Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Clark Smith
Read between
February 18 - March 12, 2020
This situation is no scandal. I am here to tell you that the adjustment of alcohol is as valuable and as trivial as adjusting the salt in a soup.
barrel aging (with its triple threat of foreign flavoring, oxygenation, and reverse osmosis concentration, for the skin of a barrel is an RO filter),
Louis Pasteur’s theory of germs is a ridiculous fiction. —Pierre Pachet, professor of physiology, University of Toulouse, 1872
Isaac Newton himself said, “I do not know what I may appear to the world, but to myself I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the sea-shore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.”3
As Einstein put it, “If we knew what it was we were doing, it would not be called research, would it?”
My goal in this chapter is not to defend Biodynamics. It sounds nuts to me. But so does string theory in particle physics. Instead, I’d like to talk about what it means to behave like a real scientist in any time of uncertainty.
Meridians and acupressure points cannot be said to exist or not to exist, any more than a chromatic scale exists in music, except in the musician’s mind and soul. The question is whether this way of thinking and working produces useful results for artful expression between humans—not whether it exists, but whether it communicates.
Word confusion is the common stamp of paradigm shifts. It took physics most of the 1920s to figure out that Bohr’s and Schroedinger’s disparate theories of the electron were really just metaphorical attempts to use Newton’s particle and wave concepts in a realm where they don’t quite apply.
Biodynamic viticulture did not begin until after World War II, and today’s practice bears as much resemblance to its Steinerian origins as our modern tongue does to the Old English of Beowulf.
Yet as George Bernard Shaw told us, “Nothing is ever accomplished by a reasonable man,”
not condemn the judgment of another because it differs from your own. You may both be wrong. —Dandemis
as the late American poet John Ciardi put it, “Show me a man who is not confused and I will show you a man who has not been thinking.”9
Biodynamics sounds nuts to me. But so does string theory. Its existence offers a delicious opportunity for scientists to test their true mettle.
Any experienced winemaker will tell you that yeast companies’ flavor claims are regarded with about as much credibility as a Louisiana campaign promise.
As far as I can tell, detractors of commercial yeast have two concerns. One is that commercial wine yeasts might be genetically modified. But they are not. ’Taint legal. They are simply “wild” yeasts that have been studied, selected for beneficial properties, grown in large quantities, dried, and bagged up. Second is the concern about flavors that are imparted by packaged yeast. As I have explained, not only is this concern naively overstated, but in my experience, uninoculated wines are more prone to microbial flavor intrusions than commercial yeast fermentations.
What I personally most despise in fresh whites is the strong butter note that malolactic bacteria impart, a hallmark of the enormously popular Kendall-Jackson Vintner’s Reserve Chardonnay. This same element cannot be reliably prevented in uncontrolled fermentations. If I were required to produce New Zealand–style Sauvignon Blanc, with its delicate purity of grape aromas, according to Natural Wine principles, I would start smashing windows.
Sure, you can simply crush the grapes, stand back, and hope for the best. That’s what Georgians do and have done for millennia with their qvevris, taking care—and I mean exquisite care—that their whites receive six months on the skins, seeds, and stems. Fair enough. Enjoy. Myself, I like these wines and find their emerging notoriety both hilarious and encouraging. But unless indoctrinated and seduced in advance, critics despise these wines. They are amber in the glass, and their tannin is off the charts. Traditional Georgian qvevri wines, though fascinating and groovy for geeks, are just
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White wines retain their fresh aromatics at low temperatures, which prevent them from being boiled off, but ironically they also produce fewer esters at lower temperature. Matching fermentation temperature to yeast strain is a balancing exercise, an exploration that can easily take decades in the context of vintage variation. Interactions with grape source and clone, impacts on body and mouthfeel, response to oxygen or its absence, optimum fermentation rate for the desired time on the skins, flocculation characteristics, and rate of breakdown during sur lie aging are among the varied
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It is likely that many wine drinkers who report sulfite allergies (a medical impossibility, since the body produces a gram per day and the compound is too small to be an antigen) are actually reacting to biogenic amines, which are commonly ten times higher in uninoculated “natural” fermentations.
It is a rare bird indeed who will taste a wine and say, “Wow, this tastes completely unlike anything I’ve ever tasted. How delightful. I’ll take a case.” That’s just not what happens in the marketplace, even in the hangouts of the ultra-natural.
As I have seen on so many AppAm panels, these first-time participants in judging by AVA groupings were surprised both by the regional character consistency and by how little difference the winemaking choices made compared to the regional variations.
