Q: Is alcohol better controlled in the vineyard (more difficult to do), rather than in the winery? Clark: Better by what standard? It's useful to start by defining yourself, what you believe and what you want from wine. Check out
Natural Wine: Choosing Your Priorities and for a discussion of rising alcohol I attached a file called Cycle Two Bagwan which shows the interrelationships affecting grape maturity. This is plenty enough to worry about without sweating alcohol content, which needs to be perfectly balanced (see the attachment "Alcohol Sweet Spots", which shows the non-linear nature of wine balance. Think of winemaking as a form of cooking. Is it better if the chef doesn't salt the soup?
[Moderator: the attachments will only show if you are logged into your account, so please register to download them.]Q: California's High Alcohol Wines - is this an increasing trend, and is that what we want?Clark: I have done so quite exhaustively in
Some Like It Hot. In the end, I think it's a red herring, mostly to do with us New Worlders finding our niche. We are now emerging from a pendulum swing in which many producers went overboard on alcohol, but we are well past that in most appellations now. The real problem is excessive maturity, which is almost unrelated to brix/alcohol. I don't think winemakers have yet learned the lessons of proper tannin structure and graceful longevity. That's largely because the buying public mostly doesn't give a damn about ageing. But those that do, especially at the high end, can influence the market if they can learn to scope out blousey wines of low integrity which may be crowd pleasers in youth but won't deliver in the cellar.
Q: Brett - How do you know if a wine has Brett versus a wine that just tastes bad?Clark: Bad is bad. If you hate a wine, it's bad for you. Why care why? The point of such a question is - will it get better or worse? Excessive Brett problems, like excessive veg and excessive oak, are not so much a artifact of too much of that flavor, but mostly failures of structure, because a good tannin structure will integrate these aromas into the wine so they become positives. I tell you right noe that my $100 Cabernet "Crucible" has 1760 ppm of 4-ethyl-phenol, the Brett indicator. That's about five times the published threshold. But the wine smells like blackberries because the dense tannin structure is perfect.
Q: Brett how can you control it? Some say to avoid barrels all together and use stainless steel, but why would you want to use stainless steel for the storage of red wines?Clark: Like in Western medicine, most winemakers want to kill the cause. This has never worked in vineyards, and Total Control has given way to IPM (Integrated Pest Management) where an ecological balance is fostered in the vineyard. We talk about a three-legged stool for IBM (Integrated Brett Management). First, deliver a healthy must through balanced vines which produce micronutrients for a complete fermentation so you end up with a nutrient desert. Second, create a fine structure which can integrate aromas. Third, allow microbial equilibrium in the cellar, by fostering other microbes to live in competitive balance with Brett, allowing it to play itself out prior to bottling. Brett is a hospital disease which only takes over when we employ draconian procedures in the cellar.
Q: Are you trying to manipulate your wine to taste like you want it to taste, or are you trying to reflect more terroir?Clark: It's the same thing. Wine is a branch of cooking. All good chefs manipulate food with cuisinarts, food mills, skillets, and even high tech stuff like vacuum, liquid nitrogen and puff technology to render food delicious. Even something totally raw and pure like sushi requires tremendous technology. Wine is the most manipulated of foods - it's a long way from grapes to what's in that glass. But our prime directive is always to show off the natural, distinctive flavors of place. When we fail, it's usually because consumers want something that doesn't taste like the place. Read
That Ain't No Termato - That's My Wine to see how this interplay can work. But the vast majority of wineries are bent on distinctive terroir expression. But in truth, they are in big trouble because consumers actually don't support regional distinctiveness very much. Changing that is my current crusade.
In any case, it's not technology that's at fault. It's the consumer. Think of folk music. It dominated the Sixties, but isn't even listed on the Billboard charts now. Lots of people like folk music, but there wasn't until recently a way for them to tap into new artists. Pandora.com has solved that. I'm engaged in articulating the profiles for our wines to enable the same kind of connection in wine. For more discussion on this topic, check out
Spoofulated or Artisanal?Q: I've read your comments about how so many winemakers are heading down the wrong path by over-manipulating wine. For any aspiring new winemakers, what are some of the pitfalls to avoid and what are some good practices to follow?Clark: Boy, I like this question, but the answers are very personal to your beliefs and intentions. If I had to give general advice:
1. More weeds. Less control, more stewardship in the vineyard. Healthy earthworm population. Screw the bank - weeds are good things. Less leaves to pull.
2. Excessive hangtime may bring out expression early, but you get a brilliant flash and a beautiful corpse. Brix and maturity are unrelated - learn to taste the grapes.
