[This information is almost 25 years old, but it’s very interesting. Edited for space.]
While sleuthing out the parentage of some of France’s finest wine-grape varieties, researchers at the University of California, Davis, discovered that somewhere in the distant viticultural past, royalty mingled with a commoner.
It came as little surprise when DNA fingerprinting techniques revealed that 16 venerable wine-grape varieties, including Chardonnay, Aligoté, and Gamay Noir, are the direct offspring of the classic Pinot Noir. But even the researchers were surprised to find that the obscure Gouais (goo-WAY) Blanc, a variety considered so mediocre that it is no longer planted in France, is the other half of the parental pair.
UC Davis professor Carole Meredith, an authority on genetic manipulation and analysis of grapevines, and John Bowers, a genetics doctoral candidate at the time the research was conducted, reported their findings in the journal Science.
“Not only is this finding historically intriguing, but it also has very practical significance both for preserving old and developing new grapevine varieties,” Meredith said. “We now know that you can conserve the entire gene pool of these 16 classic varieties just by keeping the Pinot Noir and Gouais Blanc varieties,” she explained. “And we’re reminded of the importance of crossing genetically diverse varieties to produce hardy offspring.”
Carol Meredith and her research group have been working for several years on genetically characterizing grape varieties so that California grape growers and vintners can be certain of which varieties they have. While studying major wine-grape varieties maintained in the UC Davis vineyards, they famously discovered that the highly esteemed Cabernet Sauvignon wine grape is the offspring of the much older Cabernet Franc and Sauvignon Blanc varieties.
Expanding on that work, the researchers enlisted the collaboration of French colleagues Jean-Michel Boursiquot and Patrice This. After reviewing the historical French literature on wine grapes and taking into account previous speculation on variety origins, they chose 300 varieties from among the more than 2,000 maintained in a collection near Montpellier, France, by the Institut National de la Recherche Agronomique.
In France, John Bowers took leaf samples from the 300 varieties, extracted DNA, and returned to UC Davis where he used DNA fingerprinting to generate a DNA profile for each variety.
Grapevine varieties had previously been identified by the physical features of their leaves and fruit, but those traits vary with environmental conditions. More recently, DNA fingerprinting, which compares patterns in the genetic material of a plant, animal or human, has proven to be a much more accurate way to identify grapevine varieties no matter where they are grown.
Bowers and Meredith first compared all the varieties at 17 distinct DNA sites known as “microsatellite” markers and looked for genetic evidence of close family relationships. Then they chose 60 varieties for more detailed comparisons.
Their analysis of these 60 varieties at 17 additional DNA marker sites revealed that 16 of the varieties were probably the offspring of the same pair of parent varieties -- Pinot Noir and Gouais Blanc. A further statistical test, similar to that used to validate human DNA fingerprinting results, confirmed the very high probability that these two varieties were indeed the parents.
“We are more than 99.99 percent sure that Pinot and Gouais Blanc are the original parents for these 16 varieties,” Meredith said. “There’s less than one chance in a trillion that we’re wrong.”
(Concluded Next Month)
An edited version of an article by Ula Chrobak and Katarina Zimmer in Knowable Magazine, 9/11/22
It's a bit long, but it's very informative and worth the effort!
Warming, wildfires, and unpredictable weather threaten to disrupt the delicate processes that underlie treasured wines, putting the fine distinctions between grapes at risk.
Soon after the devastating Glass Fire sparked in California’s Napa Valley in September 2020, wine chemist Anita Oberholster’s inbox was brimming with hundreds of emails from panicked viticulturists. They wanted to know if they could harvest their grapes without a dreaded effect on their wine: the odious ashtray flavor known as smoke taint. Oberholster, of the University of California, Davis, could only tell them: “Maybe.”
Industry laboratories were slammed with grape samples to test, with wait times of up to six weeks. Growers didn’t know whether it was worth harvesting their crops. Eight percent of California wine grapes in 2020 were left to rot.
Winemakers are no strangers to the vicissitudes wrought by climate change. Warmer temperatures have been a boon to some in cooler regions who are rejoicing over riper berries – but devastating to others. Scorching heat waves, wildfires, and other climate-driven calamities have ruined harvests in Europe, North America, Australia, and elsewhere.
And as 2020 showed, climate change can take its toll on grapes without directly destroying them. Wildfires and warmer temperatures can transform the flavor of wine, whose quality and very identity depends on the delicate chemistry of grapes and the conditions they’re grown in. Climate change may be robbing wines of their defining flavors, even spoiling vintages entirely.
“That’s the big worry,” says Karen MacNeil, a wine expert living in Napa Valley and author of The Wine Bible. “That’s the heartbeat of wine – it’s connected to its place.”
The greatest challenge that climate change brings to winemaking is unpredictability, MacNeil says. Producers used to know which varieties to grow, how to grow them, when to harvest the berries, and how to ferment them to produce a consistent, quality wine. Today, every step is up in the air. Researchers and winemakers are trying to find ways to preserve beloved grape varieties and their unique qualities under the shifting conditions of today’s changing world.
We spoke with experts from Bordeaux and California to understand how climate change is uprooting their traditional vines and wines. We traveled to the University of California, Davis and nearby Napa Valley to speak with scientists, growers, and winemakers. From testing new grape varieties to adapting fermentation, growers and winemakers are finding ways to mitigate climate impacts.
The taste of climate change
Weather extremes can kill vines, but much climate threat is invisible: chemical changes in grapes. That’s because wine quality, at its most granular, boils down to achieving balance between 3 broad aspects of grapes: sugar, acid, and secondary compounds. Sugar builds up in berries as vines photosynthesize, and acid breaks down as the grapes ripen. Secondary compounds, beyond those essential to core metabolism, accumulate over the season. One group, anthocyanins, give red grapes their color and protect the plant against UV rays. Another group, tannins, give wines bitterness and an astringent, drying mouthfeel; to the vines, they offer defense against grazing animals and other pests. [There are also many, many flavor chemicals specific to each grape varietal.]
These three components are affected by numerous environmental factors, including temperatures, soil types, rainfall levels, and fog, all of which are encompassed in the French word “terroir.” Climate – long-term patterns of temperature and precipitation – is the biggest part of terroir.
When a region's climate changes, that can disrupt the balance of sugar, acid, and secondary compounds by changing the rate at which they develop over the growing season, says Megan Bartlett, a plant biologist at UC Davis. Grapes, like most fruit, break down acids and accumulate sugar as they ripen. At warmer temperatures, ripening is supercharged, leading to sweet, raisin-like flavors.
Yeasts consume those sugars during fermentation and excrete alcohol, so fermenting sweeter berries leads to higher wine alcohol content – and, indeed, wines in warm regions such as southern France are growing boozier. That’s an undesirable trend for the region’s consumers, especially since it’s accompanied by a drop in acidity, says Cécile Ha, a spokesperson for the Bordeaux Wine Council. Acidity affords a fresh fruitiness and ensures that wines last for years in the cellar.
In some wines, higher alcohol creates a burning taste and masks subtle aromas, says Carolyn Ross, a food scientist at Washington State University, who cataloged wine aroma compounds in the Annual Review of Food Science and Technology. Boozier wines also tend to taste spicier. And so, as the weather gets hotter, “you’re getting pushed more and more towards that Zinfandel style,” Bartlett says. “Which is great if Zinfandel is what you’re going for. But if you’ve planted Pinot or you’ve planted Cab, you’re no longer really expressing the best version of that variety.”
If the story were simply about sugar and acid, the solution would be relatively simple: harvest grapes earlier, before they turn too sweet and while they still retain their tartness. But growers also want that stew of secondary compounds to build up, because these create the layered aromas key to quality wines. This can force wine producers to choose between harvesting early without fully developed tannins and anthocyanins or harvesting later when berries are loaded with those compounds but are overly sweet as well.
All things being equal, the changes in grapes due to warmer growing temperatures bring out more ripe, even “cooked” flavors in wine. MacNeil puts the progression this way: “an unripe cherry, to an almost-ripe cherry, to a ripe cherry, to cherry juice, to cherries that have been cooked down on a stove as if to make a pie, to dried cherries that are almost like raisins.” For wines from warmer spots, climate change is worrisome because they’re at risk of losing their sense of place as more and more wines become raisiny. (“All raisins taste the same,” says MacNeil.)
Blurring between wines is already affecting the industry, with warmer temperatures, more weather unpredictability, and increased exchanges of growing techniques. Certification of master sommeliers, an already incredibly challenging exam that includes guessing a wine’s variety, year, and region, is now even harder. “There are a lot of people who are older Masters of Wine and master sommeliers who will tell you that if they had to take that exam now, especially the tasting exam, they would never pass it,” MacNeil says.
The flavor of fire
The shifts in wine flavor due to warmer temperatures are subtle in comparison to that other, dreaded climate impact: smoke taint. While a little smokiness imparted from, say, barrel aging, might enhance a wine, smoke taint is a “very characteristic ashtray character at the back of your throat,” as Oberholster describes it, with notes such as “Band-Aid” and “medicinal.”
Compounds called volatile phenols, produced when wood is burned, seep into grapes and accumulate mainly in the skins. The phenols are bound up with sugars into odorless compounds called glycosides – until fermentation, when some of these phenols break free, imparting the distinct, overpowering flavor. (The breakdown continues in barrel, bottle, and mouth.) The taste is most pronounced when the berries are bathed in fresh smoke rather than older smoke.
The experience is “retro-nasal,” meaning the aroma rises into your sinuses once the wine is on your tongue; it’s estimated that 20-25% of people can't taste it, potentially because their saliva lacks enzymes that break bonds to release the smoky notes. It’s primarily a threat to red wines, because reds are fermented with grape skins.
The recent intense wildfires, worsened by climate change, have made Napa growers anxious each year as the autumn grape harvest approaches. Since 2017, heavy smoke has hovered over Napa vineyards most years. Worried grape growers have reached out to Oberholster for guidance, and the chemist has fermented numerous test batches exposed to varying levels of smoke.
On the day that we met with her, Oberholster took us to a 24,000-bottle-capacity library of wine at the UC Davis Robert Mondavi Institute. She tracked down two reds from the stacks, handing us the 2020 vintages. One was a moderately tainted wine from grapes exposed to a week of smoke from the Glass Fire; the other was a heavily tainted wine from grapes that endured smoke from a large complex of lightning-triggered fires that edged right up to the vineyard that year. Later on, we conducted an informal but blind taste test. Compared to a clean Cabernet, the tainted wines have a campfire-like smokiness that some experienced mostly as a smell; others also felt a burn at the back of their throat. “Drinking burnt wood,” was one note of the smokier wine.
Planting more resilient vines
Smoke taint is gross, shrieking its presence even to amateurs like us. But many winemakers are also worried about the subtler ways that climate change threatens the flavor and identity of their products. In readiness, producers and researchers in warmer regions are learning how to adapt their vineyards, winemaking, and the very vines themselves.
In Bordeaux, for example, to identify grape types that are better adapted to warmer climates and still produce wine with Bordeaux flavors, agronomist Agnès Destrac-Irvine of the French National Institute for Agriculture, Food and Environment and her colleagues recently concluded a decade-long study of 52 varieties from other regions.
Working with wine producers, the French National Institute for Agriculture, Food, and Environment settled on four red and two white vine types that fit the bill (better adapted to warmer climates and still produce wine with Bordeaux flavors). And in a remarkable move for French authorities, which have long allowed only six traditional red and eight traditional white grape varieties to be cultivated, in 2021 they authorized Bordeaux wine producers to try out the new ones – as long as they don’t represent more than 10% of a final wine blend.
These newcomers add tools to winemakers’ palettes so they can balance out the effects of climate change in Bordeaux blends, Destrac-Irvine says. One of them, the French variety Arinarnoa, can boost acidity and tannin levels; another, the Portuguese Touriga Nacional, can ramp up powerful black fruit aromas that heat-sensitive varieties might lose. “If you have more colors,” says Ha of the Bordeaux Wine Council, “maybe it will give you more possibilities to paint.”
But approving the chosen six is on a trial basis only: in Bordeaux, where growers have tended vines for some 2,000 years, the idea of new varieties is terrifying, says Gregory Gambetta, a plant physiologist at Bordeaux Sciences Agro and the Institute of Vine and Wine Science. The traditional ones are just so closely intertwined with the region’s culture and history that, “frankly, it would be much better if we could adapt the system using other levers.”
And so Gambetta and others are studying how to climate-proof vines by using different rootstocks, which are usually of other varieties anyway. Rootstocks control a plant’s overall vigor and water use, so if these are selected to tolerate the warming world, the aboveground variety – which determines the unique chemistry and flavor of the grapes – can still be used and thrive.
One sunny and warm day in November 2021, UC Davis viticulture researcher Kaan Kurtural led us to a plot of vines at the Oakville Experimental Vineyard in Napa Valley. Since 2016, Kurtural and colleagues have been monitoring 16 unique combinations of rootstocks and Cabernet Sauvignon clones to learn which combinations are most resilient under stressful conditions like heat waves and drought while still producing high-quality Cabernet Sauvignon grapes.
Some of the experimental grafts, like one with French rootstock 420A, looked wilted and, after just five years, some were dead. But others, including ones grafted onto the Austrian rootstock Kober 5 BB and the French 3309 Couderc and 110 Richter looked more vigorous and leafier.
Prominent Napa winegrower Andy Beckstoffer is working with Kurtural on a similar trial at one of his vineyards and thinks the results will be a boon to Cabernet Sauvignon. “We hope to come up with new combinations that address climate change and also improve wine quality,” he says.
Growers across the world already are changing traditional practices to temper the effects of a warming climate. Grapes are harvested earlier to prevent over-ripening and to miss the wildfire season in fire-prone regions, thus avoiding smoke taint. Bordeaux workers pick berries in the early morning when acidity is highest, and they trim bushy plants to curb sugar production.
At the Oakville research station, Kurtural showed us experiments investigating the effects of different viticultural practices, including a carbon-sucking grass that can grow between rows and vines tied up to wires in numerous trellising styles. Fortunately drought areas, the solution isn’t simply more water; his research suggests that the most balanced and aromatic wines come from vines that are under constant, mild water stress. Tackling the sun’s radiation might be a better way forward.
“Some regions of the spectra can be damaging, such as near-infrared light,” he explained – they heat up the plant and the berries. At the vineyard, he leads us to a patch of Cabernet Sauvignon vines that have spent the past two seasons under parasol-like shade films. The films slow the ripening process without affecting yield.
We got to taste the difference when Lauren Marigliano, one of Kurtural’s graduate students, presented a chemistry analysis of grapes fully exposed to the sun or protected by different types of shade. Afterward, she provided wine samples from three treatments to try.
The first wine was quite bitter, the second one less complex, but the third one had a bolder berry aroma and a smoother taste. It turned out to come from grapes that had been grown under a shade film that blocked around 30% of near-infrared light, the wavelengths most responsible for heat transmission. By cooling the grapes, the film allowed them to accumulate higher concentrations of heat-sensitive anthocyanins than the grapes for the first and second samples. One of those was grown with a less effective shade film that blocked a different set of wavelengths, the other with no film at all. The winning film still let through enough light for sun-dependent compounds to build up, creating a fuller-bodied, more complete red wine.
But it’s not economical for farmers to erect long films along their rows of vines. That’s where trellising comes in. During our tour of the experimental vineyard, Kurtural pointed out a row of vines snaking along a single, high-hanging wire. This style of trellising works similarly to a good shade film by allowing the vine leaves themselves to shade the fruit, he explains.
Practices like shade films and grape-shielding trellising had mostly been limited to Australia, South America, Israel, and Spain. “Now, with climate change, there’s 30 years of good research on warm climate viticulture suddenly relevant to places like Burgundy, Germany, Napa, and Sonoma,” says Steve Matthiasson, a Napa Valley wine producer who has adopted shade cloth. He also planted his vines in a northeast-to-southwest orientation so that the sun shines directly on top of the vines, leaving the fruit protected by the leaves. “Napa was a cool climate-growing region one generation ago.”
Repairing climate impacts in wine
Even the toughest grapes can’t withstand extreme heat and smoke. So researchers and producers are developing ways to work with climate-affected crops and still make well-rounded wines.
Oberholster thinks many of the vines left unharvested after the massive 2020 California fires could still have produced good wine, so she encourages growers to do small-scale “bucket fermentations” a few weeks before harvest to test for smoke taint – since fermentation releases the ashtray-tasting phenols. Growers can send samples to a lab for analysis while tasting the micro-batches themselves because labs only screen for a limited number of compounds. If neither detects a problem, perhaps the wine is sound.
It can also help, adds Oberholster, to sweeten smokey wine with a little grape concentrate. The extra sugar blocks enzymes in the mouth from releasing phenols. (But even small amounts of concentrates like Mega-Purple can change the character of the wine.) Even better would be removing the phenols altogether, but today’s treatments, which include activated carbon and reverse osmosis inevitably take away some desirable aromas and flavors. To that end, Oberholster is screening enzymes used in the food and beverage industries to find ones that might help to break down the undesired compounds in wine and render them easier to filter out.
Wine blending techniques can also help. Beckstoffer, for example, says that his 2020 smoke-tainted grapes were fermented and, when blended with untainted wines, “may not go into a $200 bottle of wine, but a lot of them could go into a $40 bottle of wine.”
Matthiasson carefully blends varieties to balance flavors: he picks Cabernet Sauvignon early in the season to preserve acidity, but then the grapes have less tongue-smothering richness, or mid-palate. So he mixes in Petit Verdot grapes to pump up the mid-palate and Cabernet Franc to fill in the gaps in herbal aromas. He also planted an emergency stash of the tannic Sagrantino variety – “for 20 years down the road” – to make up for the tannins that Cabernet grapes lose during warmer nights.
