Truth is simply a compliment paid to sentences seen to be paying their way.”
Progress has never been a bargain. You have to pay for it. Sometimes I think there’s a man who sits behind a counter and says, “Madam, you can have a telephone, but you’ll lose privacy, and the charm of distance. Mister, you may conquer the air; but the birds will lose their wonder, and the clouds will smell of gasoline.” —Jerome Lawrence and Robert Edwin Lee, Inherit the Wind
Scientific enology starts with the idea that wine is a chemical solution. This simple, seemingly obvious statement guides all phases of modern winemaking. It also happens to be false.
In general, solution theory leads to an analytical (sometimes called “reductionist”) view that wine flavor is the sum of its pieces. Off-aromas are connected directly to root causes: horsey aromas require more microbial control; excessive woody notes lead us to use older barrels or shorter durations; veggie aromas mean pulling more leaves to minimize shade. To manage the whole, you manage the pieces.
There have long been hints that the solution model doesn’t work. Early anomalies included the sparing solubility of anthocyanins, wine’s red color compounds, reported by Pascal Ribéreau-Gayon in 1974.2 Beyond a light rosé color, it seems, red wine is theoretically impossible.
“Ideal” solution behavior predicts that the concentration of a compound in solution corresponds to its aromatic intensity. But when we micro-oxygenate Merlot, its bell pepper aroma decreases without any change in its pyrazine content. Why do pyrazines, Brett characteristics, and oak components, even in very high concentrations, sometimes marry benignly in the aroma, yet in other wines stick out as annoying defects?
2005 review by Roy et al. in Materials Research Innovations hammers home the point that the properties of systems depend less on their composition than on their structure.3 In Japanese samurai swords, hard and soft steel are folded like puff pastry until there are millions of layers in the blade, resulting in steel that is flexible yet holds an edge. A lump of coal, a graphite tennis racket, and a diamond are all 100% carbon, but their sensory properties are entirely different because of how the atoms are structurally arranged. Consider the house you live in. The agreeability of your home’s
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Aromatic integration is how sauces work, and why the saucier is the most important chef in a French kitchen. A great béarnaise doesn’t smell of tarragon, mint, fresh onion, and vinegar; it just smells like béarnaise. The finer the emulsion, the more surface area between the fatty beads of butter and the aqueous phase that surrounds them, so in a great sauce there can be square miles of interactive surface in a tablespoon.
In structured wines, similarly, tannins, anthocyanins, and other aromatic ring compounds, which are almost insoluble in solution, aggregate into colloids—tiny beads of various sizes and compositions. It is this fine colloidal structure that allows interaction between the aqueous and phenolic regions in a wine, blending the aromatic properties as if the wine were home to all things.
A properly formed tannin colloidal structure is capable of providing a home within the wine for these aromatic compounds. The shorter the tannin chains, the finer the colloids and the greater the interactive surface area for intercollating these compounds due to their affinity for ring-stacking among the tannins,
Better to consider the sign in Einstein’s office that read, “Not everything that counts can be counted, and not everything that can be counted counts.”
Everyone perceives that a major chord is cheerful and a minor chord is melancholy, whereas played together, they constitute noise. As we shall see in chapter 11, there is strong evidence that the qualities of harmony and dissonance are as mutually perceived in wine as they are in music.
Every winemaker would love to produce wines that drink well both in youth and with age, and widening the arc of a wine’s trajectory is certainly the winemaker’s Holy Grail. It is also an attempt to defy gravity.
Control of tannin polymerization is a central postmodern skill. Small, stable colloids not only impart finesse and soulfulness in youth, but they also prolong wine’s longevity. Poorly formed tannins precipitate readily over time. When this happens, just as in the curdling of a sauce, aromatic integration is lost. Elements previously married become individually apparent, resulting in wine that seems over-oaked, vegetal, or Bretty. Wines with well-formed structure can carry much higher concentrations of these aromatic elements without offending the nose.
ingenious and laborious work done at Montpellier on the degree of polymerization (DP) that exists in grape skins and seeds. But these polymers are unlike those we are trying to build in finished wine. As soon as they hit the highly acidic grape juice, they break down into monomers, which collect into colloids, later reassembling into wine polymers through a variety of pathways. Anything we might learn about grape tannin polymerization is lost in the chaos of fermentation. Over months and years, these monomers reassemble like Lego blocks, forming two kinds of permanent chains (nonoxidative and
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Nonoxidative polymers have a soft, nonintrusive mouthfeel in young wine but tend to continue growing until they become harsh and eventually insoluble, falling out of the wine. We don’t like these polymers.
