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May 5 2007

Grapethinking.com Guest Commentary on Wine and Technology

Note from Ed.:

Ruarri from the emerging and very nice wine blog Grape Thinking wrote a 300 word comment to my blog post on wine and technology (found here).  That time and effort (and because it advances the conversation forward with a subtle wit) deserves more meritorious attention so I’m publishing it as a post:

Where does nature begin and technology end? As so aptly put - chocolate could be thought of as unnatural whilst raw cocoa couldn’t be more unnatural. In essence - oak barriques are a primitive form of technology. Do we need to go back to Luddite wine? Have virgin maidens dance in barrels of grapes, crushing them under un-calloused feet? Imagine how many grape hopping virgins Gallo would require ...

Micro-Oxygenation is necessary to get wines in large volumes that are immediately drinkable and not synthetic tasting.

I guess you get high-street fashion and haute couture in clothing.

There needs to be such a distinction in wine. Though, few people of my generation are going to purchase wines that they can lie down for a while. Just like few men our age would have had a shirt tailored personally or been hand-shaved on a reclining chair.

(By the way there are a few places in Brooklyn where some Russian barber shops give awesome hot-towel shaves for $8.00 - something about having a large bearded man hold a neck to ones throat and be gentle at the same time that makes for a thrilling grooming service.)

The problem is that a lot of producers try to hide the fact that they use micro-ox. The solution is to perhaps be more honest on the bottle, and specify what has been done. Just like clothing, you know if there are synthetic fibres etc.

That way the people who don’t go to micro-ox will get there real due… and for those who do - well at least they’re being honest.

Lets face it - very few palates are sophisticated enough to tell the difference between barrel age and micro-ox in the first 2 years. It’s only with age that micro-ox wines begin to fall apart …

Anyhow - I’ve met winemakers who tell you as a salesman to never mention micro-ox, if the consumer thinks they’re tasting wood,  then let them think that.’ And it always struck me as dishonest.  There’s nothing wrong with micro-oxygenation… because even if you’re using 3rd fill barrels with Czech wood - it’s still costly. Micro-ox is
a blessing to small producers who want to make their wine cost effective. But I do think it needs to be stated on the bottle.

The other thing is, I’ve read a few things about nanotechnology and nano-particles where they can perhaps make wine taste like anything, which makes certain people very hot under the collar. But personally I think that technology is as much a threat to the fine-wine industry as Photoshop is to fine art. There are people who like to put trippy
visuals as a background on their desktop… but there will always be room for the artist and the painting to hang. Wine, like art and literature, is open to interpretation - and its tools are simply natural materials. Its how the natural materials are used that counts.

About Ruarri, the Author:

With a family background in the wine industry in South Africa and education at the University of Cape Town, I also attended the Cape Wine Academy where I completed all my wine education.  At the end of 2004 I came to the United States as a representative for a portfolio of South African wines and worked for ‘Cape Wine Ventures’ in the North East - around Maryland, New York, Virginia and Washington.  I came to realize that things in the wine industry were basically antiquated - and there had to be a better way of selling it than by sending boxes of neck tags and shelf talkers to some distribution house’s ‘POS Graveyard’ where it may or may not find its way into the back of a salesman’s car.  So, the steps toward Grape Thinking and Tastevine were taken.

May 3 2007

On the Rocks with the Rośe Revolution

I did a podcast the other week with Tim from Winecast, Paul from Inertia Beverage Group and Mark, the Wine Writer for the Dayton (Ohio) Daily News and the blog Uncorked.

It was a lively and good conversation.  Tim, technophile du jour, is putting the finishing touches on the podcast which should be available shortly. 

In that podcast Mark made note of something that astounded me—he said a local retailer was bringing in 13 different Rośe’s for the Spring. 

Wow.  Ohio is a pretty good wine drinking state, but 13 different SKU’s surprised me a little bit.

Something of a trend is a-brewing, er, fermenting.

The current issue of Wine Spectator also has a cover package on Rośe. 

In excerpts from an article in Wine Spectator, writer Mitch Frank notes:

Rosé is the underdog of the wine world. But rosé is moving up fast, powered by rising quality and an inherent food-friendliness.

Last summer, rosé appreciation in the United States reached a critical mass. Restaurants began putting pages of rosé specials on their wine lists.  “For some reason, rosé sales popped last year,” says Efrain Madrigal, wine director at Sam’s Wine and Spirits in Chicago. Rosé sales at Sam’s stores climbed about 25 percent in 2006, Madrigal estimates.

I’d say that Rośe’ time has come.  Sales of imports growing at 40% in a year and 25% year over year at a large retail location are astounding.

One of the frustrating things about the wine industry is you can never really isolate why these sorts of hockey-stick growth curves happen.  In the wine industry, catching lightening in the bottle is just that and the best you can do is catch a wave early. 

Given that, you have to give some credit to Stormhoek winery for not only catching the wave, but doing as they do and waving off the other surfers to jump the wave alone.  The passionate and engaging South African winery is having a little fun in the U.K. with a Rośe that has been created to drink on the rocks.