Warmer temperatures threaten Matthiasson’s preferred style: wines lower in alcohol and higher in acidity than many of the full-bodied ones popular now. But he doesn't think that raisin-like wine everywhere is inevitable. In fact, some studies suggest that much of the rise in stronger, sweeter wines is a choice driven by vintners and consumer demand (Ah, Caymus), not solely due to warming climates. “I get frustrated by winemakers using climate change as an excuse for overripe, rich, jammy wine when it’s not,” he says.
Winemaking is also going high-tech to adapt to climate change. In France, microbiologist Fabienne Remize of the University of Montpellier has engineered novel strains of yeast that produce less alcohol during fermentation, to circumvent the too-much-sugar issue. Scientists have also developed an electrodialysis process that can dial up the acidity of wine by removing ions like potassium from it; the method has been adopted by winemakers in France, Morocco, and Spain.
The future of wine
The biggest question for climate-changed wine and the adaptations that researchers and wine producers come up with is, of course: will people keep buying and enjoying it?
One of the more surprising lessons from consumer research is this embrace of bolder and jammier wines, as Kurtural and Gambetta have noted. In one study of red wines from Napa and Bordeaux, they found that wine ratings have actually risen over the last 60 years, even as those regions have warmed. The findings, they wrote, seem to quash a previous prediction that quality would peak at an average growing season temperature of 17.3C (63.1F) – which both regions have long since surpassed. [An alternate interpretation would be that winemaking has simply gotten better as winemakers get better at their job and competition weeds out the weak.]
Still, Kurtural and Gambetta also note we might be reaching a tipping point where warmer temperatures wear away secondary compounds beyond the ability of growers to adapt. “Frankly, we don’t know what the optimum is,” Gambetta says. “We need better tools and better analysis to find out how far is too far.”
Matthiasson, for his part, thinks that fine wines will weather the warming climate. With his shade cloths, blending techniques, and emergency Sagrantino stash, he's ready for what comes next. “I think we’re going to be able to adapt,” he says. “In the short term, our pace of learning is faster than the pace of climate change.
Some say it can’t be done, but if you have the right wine to complement the right chocolate, it can be a match made in heaven! Whether pairing delicate white chocolate (I know, it’s not really chocolate) or a lively dark chocolate with wine, there are a few pairing tips to keep in mind.
• Rule #1. The wine should be at least as sweet, if not a touch sweeter, than the chocolate you are serving. Otherwise the taste may quickly veer towards sour. That doesn’t mean the wine has to have a lot of sugar in it. Really ripe reds can work quite well.
• Rule #2. When pairing wines with chocolate, your best bet is to match lighter, more elegant flavored chocolates with lighter-bodied wines; likewise, the stronger the chocolate, the more full-bodied the wine should be. A bittersweet chocolate, for example, tends to pair well with an intense, in-your-face California Zinfandel.
• Rule #3. Similar to “formal” wine tasting, work from light to dark if you will be experimenting with several varieties of chocolates. Start with a more subtle white chocolate and end with a dark or bittersweet chocolate.
White Chocolate Wine Suggestions
White chocolate tends to be mellower and buttery in flavor, making it an ideal candidate for a Sherry. Try a Pedro Ximinez or a Cream Sherry if the PX is too sweet for you; a Moscato d’Asti from Italy’s Piedmont region offers a hint of carbonation or an Orange Muscat from California. The Sherry and Moscato d’Asti will pick up the creaminess of the chocolates, and the Orange Muscat will pick up any fruit tones present.
Milk Chocolate Wine Suggestions
A flavorful Pinot Noir or a medium-bodied Merlot will complement a bar of milk chocolate, a creamy chocolate mousse, or chocolate-accented cheesecake. If you wish to die and go to heaven, try Riesling (Auslese style); Muscat (such as Bonny Doon’s Muscat Vin de Glaciere); a Sauternes; or even a Port. The light red, slightly carbonated Brachetto d’Acqui is a home run.
Dark Chocolate Wine Suggestions
Dark or bittersweet chocolates need a wine that offers a roasted, slightly bitter flavor itself with perhaps a hint of its own chocolate notes. Cabernets and Zinfandels have a history of perfecting the dark chocolate match, resulting in an unparalleled tasting combination. The one you choose should have good depth of fruit. Cabs much under $20 won’t cut it. Brachetto d’Acqui works well here too.
By Kim Bussing
[Lately we’ve been bombarded by articles on the health hazards of alcohol. Every story has two sides. Here's another. Of course, we always recommend moderation!]
We already knew this, but it doesn’t hurt to be backed up by cold, hard facts every once in a while: science has announced that the occasional glass of wine is good for your brain. According to a new study in Scientific Reports, low levels of alcohol help decrease inflammation in the brain and facilitate in removing waste. Some of the toxins it flushes out? Those linked to Alzheimer’s disease.
What’s going on here is tied to the glymphatic system, or what basically acts as a janitorial service for the brain. For those interested in the science behind it, this system essentially pumps cerebral spinal fluid into brain tissue to clear out waste that has accumulated, including certain proteins associated with dementia. If you like to hit the mat or the gym before you pop the cork, good news: exercise also helps boost the glymphatic system.
This particular study looked at mice exposed to both high and low levels of alcohol consumption over an extended period of time. The mice who had a low amount of alcohol, which amounted to about two and a half drinks per day, had decreased brain inflammation and a more efficient glymphatic system than mice who were not exposed to any alcohol. These groups had the same level of cognitive ability and motor function.
Those in the high alcohol category, on the other hand, had higher levels of inflammation and impaired cognitive abilities and motor skills. Key takeaway? Drinking too much remains bad, but opting to have a glass with dinner could be a better decision for your brain than foregoing it. “Low doses of alcohol appear to improve overall brain health,” said Maiken Nedergaard, co-director of the Center for Translational Neuromedicine at the University of Rochester Medical Center and lead author of the study.
This is one of many studies that have corroborated that wine is our friend, not foe. In 2017 Yale School of Medicine neurologist Gordon Shepherd published a book detailing how the act of drinking and smelling wine requires our entire brain to step it up, meaning your noggin is getting a full workout. If bubbly’s more your thing, researchers from Britain found that champagne once or twice a week can actually improve your memory.
And because the body deserves love too: a few years ago, The New York Times summarized a study that found resveratrol can slow brain and heart aging. It’s been found to activate protein agents that help heal and maintain body tissues, warding off the degenerative diseases associated with aging. While these studies emphasize that a high alcohol consumption is best avoided, low levels of vino have been consistently linked with a healthier life — and, if we may say so, a happier one.
“Prolonged intake of excessive amounts of ethanol is known to have adverse effects on the central nervous system," said Maiken Nedergaard, M.D., D.M.Sc., co-director of the Center for Translational Neuromedicine at the U. of Rochester Medical Center (URMC) and lead author of the study. "However, in this study we have shown for the first time that low doses of alcohol are potentially beneficial to brain health, namely it improves the brain’s ability to remove waste.” The finding adds to a growing body of research that point to the health benefits of low doses of alcohol. While excessive consumption of alcohol is clearly a health hazard, many studies have linked lower levels of drinking with reduced risk of cardiovascular diseases and some cancers.
Nedergaard’s research focuses on the glymphatic system, the brain’s unique cleaning process that she and her colleagues first described in 2012. They showed how cerebral spinal fluid (CSF) is pumped into brain tissue and flushes away waste including the proteins beta amyloid and tau that are associated with Alzheimer’s disease and other forms of dementia. Subsequent research has shown that the glymphatic system is more active while we sleep, can be damaged by stroke and trauma, and improves with exercise.
The new study, which was conducted in mice, looked at the impact of both acute and chronic alcohol exposure. When the researchers studied the brains of animals exposed to high levels of alcohol over a long period of time, they observed high levels of a molecular marker for inflammation, particularly in cells called astrocytes which are key regulators of the glymphatic system. They also noted impairment of the animal’s cognitive abilities and motor skills.
Animals that were exposed to low levels of alcohol consumption, analogous to approximately 2 ½ drinks per day, showed less inflammation in the brain, and their glymphatic system was more efficient in moving CSF through the brain and removing waste compared to control mice which were not exposed to alcohol. The low dose animals’ performance in the cognitive and motor tests was identical to the controls.
“The data on the effects of alcohol on the glymphatic system seemingly matches the J-shaped model relating to the dose effects of alcohol on general health and mortality whereby low doses of alcohol are beneficial while excessive consumption is detrimental to overall health,” said Nedergaard. “Studies have shown that low-to-moderate alcohol intake is associated with a lesser risk of dementia, while heavy drinking for many years confers an increased risk of cognitive decline. This study may help explain why this occurs; specifically, low doses of alcohol appear to improve overall brain health.”
by Eric Asimov
[Every few years, an article in the media claims that cheap wines are just as good as expensive ones, and even experts can’t tell the difference. Of course, this is misleading because the media invariably relies upon people who drink cheap wine. It’s not surprising that they prefer simple, soft, nondescript wines to more interesting, more complex, and more challenging ones. Here is Eric Asimov’s delightfully written and slightly edited take on the latest article. A chatGPT synopsis is at the end if you don't want to take the time to read the whole article.]
July 16, 2018 - Studies keep drawing the conclusion that people like cheap wines best and should not trust experts. But the findings say more about fears than tastes. Every few years an article bubbles up with claims that expensive wines are really no better than cheap ones. The findings come with an inevitable corollary: essentially, you are better off seeking advice from random strangers in a bar than from wine experts.
The latest, a 2016 study reposted recently by Vox, examined the correlation between professional assessments and crowdsourced reviews. That dense, statistics-heavy work was accompanied by a video smackdown of wine expertise in which a panel of Vox employees blind-tasted wines. While they were able to identify the most expensive bottles with some consistency, they far preferred the cheaper ones. Conclusion: “Expensive wine is for suckers.”
The overall argument is merely a repetition of one made back in 2010 by Freakonomics, which itself was largely a rehash of another study published in 2008. It’s not surprising to see this again at a time when knowledge and expertise have been dismissed at the highest levels and when culture and the arts seem to have lost value in America.
The bigger question is: Why is wine so regularly singled out in the United States to be assailed as something of a con game? And what is it about wine critics that invites such gleeful dismissals of their knowledge and judgment?
One reason these populist studies resonate is that they contain elements of truth. While it may be ridiculous to assert generally that expensive wines are no better than cheap ones, it is absolutely true that many expensive wines are not as good as many cheaper wines. And the notion that expensive wines are for suckers is just as inarguable as asserting that expensive clothes, cars, or tickets to “Springsteen on Broadway” are for suckers. To each his own.
The essential point the wine populists and many of these studies make is that ordinary people with little knowledge of wine prefer cheap wines to expensive ones, even if wine critics prefer more expensive bottles; therefore, people should not listen to know-it-all wine critics because they will lead them to spend more for wines that are not to their tastes.
The studies concede that the more people knew about wine, the more their tastes aligned with the critics’. So it might have been reasonable for the studies to conclude instead that people’s tastes evolve as they learn more about wine. But that would not have offered the same satisfying punch line.
In any case, what is it about wine that permits it to be subjected to the indignity of a popularity contest? J.K. Rowling has sold a lot more books than Saul Bellow, and given the choice, most people would probably prefer to read Ms. Rowling. But does that lead to the conclusion that Nobel-winning authors like Mr. Bellow are for suckers?
Authors of these gotcha wine exposés may know better, but they publish them anyway because they understand that an American audience will find them particularly gratifying. Wine in American culture has long been a synonym for snobbery. I’m sorry to say that wine culture has partly brought this on itself with its history of pretension, its equating of wine with connoisseurship, and the absurd vocabulary and rituals that many people assume must be mastered simply to enjoy wine.
No politicians, no matter how much they enjoy wine in private, would dare be seen campaigning with a stemmed glass in hand — not when a can of Bud could be brandished instead. As much as people love wine and as important as it is to the economy of several American states, it is still viewed by American society as somehow foreign, un-American, effete, prissy, and intellectual. [Dare we include elitist?]
In the public imagination, wine writers embody these characteristics. They represent a subject that is Old World in origin. Wine is anti-democratic in the sense that, all other things being equal, aristocratic terroirs will win out, even if, like the wayward child of a billionaire, bad farming and winemaking squander this built-in advantage. The wine writer often seems to speak a foreign language (and often does, with words like “terroir”). In the populist vision, the critic is simultaneously fastidious and intimidating, comic and sinister. Wine is the official beverage of the sneering elites, who think they are smarter and better than everybody else, and thus is a natural target for fear and resentment.
In the populist vision, wine critics are simultaneously fastidious and intimidating, comic and sinister. Wine is the beverage of sneering elites and thus a natural target for fear and resentment. If “Hamilton’s” King George III came to modern-day life, it would be as a wine writer. Conversely, the foppish image of the wine connoisseur as suggested in the old sitcom “Frasier” is simply a device for banishing a deeply seated fear of the unknown and the intellectual.
Wine is convenient for bashing because it is intimidating and anxiety-producing no matter what steps the wine business takes to simplify or demystify it. For far too long, the industry has been complicit in equating wine with stuffy connoisseurship. Before one could simply enjoy wine, one had to take “wine appreciation” classes, read textbooks, and learn the esoteric vocabulary of tasting, in which one had to break down the constituent elements of a swallow into a grocery list of aromas and flavors. In popular culture, the height of understanding wine seems to be the ability to guess its identity when served blind. It is a useless skill, a parlor game in the wine trade, yet it contributes to the notion that to understand and enjoy wine requires special powers.
Forgotten are the emotions wine provokes, the companionship it brings, and its place on the table (except in the sense of the “art” of food-and-wine pairing, which can be as intimidating as wine itself). The efforts to demystify/simplify never ring true because they ignore the fact that wine by its nature is mystifying and complicated. These qualities can be embraced and celebrated without suggesting that they require mastering, but that would force us to think and talk about wine in a different way, as a food staple to be enjoyed rather than as a symbol of status or as a “lifestyle.” I think we have made a start in that direction, but the regular reappearance of articles like Vox’s demonstrates that the old way of looking at wine still has a firm hold.
For the record, no wine critic has ever offered the blanket argument that expensive wines are better than cheaper bottles. But I have argued that $15 to $20 bottles are often better values than $10 bottles. It’s a complicated equation, but in general wines from small family estates in distinctive terroirs, farmed and produced conscientiously, are better and more satisfying than mass-produced wines that are fabricated to match preconceived taste profiles. (Left unsaid is the fact that many $20 bottles are better than a lot of $50 bottles.)
I don’t mean to suggest that many people will not enjoy the mass-produced bottles, nor do I fault anybody who is satisfied with those wines. But if you are curious and want to drink better, more distinctive wines, the slightly higher price is money well spent. It’s a matter of choosing craft over commerce, the difference between a fast-food burger and one from a cook who grinds the beef, cooks it to order, and sees that the roll and condiments are of similar high quality. It will cost more, but for some people the expense will be worth it.
Good wine critics present arguments and offer as evidence the bottles themselves. They make their cases with love and hope. The goal is to inspire curiosity, to promote ease and comfort with wine, to enlighten, to entertain and, occasionally, to offer vicarious pleasure.
For those who believe they are demeaned by wine or wine writers, I would suggest it is the wine populists who are doing the demeaning, by pandering to inchoate feelings of fear and resentment. These feelings may well be real. But they are not caused by wine.
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Every so often, the media claims that cheap wines are just as good as expensive ones, implying that even experts can't distinguish the difference. Yet, this is misleading, as these claims often rely on the preferences of those who primarily drink inexpensive wines. It's not surprising that people who favor simple, soft, nondescript wines might not appreciate the more interesting, complex, and challenging ones. The recurring argument is that expensive wines are for suckers, and studies show that ordinary folks with limited wine knowledge prefer cheaper options, leading to distrust in wine experts.
But why does wine consistently become a target of criticism in the United States? One reason is that these populist studies contain elements of truth. While it's unreasonable to declare that all expensive wines are inferior to cheaper ones, it's true that some pricey wines don't live up to their cost. Wine is susceptible to becoming the subject of a popularity contest, often linked to issues of snobbery and elitism. Wine writers are seen as representatives of this world, with their perceived foreign language, making wine a natural target of fear and resentment.
Simplifying or demystifying wine has been attempted, but wine's inherent mystifying and complicated nature resists such efforts. Instead, wine should be embraced for the emotions it evokes, the companionship it brings, and its place on the table. Although some may enjoy mass-produced wines, investing a bit more in small family estate wines from distinctive terroirs can lead to a more satisfying experience. Wine critics aim to inspire curiosity and ease with wine, presenting their arguments with love and hope, seeking to enlighten and entertain. Those who feel demeaned by wine or wine writers might be influenced by populist sentiments that cater to feelings of fear and resentment, rather than understanding the richness of the wine world. Wine is not the cause of these feelings, and it can be appreciated without feeling intimidated by its complexities.
Rot, Rot, Utter Rot! (Wonderful Dessert Wines)
by Andrew McNaughton
Ice Wine, Sauternes, Tokai Aszu, Beerenauslese & Trockenbeerenauslese
Rotten to the core, a bit of a rotter, rot in Hell, noble rot … ‘noble’ rot? The term ‘noble rot’ sounds just plain wrong. There can’t be anything noble about rot – can there? If you’re an enthusiast of fine dessert wines, you may however appreciate the strange love/hate relationship between grape growers and the fungus Botrytis cinerea.
