Good Grape Wine Company

February 23 2010

What Comes Before and After Spoofulated?

Conditioned by a society hell bent on labels, and with more than a little bit of German heritage that is desirous of order mentally if not physically, I find myself wanting to put wines into a natural field classification system.

You know an “A is for Apple, B is for Boy” kind of thing.

Or, perhaps, this affliction in trying to makes sense of something that doesn’t naturally make sense is caused by attending one too many parties where the 1.5L of wine is barely potable, as it was this past weekend with a “Barefoot Wallaby,” or something like that.

Now, make no mistake, many people have talked about a winery-type classification system – something based on a craft sensibility, or case load, etc.  Something that denotes the type of winery one is and the type of wine produced – artisanal, corporate, that sort of thing.

This is well and good, but increasingly case load by itself isn’t an indicator for the care that goes into winemaking, nor is ownership type.  In fact, I’m most interested in the style of wine—something that tells me what is in the bottle from a profile perspective.

Call it a case of the “extracted” blues.  Or, the “Barefoot Wallaby” blues. 

And, other “taste” classifications like “soft” or “fruity” aren’t going to cut it.

Incidentally, Randall Grahm touches on this subject at his book web site in a transcript from a speech he gave at UC Davis earlier this month.

In his wide-ranging treatise that covers “brand” versus “terroir” and introduces words like “brand sickness” (which I’ll cover tomorrow in a different post), Grahm notes:

In the world of wine you can certainly dichotomize the universe rather neatly between the industrial, and the artisanal the standard and the truly singular.

But there is an even finer distinction to be made, a distinction between what the French call vins d’effort, or wines of effort and vins de terroir, or wines which express a sense of place. You can almost think of this maybe as less of a dichotomy but rather as some sort of continuum. A “wine of effort” is one that bears the strong stylistic imprint of the winemaker, and one where the winemaker has controlled virtually every aspect of the production, from the deficit drip-irrigation of the vines to the use of selected clones, selected “designer” yeasts, enzymes and malolactic bacteria; there is a strong overlay of “house style.”

Now, I’m not the smartest guy, I’m from Indiana and I went to mid-major college, a place where I was happier to be there then they were to have me, certainly.  Given that (or perhaps despite that), the above doesn’t make much sense to me.

First, Grahm notes that there is an easy dichotomy in the world of wine in between the industrial and the artisanal, but he goes on to talk about a CONTINUUM between a “wine of effort” and a wine of place.

Regardless, it’s the striations (or continuum) in between the “wine of effort” and the wine of place that interest me.

Simply, there’s a difference in between a Marquis Phillips Shiraz and a Barefoot Shiraz.  Likewise, there’s a difference in between a Sineann Pinot Noir and Kosta Browne.

It’s not as simple as Grahm might suggest – a wine of effort equals “New World” and a wine of place equals “Old World.”

Yet, it’s not that complex, either.

In a back of napkin exercise that took moments, I classified wines into the following categories:

Natural:  Wine from vines that collectively represent as little intervention as possible in the process of growing grapes and their fermentation

Terroir:  A wine that comes from cultivated vines and express the unique characteristics of the climate and soil of their geography

Style:  A wine that carries the signature of the winemaker who made it

Spoofulated: A type of wine (typically red) that is extracted (dense), high in alcohol and best served without food

Wine Beverage: A beverage made from grapes with additives that enhance flavor and color while promoting consistency from year to year.

My overall point is a simple one – one of the reasons the wine world continues to progress in inches rather than yards is a stunning lack of clarity and alignment on the simplest things.

With natural wines and imports making a broad assault on consumer awareness, and the debate of “Old World” versus “New World” continuing to rear its feral head, the wine world (at least domestically) must create some sense of order—both for the good of understanding who they are marketing to and for the good of the consumer who wants to understand what they are buying.

A classification system need not be formal, and need not be expansive, but it does need to be generally acknowledged and it needs to encompass a wider variability than the tired clichés of “old” versus “new” with a dash of “terroir.”

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