The Wine Savant: A Guide to the New Wine Culture Read online

  Steiner’s theory of agricultural management was an odd amalgam of the autarkic and the universal (the cosmic, really). He proposed that each farm essentially be walled off from the rest of the world—that it be operated as an entirely self-sustaining entity, devoid of outside influences of any kind. This would require, among other things, using homemade fertilizers and pesticides, and Steiner instructed farmers to employ a specific array of homeopathic preparations, which he numbered 500 through 508. Preparation 500, for instance, was meant to promote healthy soil and involved filling a cow’s horn with cow manure, burying it in the field in the autumn, and exhuming it in the spring. Preparation 506, a compost, required placing dandelion flowers in the stomach lining of a cow; this was to be planted in the earth during the winter months and dug up in the spring. For rodent control, Steiner turned to the skies: he prescribed catching a young field mouse, skinning it, burning the skin, and spreading the ashes across the field when the planet Venus occults the Scorpio constellation. He also instructed the farmers to plant their crops and harvest them according to planetary alignments. He claimed that the position of the moon and the other planets had a clear, demonstrable impact on all phases of a plant’s development and that only by getting in sync with the rhythms of the solar system could the farmers restore their farms to health and improve the quality of their crops.

  In 1981, Nicolas Joly, a young winemaker in the Loire, found a book about biodynamics at a secondhand store and took it with him on a skiing holiday. Entranced, he reread the book several times before returning home. Joly had recently taken over his family’s winery, Clos de la Coulée de Serrant, a legendary domaine set on the Loire River a few minutes outside the town of Angers. Coulée de Serrant is part of the Savennières appellation and produces a wine by that name, made from the Chenin Blanc grape. Coulée de Serrant’s Savennières was once among the most esteemed French wines; the celebrated food writer Curnonsky famously declared it to be one of the five great white wines of France. Although the wines of Savennières had since fallen out of fashion, eclipsed in popularity by more opulent Chardonnay-based wines, Coulée de Serrant remained one of the most recognized names in French viticulture.

  Joly stumbled upon the book at a time when he was experiencing a crisis in the vineyard. He had been using chemical treatments for several years, and like Steiner’s Silesian farmers, he had watched as the quality of his soil and of his wines steadily eroded. To discover at that moment a book that perfectly described the problems he faced and a method of farming custom-designed to combat those problems was fortuitous beyond words. But for Joly, the biodynamic approach wasn’t attractive simply because it promised to restore his vines to health; he also found its philosophical underpinnings appealing. Joly had just left a career as an investment banker (he holds an MBA from Columbia and worked for several years in New York) to take over Coulée de Serrant. But familial duty was not the only thing that brought him back to the Loire: he had grown disillusioned with finance and numbers and conventional modes of thinking and living. He was open to new ways of looking at the world, and he found in Steiner and biodynamics a tonic not just for his vineyard but for his soul.

  Joly fully converted Coulée de Serrant to biodynamism in 1984. Today he is its most outspoken and militant advocate within the wine world. His book, Wine from Sky to Earth, a combination how-to guide and philosophic meditation, is considered the ur-text of biodynamic viticulture (in the dedication, Joly credits Steiner’s writings with giving “profound meaning to my life”). He organizes large tastings of biodynamic wines in cities around the world and uses these events as a chance to preach to the converted and proselytize to the uninitiated. His style is unfailingly charmless and hectoring. An evangelical and missionary, he believes that biodynamism offers the only path to good wine. He also contends that the world is on the brink of environmental apocalypse and that embracing biodynamic viticulture is no longer merely a choice; it is a moral imperative (“We have reached the time when nature will implement its law on earth”).

  Ironically, while the biodynamic approach appears to be yielding better wines almost everywhere that it is applied, it seems to have taken Coulée de Serrant in reverse. In fact, it is widely agreed that under Joly’s management, Coulée de Serrant’s Savennières has become a stinker. That has been my experience: I have consistently found Joly’s wines to be ungenerous oddballs, emitting off-putting aromas and flavors. For Joly, the result seems to be a secondary concern; what apparently matters most is the process. “Before it can be good,” he has said, “a wine must be true.” Likewise, his book includes this nugget: “A biodynamic wine is not necessarily ‘good,’ but it is always authentic.”