“The Petite Sirahs from Livermore Valley did have fairly consistent streaks of blackberry, blueberry, black pepper, and sweet tannins,” said Dunne. “The Petite Sirahs from Paso Robles tended to be characterized by candied fruit flavors offset against the smell of smoldering briars. Flowers, bing cherries, lemon verbena, and soft tannins ran through the Petite Sirahs of the Russian River Valley. Black-fruit flavors, green herbs, and white pepper seemed to distinguish the Petite Sirahs of Dry Creek Valley.”
Annual revenues for music worldwide exceed those of pharmaceuticals. Brain scans of listeners deeply moved by a musical piece show activity in the same cognitive areas stimulated by sex and addictive drugs.1
The special allure of wine is similar. There are no $100 beers.
the results of an experiment we did at CSU Fresno on a 1999 Syrah, in which twenty-two judges voted their preferences for blends of untreated and alcohol-reduced components comprising thirty-one alcohol points between 12.5% and 15.5% in 0.1% increments. No bell curve. Instead we have the equivalent of radio stations, with very poor wines just 0.1% away from highly rated ones. At Vinovation we alcohol-adjusted 2,500 wines per year for fifteen years and never saw a bell curve.
In 2001, brain imaging showed McGill University researchers Anne Blood and Robert Zatorre that subjects listening to a C–G perfect fifth directed the signal to a “reward system,” experiencing a “smooth, sweet” sound. When the same subjects heard a C/C-sharp dissonance, the signal was instead directed to the “fight-or-flight” areas of the brain’s limbic system. Dissonant chords were characterized as having a “rough” sound.6
Our work as winemakers is to create an elaborate illusion. The euphoria of great wine in perfect circumstances is similar to those peak moments at a rock concert or symphony when our souls feel profoundly connected and our brains don’t mind the volume.
Soulfulness is an inherent quality of an artistic product, a message transcending words that the artist vividly shares with an audience. It can be a cello performance, a cheese, a dance, a sauce, or a wine that touches us profoundly. Soulful wines often contain diverse, even conflicting elements such as earth, fruit, and spice, which intertwine to convey a feeling of profound depth. The essence of soulful wine is a deep connectedness, of being shown by another a part of ourselves we did not know existed. The production of soulful wines requires focused artisanal attention that sets aside
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Our sense of harmony is strongly shared—if the piano is out of tune, everybody leaves the bar; but we also, as individuals, have broadly disparate preferences. Two warring notions, both valid. Lots of people just don’t get it about wine. Any kid who has sneaked a taste will tell you that wine is hot, sour, bitter, and harsh. If you are reading this book, though, you somehow got past that. You had a peak experience that turned you into an oenophile.
Sulfur dioxide is a preservative that is added to nearly all wines, both at the crusher and at the end of primary fermentation, or after malolactic if desired. SO2 (which creates in wine a family of free and bound sulfites) is an intentionally added preservative, whereas hydrogen sulfide is a stinky aroma defect that is not chemically related and is never added to wine. Excessive sulfur dioxide has a sharp odor similar to a freshly struck match, and is not to be confused with hydrogen sulfide, which has a rotten egg odor. It is unprofessional to speak of adding or smelling “sulfur,” as this is
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For beginning winemakers, my preferred general text on modern enology is Ron S. Jackson’s Wine Science: Principles and Applications, 3rd ed. (Oxford: Elsevier, 2008). New small wineries should also purchase Murli Dharmadhikari’s Micro-vinification: A Practical Guide to Small-Scale Wine Production (Springfield: Midwest Viticulture and Enology Center, Department of Fruit Science, Southwest Missouri State University, 2001). The definitive guide to chemical analysis of wine is Bruce W. Zoecklein, Ken Fugelsang, Barry Gump, and Michael Nury, Wine Production Analysis (New York: Chapman and Hall,
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COEXTRACTION A technique for facilitating the extraction from grape skins of otherwise nearly insoluble flavor and color compounds that need assistance to form colloidal beads. The assistance comes from the infusion of monomeric phenols from tannin-rich varieties, often from white grapes. Garnacha in Rioja, for example, is assisted by cofermentation with the skins of palomino, syrah in the Rhône with viognier, and sangiovese with trebbiano and malvasia, mistakenly often supposed only to add aromaticity.
For you chemistry nuts, a phenolic is simply any compound containing a benzene ring (six carbons in a ring connected by double bonds) with an -OH bonded to it. Red wine can be thought of as liquid chocolate, because its phenolics are almost identical. Because phenolics aren’t generally very soluble, they exist in wine as tiny suspended beads called colloids.
REDUCTIVE STRENGTH While imbued with many other meanings, in chemistry reduction is simply the opposite of oxidation, and reductive strength is just a shorter way of saying antioxidative power or vigor. Reductive strength (or reductive vigor) is measured as the rate at which a given wine can consume oxygen without a resulting buildup in dissolved oxygen.