From a South African wine web site:

South African brand Stormhoek this week announced the imminent release of a concept wine in the UK named Couture – a Rosé made by Stormhoek winemaker Graham Knox, in a style intended to be consumed with ice.
Couture - a blend of Pinotage, Shiraz and Cabernet Sauvignon - launches in June in a major UK retailer at £6.99. It is packaged in a tall, colourful, modern, and chic bottle, its developers say, and its secret recipe and different serving techniques, including draught on tap for the on-trade, they believe give the product an edge in all market sectors.

Sixty-thousand consumers at Taste London 2007 will witness the launch of Couture, where an Interactive Ice Bar filled with huge blocks of multi-coloured ice, will have a mixologist serving Couture in its four guises: wine glass, tumbler, martini glass and champagne flute.

Jason Korman, the CEO of Stormhoek Vineyards is so damned wicked smart.  As he told me in another communication, “Wine isn’t a distribution game, it’s a communication game.”

Regardless of what kind of game it is, he’s playing it well—catching the Rośe wave and putting a unique twist on it.  Stormhoek just seems to get “it”—that same indefinable thing that also seems to go hand-in-hand with unexplainable growth.  And, they always deliver above price point, which is a nice attribute, as well. 

Now, if only we could get them a little bit better penetration in the states … that would be a really nice wave, for them and us. 

May 2 2007

Hung-over in the Technology/Terroir Debate

Remember when you were at that college party at 4:00 am? Few, very few stragglers are left in a foggy machismo haze, clinging to the bravado of draining the keg?  The detritus of an evening sweaty and cramped in a friend of friend’s basement litters the ground.  In the background the clamorous bellow of the soused is echoing in your head as some knuckleheads try to tie together the shreds of a philosophical debate that doesn’t have an answer. 

Your head hurts and you have made it to the point in the evening where you have been simultaneously over-served and begun your hangover—without the benefit of any respite in between the end of your evening and the beginning of your morning.  Aspirin and water seems like a good idea.

I feel like that—I have started my hangover, but I haven’t gone to sleep yet.  Soooo tired.  Must rest.

This technology/terroir debate can do that to a man. 

A week or two back I blogged in a post found here about the blogging fury that started with a couple of Eric Asimov posts on technology in wine.  Appellation America subsequently took up the conversation in a two-part article by Alan Goldfarb and gave a final postscript by respected wine writer Dan Berger.

Mercifully, (and hopefully) the Clark Smith, technology “Frankenwine” conversation will go into hibernation for 6 months or so, or at least long enough for Alice Feiring to write a book touting natural and non-interventionist wines.

My take on the entire technological intervention (Micro-oxygenation, alcohol reduction, etc) debate was that I couldn’t form an opinion because I hadn’t yet tasted any wine that I knew had been manipulated.

So, I bought some vino from Clark Smith and his label WineSmith—a Syrah, a Faux Chablis and a Cab Franc.

I now kind of get Smith’s philosophical musings about being a cook and using ingredients to create a dish, as the below excerpt indicates:

“If you haven’t had an education in what wine is and how it can be worked with, then you’re basically bottling cocoa powder because you don’t know what the Aztecs taught the Belgians – how to transform cocoa powder into chocolate; how to transform something nasty into something profound.

“If you know how to work with the raw material to build a structure, you don’t strip it out of the wine. You use it to make wines that have much more presence and much more depth and much more longevity.”

The Syrah, especially, straight out the bottle had a nice, well developed peppery nose—varietally correct.  From popped cork to my gullet inside of 60 seconds, the Syrah drank like it had been decanted for three hours.  It offered integrated tannins and a full explosion of flavors—it was very soft, velvety, enjoyable. 

Even the Faux Chablis tasted less like a Chardonnay from the Napa Valley College student vineyard and more like a nice Chablis—with a steely undercurrent.

And while both wines are pleasant drinkers, they just don’t seem normal. 

In the Dan Berger article he notes:

Last year on a trip to Australia (my 14th), one of the top wine makers in Australia said, “Look, there is just no substitute here for time. Micro-ox is a great technique for [tannin management in] low-priced wine, but you’d never want to risk doing it with anything like fine wine.”

A second Australian wine maker told me that micro-oxygenation is a fine technique to reduce tannins in cheap wines, but that the process tries to speed up the polymerization of tannins and can leave a fine wine lacking some of the stability wine makers prefer for wines that will be aged—which is the goal of many fine wines.

Ultimately, I view this technology vs. terroir debate through the mental filter that wines that age, fine wines with forbidding young tannins, will probably be exposed for the use of MicroOX over the long haul and consequently they won’t use the technique, or will use it in an understood, transparent kind of way. 

It seems to me, in a speculative manner, that some of the cult cabs that are immediately drinkable, but also can be laid down for a few years surely use MicroOX to soften the tannins. 

To me, it seems that the Syrah from WineSmith would not be good for anything but short-term gratification.  For lesser quality wines I can see where it has its merit.  This is the difference between art and pop culture—the difference between a something designed for immediate consumption like a tabloid magazine versus a literary book.  There’s room for both, it just depends on what floats your boat.

And, as most of us know, when we chase short-term gratification, a hangover of some sort usually entails.  Maybe those bellowing and soused students can take up the debate … 

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