  Joly, with his fire-and-brimstone style, is a fat target for biodynamics skeptics, of which there are many. A lot of people regard the method as New Age hooey. Stu Smith of California’s Smith-Madrone winery, which makes some of the best wines you have probably never heard of, thinks that Steiner was a kook and that the biodynamic method is “a hoax” that ought to be accorded “the same level of respect we give witchcraft.” He has even set up a website called biodynamicsisahoax.com. In an article for the magazine World of Fine Wine, Douglass Smith and Jesús Barquín (the former a New York investor and wine collector with a doctorate in the history of science, the latter a Spanish wine expert and professor of criminology) dismissed the biodynamic approach as “a vista of starry eyes and good intentions mixed with quasi-religious hocus-pocus, good salesmanship, and plain scientific illiteracy.” They pointed out that there is no evidence that biodynamics yields healthier soils and grapes than regular organic viticulture and suggested that its positive effects are almost surely attributable to the standard organic practices it employs (no chemical fertilizers or pesticides are used). Indeed, they said, the few credible studies that have been done comparing the effects of biodynamics and organic viticulture on soil and grapes found no statistically significant differences between the two approaches. They ridiculed Steiner’s eight preparations as “viticultural voodoo” and savaged the cosmological aspects of biodynamics as “pseudoscience.” In their judgment, biodynamics was nothing more than faith-based farming.

  The faith-based aspect is undeniable. Like many faiths, biodynamics even has a schism. The main biodynamic organization, Demeter International, which was founded in 1928, certifies all types of biodynamic farms. Several years ago, a handful of French biodynamic winemakers, frustrated by Demeter’s global mandate and what they viewed as its lax standards, formed a breakaway group called Biodivin, which certifies only biodynamic wineries. The U.S. arm of Demeter responded by trademarking the name Biodynamic, thus preventing American wineries from using the word biodynamic on their labels unless authorized to do so by Demeter.

  So what to make of biodynamics? Even if some of it amounts to quackery, it yields seriously good wines, and the fact that it has won the adherence of some of the foremost producers on the planet speaks to the quality of the results. Not all biodynamic wines are good—just look at Coulée de Serrant. But the good ones, and there are many of them, are not only delicious; they display a vigor that you don’t typically find in wines made from conventionally farmed grapes. There is an almost feral intensity about them, an untamed aspect that makes them seem somehow closer to the vine, closer to the vineyard. Like Stu Smith and other biodynamic bashers, I’m skeptical of Steiner and can’t help but roll my eyes at the preparations that he prescribed. I suspect that the real secret behind the success of biodynamics is that it encourages—requires, really—winemakers to take fanatical care of their vineyards. By eschewing the use of all chemicals and painstakingly nurturing their vines and the soils beneath them, biodynamic producers are able to obtain great fruit (assuming the weather cooperates), which translates into fantastic wines assuming they show a reasonably deft hand in the cellar. I’m not sold on the particulars of biodynamics, but the quality of the wines has made a believer of me.

  NATURAL WINES

  Among oenophiles of
all persuasions—those who enjoy fruit bombs, those who prefer less percussive wines—it is an article of faith that winemaking is best done with a light touch. We grape nuts never tire of pointing out that wine is foremost an agricultural product, and wine nomenclature, with its surfeit of pastoral imagery, underscores this essential fact. It is considered axiomatic that the best wines are those that bear the fewest fingerprints and that most clearly reflect the particular attributes of their vineyards—that offer the least adulterated expressions of sun, soil, and vine possible. In recent decades, however, science has given vintners an array of tools that can be used to change the fundamental character of a wine, altering its color, structure, texture, and taste. Inferior land, bad weather, and shoddy farming are no longer necessarily impediments to producing appealing wines; using technology, winemakers can now override the will of nature and perform all kinds of nips and tucks on their Cabernets and Syrahs.