On the other hand, if you’re a strawberry grower there’s no love for B. cinerea. On a strawberry B. cinerea is nothing more than a crop-rotting grey mold (botrytis). It thrives in damp conditions and can reduce a succulent red strawberry to sooty grey mush in days. Those layers of straw often seen under strawberries aren’t for decoration, they’re for improving airflow and reducing the chances of B. cinerea gaining a foothold. What about grapes?
When B. cinerea attacks grapes, it dehydrates them, and the result is a more intense sweetness and characteristic honey aroma in the wine. Get it right and the wine can command a dizzying price and pair with dessert or sharp cheese. Get it wrong, and you’ll have sympathy for strawberry growers. The grape grower plays a dangerous game for any misstep in judgement.
The line between adulation and disaster comes down to timing. Grey mold spores are on the grapes virtually all the time. Like us the grape is protected from many pathogens by its skin. If its skin is breached through insect attack or wind damage for example, the equilibrium with B. cinerea is disrupted and the fungus gains a foothold within the grape. High humidity often tips the balance in favor of B. cinerea, the outcome being a rampant invasion of the grapes and crop loss unless the humid spell of weather is quickly followed by a drier period. In this case the grey mold can establish itself within the grape but not overwhelm it. What happens then is the stuff of legend. The odds are, however, against the stuff of legend. Humidity must be between 85-95% and temperature between 20 and 25 degrees for botrytis to establish in the grapes. Humidity must then plunge to below 60%. At higher humidities, the grape skin ruptures and all hell breaks loose in the grape as other opportunist pathogens invade. Trapped within the grape, botrytis dehydrates it, and sugar content gradually rises to the point where it limits further fungal growth. The result is a sugary raisin-like grape with a uniquely altered biochemistry.
The magic of making noble rot wine involves juggling an entirely altered biochemistry compared to normal wine. Organic acids such as malic and tartaric are metabolized and result in a higher pH. Complex polysaccarides are produced, including high molecular weight glucans which can cause filtration problems. Heteroplysaccarides are also produced which can inhibit yeast activity and therefore alcohol formation. The usual aromatics, such as terpenes, are destroyed; other aromatics characteristic of noble rot are produced. Some winemakers have been known to nurse their vats through the night as they struggle to produce a wine under conditions that fight to destroy it at every step. If they lose the battle, they may instead utter words more suited to the common form of botrytis: ‘vulgar rot.’
Investigating the Impact of Training on Blind Tasting Accuracy and Wine Preference by Qian Janice Wang and Domen Presern (abbreviated version)
The Acquisition of Expertise?
Is blind tasting just nonsense? In an article published in the Journal of Wine Economics (Volume 13, Number 4, 2019, Pages 384–393), the authors reported on a unique oppor- tunity to follow the progress of a group of students as they went through an intensive 5 week training program, the Oxford University Blind Tasting Society’s 2018 training season.
By collecting participants’ tasting sheets and guesses during the training program, the authors aimed to assess the impact of blind tasting training in terms of group accuracy and individual accuracy (including structural elements such as acid and alcohol). They also kept track of any changes in wine preference throughout the training session to study how the acquisition of expertise may shape buying intentions. Given the rapid increase in the number of knowledgeable wine tasters in developing markets (e.g., China), it is crucial to understand how increasing expertise can influence preference for specific wine styles (e.g., less fruit-driven, more bottle maturation, etc.). Because the wines were tasted blind, the authors were able to track the preferences based only on the intrinsic attributes of the wine without the participants being biased by label, price, or origin information.
Conclusions:
Over 18 sessions, subjects showed an increase in accuracy and within-group agreement when it comes to the variety of the grape, as well as an improvement in the estimation of the acidity.
No improvements in accuracy or within-group agreement was shown when it came to guesses of country or region. Vocabulary size and tasting note length did not change during the course of the training session, which implies that longer-term learning may be needed. In addition, an interesting relationship emerged between length of note and wine preference, with more preferred wines having longer tasting notes. This may help shed some light on the mental process behind writing tasting notes, where more preferred wines may enhance processing fluency (or that wines that are easier to describe are, in turn, more preferred).
The analysis of the preference for wine revealed that, overall, preference was positively correlated with wine age, acidity, sweetness, and color (red wine was preferred to white). More remarkably, when taking into account the price of wine, there was a significant positive correlation between the price and the preference of the wine, even when the wines were tasted blind. This gives limited evidence that the more expensive wines, broadly speaking, may have sensorial properties which make them appealing to tasters. Over time, we observed a shift in preference towards older wines and a decrease in the importance of wine color as a predictor of preference. Those with little initial blind tasting training also experienced a change in preference toward wines with greater acidity and alcohol, and they decreased their preference for oak flavors. These observations have important implications for growing wine markets with an increasingly educated consumer population, where the initial preference for heavily oaked, young red wines may shift in time toward wines with more maturity and structure.
[Although this article by Maximillian Potter appeared back in the May 2011 issue of Vanity Fair, most wine lovers are unaware of the story. Fascinating for lovers of Burgundy, edited for brevity. A chatGPT synopsis is at the end if you don't want to take the time to read the whole article.]
Burgundy’s Côte d’Or is arguably the world’s most enigmatic wine-growing region. About a three-hour drive southeast of Paris, it’s a 30-mile-long-by-two-mile-wide slice of countryside between Dijon in the north [to just south of] Beaune in the south. Within Burgundy (Bourgogne) there are dozens of subregions, and within those, numerous towns and villages, each with dozens of vineyards or climats. Vosne-Romanée is one such village.
Although the region cultivates almost exclusively one type of red grape, Pinot Noir, the wines of each climat are distinctive. This is not hype but rather a geological fact. Abrupt, dramatic changes in fault lines and other natural phenomena unique to the Côte mean the characteristics—the terroir—of individual climats, even ones side by side, can be wildly different. So, too, then are their Pinot grapes. Along with the hundreds of climats, there are almost as many wine-making domaines, and most every domaine has its own viticulture techniques.
These factors draw discerning oenophiles and savvy collectors to Burgundy. The diversity, the complexity, the romantic alchemy when done well are what make Burgundies … well, so divine. As the writer Matt Kramer put it in his critically acclaimed guide to the region, Making Sense of Burgundy, “Even the most skeptical are willing, after savoring a genuinely great Burgundy, to concede that there may well be—dare one say it?—a Presence in the universe beyond our own.”
The fact that Burgundy has such a small wine-growing region and produces so few bottles compared to the expansive French Bordeaux region only makes the quest for the finest Burgundies all the more worthwhile. One would be hard-pressed to find an educated wine-lover who would disagree with Robert Sleigh, one of Sotheby’s leading wine experts, when he says, “Romanée-Conti is hands down the best and rarest Burgundy in the world—the Holy Grail.” The legendary vineyard is a postage stamp of soil at 4.46 acres, producing only 500 cases annually, less than one-fiftieth the production of Bordeaux’s Château Lafite Rothschild.
Indeed, whatever superlatives can be ascribed to a wine apply to the Romanée-Conti vineyard. It ranks among the very top of the most highly coveted, most expensive wines in the world. Because D.R.C. is produced in such limited quantities, and because the high-end wine market is such an intricate and virtually impenetrable web of advance orders—futures—and aftermarket wheeling and dealing, it’s very difficult to obtain. A bottle of the 2015 or 2016, sells for roughly $20,000, more than twice the price for a case of current vintage Lafite!
In mid-2010, word of an attack on the vines of Romanée-Conti began seeping into the world beyond Burgundy. Very little news of the incident, an unprecedented and remarkable crime, had been reported in the French media. In the United States, there was nothing other than small blurbs in the wine press. Clearly, no one in Burgundy—including the patriarch in charge of the family-owned-and-operated Domaine de la Romanée-Conti—wanted to talk about it publicly. Explaining the silence, a former mayor from the Côte and a wine-maker there, Jeanine Gros, summed it up: “ ‘Wine’ and ‘poison,’ these two words do not belong in the same sentence.”
On the top of Aubert de Villaine’s otherwise tan, bald head, there is a doily-size pinkish splotch that he scratches when he is thinking, as when he has to decide when to begin harvesting—and just as he did on that day in early January 2010 when he read an unsigned note informing him that the D.R.C. must prepare to pay a ransom or Romanée-Conti would be destroyed.
It was not so much a note as it was a package delivered to his private residence. (An identical package arrived at the home of Henry-Frédéric Roch, D.R.C co-director, who represents the Leroy family’s interest in the Domaine.) Inside the cylindrical container, the type an architect might use for blueprints, was a large parchment. Unrolled, the document was a detailed drawing of Romanée-Conti. While the 4.46-acre vineyard is essentially a rectangle, there are nuances to its shape. De Villaine noticed that whoever had sent this letter and sketched the vineyard knew its every contour, and the author had noted every single one of its roughly 20,000 vines! In the center of the sketch was a circle. A note conveyed that the vineyard would be destroyed unless certain demands were met; further instructions would be coming in 10 to 15 days
De Villaine viewed the letter as a hoax, some kind of sick joke. That was easier, much easier, than the unthinkable - that it was real. But in mid-January 2010, he received a similar package, and this time the sketch showed two circles, one in the center and a much smaller circle in the upper left corner of the vineyard. The correspondence instructed de Villaine to leave one million euros in a suitcase in the corner of the Romanée-Conti vineyard, near the small circle on the drawing. By way of proof that he (she?, they?) meant business, the letter informed de Villaine that some 82 vines of Romanée-Conti had already been poisoned, two in the small circle and marked by two X’s and 80 vines marked by X’s in the much larger, center circle. These latter vines could be spared with an antidote—that is, provided de Villaine paid up.
This time de Villaine called the authorities. He did not call the local police. Burgundy is too small, too full of gossips and competitors who might use this fact or fiction against his Domaine. True or not, if the world thought the D.R.C. vineyards had been compromised … Well, de Villaine could not begin to imagine, or, rather, he could imagine what that might mean. He could not afford for this to be mishandled, and so he called a police official he’d met in Dijon who was now a senior official with the police based in Paris. Investigators arrived at the D.R.C. The two vines supposedly poisoned were removed. Quickly, it was determined they had been poisoned, and were dying. The other 80 or so vines in the large circle—while they had been drilled—in reality had not been poisoned. That part, at least so far, was a bluff.
Whoever was responsible knew exactly what he or she was doing. Clearly someone had been sneaking around in his vineyard for quite some time to produce such a detailed sketch. What’s more, it appeared to de Villaine that whoever it was likely knew a great deal about wine. The second letter included sophisticated wine-making terms, like décavaillonnage and démontage.
The police discovered that the criminal, or criminals, used a syringe to inject the poison. This was especially significant—over the centuries, vignerons had used such a pal or syringe-like technique to inject liquid carbon disulfide into the soil and save the vineyards from devastating infestations by the phylloxera insect. The very methodology that had been used to preserve the vines was now being employed in an attempt to kill the vineyards of Romanée-Conti.
On the advice of investigators, de Villaine did not drop off the money as directed. Instead, a trusted employee, in the dark of night, left a note in the vineyard on the specified day, February 4. In the note, de Villaine relayed that he would pay as demanded, but it would take time to muster the euros; he’d have to call an emergency meeting of the shareholders from the Leroy and de Villaine families. Within days, de Villaine received another mailing—what would be the third and final piece of correspondence. The tone of this letter was polite, even grateful that payment would be made. It instructed de Villaine to please deliver the money in a valise to the cemetery in the neighboring town of Chambolle-Musigny at 11 P.M. on February 12, 2010.
The week of the arranged drop-off, de Villaine was scheduled to be in America promoting the D.R.C.’s 2007 vintage. Investigators encouraged de Villaine to go about his normal business, as if nothing unusual were afoot. The same D.R.C. employee who had left the note at the vineyard could serve as the drop-off man. Jean-Charles Cuvelier, the deputy manager of the D.R.C., the police said, appears to “be capable and cold-blooded.” The latter part of the description was wry cop humor, for Cuvelier is about as cold and hard as a freshly baked croissant.
Cuvelier has been de Villaine’s indispensable lieutenant since 1993. The two met at a party in Dijon. Cuvelier, then in his early 30s, had mentioned that he was a schoolteacher who worked with at-risk kids and that the job was wearing on him. De Villaine mentioned he was looking for an assistant. Ever since, Cuvelier has been at de Villaine’s side, quietly anticipating his needs.
Cuvelier is a stocky man, now in his late 50s, with bifocals on the end of his nose, which he tends to wrinkle. He has a gap-toothed smile and fidgets with an endearing nervousness. He easily perspires but only because he sweats the details of the D.R.C. He had recently became a widower after his wife of 33 years died of cancer in June 2008. Who would have blamed Cuvelier if, on that night of February 12, 2010, he had wondered what his wife would have said if she could see him now, walking into a cemetery in the black of night carrying a suitcase with one million in fake euros. He could only hope she would watch over him and keep him safe.
The ancient village of Chambolle-Musigny is only two miles north of Vosne-Romanée, if you take the right dirt road through the vineyards. Like Vosne-Romanée, Chambolle-Musigny has no more than 600 full-time residents. The cemetery is on the outskirts of the town. You pass it on the way in and out; it’s square, surrounded by a stone wall, and not much bigger than a public pool. The entrance is an arching, green wrought-iron fence. Just as the criminal had directed, it was 11 P.M. when Cuvelier pushed through the squeaking gates.
Earlier in the day, Cuvelier (de Villaine’s indispensable lieutenant) had traveled to the police station in Dijon, where he was briefed on the night’s plan. A dozen armed police officers would be hidden about the cemetery. In the bag, along with the fake euros, there would be a tracking device that would be activated when the bag passed by a sensor embedded in the threshold of the cemetery archway. Cuvelier was instructed to keep the earpiece for his cell phone in his ear and activated, as a police officer would be in constant communication with him. Cuvelier, perspiring and his heart pounding, entered the cemetery. It was cold and dark, with frost on the tombstones. He dropped the bag in the flower box just inside the gate and left. He got into his car and drove off. Thirty minutes later, he received a call from the police: We got him.
Crime and Punishment
Cuvelier immediately phoned de Villaine in the United States and passed along the information police had thus far. The man’s name was Jacques Soltys; he was in his late 50s. Catching him had been a snap. After Cuvelier left the bag, police spotted Soltys coming down a hillside on foot, then entering the cemetery. He retrieved the bag and walked off. He was caught less than 200 meters away, on his way to a nearby train station. The police soon learned more.
The D.R.C. had not been Soltys’s only mark. He had simultaneously orchestrated a similar plot against another very highly regarded vineyard, Domaine Comte Georges de Vogüé, in Chambolle-Musigny. The first package mailed to de Villaine had a Paris postmark. Surveillance footage showed that another package, very similar to the ones mailed to de Villaine, had been mailed to the owners of de Vogüé. That vineyard, too, had lost two of its vines to poison.
As de Villaine and Jean-Luc Pépin, the director of de Vogüé, suspected, Soltys knew about wine-making. His parents had sent him to the Lycée Viticole de Beaune, a boarding trade school specializing in wine-making. According to the current principal, Pierre Enjuanès, Soltys was raised in the Épernay area (Champagne). His parents were wine-makers there, overseeing a modest vineyard. Soltys was trouble from the start; he was expelled after only a few months for offenses including smoking, cursing, and staying up all night. In the file at the school, there’s a black-and-white picture of young Soltys: dark hair, starched white collar, and furrowed brow.
Soltys went from delinquent to career criminal. He committed a string of armed robberies and attempted a kidnapping! During one of the crimes, shots were exchanged with the police, and Soltys was hit in the chest. In all he was sentenced to 20 years. Though he served only a portion of that time, he had spent most of his adult life behind bars. Soltys figured that there were easier jobs to pull off, like extorting wine-makers, and did considerable planning and preparation. He’d built a makeshift shack deep in the woods atop the hills overlooking the vineyards. In the shack police found a sleeping bag, a couch, a hot plate, a change of clothes—the clothes of a vineyard laborer—batteries, a headlamp, a cordless-drill kit, syringes, many bottles of the weed killer Roundup, and a handgun.
Soltys had not been operating alone. He’d been able to mail the package to de Villaine’s home because he had his son, Cédric, follow the wine-maker and learn his address. Unlike his father, Cédric didn’t have a record but, according to several sources, is mentally fragile. The portrait of the son that emerges is one who relied heavily on his father. Soltys Sr. may have treated his son poorly, but he also looked after him, an Of Mice and Men George-and-Lennie bond. Soltys’s life of crime had left his wife, Cédric’s mother, struggling to get by; she too was a victim.
To show his thanks to the investigators, de Villaine invited them to the Domaine and uncorked a few bottles of 2006 Vosne-Romanée Premier Cru—along with a tasting of a 1961 Romanée-Conti. As word of the crime leaked into the French press, de Villaine hoped the whole matter could be “bottled up” quietly, that criminal proceedings would be resolved without trial, which would generate media attention, inspiring copycat crimes. Also, why would he want the world to think about the fact that weed killer had been injected into vines of Romanée-Conti? Five months after the arrests, the prosecution’s case against Jacques and Cédric Soltys became extremely difficult to pursue, because in July 2010, Jacques hanged himself in prison.
Burgundy’s Heritage
In the French legal system, once a suspect is in custody, the matter is turned over to a juge d’instruction. A one-person grand jury, this judge takes over the investigation, overseeing the defense, the prosecution, and the police and decides whether “formal accusations” should be filed. Until a trial begins, nothing is made public, not even mug shots. Attorneys can be fined or worse for speaking to the media. Officially, the only officer of the court empowered to discuss the Soltys matter is Éric Lallement, the equivalent of the district attorney of Dijon.
