Winemakers in Bondage: Who Took the “Fun” From ProFUNdity?

The Basic Premise is dirt-simple, in either case. It can be hideously complicated, both by its chemistry and by the necessity of keeping the process sanitary but, as with most other human crafts, it can easily be reduced to its core elements and, if you just deal with those basics, you will end up with something that qualifies as That Thing.

It goes like this:

1.  Take a liquid.

2.  Ferment it.

And…

1.  Take a liquid.

2.  Add stuff to it.

3.  Ferment it.

4. (Optional)  Add more stuff to it.

One is Wine, the other is Beer. You probably know which is which.

I’ve been writing about wine since 1992. I had a LONG history with wine, as the buyer for the wine lists at every restaurant for which I was a chef, except one. I started writing about beer in 1973. Had several periods in which I didn’t do it but never more than a year or so. I have a LOT of time invested in both and, for the first 25 years or so, dealing with each was something of a dry, quasi-academic exercise. The only interesting beers were imports (at least those I could find in DC, MD, VA, and NC) and the marketing, the image of both were a little pompous and faux-grand.

“Fun” wasn’t a concept that was overly emphasized in the marketing of beer or wine. One of those most responsible for changing that was Seattle’s and Pike Brewing’s own Charles Finkel, a slightly-oversized leprechaun of a man who started importing Germany’s Ayinger and England’s Samuel Smith and managed to inject both with a tiny bit of Yankee irreverence. Charlie always kept in mind that a bottle of beer is pleasurable to drink, that it wasn’t an Art Object and could, in fact, endure a bit of humor and cool edginess in its graphics and – wonder of wonders! – not turn off the American beer drinker. This radical concept landed on the emerging American craft beer community like yeast on honey-water…and it’s still blooming today.

As we ease into the 40th (ish) year of US craft brewing, beer has blown up in a way that wine never did. Wine’s growth has been explosive, at times, but for a sustained “BOOM!” heard around the world, the last decade of beer has been without equal.

BUT…as my own daily immersion in both cultures reached Critical Mass, the past fourteen years, I’ve found myself increasingly engrossed in beer – the brewing of it, the hyper-creativity, the packaging, the marketing, the whole milieu, in fact, that has become this wonderful, free-wheeling adult theme park where decidedly-mortal Average Joes can, if they are dedicated and studious enough, achieve at fairly high levels. You can easily set up a brewery in your rec room and, in fact, many, MANY great brewers started just that way. To make wine, you have to start with a lot more investment, lots more room, and grapes of the sort which you cannot just pick up at the supermarket. In most cases, you don’t even try that. You hang around wineries, being omnipresent, pitching in, maybe working as a cellar rat, until you either get bored or catch on as an assistant. And the Big Move to your own winery involves Serious Jack.

To do both, also, there’s a fair bit of technology involved…if you expect to drink the stuff, instead of just using it to get drunk. Wine and beer can both be made crudely and in micro-batches. Heck, the ancient Sumerians, Egyptians, and Etruscans did it and they had NO technology to speak of, unless we’re reopening that whole “aliens built the pyramids” debate. (Which we are NOT.) The technology of brewing is a lot more compact and micro-friendly than that for wine. And, even if you do have the space and technology to make small quantities of wine, that’s no guarantee of success, at all. Most winemakers will tell you that wines are made in the vineyard; that you will never make great wine from average grapes. If you’re making wine at home, unless you know somebody with a vineyard (and maybe not even then), you ain’t gettin’ the great grapes. I’m neither a veteran brewer nor a winemaker in making these observations but to me, the element of personal creativity is FAR greater in brewing than it is – or than we have allowed it to be! – in winemaking.

And I think that could change without the earth tilting off its axis.

It’s inarguable that one of the world’s truly great ales is Deschutes “The Abyss”. If you read The Pour Fool, you’ll have discovered that it is my favorite beverage of any type – yes, even beyond the greatest wines, the 100 Point critical darlings that I’ve tasted over the past 40 years. I’ve now heard the comment, “I don’t see how anyone could possibly compare The Abyss with a bottle of 2005 Quilceda Creek Cabernet“, about 200 times and it’s been aimed in both directions: beer geeks baffled at how anyone could consider a bottle of grape juice greater than one of the world’s great Stouts, and wine weenies puzzled and not a little offended as to how I, a supposedly wine-savvy adult, could possibly find anything as momentous and profound in some bottle of suds as in a near-perfect Cabernet.

Well…that little conundrum lies at the heart of this post.