  The natural wine movement began as a backlash against this kind of manipulation. The idea was to defend authenticity and artisanship against industrial winemaking and bland homogeneity. Although using the word natural in reference to food or drink is normally taken to be an implicit claim of wholesomeness, health concerns have never factored prominently in the natural-wine canon, nor could they. That’s because there is no evidence that “unnatural” practices—using additives such as powdered tannins, for instance, or oak chips—are harmful to consumers. They won’t rot your innards, cause your teeth to fall out, or reduce your sperm count. The argument against them is simply that they represent a form of cheating and yield less authentic wines.

  But it is one thing to want wines to be made as naturally as possible; it is quite another to anoint certain wines as “natural,” and this is where the natural-wine movement runs into a wall of tannins. For one thing, a truly natural wine goes by another name: it is called vinegar. If you don’t add sulfur dioxide, which acts as an antioxidant and preservative, during the vinification process, the wine will very likely spoil and become vinegar (more on sulfur in a moment). So what then do natural-wine proponents really mean when they talk about “natural” wines? That’s not entirely clear. In contrast to biodynamic wines, for which there are certification programs that require adherence to prescribed farming practices, natural wines have no official classification, no sanctioning body that decrees whether a wine qualifies.

  In broadest terms, “natural” wines are described as those that have been made with minimal involvement by the vintner. As with organic and biodynamic wines, the grapes must come from vineyards that have not been treated with synthetic chemicals; what sets natural wines apart is that the same hands-off approach is supposed to be carried into the cellar. The winemaker performs only those tasks that require midwifery, such as crushing the fruit. Apart from that, the wines are left to birth themselves; “nothing added, nothing taken away” is the popular catchphrase. This means relying on ambient yeasts—those floating around the cellar and vineyard—rather than commercial ones, eschewing high-tech toys such as spinning cones and reverse osmosis machines, and neither acidifying wines nor otherwise tinkering with their composition.

  But when you move beyond these general guidelines, the natural-wine idea devolves into a conceptual free-for-all. Take, for instance, the issue of sulfur dioxide. Some naturalistas insist that sulfur should never be added, vinegar be damned; others say it is permissible but only in small amounts (some cap it at 10 milligrams per liter total SO2, others say up to 20, but many refuse to put a number on it). Then there is chaptalization, the process of adding sugar before or during fermentation in order to boost a wine’s alcohol content. Hardliners consider it verboten, but others, no doubt mindful of the long tradition of chaptalization in natural-wine strongholds like France’s Beaujolais region, are more flexible.

  There even appears to be wiggle room on the all-important yeast question. Strict constructionists assert that manufactured yeasts aren’t allowed under any circumstances; use them and you forfeit the right to call yours a natural wine. But other people say that you can employ them if it’s the only way to finish fermenting a wine. Some natural-wine evangelists contend that beyond certain inviolable principles—not using poisons in the vineyard, for instance—intent matters as much as actions; if a vintner is making a good-faith effort to be natural, that’s good enough.

  I’d be more inclined to take this movement seriously if the wines were unequivocally superior, but that’s not the case. Some of them are great. The late Marcel Lapierre’s Morgon, a cru Beaujolais that was widely regarded as a beacon of naturalness, was consistently ethereal—in fact, I can’t think of a wine that made me happier. The wines imported by New York–based Louis/Dressner are likewise considered paragons of minimalism and are usually delicious. However, plenty of mediocre wines are also parading under the natural banner, and a lot of hideously bad ones are, too—oxidized, microbial messes that only a vintner’s mother, or an ideologue who values means over ends, could possibly love.