Late last year, Lallement showed me into his office and through an interpreter fielded questions. A man in his early 50s, dressed in a blue suit, he sat with his legs crossed and fiddled with his cufflinks. He kept his file to himself but referred to it periodically throughout our conversation. Soltys, he said, left behind a suicide note, but in it, he did not attempt to absolve his son of responsibility. Cédric, he said, had been released from prison, but not cleared of charges.
Lallement suspected the judge would determine formal accusations were warranted against the son. After all, he said, Romanée-Conti is not only a Burgundian treasure but a national one, and it is important for the government to send the message that such crimes will not be tolerated.
Of particular interest to Lallement is that the Soltys plot to poison the most storied vineyard in the world is unprecedented. While there have been crimes of vandalism, agriculture terrorism, and extortion on vineyards in France and elsewhere, never before has there been a poisoning of the vines. The top wine-makers of the most storied domaines are concerned. Quite frankly, they all would rather not discuss such a vulnerability. Like de Villaine, they are concerned about the possibility of copycat attempts. They quietly support his wish that there be no trial, that there be no further talk of the Soltyses and poison in the vines, as there is nothing anyone could do, or at least wants to do, to prevent such crimes. “A Burgundy with fences and lights and patrolled by German shepherds,” says Cécile Mathiaud, press director for the association of Burgundy wine-makers. “This is something I cannot imagine. This would not be Burgundy.”
When Cédric found out about his father’s suicide, he sat in a chair, staring into space, looking lost. If prosecuted, experts hired to determine his mental competency would likely declare him unfit to stand trial. Outwardly, Aubert de Villaine seems to have moved on. The two tainted vines and all traces of the Roundup have been removed. No other vines were harmed—the terroir has been preserved, and there will be no impact on future harvests. De Villaine is at the forefront of a campaign to have the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization recognize all of the Côte as a World Heritage site. Currently, there are 911 sites around the world that have received this rare distinction of “outstanding universal value.” The Great Barrier Reef, the Great Wall of China, the Tower of London, the Statue of Liberty, and the banks of the Seine in Paris are but a few on the list. It would, undoubtedly, be a fitting tribute for the D.R.C., Burgundy, and France. Such an honor, Aubert de Villaine understandably hopes, would make it easier for everyone to forget all of this talk of wine and poison.
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Burgundy’s Côte d’Or, a renowned wine-growing region, is geographically diverse, with distinct vineyards known as climats producing unique wines. Burgundy's exclusivity and limited production make it highly sought after by wine enthusiasts and collectors. At the heart of this region lies the village of Vosne-Romanée, known for its exceptional Pinot Noir wines.
In 2010, an unprecedented crime shocked the wine world when someone threatened to destroy the legendary Romanée-Conti vineyard, one of the most prestigious and expensive in the world. The criminal, Jacques Soltys, demanded a ransom, using a detailed drawing of the vineyard to demonstrate his knowledge. However, the plot was foiled by the police, and Soltys was caught.
Further investigation revealed that Soltys had targeted another esteemed vineyard, Domaine Comte Georges de Vogüé. Soltys had a troubled past and a criminal history, but he had planned the extortion meticulously. His son, Cédric, also played a role in the scheme. Jacques ultimately committed suicide in prison, leaving Cédric under suspicion and yet to be formally charged.
The French authorities were concerned about the impact of such a crime on the nation's wine industry and the risk of copycat incidents. Vineyard owners and winemakers, like Aubert de Villaine, preferred to keep the matter discreet to avoid inspiring similar crimes. They sought to preserve the region's heritage and terroir without drastic security measures.
Despite the unfortunate incident, Aubert de Villaine remained focused on promoting Burgundy's unique wine culture and history. He hoped to gain UNESCO World Heritage recognition for the Côte, solidifying its status as a cultural treasure and diverting attention from the incident of wine and poison.
[Edited from a Forbes Magazine article by Per and Britt Karlsson]
Rosé wine is no longer only a summer wine to be drunk on a sunny terrace, preferably in Provence. The height of fashion, it is no longer looked down upon, for it is trendy, and the quality is so much better than it used to be. Provence in southern France is probably the pinkest wine region in the world. Almost 90% of its production is rosé. And as more and more producers start to make ultra-premium rosé, the crucial question is, can rosé ever be great wine?
Trendy or not, it is much easier to like rosé wines nowadays, for they are both fresher and drier in style. The aroma of red berries is still prevalent, but as the structure is better and the acidity fresher, they seem less juicy and more like a “real” wine. Of course, they are still considered quite unpretentious by most consumers, but that doesn’t mean they are easy to produce. It is technically challenging to make rosé. Technology from both white wine and red wine production is used, and getting the exact color you want is not as easy as one may think.
Provence produces a lot of rosé, much of which is also consumed there. Tourists love it. Spain, another sunny destination, also has a long tradition of rosado, which is popular with tapas. With rosé the dominant wine in Provence, red and white wine producers there are frustrated that their wines don’t get much attention. Certain wine journalists worry that Provence will never be considered a serious wine region again. But rosé wines have brought financial stability to the region. And if people are queuing to buy your rosé wine, why stop making it?
Different countries have different preferences regarding the shade of pink. French consumers want really pale rosés as they are made in Provence. Northern Europeans, Japanese, and Americans used to prefer stronger color, but there seems to be a general movement towards pale colored rosés. Here is where the technology comes into the picture. To get the color you want, you have to know exactly when to remove the skins. Remove the skins? Yes!
Rosé is not made by blending white and red wine. At least not in Europe and not in any quality region in the rest of the world either. The European Commission wanted to permit it a few years ago, but the protests from producers were loud, and the proposal was quickly withdrawn (It is permitted for pink Champagne). Rosé wine is made from red grapes (although white grapes may be used too). As the color is only in the skins, the time of contact between the juice and the skins determines the color of the wine. Pale rosé is made with just a soft pressing of the grapes; no skin contact with the juice. Deeper color requires the skins to macerate in the must for anywhere from 2 to 20 hours.
One method of making rosé is saignée. Producers start making a red wine but soon withdraw some juice from the tank. This juice has been slightly colored by the skins and will be fermented into a rosé. The red wine that remains in the tank will be richer in flavor (as there will be less juice for the same amount of skins in the tank). The rosé is a sort of waste product. The downside (and it’s a big downside) for this method of rosé production is that the grapes probably were harvested at the time that suited the red wine, which in many cases is too late for a good quality rosé wine. The grapes for rosé should be harvested earlier to get a good, fresh acidity. Nevertheless, there is some good rosé de saignée.
There are no special rosé grapes; any red will do. The grape will influence the wine. Pinot Noir gives a softer, more flattering rosé than one made from Malbec or Cabernet. Tibouren in Provence is hardly used for anything else. Cinsault and Grenache are commonly used.
Rosé from Bandol in Provence is among the most appreciated by rosé connoisseurs. It uses the powerful Mourvèdre grape. The wines of Tavel in the southern Rhône Valley, an appellation that is exclusively for rosé, are made primarily from Grenache, Syrah and Mourvèdre. White grapes may be added, Clairette for floral aromas and Bourboulenc for freshness.
Europe dominates rosé production (75%), and in Europe, France is at the top. Nearly 10% of world wine production today is rosé wine, and the number is growing. More rosé wine producers are making premium rosé wines. The question is, how good can it get?
For this city dweller, wine provided the opening to a greater understanding of food and agriculture, and their precarious balance.
By Eric Asimov, July 20, 2020
Last year a friend asked me a question I had never considered before: Over the many years I had been writing about wine, what was the greatest thing this job had given me? I answered almost reflexively. As a New Yorker who has spent most of my life living in Manhattan, wine had provided me a connection to nature that I most likely would never have experienced otherwise.
I’ve thought about this a lot over the last few weeks, as the pandemic has now been with us for more than four months. Most of that time, I’ve been in my apartment, far away from vineyards, much less anything that might reasonably be construed as wild and natural, like a forest or ocean. I feel the difference, physically and emotionally.
My friend professed surprise at my answer. He’d assumed that I would cite the wonderful, otherwise inaccessible wines I had been able to drink, or maybe the many intriguing personalities in the wine world with whom I’ve spent time. The wonderful, otherwise inaccessible wines I have been able to drink and the many intriguing wine personalities with whom I’ve spent time have been wonderful benefits of my job. If I were not representing readers of The New York Times, I would never have had an opportunity to drink, wine made from 1846, or to try 16 vintages of Ch. Lafite-Rothschild going back to 1868.
I also know that my understanding of wine would not be nearly as rich without having had the opportunity to spend time with people as diverse as Jean-François Fillastre, a little-known Bordeaux vigneron; Paul Draper, the longtime guiding force of Ridge Vineyards; Bartolo Mascarello, a tireless defender of ancestral Barolo practices; María José López de Heredia, an equally stalwart proponent of traditional Rioja, and so many others.
But nothing in wine has affected me so profoundly as observing the intimate relationship that enlightened farmers have with the land that they tend. What I’ve learned from them has shaped my outlook in many important facets of my life, from the foods and wines I buy to the clothes I wear to how I think about climate change and political issues.
It has also made clear to me how little we know about the natural world, particularly the complex and intricate links that govern the well-being of a healthy ecosystem, from the network of microbial life in the soil to the diversity of plant life to the importance of animal life all the way up to the apex predator. Taking away any one link in this complicated chain can have devastating consequences — to the soil, the air or even the flavor of the wine in your glass. Even something as seemingly mundane as putting up a fence, which might impede animal pathways or divert the natural flow of water, can have ripple effects far beyond anything intended.
It has also made clear to me how little we know about the natural world, particularly the complex and intricate links that govern the well-being of a healthy ecosystem, from the network of microbial life in the soil to the diversity of plant life to the importance of animal life. I would not have grasped any of these connections had I not spent time walking the land with people like Deirdre Heekin of La Garagista in Vermont; Mimi Casteel of Hope Well in Oregon; Andy Brennan, who makes ciders in the Catskills; Steve Matthiasson in Napa Valley; or Arianna Occhipinti in the Vittoria region of Sicily.
I come to none of this naturally. I was born in the suburbs to city people. My father, who grew up in Brooklyn, never left the city until a classmate at New York University one summer invited him to visit his family’s house upstate. There, the classmate showed him their property, including a vegetable garden. As my father liked to tell it, his friend reached down and pulled up a carrot and proudly displayed it. “From the dirt?” exclaimed my father, whose sidewalk-and-streets upbringing had not prepared him for such a sight.
I, at least, had the opportunity as a child to go to a camp, to hike and swim and learn how to gather wood and build a fire. But as an adult, I have never hunted or fished. I love to hike, but not overnight. I prefer running water and clean sheets to tents and sleeping bags. Still, nature has touched me through wine. Perhaps it’s an example of biophilia, a notion popularized by biologist Edward O. Wilson, who posited that humans possess an innate love of nature.
I can’t say if it is true, but I’m desperate to smell the earth and air in a naturally farmed vineyard, to walk in a forest or stumble barefoot through a stream. I owe my consciousness of this yearning to wine. If it had not been for wine, I would not have been able to distinguish between the dirt my father perceived and living soil, which teems with unseen life, playing a crucial, symbiotic role in ensuring the healthiness and well-being of plants, including grapevines.
I would not have known that you cannot assess the healthiness of a vineyard without looking at the ecosystem, of which the vineyard is a small part. “An object seen in isolation from the whole is not the real thing,” the Japanese farmer Masanobu Fukuoka wrote in his seminal 1978 book “The One-Straw Revolution,” and I’ve come to see the simple truth in that insight.
Throughout the 20th century, the trend in agriculture — what we now call conventional agriculture — was isolation. Vast tracts of corn, soybeans, wheat, and even grapes replaced the subsistence farms where a mixture of vegetables, fruits, grains, and animals coexisted. Such polycultures were threaded through with wild areas, where beneficial insects, birds, and other animals lived. This, theoretically at least, fostered a healthy biological diversity in which pests and diseases were kept in check naturally rather than through artificial means.
[Our articles are typically about wine, but here's one on the beer industry.]
The COVID pandemic and subsequent supply chain disruptions were challenging for the beer industry. There were worker shortages, aluminum shortages, glass shortages, packaging shortages, and shipping woes worldwide. (The Corona plant in Mexico actually shut down for a month!) Much of the glass used by European beer companies turns out to have been previously made in Ukraine! Shortages there affected demand and thus prices all over the world as breweries scrambled for supplies. (The glass shortage also affected wineries). New, small, craft breweries were hit particularly hard as suppliers favored large, established beer companies for what materials they did have. All this at a time when consumers were staying home, enjoying a drink (or two), and going upscale to craft brew, better Bourbons, aged Scotches, etc. We are still seeing spot shortages. Twenty-one-year- single malt? Forget it!
It’s obvious that beer has bubbles. The bubbles in beer (and Champagne) are carbon dioxide (CO2) gas that is a byproduct of the fermentation process. But that’s only part of the story. Apparently, it takes a lot of carbon dioxide to make beer. Some of it comes from fermentation, but most actually comes from industrial CO2.
Global warming can be attributed to the rise of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. CO2 is not the only greenhouse gas. Methane may be even more of a problem, but carbon dioxide gets the most attention. Released by the burning of fossil fuels and the thawing of permafrost, we know that there is too much CO2 in the atmosphere. But in the beer world, there's actually a shortage!
When beer lovers are asked to name the ingredients that go into making their favorite products, yeast, barely, hops, and even water are likely to elicit the most frequent responses. But as many in the industry have found out recently through a shortage, carbon dioxide plays an equally important role in creating the appearance (bubbles & foam), flavors, mouthfeel, & acidity level that consumers look for in their beers. It also blocks oxidization that would make beer taste stale. “Without it, beer is not a palatable, enjoyable beverage,” said Chuck Skypeck, technical brewing projects manager with the Brewers Association. “It’s truly an unsung ingredient.”
Carbon dioxide is akin to adding salt to items when baking or cooking in that it helps enhance the other flavors prevalent in the beer. The colorless and odorless gas also maintains the iconic foam head on a beer after it’s poured, and can help brewers alter the pH of the beverage to create just the right flavor — lower pH produces a more acidic profile. There are other advantages, too, as extra CO2 creates a crisper taste and lifts out the aroma of the beer just before it’s consumed.
CO2 is also required in the brewery to pump liquid and clean out lines. For example at Harpoon Brewery, a moderate size craft operation making beer in Boston since 1986, the brewer goes through up to 1,000 tons of liquid CO2 each year, or the equivalent of roughly 16 to 20 tons a week!
by Jonathan Becher, SAP
[Buying by the label is a terrible way to buy wine. Forearmed with this knowledge, it’s fine to be amused by a cute label. But choose - and drink - a good wine! - Joel]
After much field research, I’ve come to the conclusion that most of us choose wine based on brand, rather than taste. Sure, many people have an oenophile friend who knows that a bottle of 1787 Chateau Lafite with the initials Th. J. etched on it sold for more than $150K. However, most of us either stick with a few wines we’re already familiar with or, when we want something new, we make the decision largely based on the label. That’s right, the label.
According to David Schuemann of CF Napa Brand Design, “a carefully crafted label can make us think the bottle is way more expensive than it is, and it can boost our enjoyment of the wine itself.” In his new book, 99 Bottles of Wine: The Making of the Contemporary Wine Label, Schuemann reveals the strategy behind the company’s most successful designs. The book contains a wide variety of photographs of some of the most eye-catching wine labels which “tickle our subconscious and coerce us into grabbing a bottle off the shelf.” The book’s dust jacket unfolds to become a poster that displays all of the wine bottles in the book.
The general public needs explicit clues on what to expect from a wine so the entire bottle is designed to convince novices to buy it. For starters, bottles typically look $10 more expensive than they actually are. People associate simple, uncluttered designs with high-end wines and sophisticated flavors. Therefore, more expensive wines have a label with a single color background with only a simple logo.
For mass-market wines, labels are colorful so they can compete for attention. As Schuemann says, “They are whimsical in a clever way. And we’ll still add a bit of gold foil to show the quality.” The foil helps beginners know what flavors to expect; red means berries, yellow is buttery, and green implies tropical flavors. And, of course, the descriptions on the back of the bottles are usually less about the wine itself and more about the experience you will have drinking it.
Academic research shows this effort pays off. In Customer Sense: How the 5 Senses Influence Buying Behavior, Professor Aradhna Krishna explains the brain’s pleasure centers are more active when people think they are drinking $90 wine than $5 wine, even if the two are really identical. The flowery writing on the back of the bottle also works: “If the description on the back makes you imagine the wine’s fruity bouquet and the way it feels in your mouth, then the taste will be enhanced and consumption goes up,” says Krishna.
So the next time you reach for an impulse buy of a bottle of wine, go ahead and choose by the label. It may or may not be a great wine, but you’re likely to be entertained.
A Samantha Leal (Marieclaire.com) interview with Dr. Jeremy Fischer of Vitality Integrative Medicine
Before Drinking
1. Drink fluids in advance. “Hydration is really important. Alcohol is a diuretic, causing dehydration, which is a major cause of hangover symptoms,” says Dr. Fischer. “So if you know you’ll be drinking, start preparing in advance by drinking plenty of fluids throughout the day. Water with a pinch of salt is one option. Coconut water is even better, as it’s full of electrolytes (which you’ll be peeing away later, so better stock up in advance).”
2. Avoid caffeine the day of drinking. “Caffeine is also a diuretic. Combined with alcohol, it will just exacerbate your fluid losses,” says Dr. Fischer. As far as the day after drinking? Stick to one cup (if you can’t function without it) as it can definitely help with any headaches, but drink extra fluids to offset the diuretic effect.
3. Eat before drinking. It’s a no-brainer, but the consequences are real if you don’t. “Having food in your stomach will slow the absorption of alcohol into the blood, giving your liver more time to detoxify the alcohol, and causing less buildup of the nasty acetaldehyde, which is responsible in large part for the hangover symptoms,” says Dr. Fischer. “Aim for substantial foods with protein, carbs, and/or fats. Continue to eat while drinking.”
