Thinking about Drinking … Wine

Flotsam and jetsam from thinking about drinking wine …

Umami

I’ve never felt completely comfortable with the “Parker’s Palate” globalization paint brush.  Parker has vigorously and consistently denied that winemaking has changed to a riper, more fruit forward style based on his palate.

While, it’s undeniable that this “Parkerization” theory has enough credibility that people have altered their style of winemaking, I still can’t quite wrap my head around Parker being a dictator of style to the extent that he has a created a cottage style, a phenomena that dates back to the late 80s and early 90s to present day.  The world just doesn’t work in such a tidy fashion.  It doesn’t work in a tidy fashion any more so than the mortgage industry collapsed as a result of Alan Greenspan economic policies – there are just too many moving parts to isolate a single point of failure.

Factor in that the wine world is more complex in disparity than other industry that I’ve been in and it’s consequently impossible for me to isolate a single factor that has led to a predominant style in richness.

While I would love to prove it (it would make for a fascinating non-fiction book or Master’s Thesis and I have plans for neither), something that I keep coming back to time and time again as a possible counter explanation to the development of richer, fuller wine styles is the notion of “Umami.”

Defined as the “fifth taste sense,” Umami means “delicious” in Japanese.  It’s exactly that deliciousness and richness that creates palate satisfaction.

If you think about big Aussie and California wines, they all have that mouth-filling savory quality.  The extractedness of a wine (another word like spoofulated and typicity that doesn’t live outside the world of wine) seems to be the same mouthfeel sense of fullness that food scientists have been developing since Umami was scientifically discovered in the mid-80s.

We’ve all seen the commercials and marketing for food that is “craveable.” It’s the sensation of umami that we crave in those foods, something really smart people and well-heeled restaurants and food manufacturers try to create in their menus and food.

In my mind, at a minimum, any movement over the course of the last 20 + years to a richer style of wine has to at least partially account for the movement in awareness of what creates happy taste buds, and that includes winemaking.  In fact, a search for the word “Umami” yields a first page search result from Kalin Cellars where they say:

Most modern wines are made for immediate consumption and evoke the taste sensations of sweet, salty, bitter and sour. These “Fast Wines” are well matched to the spectrum of flavors found in “Fast Food.”

They go on to say, “Kalin Cellars wines achieve Umami by the use of artisanal methods: barrel or (cuvee) fermentation, sur lies aging, malolactic fermentation, extended barrel development, bottling with no filtration, and aging in temperature and humidity controlled underground cellars.”

While it would take more research than a blog post can provide to make a credible case, anybody that gets on the stylistic Parker-bashing bus should at least pause for a second and look at the bigger picture – that Panera chicken salad sandwich is formulated to evoke a certain satisfaction and it’s highly likely, though perhaps more innocently executed, that winemakers are responding to our collective American palates and not just Robert Parker’s.

Man’s Search for Meaning

There are a raft of wine books that have been recently published or are getting ready to hit the market that try to use wine as context for understanding the human condition and the world around us.  Notable amongst these is the somewhat eponymous forthcoming book called, “Using Wine to Make Sense of the World” by Elliot Essman as well as “The Psychology of Wine” by Evan and Brian Mitchell. This is all interesting because those that are passionate about wine tend to look at life through the prism of the wine glass, gleaning profundity where possible.

I am certainly one of those people that believe that virtually every experience in life holds some thread that can tied back to wine in some form, heck, it’s a principle of my writing … that said, man does not live on wine alone.

Given that the last several years of my life have been a struggle in which I have not attained success at the caliber that I feel I am capable of or satisfied with (throw in some adversity, too), I recently bought Viktor Frankel’s world famous book,“Man’s Search for Meaning.”

Deemed by a survey jointly conducted by The Book-of the-Month Club and the Library of Congress as one of the 10 most influential books in the U.S., it has been on a sales tear throughout 2009, reaching its sales peak in late June of this year while significantly outpacing sales from the last three years.

The sales are obviously a response to the economic conditions we’re living in causing many people to rethink their life and the path they’re on.  And, the sales peak may too be an indicator of when the economy hit the bottom.

The main premise of the book is far too complex and personal to summarize in a sentence, but to say it provides enlightenment above and beyond the minutia of the moment is an understatement.

In general, this quote is an example of one piece of wisdom that resonates:

“It did not really matter what we expected from life, but rather what life expected from us. We needed to stop asking about the meaning of life, and instead to think of ourselves as those who were being questioned by life - daily and hourly. Our answer must consist, not in talk and meditation, but in right action and in right conduct. Life ultimately means taking the responsibility to find the right answer to its problems and to fulfill the tasks which it constantly sets for each individual.”

“Man’s Search for Meaning” has nothing to do with wine whatsoever, but certainly makes for a happy companion to a glass of wine, preferably three of them.  Read the wine-related books after the fact, they require lucidity.