  And here’s a related point: nonintervention can often be more detrimental to terroir expression and authenticity than intervention. If, for instance, a vintner chooses not to add sulfur to his wine and the wine oxidizes or is otherwise flawed, he has actually throttled the voice of the vineyard. Oxidation is not an expression of terroir; it is inimical to the expression of it (a point that Paul Draper, arguably America’s finest winemaker and a longtime practitioner of minimal intervention, has made). If the goal of “natural” wines is to produce wines that taste true to their origins, then eschewing the use of sulfur makes no sense; if the result is an oxidized wine, it is a wine that reflects the cellar practices of the winemaker more than the particular attributes of the vineyard from which it came.

  Given the growing influence of science and technology over wine, a backlash was inevitable, and for now the backlash has taken the form of the natural-wine movement. Natural advocates are driven in part by a romanticized view of the past: that if only we could go back to the way that wines used to be made, our palates would be so much better off. But this is mythologizing on an epic scale. Forget ancient wines and just focus on the more recent past. Fifty years ago, a lot of wines were quite literally dirty—they were made in filthy cellars and were often riddled with flaws. Why did new oak barrels became fashionable in Bordeaux in the 1960s and ’70s? Because the great consulting oenologist Émile Peynaud pointed out that the use of dirty old barrels teeming with bacteria had fatally compromised many wines, and he managed to persuade winemakers to start using cleaner wood and otherwise to improve the hygiene in their cellars. Sure, the new oak thing has gone too far, but the use of sanitary wood vessels for aging wines helped raise the quality not only in Bordeaux but throughout the wine world. These days clean, stable wines are the norm, and that is a significant and wholly salutary change from fifty or a hundred years ago.

  That said, I’m all in favor of experimentation, and if the natural-wine movement encourages people to give more thought to how they vinify their grapes, that’s a good thing. I can also say that I share the same general outlook as natural-wine proponents. I don’t want wines doctored up by machines and chemical additives in order to invest them with qualities they would otherwise lack, even if those artificial influences aren’t necessarily obvious to my palate. But for the same reason that I prefer clean sports stars to those who are bulked up on steroids, I want wines that come by their attributes as naturally as possible. I’ll take Hank Aaron wines over Barry Bonds wines any day.

  But I think “natural” advocates ought to ditch the “natural” label, which is hopelessly tendentious and polarizing, and instead put the focus where it really belongs, on individual wines and winemakers. Call them good wines, call them distinctive, soulful, or funky wines—just don’t call them natural wines.

  5

  Food and Wine,

  or Is It Food versus Wine?

  HERE IS ONE of the great wine ironies of our time: never have sommeliers been more prominent than
they are today, and never have food and wine pairings mattered less. In case you haven’t noticed, sommeliers have become the cool kids of the wine world; they are widely seen as the guys (and gals) with the best jobs in wine and the most glamorous lives. They are being celebrated in both print and film, are often as big an attraction at restaurants as the chefs (or bigger ones), and have become genuine tastemakers, too. If sommeliers get behind a particular grape or style of wine, it inevitably becomes the new “it” wine among avant-garde oenophiles. And yet all this sommelier worship comes at a time when the most basic function of sommeliers—to help diners find the right wine to match with the food they’ve ordered—is not nearly as important as it used to be. In part that’s because of the kinds of foods we are eating these days and how those dishes are being served. It also speaks to the very self-confident wine culture that has taken root in the United States. Many people have no trouble navigating wine lists and thus have little need for advice from sommeliers.

  Given the way celebrity has infected American food culture, turning chefs into television stars and cultural icons, it was probably inevitable that something similar would happen in wine. But it is curious that the spotlight has fallen on sommeliers. Without in any way intending to slight sommeliers—some of my best friends in the wine business are sommeliers—their job is not, on its face, particularly glamorous; they are wine waiters. And yet the fickle gaze of celebrity has now fallen on them, a point underscored rather dramatically by a recent documentary entitled Somm, which follows several sommeliers as they take the notoriously challenging Master Sommelier exam. Not only did Somm get screened at the 2013 Santa Barbara International Film Festival; immediately thereafter, Samuel Goldwyn Films acquired North American rights to it. And with that, the celebrity sommelier phenomenon reached the ultimate destination, Hollywood.