4. Take antioxidants. “They help the liver break down the alcohol, and they reduce inflammation caused by free radicals from alcohol digestion.” Specifically, try vitamin C (Dr. Fischer recommends 500 mg to 2 grams, two to three times a day, but make sure you increase the dosage slowly as too much at one time, while perfectly safe, can make you go to the bathroom a lot more. You can also try NAC, 400 mg two to three times a day. “Start the day of drinking with your dosages, and continue the day after drinking, whether or not you have a hangover, as you will definitely have depleted your antioxidants. Also, take a good B complex pill to help detox.”
5. Take curcumin. “Curcumin, the potent anti-inflammatory chemical found in turmeric, can help decrease inflammation, improve liver detoxification while protecting the liver from toxicity, and reduce free radicals. Take 1 gram several times the day of drinking, and several times the day after,” says Dr. Fischer.
While Drinking
6. Drink slowly and in moderation. “Pacing your drinking will give the body more time to break down the alcohol and decrease your chances of a hangover. Sip instead of gulping (or chugging).” A good rule of thumb if you’re drinking something with ice cubes: pace it so some cubes melt before you finish your drink. “This will dilute the alcohol and improve hydration.”
7. One glass (or more) of hydrating fluids after every drink. “If you’ve ever wondered why when you drink it seems like you’re peeing out way more than you're taking in, it’s because you probably are,” says Dr. Fischer. “This strategy will help replace the fluids and electrolytes lost while drinking. Water is okay, but juices or coconut water are best. If you just have water, add a pinch of salt to it for electrolytes.”
8. Stick to clear or lighter-colored alcohols. “The darker-colored alcohols tend to have more congeners, AKA impurities, which have been associated with more severe hangover symptoms. Bourbon has the most congeners, and vodka has the least.”
9. Avoid carbonated drinks. “Carbonation increases the rate of alcohol absorption, putting more stress on the detox process in your liver.”
10. Avoid smoking! Smoking with drinking resulted in worse hangover symptoms.
After Drinking - [this isn’t exactly practical for most of us]
11. Get an IV drip. “IV (intravenous) therapy brings needed hydration, vitamins, and electrolytes directly into your bloodstream where they’re needed," says Dr. Fischer. “Various doctors and clinics across the country currently offer this therapy, which can be done either before or after drinking to restore fluids & nutrients, and assist detoxification. Receiving your nutrients intravenously has clinically been observed to be more effective than taking them orally.”
by Nina Martyris of WNYC’s The Salt
As Adolf Hitler was rising to power in Germany, the man who became his implacable foe was drowning — in debt and champagne. In 1936 Winston Churchill owed his wine merchant $75,000 in today's money. He was also in hock to his shirt-maker, watchmaker, and printer, but his sybaritic lifestyle of a cigar-smoking, horse-owning country aristocrat continued apace.
Stories of Churchill's special relationship with alcohol are legendary. Eleanor Roosevelt, who was his host at the White House during World War II, was astonished "that anyone could smoke so much and drink so much and keep perfectly well." Churchill started his day with whisky, but it was Champagne that was his truest passion. Now, for the first time, we get a glimpse into the extent to which that passion imperiled his already threadbare bank balance.
In a new book titled No More Champagne: Churchill and His Money, retired banker David Lough, who read history at Oxford, recounts the story of the former prime minister's fiscal excesses. After years of sifting through Churchill's bank statements and bills, Lough, a skilled financial gumshoe, has amassed a trove of material that he deploys to great effect in his book.
We learn of Churchill's ruinous stock market speculation circa 1929; the inheritances he squandered; his gambling at the casinos in Biarritz and Monte Carlo; the money he sank into the upkeep of his country mansion; and the torrent of cash he poured into a first-rate cellar.
To get an idea of Churchill's [household] alcohol consumption, in 1908, the year he married Clementine, he ordered 108 bottles and 84 half-bottles of Pol Roger 1895 vintage champagne plus 48 half-bottles of the 1900 Pol Roger vintage; 72 bottles of St.-Estèphe; 60 bottles of Port; 84 bottles of sparkling Moselle; 72 bottles of whisky [presumably Scotch whisky]; 36 bottles of 20-year-old brandy; 36 bottles of vermouth; and 4 bottles of gin.
Lough marveled at how such a prominent public figure got away by living his life well over the overdraft and alcohol limit. He was also perennially late on his taxes. Rich friends bailed him out, and at one point, the government settled his liquor bills — something unthinkable today!
Occasionally, Churchill's creditors threatened to reel him in, and he would attempt to tighten his belt. He clearly needed prodigious amounts of alcohol to function, so fortunately for him — and the free world — he had a patient wine merchant. "Randolph Payne & Sons had been the Churchill family's wine mer-chants for generations," says Lough. "They were a top-end-of-the-market firm with the 'royal warrant' on their letterhead: 'By Special Appointment to Her Majesty The Late Queen Victoria and to The Late King William The Fourth.'" The firm gave Churchill a long rope, but when his outstanding balance touched today's equivalent of $75,000 (as it did in 1914 and 1936), the chairman was forced to write to him — triggering yet another fit of economizing that fizzled out faster than an uncorked bottle of Pol Roger.
Churchill drank several Champagnes such as Giesler, Moët et Chandon, and Pommery, but Pol Roger was his clear favorite. Every year on Churchill's birthday, the charming and shrewd Odette Pol Roger sent him a case of champagne. (His other great friend, Soviet leader Joseph Stalin, sent him caviar until they fell out over Churchill's Iron Curtain speech.) When Churchill died in 1965 at the mellow age of 90, Pol Roger put a black border around the labels of bottles exported to Britain. Madame Pol Roger was among the few personal friends invited to the funeral service at St. Paul's Cathedral. In 1984, no doubt to solder the Churchillian connection, Pol Roger launched a prestige cuvée named Sir Winston Churchill.
Churchill historian Michael Richards describes a game Churchill played with his friend Frederick Lindemann, an Oxford don and the government's chief scientific adviser. "Prof!" Churchill would command. "Pray calculate the total quantity of champagne, wine, and spirits I have consumed thus far in my life and tell us how much of this room it would fill." Lindemann would pull out a slide rule, pretend to make calculations, and announce, "I'm sorry, Winston, it would only reach our ankles." Churchill would mock sigh, "How much to do — how little time remains."
It may surprise you to learn that your average soil (the kind that’s perfect for the veggies you hope to grow this summer) is not a place where you should plant a grape vine. Isn’t a beautiful, rich, fertile plot of earth perfect for plant life? Dirt, sun, and water are all you need, right?
Not quite. Many of the best wines are grown in places where not much else will grow due, in part, to low nutrients. Soil types and the wines that grow there are complicated and wine geeks can get uber-nerdy about the whole soil thing. Wine people can’t help it because soil is completely fascinating, right down to the actual textural sensation that occurs on your tastebuds when you taste a wine. Little details like that can have everything to do with dirt.
Several types of soil are considered optimal for grape growing when combined with the right elevation, sun exposure, and favorable weather. Most soil types are place-specific; hence, the concept of terroir. Wine is truly a one-of-a-kind expression of exactly where it came from, right down to the minerals found in the soil. Here’s a quick rundown of some of the most famous soil types:
VOLCANIC - found around Mt. Etna (Sicily), parts of the Napa Valley, parts of the Willamette Valley, parts of Campagna (Italy), and Santorini (Greece). Why it’s special: Volcanic soil results from a long-ago volcanic eruptions. It is rich in specific minerals: iron, potassium, magnesium, and calcium. This allows for excellent water drainage so the grapevines don’t get “wet feet.” Wines grown in this soil type generally exhibit pronounced aromatics. They have a bright, fresh quality that captivates. Grapes that dig it: Nerello Moscalese, Chardonnay, Assyrtiko, Cab Sauvignon.
LIMESTONE - found in Champagne, Burgundy, parts of the Loire Valley, England. Why it’s special: If there were to be a “most famous” soil type, it would probably be limestone. There is a trail of limestone that runs from England all the way down through many famous French wine regions. Containing ancient sea shells, this soil type contains a high percentage of calcium carbonate, the main component of limestone. This chemical compound allows for easy absorption of minerals and make happy and delicious grapes. Limestone soil also retains moisture very well, helping the vines withstand periods of drought. When you taste a wine grown in limestone soil, it will often sear across your tastebuds with tingly minerality and high acid - a delightful experience. Grapes that dig it: Chardonnay, Pinot Noir, Sauvignon Blanc, Chenin Blanc.
CLAY - found in Pomerol (Bordeaux), Rioja and Ribera del Duero (Spain), and Barossa Valley (Australia). Why it’s special: Clay soils reduce yields and stay cooler than other soils, which works out well for hot regions like the Barossa Valley. They produce exceptionally bold, burly, and concentrated wines. There are almost endless combinations of clay-based soils; some are rich with limestone, known as calcareous clay. Barossa’s soil is clay-loam:, a mix of clay, sand, and silt. Grapes that dig it: Shiraz, Tempranillo, Merlot, Cabernet Franc.
SAND/STONES - found in Barolo (Italy), Swartland (South Africa), Médoc and Graves (Bordeaux), parts of California, and parts of Portugal. Why it’s special: Sandy soils are resistant to that nasty louse, Phylloxera, which will slowly strangle the life from a grapevine. Areas with sandy soil often have extremely old vines, thus giving them major bragging rights. A wine grown in sandy soil is often soft, with light color and low tannin. Sandy soil retains heat well, and in a cooler climate will result in soaring aromatics in the finished wine. A quick examination of Bordeaux’s Médoc and Graves and the Rhône’s Chateauneuf du Pape show that things are much more complicated. Gravel (Bordeaux) and stones (Rhône) are very important, perhaps even more important than the sand. Grapes that dig it: Cabernet Sauvignon, Grenache, Nebbiolo, Zinfandel.
The next time you find a wine that you really love, do a quick search to see what kind of soil it comes from. See if you notice any patterns in your taste!
An Upside To Climate Change? Better French Wine
by Alastair Bland, The Salt
[This article is a little dated, but it still has some interesting points; it turns out that global warming is more complicated than was initially thought. The changes are geographically uneven, and one of the major effects has been more frequent and more intense storms, as well as more frost early in the season]
Global warming has made conditions historically associated with great wines more frequent in Bordeaux and Burgundy, a study finds. But things look less bright for California vineyards.
While climate change threatens coastal cities and generates extreme weather, global warming could bring good news to some of France's most esteemed vineyards. The conditions for early-ripening fruit here, historically associated with highly rated wines, have become more frequent, according to research published online in the journal Nature Climate Change. "Before 1980 you needed drought to generate the heat for a really early harvest," says the study's co-author, Benjamin Cook, a climate scientist with NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York. "But since 1980 it's been so warm that you can get the hot summers and really early harvests without needing a drought."
In other words warming has become so pronounced that even drenching summer rains cannot always absorb and reduce the heat that helps ripen grapes. This has meant early harvests, a potentially good thing for Bordeaux and Burgundy, where Cook and his co-author, Harvard University's Elizabeth M. Wolkovich, focused their research. "There is a very clear signal that the earlier the harvest, the much more likely that you're going to have high-quality wines," Cook says.
Cook also says the traditional reasoning that hotter weather and an earlier harvest means better wine may only hold true to a point. He notes that extreme heat and drought in 2003 led to one of France's earliest harvests on record. Grape growers harvested fruit in mid August, several weeks earlier than usual. "But the wine quality was middling," Cook says. "After a certain point, it could just get to be so warm and the harvest so early that the old rules no longer apply." In fact other research predicts that global warming could redraw the entire global winemaking map. A paper published in 2013 in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences warned that grape growers may need to move their vineyards to higher latitudes and higher elevations to beat the heat of global warming.
Lee Hannah, co-author of that study, says his results don't necessarily conflict with Cook's research. The differing results are a result of the global, rather than localized, view that he and his colleagues took in gathering their data and running their climate models. Hannah is a U. of California-Santa Barbara climate change biologist with Conservation Inter- national. Hannah says warming trends will almost certainly force winemakers to make adjustments to how they operate. "But the devil is in the details for each particular region in how that exactly plays out, and there may be winners and losers," Hannah says. "In Europe, things could be more moderate than what our model suggests, and in California things could be more extreme."
In California, Hannah notes, escalating temperatures have come in tandem with drought, whereas in Europe drought and temperature have become decoupled. For California winemakers, this could mean extreme conditions that make regions known for fine wine, like Napa and Sonoma counties, too hot to produce premium wines in the future. "People are very worried about what this latest drought could mean for wine production in California," Hannah says.
Gregory Jones, a professor of environmental science and policy at Southern Oregon University, says that the climate trends observed in Cook's study, which Jones helped review, could make California more dependent on irrigation. Cook also believes some facets of winemaking will need to change as the planet warms. But the point of his and Wolkovich's study was to provide winemakers with information that could help them adapt to warmer conditions rather than flee from them. "People are still going to want to grow wine in Bordeaux in the future," Cook says. "We wanted to get more information about what is happening here [due to climate change] so that people could use that information. Winemakers do not need to be complete slaves to what the environment does."
UC Davis, November 25, 2013 - It is widely accepted that terroir — the unique blend of a vineyard’s soil, climate, and exposure — sculpts the flavor and quality of wine. Now a new study led by UC Davis researchers offers evidence that grapes and the wines they produce are also the product of an unseen but fairly predictable microbial terroir, itself shaped by the climate and geography of the region, vineyard, and even individual vine.
Results from DNA sequencing revealed that there are patterns in the fungal and bacterial communities that inhabit the surface of wine grapes, and these patterns are influenced by the vineyard’s environmental conditions. The findings appear online in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
“The study results represent a paradigm shift in our understanding of grape and wine production as well as other food and agricultural systems in which microbial communities impact the qualities of the fresh or processed products,” said Professor David Mills, a microbiologist in the Department of Viticulture and Enology and Department of Food Science and Technology. He noted that further studies are needed to determine whether these variations in the microbial communities that inhabit the surface of the grapes eventually produce detectable differences in the flavor, aroma, and other chemically linked sensory properties of wines. The study’s co-authors suggest that by gaining a better understanding of microbial terroir, growers and vintners may be able to better plan how to manage their vineyards and customize wine production to achieve optimal wine quality.
To examine the microbial terroir, the researchers collected 273 samples of grape “must,” the pulpy mixture of juice, skins, and seeds from freshly crushed, de-stemmed wine grapes. The must samples were collected right after crushing from wineries throughout California’s wine-grape growing regions during two separate vintages. Each sample, containing grapes from a specific vineyard block, was immediately frozen for analysis. The researchers used a DNA sequencing technique called short-amplicon sequencing to characterize the fungal and bacterial communities growing on the surface of the grapes and subsequently appearing in the grape must samples.
The researchers found that the structure of the microbial communities varied widely across different wine regions. The data also indicated that there were significant regional patterns of both fungal and bacterial communities represented in Chardonnay must samples; however, the Cabernet Sauvignon samples exhibited strong regional patterns for fungal communities but only weak patterns for bacterial communities. Further tests showed that the bacterial and fungal patterns followed a north-south axis, roughly paralleling the California coastline; hence suggesting that microbial patterns are influenced by environmental factors.
These and other results from the study reveal patterns of regional distributions of the microbial communities across large geographical scales. It appears that growing regions can be distinguished based on the abundance of several key groups of fungi and bacteria, and that these regional features have obvious consequences for both grapevine management and wine quality.
Collaborating with Mills were graduate student Nicholas Bokulich of the UC Davis Dept. of Viticulture and Enology; John Thorngate of Constellation Brands Inc.; and Paul Rich- ardson, CEO of MicroTrek Inc., a company founded to provide microbial mapping services to help vintners understand this phenomenon. Constellation Brands Inc. provided in-kind support for the study through sample and metadata collection. Funding for the study was provided, in part, by the American Wine Society Educational Foundation Endowment Fund, the American Society of Brewing Chemists Foundation and the Wine Spectator.
Articles about wine often mention yield as if everyone understands the term and its implications. In viticulture, yield is a measure of the quantity of grapes or wine produced per unit of vineyard surface. Two different types of yield measures are commonly used, one based on the mass of grapes produced and the other based on the volume of wine produced. The two measures are close but not identical.
Who cares? The yield of a vineyard is often seen as a quality factor. Lower yields are generally associated with wines with more concentrated flavors; in fact, the maximum allowed yield is regulated for many wine appellations.
In most of Europe, yield is measured in the volume of wine produced, specifically the metric hectoliters of wine per hectare of vineyard (hl/ha). In most of the New World, yield is measured in tons of grapes per acre of vineyard.
Due to differing procedures for making different styles of wine and different properties of the various grape varieties, the amount of wine produced from a unit mass of grapes varies, so it is not possible to make an exact conversion between these two measures. For example, it takes an average of 160 kilograms (363 lbs.) of grapes to make 100 liters (1 hectoliter or 22 gallons or 110 bottles) of white wine, but it takes on average 130 kg (287 lbs.) to make the same amount of red wine.
A vineyard that produces 100 hectoliters per hectare would yield about 6.5 tons per acre of white grapes (100 hl/ha ~ 16,000 kg/ha = 16 tons/ha = 6.5 tons per acre), whereas that same productivity would result in 5.3 tons per acre of red grapes (100 hl/ha ~ 13,000 kg/ha = 13 tons/ha = 5.3 tons/acre). Conversely 1 ton/acre ~ 15 hl/ha of white wine or 19 hl/ha of red.