3. Proper maturity leads to reductive problems in the cellar. Sulfides are marks of quality, not defects. to anticipate and resolve these artifacts of life energy in the cellar instead of in the vineyard.
4. Brett is a hospital disease. Practice IBM (see above).
5. Try to work out a program that avoids copper addition, DAP and sterile filtration.
6. Above all, respect distinctive terroir expression. This requires artisanal skill. The better you get, the sooner you'll act and the less intervention is needed. It's a life's work to get it right.
Q: How much manipulation is too much, a little may be good, a lot is not necessarily better?Clark: I'm sorry - I think this is just a silly question. I don't even know what it means. It's like you're asking "Is too much skill a bad thing? Is less skill better?" All winemaking is manipulation. Everything we do in a winery today is based on petroleum agriculture, electricity, refrigeration, stainless steel, all kinds of plastic membranes, etc.. Is anyone out there willing or even interested in cooking their dinner on a wood fire in the dark? There is a very good parsing of this question in Jamie Goode's book
"The Science of Wine" right in the middle of the book.
But even before the 20th Century, wine was always the most manipulated of foods. So I assume that manipulation refer not to traditional winemaking practices, nor to the standard conventional Post WWII suite of technologies - electricity, stainless steel, refrigeration, inert gas, and sterile bottling - but to the recent bogeymen, reverse osmosis and micro-oxygenation chief among them, which the press has done such a lousy job of explaining to people. For Pete's sake, an RO is just the water filter in that big vending machine at Safeway, and microox is just controlled exposure to air, the key to transforming cocoa powder into chocolate.
The focus of the discussion about wine technology is not about whether the techniques work, but will we go to hell if we use them. What that really means is, in an age when our consumers are extremely poorly educated and need everything reduced to simple soundbytes, can we explain complex issues to them, or should we just lay low and make a lot of very good wine?
I believe this question arises from anger at winemakers for lying to the public for twenty years. You don't trust us. Why this happened I have written about in
Spoofulated or Artisanal? Yes, we lied to you. We had good reasons. You wouldn't have understood, etc.. But you outed us, and now we're sorry, but the paparazzi is still firing live ammo over our heads, so we're going to keep lying to you until they stop. It's like a bad marriage. All except ME (I don't have much choice but to just be straight with you) and a small band of heroes like Randy Dunn and Michael Havens. I gotta tell you, telling the truth to a bunch of pissed off people ain't exactly fun.
Let's come back to Earth. What do you want out of wine? If you want perfect balance, easy-to-like wines, more freedom for the winemaker is good. This is almost everybody. If you want really distinctive wines, then go with the single vineyard minimalists - there are plenty of them and they are ALL starving to death. Don't push this agenda if you are not willing to buy buy buy these wines and tell your friends. You can start with my
Faux Chablis. I addressed this dilemma in my recent article about
Santa Cruz Mountain Chardonnays. These are very concentrated wines, and many critics diss them because of their power. They are almost entirely single vineyard blends with a great sense of place, and widely criticized for being so far from the mainstream. Tough to get a cult following going these days, unless you're Parker. The blends of multiple vineyards are better starter wines, because the winemakers have greater freedom to create a halfway pleasant balance.
In the end, each person has to decide how edgy they like it. The issue of wine manipulation offers absolutely no sort of handle on this. Thus the discussion seems to me a huge waste of time.
A question of my own: Can someone explain to me why this question about wine manipulation keeps coming up? Are you just deeply hurt that we are constantly lying to you, or does process actually matter? That is, do you actually care whether your wines are made under electric lights, refrigeration, reverse osmosis, micro-whoopie-genation and polypreposteration? Is it the big words that are the problem?
If I seem angry here, you might realize that I represent thousands of winemakers who have devoted their lives to making you happy, make almost no money for it, and for the most part are doing a damned fine job. Just what the hell are you complaining about?
I really want to know whether those of you who ask these sorts of questions are speaking from your own experience or from reading the militant moron press. If it is the former, which I respect, please write to me about specific wine examples. Then we can talk.
Q: DAP I understand GrapeCraft discourages its use. What is the alternative if one experiences a stuck fermentation?Clark: DAP is useless if one experiences a stuck fermentation. It's a preventative. If you are delivered an unbalanced must, you should take action. But the first thing to do is figure out for next year why you screwed up and allowed this to happen. The real solution is in the vineyard in the Spring and before. Using DAP, which is simply inorganic fertilizer, encourages Brett because it creates a vigorous fermentation which fails to consume micronutrients, leaving many goodies behind for Brett, and short-circuiting microbial equilibrium strategies. It's not verboten, just an undesireable compromise. The point is, there are consequences.