It turns out that the key to good structure is a good concentration of red anthocyanin pigment. Color caps off tannins, leading to wines with more finesse. In effect, the more color that is present, the shorter the resulting polymers and the finer the colloids (figs. 2 and 3).
If oxygen is delivered to a young red wine, a different kind of polymer results that is more expanded. In much the same way a wire whisk creates meringue from egg whites, skillful introduction of oxygen to young red wine creates a mouth-filling, light structure that is stable and can form a foundation for soulfulness and graceful longevity. That’s why the Aztecs taught the the Spanish explorer Cortés the use of oxygen (“conching”) to convert cocoa powder into chocolate, still a standard practice in the finest Belgian shops (yes, that chocolate waterfall in Willy Wonka’s Chocolate Factory
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In red wines, prompt action is critical, because color molecules (anthocyanins) are easily lost to precipitation, yeast adsorption, and enzymatic attack. Successful oxidative structuring is best begun within days of the completion of alcoholic fermentation, sometimes even under the cap.
The mechanism of oxidative polymerization was elucidated in 1987 by Vern Singleton, who found that certain phenols found in grape skins could take up an O2 molecule and become highly reactive, linking up to other phenols.1 Singleton discovered, bizarrely, that the starting structure gets re-created at the end of the reaction in an increasingly reactive form, available to react over and over, resulting in a cascading polymerization effect. The reaction is homeopathic: early introduction of oxygen actually increases the wine’s antioxidative power.
Understanding the ins and outs of the vicinal diphenol cascade is essential to a grasp of red wine’s fundamental chemistry,
Even if oxygen is not employed, color will still improve structural finesse. Despite its high tannin levels, Syrah texture is dependably soft, while Pinot Noir, though much lighter, is notoriously susceptible to the coarse, dry mouthfeel associated with overpolymerized tannins.
Malic acid reduction occurs throughout ripening and is advantageous to mouthfeel because excessive acidity overstimulates salivary response and brings excessive protein into the mouth, leading to coarse mouthfeel.
the reactive potential of tannins and anthocyanins must be protected from field oxidation. We are trying to make a tannin soufflé, and if the eggs are already scrambled, there is nothing that can be done in the kitchen.
brix is an unreliable maturity index. It is a reliable guide to eventual alcohol content, but as we shall see, elevated alcohol is an enemy of color extraction.
In 1974, Pascal Ribéreau-Gayon published a color plate that revealed a mysterious reality: by themselves, anthocyanins are not very soluble in 12% alcohol and confer only a light pink color.3 If wine is a solution, red wine is not possible. He then showed how, in combination with tannins, the anthocyanins become deep red. Although no one knew what to make of this at the time, he was really demonstrating that color and tannin together form colloidal structures.
I will argue for the predominance of my more literal usage, in which the structure exists in the wine itself and not as an aesthetic theoretical construct residing within human cognition.
I hope that we are like the centuries of natural philosophers who followed Linnaeus’s lead and compiled a biological taxonomy based on observable traits, long before there was any understanding of DNA or even genetics, or those generations of chemists who ordered the elements into a periodic table based on their behavior alone, in total absence of an atomic theory.
Such ideas are, of course, mixed in among a lot of bushwah. In these circumstances, one tends to go with what works. What follows is a description of some winemaking procedures that work very effectively, together with some technical assertions that, even if untrue, provide a powerful predictive platform for working with structure.
“I WILL FEAR NO TANNIN”
Experience with élevage unlocks the possibility of harvesting at true ripeness, when tannins are at their meanest, and permits the winemaker to pursue full extraction and extended maceration without fear of bitterness or astringency. These are culinary skills, not far different from chocolate-making techniques.
TINY BUBBLES IN THE WINE
Like an infant’s temper tantrum, these disagreeable behaviors are signs of intense vitality that we can channel toward greatness.
By definition, MOx involves continuously dissolving pure oxygen gas into wine at a rate equal to or less than its uptake capacity.