In the real world of wine making, a yield of 50 hl/ha (3.25 tons per acre for whites and 2.65 for reds) is often considered the dividing line between high quality and only good quality wine. The explanation is that a vine has only so much energy. Think about it as the leaf to fruit ratio. A vine has only so many leaves, and these are the engines of photosynthesis and thus ripening. The vine can funnel all its energy into ripening fewer grapes, thus getting more flavor, or it can dilute its efforts and yield many more grapes of much weaker flavor (i.e. Yellow Tail).
Among the best wines, yields are often 2 tons per acre or less. The Yellow Tails of the wine world are made from 10 or more tons of fruit per acre (in the neighborhood of 200 hl/ha)! Of course it is more complicated than that. Some vineyardists report that overly restricting yields can produce wines that are out of balance. And some varietals, such as Sauvignon Blanc, can produce fine wine at relatively high yields; whereas others, such as Pinot Noir, show greatly reduced character unless yields are severely restricted. (This is one reason why good Pinot Noir is always expensive.)
It is not always meaningful to compare the overall yields of the various countries because the relative proportion of bulk wines to quality wines and the proportion of white wines to red wines; none-the-less, the following figures are interesting. Average yields (hl/ha) for major wine producing countries are: Italy (55), France (52), Spain (30), United States (49), Argentina (65), Germany (103), South Africa (73), Australia (55), Portugal (73), and Austria (52).
• for white wine, 100 hl/ha ≈ 16,000 kg/ha (16 ton/ha) = 6.5 ton/acre.
• 1 ton/acre = 2470 kg/ha ≈ 15 hl/ha
• for red wine, 100 hl/ha ≈ 13,000 kg/ha (13 ton/ha) = 5.3 ton/acre.
• 1 ton/acre = 2470 kg/ha ≈ 19 hl/ha
• for mixed wine, 100 hl/ha ≈ 14,000 kg/ha (14 ton/ha) = 5.7 ton/acre.
• 1 ton/acre = 2470 kg/ha ≈ 17.5 hl/ha
There are over 20 million bubbles in a bottle of champagne and every one of them alters the taste, scent and fluid dynamics of the sparkling wine, say researchers studying the chemistry of carbonation and the physics of fizz.
During centuries of artisanal trial and error, winemakers had learned surprisingly little about how a sparkling wine's most active ingredient affected its chemistry of aroma and flavor. To understand the essence of its effervescence, the researchers analyzed champagne bubbles with mass spectrometry, laser tomography and high-speed microphotography, and then tested its carbonation on genetically engineered mice.
To a vintner, the bubbly in a crystal flute may be vintage Dom Perignon or Pol Roger. But to these scientists, it is a complex hydroalcoholic solution supersaturated with carbon dioxide molecules and laced with proteins, lipids and amino acids.
University of Reims physics professor Gerard Liger-Belair explored the scientific reasons for the behavior and taste of sparkling wines in "Uncorked: The Science of Champagne."
Their experiments, described in Science, the American Scientist and the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, reveal the unexpected ways in which the microscopic and molecular behavior of carbonation make champagne tingle in the nose and tap-dance on the tongue. Champagne owes much of its magic -- its savor, scent and glow -- to the micro-mechanics of CO2 bubbles, they reported.
"I could not imagine such beautiful hydrodynamic phenomena hidden right under our noses," says Gerard Liger-Belair, professor at the laboratory of enology and applied chemistry at the University of Reims Champagne-Ardenne in France, who has devoted a decade to deconstructing the fluid mechanics of sparkling wine.
Every bottle of champagne is a blend of many wines, but it owes its signature sparkle entirely to pent-up carbon dioxide. In fact, an average bottle of champagne contains about five or six times its volume in carbon dioxide, so compressed that when the champagne cork pops, it typically kicks out of the bottle's neck at about 30 miles per hour, Dr. Liger-Belair says. The champagne will actually taste better, he says, if the cork can be released with a more subdued CO2 sigh.
All this gas is the natural product of fermentation, created as yeast transforms sugar into ethanol. For centuries, though, winemakers treated so much CO2 as a hazard that, unvented, could make their wine bottles explode. The original developer of champagne is lost to legend, but an innovative 17th century Benedictine monk named Dom Pierre Perignon is sometimes credited with pioneering the predecessor of the wire collar, called a muselet, which holds a cork in place to withstand the fermentation pressure. With that simple twist, he turned a gassy nuisance into a luxury industry that last year sold about 322 million bottles of champagne world-wide.
For centuries, champagne makers considered pent-up carbon dioxide a hazard that could make their bottles explode. But the bubbles are so pleasing to the palette, it's no wonder 322 million bottles of champagne were sold world-wide in 2021.
Today, champagne makers ensure their lucrative bubbly is sufficiently saturated with CO2 by subjecting a base wine to a second round of fermentation inside tightly sealed bottles. After that, the CO2 pressure in the bottle is about six times the normal atmospheric pressure. When the bottle is uncorked, most of that gas quickly dissipates in a distinctive mist around the open bottle neck, but enough remains in the liquid to sire millions of bubbles, Dr. Liger-Belair says.
Traditionally, champagne bubbles were prized for their size and an aesthetic appeal that 19th century poet Lord Byron praised as "foaming whirls, as white as Cleopatra's pearls." Substituting the tools of chemistry for a wine-taster's more subjective judgments, Dr. Liger-Belair and his colleagues documented the expanding bubble universe within a glass of champagne.
In their findings, a bubble's biography begins inside a microscopic cellulose fiber clinging to the glass surface, usually fallen from the air or left by a towel. Gas builds up in the fiber as champagne splashes into the glass. When the combination of pressure, surface tension and viscosity is just right, the fiber starts leaking bubbles, the researchers said. Once settled after pouring, a glass of highly carbonated champagne effervesces at the rate of about 400 bubbles per second, compared with a rate of about 150 bubbles per second for beer, they reported. Champagne bubbles also are more flexible than beer bubbles, which affects how long they linger at the surface before popping.
As they rise, the bubbles swell to slightly less than a millimeter or so in diameter, absorbing other chemicals from the champagne. At the surface, they burst in a piquant froth.
Each exploding bubble sprays hundreds of droplets of concentrated compounds into the air, wreathing anyone drinking it in a fragrant mist, mass spectroscopy studies show. "These tiny droplets are highly concentrated, and this makes you feel directly through your nostrils all those aromatic molecules," Dr. Liger-Belair says.
Researchers used fluorescent dyes and laser imaging to monitor flow patterns. They discovered that the shape of a champagne glass can affect how thoroughly bubbles mix the beverage, which could affect its scent and flavor. Bubbles appeared to mix champagne more completely in a narrow, engraved flute than in the broad, shallow glass called a coupe.
Fizz, they found, seems to please the palette. Carbonated bubbles in sparkling wine, beer or soda actually activate our taste buds, researchers at Columbia University and University of California, San Diego recently reported.
Their discovery was inspired by reports of mountaineers who had lost their taste for bubbles after taking a medication called acetazolamide, which is used to prevent altitude sickness. After reaching the mountaintop, the climbers found that their beer tasted flat and soda tasted like dishwater. They dubbed the effect the champagne blues.
In October, biochemists Charles Zuker at Columbia and Jayaram Chandrashekar at UC San Diego showed that carbonation triggers an enzyme in taste buds that normally sense sourness. First, they implanted electrodes in normal mice to monitor a nerve connecting taste cells on the tongue. The nerve reacted to a taste of club soda or even a squirt of CO2 gas. The researchers then bred genetically engineered mice lacking those taste receptors and repeated the CO2 tests. "We can make a mouse with all its sour cells gone," Dr. Zuker says. "And when we make such a mouse, all CO2 sensing is gone."
Eventually, they identified a single sour-cell gene, called Car4, responsible for the enzyme sensitive to the taste of CO2. They found that the Car4 enzyme is also blocked by the altitude medication. "The zing and the tingle you get on your tongue is the stimulation of the sour receptors," says Dr. Zuker.
Brendan Pierson, New York Law Journal, April 08, 2014
A Manhattan judge has dismissed a fraudulent inducement lawsuit filed against a wine store and its owner by a customer who bought six $12.99 bottles of a wine he didn’t like. Civil Court Judge David Cohen also dismissed a claim accusing the White Plains store, Grapes, The Wine Company, and its owner, Daniel Posner, of defamation for calling the customer “a disgusting human being.”
The plaintiff, Philip Seldon, has written several books about wine, including The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Wine. Seldon also attracted attention in the mid-1990s when he taught a night school class called “Getting Even” about how to get revenge legally, according to a 1995 article in the Los Angeles Times.
Seldon bought six bottles of 2009 Cune Vina Rioja Crianza after getting an e-mail promotion from the store. The e-mail said the store’s staff was “very impressed” with the wine and that the “old world style of Rioja” is on a roll. It also touted the wine’s 91-point rating from leading wine critic Robert Parker.
Seldon didn’t like the wine and demanded a refund. When Posner refused, Seldon contested the charge for the wine with American Express. In an e-mail response to AmEx, Posner called Seldon “a disgusting human being.” Soon after, Seldon sent the store an e-mail saying he would sue, explaining, “I have nothing better to do with my life,” and filed the suit.
On March 20, Judge Cohen found that the defamation claim must be dismissed because the e-mail was simply name-calling, not actionable defamation. And the judge found the fraudulent inducement suit must be dismissed because Seldon hadn’t alleged any false statements. “When the wine did not measure up to his subjective tastes, he decided that the wine was not as advertised,” Cohen wrote. “However, plaintiff has not demonstrated at even the minimum prima facie level that any deception took place, that there was any falsity or anything other than plaintiff’s assumptions were incorrect.”
Seldon was represented by the law firm of Jeffrey L. Lessoff. Lesoff said his client would appeal. The defendants were represented by L'Abbate, Balkan, Colavita & Contini. The case is Seldon v. Grapes, The Wine Company, 20953/13.
Comments from readers of the New York Law Journal:
Judges have ample tools at their disposal to deal with litigants and attorneys who bring frivolous claims. Give them a taste of the lash in the form of sanctions. It will specifically deter the offender and generally deter future conduct by similarly motivated individuals. - George Ichert
He should have to pay for the time of the judge and all the court personnel as well. - Sid
This is why the European system of requiring the loser to pay the winner’s attorney’s fees and costs has merit. - no name
Read more:
http://www.newyorklawjournal.com/id=1202650104914/Patron-Who-Didn%27t-Like-Wine-Loses-Suit-Against-Retailer#ixzz2yKlLGAiV
ScienceDailey, Sep. 11, 2013 — Scientists have discovered where plants build tannins, complex chemicals used by plants for defense and protection. The source is the tannosome, a newly discovered organelle that is found in most land plants.
All living things are made from cells, whether they are single-celled organisms like amoeba or enormous entities like Giant Redwoods (in which millions of cells make up the body of the organism). Although cells may become specialized for particular roles in an organism, they each undertake many different tasks.
Internally each cell is furnished with a range of smaller bodies -- termed organelles -- that perform those various essential functions, e.g. chloroplasts in plant cells which are involved in photosynthesis, mitochondria in both animal and plant cells to power its various functions, and ribosomes that are essential for protein synthesis. Each organelle also produces a range of chemicals for the cell. The scientists were examining the organelles in plant cells and almost overlooked some of them.
Geneviève Conéjéro said, “When we purified the tannosomes (unknown objects at this time), for the first time, we thought we had obtained chloroplasts and rejected them as rubbish artifacts. After several trials, we considered that chloroplasts were not the only green objects in plants.”
The international team, headquartered at INRA in Montpellier, used a number of techniques to examine the cells in action. In some cases, they fixed cells into place, in others they introduced dyes, and in more samples, they examined spectra, light signatures of chemicals. What they found was that these strange organelles were producing tannins. Until now no one has known exactly where in the cell tannins have been made. We could see tannins stored in the vacuole, another organelle in the plant cell, but we couldn’t work out how they got there.
Geneviève Conéjéro said, “Tannins, also called condensed tannins or proanthocyanidins, are thought to play diverse roles such as defense against herbivores and pathogens or ultraviolet protection. They give a feeling of pungency in the mouth, the feel of a cat’s tongue licking your hand. Common sense associates tannins with immature unripe fruit, and people ironically say ‘this fruit is too green.’ More seriously, plant tannins have been used since the Neolithic times to prevent spoilage of animal skins, [a necessity] to manufacture leather laces and soles protecting feet from rough ground.”
The result was unexpected and was checked and rechecked. Conéjéro added, “To come to that conclusion and propose a somewhat revolutionary model, we needed a multidisciplinary approach associating several microscopy and biochemistry techniques. The most intriguing finding from this study is the very close proximity of the tannin polymerization system and the photosynthesis supercomplexes.”
Aside from their protective roles in plants, tannins are also important in making tea and red wine taste the way they do. It isn’t every day that a new organelle is identified, but this shows that something as commonplace and seemingly familiar as the cell still has secrets to be discovered. Something to think about the next time you have a “cuppa” or glass of Cabernet.
[A long but worthwhile read! An edited article by David Darlington about winery consultant Leo McCloskey of Enologix. Published in 2005, still very relevant. A chatGPT synopsis is at the end for those who don't have time to read the whole article]
One day in September of 2004 while Leo McCloskey was driving to the Chappellet winery in Napa Valley, he telephoned a client in Sonoma. “I’m looking at your metrics,” McCloskey said. “They’re pretty beefy. If you have that at midferm, you’re already there. You need 50 percent as a 4; I think drain-down-sweet is the name of the game this year. Let’s do what they do at Lafite -- come out shy of tannin, and we’ll add tannin. I want to encourage you to move more aggressively than you normally would.”
He listened for a few seconds. “You’re golden,” McCloskey said. “Beautiful. You got a statue in the quad. Hey, I gotta fly.” He ended the call and turned to me. “If you’re in Sonoma, you have to rearrange Mother Nature to match the beauty of Napa and Bordeaux,” he said. “Napa Cabernet is the only new world wine ruler being used internationally. Sonoma is an also-ran.”
McCloskey steered onto the Silverado Trail entering into Stags Leap, the area that produced the Cabernet Sauvignon that won a famous Paris tasting in 1976 heralding the international arrival of California wine. “They picked too early,” McCloskey said gazing at acres of grapeless vines on both sides of the road. “We have a weekly online bulletin that tells people when to pick. On Sept. 13 we said not to, and people who picked anyway drained down at 87.1.”
McCloskey could say this because his company, Enologix, takes grape samples from clients and extracts the juice to measure some of its chemical compounds. Using software developed by McCloskey, Enologix then compares the chemistry of the projected wines with that of a benchmark example. The outcome is a score on a 100-point scale, analogous -- not coincidentally -- to those employed by critics like Robert Parker of The Wine Advocate and James Laube of Wine Spectator. McCloskey boasted that his “thinking is in tune with Parker, Laube, and Helen Turley,” the latter a California winemaker known for favoring big, fruity, intense wines.
Not everyone shares this taste. Many oenophiles argue that owing especially to the influence of Parker, who has been called the planet’s most powerful critic in any field, wines all over the world have become more homogenous. The jammy, oaky, international style is largely free of the tannins that mellow and support a wine as it ages, but can make it taste bitter or astringent when young. Yet these wines often lack a sense of terroir, or regional distinctiveness. Parker’s most lamented impact is his popularization of the 100-point scale that is now employed by most wine magazines. The so-called “score” has been described as America’s main contribution to the wine business: a democratic, no-nonsense way of jettisoning the elitist jargon that veils quality from the consumer. It is also maligned for turning wine buyers into mindless puppets and vintners into sycophants seeking the favor of King Parker and King Laube.
But Leo McCloskey is unfazed. “The wine world is so big today that without ratings it would be chaos,” he says. “The consumer doesn’t need to know about terroir. He just wants to know whether a wine is worth $28 or whatever he’s paying for it.”
In the 15 years since McCloskey went into business as a wine consultant, the number of California wineries has increased from 800 to 1,700. The market share of foreign-made wines in the United States has doubled over the same period. With so many wineries now under the bottom-line control of corporations -- Constellation, Bronco, Beringer Blass, Brown-Forman, Kendall-Jackson, Diageo, the Wine Group, and the longtime kingpin, E. & J. Gallo -- it is easy to see the appeal of Enologix with its promise of “metrics that assist winemakers in . . . boosting average national critics’ scores.” But McCloskey doesn’t stop there. He insists that high-scoring wines can, through chemical analysis, be scientifically proven to be the best wines on the market. In other words, there is accounting for taste.
The low-slung Enologix offices are situated in a mini-business-park in the town of Sonoma where McCloskey has a database of 70,000 wines including information about soil, climate, prices, winemaking techniques, grape-growing practices, and critical scores. While traditional wine science focuses mainly on primary chemicals -- sugar, alcohol, and acid, which determine whether a wine meets basic standards of acceptability -- McCloskey looks at secondary chemicals like terpenes, phenols, and anthocyanins which, in affecting more nuanced characteristics like texture, aroma, taste, and color, are more closely associated with quality.
To analyze an individual wine, Enologix runs a sample through a liquid chromatograph (and for white wine, a mass spectrometer) to separate and measure chemical compounds. McCloskey says he has identified about 100 that can affect a person’s response; to compute a wine’s “quality index,” the ratios -- not just the amounts -- of these compounds to one another are compared with those of bottled wines previously judged and scored by groups of vintners, growers, owners, and critics. McCloskey publishes his findings in his magazine, Global Vintage Quarterly, alongside a national critics’ score, which represents an average rating compiled from five publications: Wine Spectator, The Wine Advocate, Wine Enthusiast, Stephen Tanzer’s International Wine Cellar, and Connoisseurs’ Guide to California Wine.