In wine, it’s cheating if you do virtually anything to deliberately manipulate the result you’re going to get from the grapes and their juice that God gave you, straight out of the vineyard. Certain minor adjustments are begrudged but generally excused: you can choose wood or stainless steel (or, if you’re a little kinky, concrete) for your fermentation. You can vary fermentation times and temperatures. You can filter a lot, a little, or not at all. You can vary aging times wildly; all the way from almost none to, in  the case of the Spanish colossus, Vega Sicilia, thirteen years. You can destem your grapes, for softer tannins and more easy youthful drinkability. You can age in different types of barrels – woods from, different regions and made by different methods usually taste distinctly different in the finished wine – and you can choose brand new, unused wood, which imparts a huge, lush vanilla and wood flavor, as well as velvety mouthfeel, or barrels used to varying degrees, which show less of the vanilla and texture as they build up residue. You can bring a well-used – what’s referred to as “neutral” – barrel back a bit by shaving it and removing the grain permeated with old wine. And you can continue to use it as is, which can still give the wine a silky feel without all the vanilla cream. Barrels can also be toasted, which will contribute a lovely smokiness to the wine.

Certain other “corrections” are severely frowned upon but, to a point, tolerated. Wines which are made with grapes that don’t develop a sufficient sugar level are sometimes treated by a process called “chaptalization” the addition of sugar to allow the yeasts to develop proper alcohol levels. For many, many wine purists, chaptalization is cheating and woe unto the winemaker who gets caught at it. Not that any of them are going to refuse to do it, if needed, because wine is a business and there is far more disaster involved from having a whole vintage that’s undrinkable than in facing the withering scorn of some wine geeks.

There may be a few other discreet tricks available to the savvy winemaker but those are the biggies and they all have one thing – one earthshakingly important, unspeakable Thing – in common:

They don’t involve adding any intentional flavorings to the wine. Which is not so much Frowned Upon and it is Punishable By Death.

Which brings us back to The Abyss.

The theory behind The Abyss is almost absurdly simple and quintessentially American: More is Better. The Deschutes brewers took the flavors that naturally occur in the making of a great Imperial Stout and decided to simply and selectively amplify them. Chocolate malts and Black Patent malts show big, generous flavors of coffee, chocolate, molasses, figs, smoke, licorice, and various other roasted notes. In The Abyss and in their annual adventure in Fixing What Ain’t Broken, the series of Black Butte Annversary Editions, the folks at Deschutes tinker wildly with a recipe that most brewers would simply labor to just reproduce. In just the ten years that I’ve been reviewing it, The Abyss has been infused with chocolate nibs, cherry bark, candied black licorice, vanilla beans, and a virtual conga line of different barrels, including Bourbon, Canadian Whiskey, Pinot Noir, new Oregon oak, and God Knows what else that they don’t own up to.

In short, The Abyss is a concoction that would cause any wine purist to seize up in an apoplectic fit and carom off their antique chifferobe like a pudgy pinball.

The Abyss is composed, not arrived at naturally or in some “non-interventionist” way. It is not the gift of a benevolent Mother Nature and set apart from the sordid machinations of mere mortals. The Abyss celebrates its creators’ artistic impulses. Its “natural” flavors of coffee and chocolate and molasses, etc., are turbo-charged like a fine engine and arranged like a Mozart symphony. It’s deliberate, where wine is far more providential. Wine would be the equivalent, to extend the metaphor, of gathering an orchestra of the best players you can find and just yelling, “Play!”, giving them a sketch, a suggestion of a score and giving all the direction in finger gestures. But in brewing, the orchestra may be given some whoopie cushions, kazoos, bongos, and a wash tub to play also, and encouraged to improvise. Adding stuff and playing with the liquid is just part of the task; a matter of judgment and experimentation and not only allowed but encouraged. In wine…it’s heresy.

WHY, for the love of God, can winemakers not experiment with their products? Oh, they can, of course. Any American winemaker is free to dump any of the hundreds of wine additives – all bought on the deep Down-Low and sneaked into wineries like bondage-porn videos – that are available or to use berries, chocolate, herbs, Seahawks jerseys, auto parts, or the scent glands of the Eurasian minx if they like…as long as they understand that, if ONE person finds out about it, their wine will go instantly and permanently to the bottom shelf of every shop, grocery store, 7-11, or reservation smoke shop. Wine critics will either ignore it altogether, trash it, or, maybe worst of all, damn it with some sort of left-handed faint praise – at very best. And that segment of the wine-buying public which prides itself on “the integrity of the Art of Wine“, will not only not buy it but exert immense peer-group pressure to the task of killing it.  Adding things to wine is cheating, sonny, and you can do it but you will…pay…the…price!