Enologix divides wine into four categories. For reds, Style 1 is pale in color and low in tannin like most Pinot Noir or French Burgundy; Style 2 is also pale, but higher in tannin like Italian Barolo; Style 3 is dark and tannic like a great many Cabernet Sauvignons and top Bordeaux; Style 4 is similarly dark but only moderately tannic. This last category, McCloskey told me, represents “the vast majority of successful, flagship mainstream wines, the most elegant and popular wines in the world.”
Fermentation, the foundation of winemaking, occurs when yeast converts grape sugar into alcohol. Harvesting fruit late yields more intense flavor, though higher sugars result in higher alcohol levels. “Draining down sweet,” separating the juice in a fermentation tank from its crushed grape skins before all the sugar has been transformed, means that less harsh-tasting tannin will find its way into the wine with the side effect that it may age less well. According to McCloskey, these techniques can yield the Style 4 qualities -- rich, concentrated flavor and a soft, velvety sensation in the mouth -- that contemporary critics value most.
McCloskey claims that by using his system, winemakers can predict their own average critical scores within two and a half points with 95 percent accuracy (one and a half points with 80 percent accuracy). He says that the typical winery signing up with Enologix realizes a five-point rise over its previous years’ average scores for red wines, six for white. McCloskey’s emphasis is on the luxury cabernet market in which wineries can afford Enologix’s average annual service fee of $20,000. The company’s revenue flows from such prestigious names as Beaulieu, Benziger, Diamond Creek, Merry Edwards, Niebaum-Coppola, Ridge, St. Francis, and Sebastiani. According to McCloskey, 39 Enologix wines scored 90 points or higher in a recent issue of The Wine Advocate.
The Chappellet winery is hidden in a grove of oaks backed by open slopes of grapevines high among the rugged hills on Napa Valley’s eastern edge. Founded in 1968 by Donn and Molly Chappellet, the winery won early acclaim for its Cabernet, but as consumer tastes shifted toward softer textures and juicier fruit, it acquired the aura of a has-been. To turn things around, the owners hired winemaker Phillip Titus in 1990. He began working with Enologix in 1996, and in 2004 Connoisseurs’ Guide chose a Chappellet Cabernet as the Wine of the Year.
After parking the car and entering the winery’s cavernous interior, we were greeted by Titus, now 49, who drew a foaming sample of Merlot from a stainless-steel fermentation tank. As we tasted it, Titus recited its levels of tannin and complex anthocyanins -- in parts per million -- from the Enologix chemical report. “In my tasting group, they can’t speak this language,” Titus said. “Unless you're an Enologix client, you don’t talk about complex anthocyanins.”
Soon we were joined by two more of McCloskey’s clients, Sam Spencer and Wendy Roloson, who were making 5,000 cases of wine at Chappellet. With the first fruit he picked, Spencer had pressed the wine off its skins after fermentation was finished. “But when we looked at the results,” McCloskey said, “the tannin was high. I wasn’t able to drain down into a Style 4,” Spencer confirmed. “Your grapes are growing at Style 3,” McCloskey told him. “That’s the pitch your terroir is throwing you. But Parker, Laube, and consumers are at Style 4, so you need to ask, how can I get my wine stylistically in the right ballpark?” The answer was to press his remaining grapes earlier and produce a successful product through blending. “You need to be so low in tannin that you’re going to feel really uncomfortable,” McCloskey warned.
Spencer told me that Enologix at first “seemed like a luxury. It wasn’t forthcoming about how the system works -- you have to sign a nondisclosure agreement to see how the metrics add up, and I wasn’t convinced. But now I think it’s a tool that every carpenter ought to have.”
Not all of McCloskey’s clients are so complimentary. Several I spoke to declined to be quoted, apparently owing to a fear that being identified with Enologix would suggest that they have gone over to the dark side and are chasing “the score.” (McCloskey calls this “the cover-up,” when winemakers refuse to acknowledge their use of modern technologies at odds with romantic marketing images.)
Ravenswood co-founder Joel Peterson told me that after Ravenswood’s brief experience with Enologix, he thought the company provided information only for making one style of wine. “It’s a very narrow definition of taste,” Peterson says. “Part of the charm and beauty of wine is its idiosyncrasy, but when everybody tries to hit the same sweet spot, it’s like making soda pop.” [When all wines taste alike] “As a consumer you have to ask what you’re paying for.”
Although McCloskey is fond of proclaiming that “the consumer is king,” sales don’t figure into the Enologix Index. In lieu of formal studies or statistics, McCloskey (like most of the rest of the wine industry) accepts the axiom that buyers obey critics whether or not the average consumer’s palate agrees with that of the average wine writer.
The common objection to “the score” is that wine is too complex a beverage to be summed up in a single number. The way in which someone responds to a wine depends on myriad variables: stylistic preference, mood, the accompanying food, and the state of the wine itself after shipping, storing, and aging; not to mention the prejudices and expectations that attend a wine’s reputation and price. For the same reason that a thundering symphony or screaming guitar solo may not make the best dinner music, wines that get middling scores in tastings sometimes fare better with meals than attention-grabbing ones that impress judges in isolation. By keying his chemical evaluation system to critical scores, McCloskey makes the not uncommon assumption that intensity equals quality when it’s often equivalent only to extravagance.
“The prevailing critics can’t distinguish real quality,” says Randall Grahm, the founder of Bonny Doon Vineyards (like Ravenswood, a former Parker favorite that fell from grace as it grew). “They’re easily fooled by fakery because the only thing they’re looking for is concentration. That probably can be correlated with chemistry, but I would argue that while it can be an indicator of quality, it’s not the only one. It doesn’t speak to balance, for example.”
Roger Boulton, a professor of Viticulture and Oenology at the University of California, Davis, is critical of the fact that Enologix’s analytical methods aren’t available for outsiders to verify. “If Leo is so sure about these things,” Boulton asked me, “why are they hidden?” Others agree, complaining that McCloskey’s proprietary system constitutes a “black box” impervious to academic and professional scrutiny.
“I’m not in the tenure-track business,” McCloskey retorts. “I followed the academic rules and published papers for a while. I found it was insanely slow. If you walked up to Steve Jobs and asked him to reveal everything, he’d say, ‘Get out of my face.’”
Interestingly enough McCloskey grew up in San Francisco and Cupertino, Calif., the home of Apple Computer. Upon graduating from Oregon State in 1971 with a degree in general science, he returned home and got a job painting barrels with mildicide at Ridge Vineyards. Within a year, he had taken over the winery’s lab, and by the time he was 25 had published new methods for measuring alcohol and malolactic fermentation (both now essential to wine analysis). In 1976 he helped to found Felton-Empire, a winery whose first vintage Riesling won the Sweepstakes Award at the Los Angeles County Fair [and whose Pinot Noirs I remember fondly].
Paul Draper, the now-celebrated vintner who arrived at Ridge shortly before McCloskey, recalls that Charlie Rosen -- one of the winery’s founders and then-head of artificial intelligence at the Stanford Research Institute -- considered McCloskey a genius. Maynard Amerine, a U.C. Davis professor who helped to classify California’s wine regions by climate, suggested that McCloskey get a doctorate at Davis and then join the faculty. But Rosen and Carl Djerassi, a Ridge investor and the inventor of the birth-control pill, advised McCloskey to study “things like chemistry and mathematics, which actually have principles. Enology is more like a social science.” Remaining a paid consultant at Ridge, McCloskey attended U.C. Santa Cruz where he met his future wife, Susanne Arrhenius, a Swedish-born grad student whose lineage included two Nobel laureates in chemistry. Following Arrhenius into the field of chemical ecology, which analyzes the relationships between organisms and their environments, McCloskey completed his Ph.D. while consulting and serving as president of Felton-Empire.
“Chemical ecology says that a wine’s flavor, color, and fragrance are expressions of its ecosystem,” McCloskey told me. “Wine scientists thought grapes were more complicated than any other plant system. But we found out that Vitis vinifera produces a relatively simple list of flavors. Grapes are really rather primitive.”
Soon after McCloskey left U.C. Santa Cruz, Felton-Empire was sold. He noticed that the U.S. wine industry was becoming more businesslike and less entrepreneurial. “Critics were starting to control the value chain that went from the winery to the distributor to the retailer and restaurateur to the consumer,” McCloskey says. “By 1990 everybody was discrediting ‘the score,’ but I saw that the critics were going to win because Americans wanted to reduce their risk of purchase, and winemakers weren’t filling the information void.”
That year, 1990, McCloskey met with Dick Graff, then chairman of the Chalone Wine Group. McCloskey told him that although winemakers always seemed surprised when their efforts didn’t pan out, chemistry could actually predict critical performance. Graff arranged for McCloskey to taste Chalone wines with the company’s vintners, after which McCloskey assembled the results and analyzed the wines’ chemistry. Later the winemakers were presented with 12 wines, and asked to rank the 6 best and 6 worst. While others tallied the votes, McCloskey produced a sealed envelope containing his chemically based predictions: he correctly guessed the group’s top 3 and bottom 3 choices in the correct order!
Graff introduced McCloskey to the owners of Chateau Lafite Rothschild, the famous first-growth Bordeaux estate that had a financial interest in Chalone. When McCloskey analyzed the chemistry of Lafite’s vintages from the previous decade, his quality index exactly mirrored their economic performance. McCloskey continued to work with Lafite for the next four years, over which time he gained a dozen more clients. In 1993 he trademarked the name Enologix.
A week and a half after the meeting at Chappellet, Sam Spencer visited the Enologix offices with samples of wine he had pressed according to McCloskey's instructions. Studying its numbers, McCloskey said, “That’s a home run.” “I literally baby-sat the fermenter,” Spencer said.
Later McCloskey told me, “My goal is to make my customers self-sufficient so that metrics alone can solve all their problems.” Toward that end, he is now creating a thousand proprietary documents that will include all of his winemaking knowledge. Ultimately, he said, “I’ll be replaced by customer-management software.” And if McCloskey has his way, descriptions of a wine’s terroir will be replaced by reports on its levels of tannin and complex anthocyanin.
David Darlington is the author of Zin: The History and Mystery of Zinfandel (originally published as Angels’ Visits), among other books, and writes the “Short Finish” column for Wine & Spirits magazine.
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In September 2004, Leo McCloskey was driving to a winery in Napa Valley when he discussed winemaking metrics with a client over the phone. McCloskey, the founder of Enologix, a wine consulting company, believes in using chemical analysis to predict wine quality and critic scores. He follows a 100-point scale similar to those used by famous wine critics like Robert Parker and James Laube. While many appreciate his approach, others criticize it for creating a homogenous international wine style and overlooking terroir, the unique regional characteristics of wines.
Enologix analyzes wine samples using liquid chromatography and mass spectrometry to measure chemical compounds related to flavor, aroma, and texture. McCloskey's system identifies around 100 compounds affecting a wine's quality and compares their ratios to those of benchmark wines previously scored by critics. The company's database holds information about 70,000 wines, including soil, climate, prices, and more.
McCloskey classifies wines into four categories based on color and tannin levels. He believes that Style 4, dark and moderately tannic, represents the most elegant and popular wines globally. Enologix's clients include prestigious wineries like Beaulieu, Ridge, and St. Francis. According to McCloskey, their wines often receive high critical scores.
Some winemakers praise Enologix for its ability to improve scores and cater to consumer preferences. However, critics argue that wine's complexity cannot be reduced to a single number. They point out that factors like individual taste, food pairings, and aging affect how someone perceives a wine. Some winemakers are hesitant to be associated with Enologix, fearing the system may prioritize scores over wine's true character.
McCloskey is confident in his approach and believes his metrics are essential in today's large and competitive wine market. He aims to make his customers self-sufficient by providing them with proprietary documents containing his winemaking knowledge. However, some critics call for more transparency, as the details of Enologix's analytical methods remain hidden from the public and academic scrutiny. Despite the criticisms, McCloskey remains steadfast in his belief that metrics are necessary in the modern wine industry.
by Lynn Alley
The proud parents? Dureza and Mondeuse Blanche. Their offspring? Syrah, one of the stars of the global wine industry, appearing in the great reds of France’s Northern Rhône Valley, in Australia under the name Shiraz, and in California, Washington, and South Africa.
Although Syrah’s roots [so to speak] were buried in history, legends about its origin abound. One theory is that it originated in the city of Shiraz in the ancient Persian empire (now Iran). Another theory says it was introduced to France from Cyprus by Crusaders returning home from the Middle East in the 13th century. Yet others say it originated in Phoenicia or ancient Greece or that it was carried from Egypt via Syracuse by Roman legions. But French winemakers have patriotically believed that the grape is indigenous to their country.
Turns out the French were right. The finding was made jointly by grapevine geneticist Carole Meredith, a professor at the University of California, Davis, and Jean-Michel Boursiquot, France’s leading expert in grapevine identification and teacher at L’École Nationale Supèriore Agronomique de Montpellier. “We first identified the parents in 1998, but we weren’t sure we believed it,” said Meredith, who attributed much of the initial work to her former graduate student, John Bowers.
Mondeuse Blanche is the lesser-known cousin of Mondeuse Noire, a mainstay of wines from France’s Savoie region. Dureza, which likewise never obtained substantial recognition, is a traditional variety grown in France’s northern Ardèche region west of the Rhône River. The union between the two obscure French varieties is most likely a natural one, occurring before humans had learned to make deliberate genetic crosses, said Meredith. Such crosses happen with relative frequency in nature. They just don’t often result in such spectacular offspring.
The researchers began by identifying the parents of Syrah using 32 DNA markers, in the same way that DNA testing is used to show relationships between people. “You normally don’t need more than 25 markers to show that a clear relationship exists,” explained Meredith. “But because the relationship was a surprise to us, we added an extra 18 to 20 markers for good measure. We’ve now analyzed Syrah and its parents using 50 DNA markers, which we feel establishes the parentage beyond a reasonable doubt.”
Bowers, who is now at the University of Georgia, and Meredith first surprised the wine world in 1997 when they revealed Cabernet Sauvignon to be the offspring of Sauvignon Blanc and Cabernet Franc. They then theorized that powerful DNA profiling techniques might uncover other interesting relationships, so they turned to the French national grapevine collection overseen by Boursiquot. The agricultural archive contains cuttings of many obscure varieties, including some that no longer exist. Meredith proposed the collaboration to Boursiquot over a glass of Greek wine in Paris’ Latin Quarter in spring 1997. That June, Bowers went to Montpellier for a month to collect DNA samples from 300 varieties carefully selected by Boursiquot.
Within a couple of months, Meredith sent Boursiquot a detailed e-mail on their preliminary findings, starting with “Take a deep breath ... this is a long message.”
The search not only yielded the Syrah find, but also the earlier-announced discovery that noble Chardonnay, the United States’ most popular white variety and the grape that makes up great white Burgundies, was the chance offspring of the Pinot family and a little-known Central European white wine grape called Gouais Blanc.
France is the largest producer of fine wine in the world. Each French region is different, not only in its terroir, but in the history and style of the wines it produces. This uniqueness is reflected on the wine labels, for every region has its own set of appellations, classifications, and labeling rules, all controlled by regional, national, and European Union laws.
To understand a French wine label, it is important to have a basic understanding of the classification systems and terminology currently used in France’s wine industry.
French Wine Classification
• AOC (Appellation d’Origine Controlée): An AOC classification acts as a consumer guarantee that a wine is of a particular quality and generally of a particular style. It also states that the wine has been made in a designated area in accordance with local wine production laws and regulations. All AOC appellation titles are derived from the place in which the wines are made; however, the degree of geographical specificity varies greatly. The regional AOC Bourgogne, for example, covers more than 300 villages over the length and breadth of Burgundy, while AOC Vosne-Romanee covers just one. To complete the spectrum, AOC Romanee-Conti Grand Cru covers only one vineyard of less than four acres (1.6 ha) within the village of Vosne-Romanee, and is one of the smallest appellations in France. All Grand Cru and Premier Cru wines fall under AOC-level appellations and imply a further step up in terms of quality.
• Grand Cru is the highest-possible classification for a French wine. It is used in two distinct ways. In the 1855 Classification of Médoc and Graves, specific wineries were granted Grand Cru status, whereas in Burgundy’s Cote d’Or district, it is the land itself that is considered to be Grand Cru. (With Burgundy’s historical laws of inheritance, this has resulted in many owners of a single vineyard.) This latter system has been also been adopted in Champagne, Alsace, Languedoc-Roussillon, and the Loire Valley.
• Premier Cru is also used in two ways. In Bordeaux it denotes the highest tier within an existing Grand Cru classification (such as the Premier Grand Cru Classes of Médoc and Saint-Emilion. In Burgundy and Champagne, it denotes land of superior quality, but which falls short of Grand Cru status.
• AOP (Appellation d’Origine Protegée): the European equivalent of the French AOC.
• VDQS (Vin Delimite de Qualité Superieure): This level is not as prestigious, but is seen as a stepping stone for appellations seeking promotion to AOC/AOP status. VDQS titles represent less than 1% of France’s total wine production and change often, so VDQS is not commonly seen on a wine label, and the category is being eliminated as of the 2011 vintage.
• VDP (Vin de Pays) means “Wine of the Land” or “Country Wine.” This classification is below VDQS but above “Vin de Table” and was introduced in the 1970s. It covers about 25% of French wine, most of which is intended for the domestic market. There are more than 100 VDP titles, each denoting the geographical area in which the wines are made. These areas are divided into three types. There are five very broad “VDPs Regionaux,” 52 slightly more precise “VDPs de Departement,” and 100 or so location-specific “VDPs de Zone.” VDP labels are permitted to indicate both the grape varieties used in the wine and the vintage.