What would be the problem with creating a new category of wines that are deliberately and overtly augmented, enhanced, refined? Pick your own term. Could we not enjoy a big Walla Walla Cabernet which, in the winemaker’s opinion, would not have worked as he or she intended if left as-is but would be elevated to acceptability with the judicious and artful addition of natural elements which serve to expand the emphasis on some of the wine’s inherent flavors? What if they added  fresh blackberries or black currants or Bing cherries or plums or chocolate nibs or coffee beans …and simply said so?

I already know what the wine purists are going to say and they are no more capable of not saying it than they are of stooping to drink an Aussie Shiraz: “But then, you’re not talking about wine! If you do that, you lose what makes wine enjoyable: the purity of the process, the gifts of nature, the balance of the elements, the glorious history of winemaking! Ask yourself, ‘What Would the French Jesus Do‘?” (Okay, I made up that last thing.)

For the 85% of all wine drinkers in this country – you know, the inconvenient faction whose existence is the thorn in the side of every “serious” wine weenie (and who are routinely ridiculed by same) but whose dollars do, in fact, fund 90% of those wines which are anointed by those same weenies –  would these wines deserve to be ghettoized to the Bottom Shelf or could they not just sit among the “real wines” with maybe an identifying note on the label but, otherwise, without comment?

They still have to taste good; that requirement never changes. Wine purists can pontificate all they like about “terroir over fruit” or “this American preoccupation with soft wines” but I’ve now held and/or participated in better than twenty tastings, over the years, in which those very purists were faced with unmarked bottles and wound up showing a clear affinity for those which showed great fruit and compulsive drinkability. In one memorable tasting of Bordeaux, nine bottles sat on the tasting bar and bottle # Eight was gone about 25 minutes before everything else. Lofty discussions of Left Bank vs. Right Bank, terroir, restraint, and nuance raged like wildfires. When the bags were take off, eight wonderful Bordeaux were revealed…along with one ringer: Bottle #8…Shafer Napa Cabernet.

We’ll all tacitly admit – even me – that other elements besides fruit drive the flavor of wine. Terroir, for me, is a vital enhancement to the profile of any wine. I want those mineral, loam, soil, groundwater, and ambient plant notes. I want complexity and those are irreplaceable parts of it. But I can also appreciate a wine just for its magnificent fruit. If wine is not, at least to a great degree, about fruit, let’s all just drink stone-vat-fermented mead and be done with it.

I would MUCH rather taste and evaluate wines which have been augmented with crafty and careful additions of natural items which illuminate their native flavors than to wade with dogged determination through that vast yearly ocean – sometimes as 60% of the 2,000+ wines I sample – which have little or nothing going on. Instead of the artsy rationalizations and suggestive tasting notes offered by many wineries, why not just fix what the winemaker finds lacking? Why not just accept that, just maybe, crafting a wine in a manner similar to what every brewer in the US does with every beer, every day, could be to the betterment of the wine trade as a whole? I’ve heard this a million times: “Mother Nature is fickle partner.” Do we all – especially winemakers, whose very livelihood hinges on Her every whim – have to be at the quirky mercies of random Fate? There are a TON of wineries which are on such shaky financial footing that one bad vintage could just shutter the place and send the investors to the showers. Do we completely ignore commerce for the sake of Art and Tradition when a simple remedy is at hand?

If we have to invent a new name for wines like these, just so the purists – who WILL still whine and bitch about their very existence – can have a convenient waste bin in which to toss them, fine. Maybe something as simple as “EWines”  (since it’s all the rage, these days) – “E” for “Enhanced“? I guarantee that The 85%, who just want to pour into their pieholes something which tastes great and isn’t cripplingly expensive, would care about it for maybe a week and then it would be Old News. They’d drink the things because they taste good and offer great value. And – oh, yeah – winemakers could actually label barrels of wine that they now try to sell off as bulk, move to negociants, or simply wind up dumping. Instead of valiantly trying to explain away their wine’s shortcomings, they could simply pour a glass, stand back, and work the cash register.

Most shocking of all, this could all introduce layers upon layers of FUN at wineries everywhere. People who make wine, especially these days, are also (usually) a product of their times. Guys like Trey Busch and Charles Smith and Rich Funk have demonstrated that Fun can enter into the image-conscious world of wine and actually work. Every time I read the words, “Punk Rock Wines for Punk Rock Minds“, I want to hug Trey Busch. (Not enough to actually do it, of course). It is no longer a prerequisite of owning a winery or making wine that you have a pole lodged up your posterior.

If we could all just unclench a bit, maybe – just maybe – we could find a whole new world of wines that are carefully-crafted, realize their innate potential, and are fun to drink!

But I think the chances are very remote.

And I expect to be deleteting a LOT of email….