• IGP (Indication Geographique Protegée): the Europe-wide equivalent of the French national-level VDP.
• VDT (Vin de Table) or “Table Wine.” This is the lowest category of French wine and the least regulated. VDT wines can be made anywhere in France and have no official statement about region, vintage, or grape varieties. It’s the same as Vin de France. With the development of the VDP category, very little wine is now sold under the VDT title.
French Wine Label Terms
Blanc - White
Brut - Dry
Cave - Wine cellar
Chateau - An estate. Literally “castle,” but it mostly refers to large country houses.
Cooperative - A cooperative or more likely a syndicate of wine growers
Côte/Côteaux - Slope of a hill/hillsides
Cremant - A style of sparkling wine other than Champagne, usually less bubbly (such as Cremant de Alsace, Cremant de Bourgogne, Cremant de Loire, etc.) These can be great values.
Cru - Literally “growth.” Denotes status of a vineyard.
Cru Classe - Classified vineyard
Demi-sec - Medium-dry
Domaine - Estate
Doux - Sweet
Grand Cru - Literally “great growth.” Highest-quality wine.
Methode Traditionnelle - Traditional method of sparkling winemaking, same as used for Champagne
Millesime - The vintage of a wine, specifically the year the grapes were grown
Mise en Bouteille au Chateau/Domaine/a la proprieté - Estate-bottled. Sometimes MC in short for Bordeaux wines.
Negoçiant - A merchant who buys grapes, juice, or wine from growers and sells the wines under his own label
Premier Cru - First growth. Very high quality wine
Proprietaire - Estate or vineyard owner
Recoltant - A grape grower. Sometimes also means a person who harvests the grapes.
Recolte - Harvest or vintage
Rouge - Red
Selection de Grains Nobles - A sweet style of wine made in Alsace from grapes affected by noble rot (botrytis)
Supérieur - A wine with higher alcohol content
Vendange - Harvest
Vendange Tardive - Late harvest. A style of wine original to Alsace but now used in various French wine regions for dessert wines.
Vieilles Vignes - Old vines (There is no specific requirement; it is up to each individual grower, but it generally refers to vines 40 years and older)
Vigneron/Viticulteur - Vine grower/grape grower (also implies winemaker; there is no specific French term for winemaker.)
Vignoble - Vineyard
Vin - Wine (Grand Vin, or “great wine,” is puffery and has no legal meaning on a label.)
Vodka Delivers Shot of Creativity - A boozy glow may trigger problem-solving insights
By Bruce Bower, ScienceNews
A new study finds getting a buzz may boost creativity. Tipsy men solved more problems demanding verbal resourcefulness in less time than sober guys did. Sudden, intuitive insights into tricky word-association problems occurred more frequently when men were intoxicated but not legally drunk, say psychology graduate student Andrew Jarosz and his colleagues at the U. of Illinois at Chicago. Sober men took a more deliberative approach to this task.
In the study, 20 social drinkers watched an animated movie while snacking and drinking enough of a vodka-cranberry drink to reach an average peak blood alcohol level of 0.075%, just below the 0.08% cutoff for legal intoxication in the US. Another 20 social drinkers watched the same movie but neither ate nor drank. All men then took a creative problem-solving test. For each of 15 items, they saw three words — say peach, arm, and tar — and had to think of a fourth word that forms a phrase with each of them, such as pit.
On average, the imbibers solved about nine problems correctly versus approximately six winners for the sober crowd. It took an average of 11.5 seconds for intoxicated men to generate a correct solution, compared with 15.2 seconds for sober men. Both groups performed comparably on the test before the study began.
Jarosz and U. of Illinois psychologist Jennifer Wiley, a study coauthor, suspect their finding applies to musical and artistic inspiration. “A composer or artist fixated on previous work may indeed find creative benefits from intoxication,” they say.
Other preliminary evidence – some from the Chicago team — finds a creative bump from additional approaches to broadening attention’s scope, such as watching a mood-enhancing movie or using biofeedback to reach a relaxed mental state.
Jarosz’s team offers an intriguing glimpse at how an alcoholic buzz prompts intuitive insights into problems that require searching pre-existing knowledge, says psychologist Mark Beeman of Northwestern University in Evanston, Ill. Further studies with intoxicated volunteers should employ complex problems that require information gathering and recognition of novel patterns, key features of many real-life problems, Beeman suggests.
Intoxication may aid verbal creativity partly by lowering the ability to control one’s thoughts, comments psychologist J. Scott Saults of the University of Missouri in Columbia. He and his colleagues have found that alcohol reduces recall of sequences of sounds and images but leaves working memory unaffected. They have also reported that intoxicated individuals become less afraid to make mistakes, another possible creativity booster.
by Joel Mitchel of Beekmans
Having tasted numerous New Jersey wines over the last three decades, I was under the impression that there was no reason why high quality wines couldn’t be grown in the state. I thought the only problem was a lack of commitment and the failure to invest in the most modern equipment and the best talent in wine making. It’s apparently not that simple.
David Rossi, of Fulcrum Vineyards, lives part time in New Jersey and is familiar with the wine industry here. When he came into the store to taste me on his California wines, we also discussed the potential for New Jersey wines. He pointed out that quality was increasing as the more serious producers moved up the learning curve and figured out which varietals would do best. Good wines may be made here, but great wines? Probably not.
There are several limiting factors that prevent New Jersey from producing great wines. The best varietals do not thrive in the high humidity that we get here during the summer. Humidity increases the susceptibility of top varietals to various pests and diseases. Even more important is the lack of diurnal temperature swings. In the best wine regions, day time temperatures may sometimes exceed 90 degrees, but night time temperatures generally fall back into the 50s. This is incredibly important for the maintenance of good acidity in the grapes and the ensuing wine. Typical New Jersey weather in July and August features nights with temperatures well into the 70s, resulting in wines that are generally too soft and flabby, lacking structure and balance.
In part, this problem can be ameliorated by employing varietals that are better suited to our climate. That is exactly what many of the New Jersey producers are working on by trial and error. The best varietals for New Jersey may well turn out to be ones we are not familiar with or even hybrids. crosses between the Vinifera and Labrusca species of grapes.
Nightly Glass Of Wine May Protect Boomer Women’s Bones
(by Allison Aubrey, NPR)
It is well-known that exercise is good for our bones, even as we age, but how about that nightly glass of wine? A new study of women in their 50s and early 60s finds that moderate alcohol consumption may help prevent bone loss. The women in the study consumed about 1 1/2 drinks per day.
The findings fit with previous studies, including the Framingham Heart Study, which documented that moderate drinkers — people who consume one to two drinks per day — have higher bone mineral density compared with heavy drinkers and people who don’t consume alcohol at all. But sorry guys, this one is just for the ladies.
The latest study, published in the journal Menopause, finds evidence that moderate alcohol consumption influences bone turnover. The study is small, just 40 women, but it helps explain why this may be the case.
Our bodies are constantly in the process of remaking bone. Bits of bone are dissolved (resorbed) and new bone is formed. During menopause the rate of resorption increases, according to researcher Urszula Iwaniec of Oregon State University, “and the formation [of new bone] doesn’t keep up with resorption.” As a result, bone loss can occur.
Iwaniec and colleagues took blood samples to measure byproducts of bone remodeling. When bone dissolves, bits of protein that were part of the bone spill into the bloodstream. “These [markers] correlate with the amount of bone that is resorbed,” explains Iwaniec.
The researchers first took blood samples of women who had been regularly consuming alcohol (most were wine drinkers). Then they took blood samples two weeks later after the women were told not to drink for those two weeks. “What we found was that the [blood] markers were significantly higher [after the women stopped drinking], indicating that more bone was being resorbed.”
But once the women went back to the nightly glass of wine, the blood markers dropped back to where they had been. In other words, the alcohol seemed to slow down the bone turnover rate, which may over time protect against fractures.
The risk of any study that concludes that alcohol consumption may be beneficial is that we'll get carried away. If we hear that a drink a day is good for us, it’s easy to think: Hey — two or three drinks sound even better! “Many people don’t interpret studies like this correctly,” says John Callaci, director of the Molecular and Cellular Bone Biology Laboratory. He has studied the deleterious effects of binge-drinking on bones. Seven to nine drinks spread out over the course of a week may be beneficial for women’s bone health, as this study suggests, but binge drinking, especially by people under the age of 25 who are still building bone mass “might interrupt the process of bone-mass accrual and would be bad [for young people],” says Callaci.
(by Karla Gale, Reuters Health)
A drink or two per day appears to modestly decrease the risk of developing kidney cell cancer, regardless of the type of alcohol that is consumed, according to a study published in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute. Multiple studies have hinted at an inverse association between alcohol and kidney cancer, “but previous studies were inconclusive, and it is not clear whether alcohol itself affects risk, or if the effects are due to specific types of beverages,” said lead author Dr. Jung Eun Lee of Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston.
Lee and her colleagues analyzed data from 12 clinical studies from five countries covering 530,469 women and 229,575 men. At study entry, the subjects had completed food frequency questionnaires that included alcoholic beverages. The authors defined moderate drinking as the equivalent of “slightly more than one alcoholic drink per day.” They excluded subjects who drank more than two drinks per day. After controlling for age and other risk factors, the risk of kidney cell cancer was 25 percent lower among the moderate drinkers than among the nondrinkers (statistically significant). There also appeared to be a dose-response relationship. The results were similar for beer, wine, and liquor.
During 7 to 20 years of follow-up, 711 women and 719 men were diagnosed with kidney cell cancer. This translated into 23 cases for every 100,000 non-drinkers per year and 15 cases for every 100,000 moderate drinkers per year.
There also appeared to be a dose-response relationship - as the amount of daily alcohol consumption increased from about two drinks per week to about one drink per day, the risk of kidney cancer went from 6 percent lower to 25 percent lower, respectively. The associations were still similar after taking into account risk factors for kidney cancer, including weight, history of high blood pressure, smoking and other factors.
Reproductive history and total calorie intake had little impact.
The investigators were not able to distinguish between subjects who were moderate daily alcoholic drinkers versus those who tended to drink large amounts sporadically. Therefore the effects of very heavy alcohol use, frequency of use, and various drinking patterns, were unclear, Dr. Eun Lee said.
The investigators suggest that alcohol may reduce the risk of kidney cell cancer by improving insulin sensitivity. Other possibilities include the activity of antioxidant phenolic compounds contained in alcohol, which may help decrease kidney cell cancer risk by removing carcinogenic agents, reducing cancer cell proliferation or promoting cell death. On the other hand, they add, "Alcohol per se is most likely the responsible factor."
Regardless of the mechanism involved in this moderate reduction in risk, patients should be reminded that alcohol can also increase the risk of many other types of cancer, including breast, liver and esophageal cancer, Eun Lee cautioned.
"Maintaining a healthy weight and avoiding smoking are the principal known means to reduce the risk of kidney cancer that should be encouraged; doing so may also reduce the risk of many other cancers, as well as cardiovascular disease"
SOURCE: Journal of the National Cancer Institute, May 16, 2007.
(By Makiko Kitamura, Bloomberg News, March 27, 2012)
Men who have two drinks a day after surviving a first heart attack have a lower risk of death from heart disease than nondrinkers, Harvard researchers said adding to evidence that moderate alcohol use may be healthy. Compared with nondrinkers, men who survived a heart attack and who drank two alcoholic drinks a day had a 42 percent lower risk of death from cardiovascular disease and 14 percent lower risk of death from any cause during the study. The study, led by Jennifer Pai of Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Harvard Medical School, followed 1,818 men for as many as 20 years from the time of their first heart attack.
The results, published in the European Heart Journal, add to other studies that have observed the positive effects of moderate drinking. People who have one drink or fewer each day are 14 percent to 25 percent less likely to develop heart disease compared with those who don’t imbibe, Canadian researchers said last year. Until now, data on whether it can also help heart attack survivors have been limited and conflicting.
According to Pai, “The findings of our study support the European Society of Cardiology recommended guidelines for long-term management of acute coronary syndromes that moderate alcohol consumption of 10 to 30 grams per day in men should not be discouraged and may be beneficial for long-term prognosis after a heart attack.”
Participants who drank between 10 and 29.9 grams (1.1 ounces) of alcohol daily were categorized as moderate drinkers. A bottle or can of beer contains 12.8 grams, while a 4-ounce glass of wine has 11 grams of alcohol. Men who drank the most, 30 grams or more a day, had a risk of death from any cause that was similar to that of nondrinkers. In previous studies, moderate alcohol intake has been associated with increased levels of HDL, or so-called good cholesterol, improved insulin sensitivity, and other effects that reduce heart attack risk, Pai said.
While Pai’s study only observed men, associations tend to be similar between chronic disease and lower quantities of alcohol for women. “An association is likely to be observed at five to 14.9 grams per day, or up to a drink a day for women,” she said. The study was funded by the U.S. National Institutes of Health.
(By Roni Caryn Rabin, The New York Times, March 4, 2009)
While millions of Americans suffer from heartburn and gastric reflux, only a small number develop more severe ailments that can lead to esophageal cancer. Scientists have identified wine as an agent that may protect against these conditions. Two studies published in the journal Gastroenterology suggest that people who drink white or red wine in moderation are less likely to develop conditions that may lead to esophageal adenocarcinoma, a cancer that has increased sharply in the United States over the past 30 years.
The reports are particularly surprising because excessive alcohol intake is a well-established risk factor for the other main form of esophageal cancer, squamous cell carcinoma.
Researchers at Kaiser Permanente in Oakland, Calif. found that drinking one glass of wine a day was associated with a more than 50 percent reduction in the risk of developing Barrett’s esophagus, although there was no reduction in risk among adults who drank liquor or beer. [It’s not clear if the researchers controlled for income, education, or other life style factors.]
In the second study, researchers at Queen’s University Belfast in Northern Ireland reported that, compared with patients who drank no wine, those drinking one glass of wine or more a month saw a more than 50 percent reduction in the risk of reflux esophagitis, an irritation of the esophagus often caused by chronic heartburn. The findings from the two studies are consistent with those from an Australian report published in Gastroenterology in 2008 which linked moderate wine drinking to lower risks for both forms of esophageal cancer.
[Edited from an article by Dan Berger. The article appeared over 10 years ago, but it is still relevant today.]
In 1985 the cover of a national wine magazine trumpeted a story headlined “The Great 1982 Cabernets.” Just four years later, the author of that article wrote that California’s 1982 Cabernets, on the 100-point scale, rated only 78. How could a vintage go from one of the “great” vintages to one no self-respecting collector would buy? And in just four years?
Such is the myth of the vintage chart, a fallacy in the making. And it points up the fallacies in any so-called system to rate such a subjective discipline as taste and apply it to a wide range of wines from various producers. (Especially since the ratings of young wines may have nothing to do with how they will age.)
At the time of the original article, many 1982 Cabernets were attractive to some people. These were obvious wines with relatively low acid levels; wines that were simply not candidates to age very well. Those people who love upfront, jammy, almost porty aromas and fat, rich tastes loved the 1982 Cabernet Sauvignons. Such wines were forward and easy to like. If you had no interest in seeing how they would do in the bottle, you could easily call them great.
Writing for a national magazine that survives on circulation and advertising, the author had a choice to make. Is it possible that he was looking for a headline story that would attract readers and thus ratcheted up his view of the wines? Not consciously, perhaps, but journalists know that headlines sell.
Moreover, look at the context of the 1982 vintage. After the cool 1975, the two drought years of 1976 and 1977, the hyped and only partially successful 1978s, the cold, wet 1979s, the heat-affected 1980s, and the short, rain-threatened harvest season of 1981, the ’82 Cabernets were the first chance for a “great” vintage since 1974. As such, there was much anticipation for the 1982s. And most writers were starved for another “vintage of the century.” In addition the 1983 harvest, already in barrels, was seen as dicey—an El Niño vintage which would not be classic. In that context, hyping the 1982s wasn’t a bad idea.
Looking at vintage charts from around the world, you get the feeling that there is a fixed-in-stone element to all of this. Yet many of the rankings are based on the concentration of the wines, not on their quality or age-worthiness. Example: a national wine magazine published a vintage chart in early 2000 that gave California’s 1994 north coast Cabernets a 97 and the 1995s a 92. This is a huge difference; 92 is one of the lowest scores of the last 15 years. Yet the elegant 1995s seem to be aging beautifully. while many of the overripe 1994s remain dumb and awkward. A number are showing porty qualities I find unattractive.
Another problem with vintage charts is that they rarely say anything about the fact that, more than likely, most of the older wines are now dead. Storage conditions vary, but in typical fashion, most wines will be poorly stored. Result: a vintage-chart assessment of 98 could well be worth only 94 after years of poor to mediocre storage. As an example, look at the vintage charts surrounding the vaunted 1982 Bordeaux. Even today, the vintage is rated as a success by many people, with scores for many of the wines in the mid-90s on the 100-point scale and in the 9s or 10s on the 10-point scale. Is this valid?
To be sure, for the first growths and many classified growth Bordeaux, the wines are fine if not excellent—certainly in a new style for the region (more forward and rich), but still sound if properly stored. But for the vast majority of 1982s, including most of the Cru Bourgeois, the wines are now dead or unappealing, showing more Port qualities than classic fruit.
There are many other problems with vintage charts. [These examples are historic, but the issue is still relevant today.] One is the relative nature of the rankings. Look at the recent vintage chart that rated California’s 1989 north coast Chardonnays (82) with the same vintage’s Cabernets (83). That seems fair, doesn’t it? After all, it was the exact same vintage.
Ah, but the grapes are radically different. Early-ripening Chardonnay was hard hit by rain; most wines turned out poorly. Late-ripening Cabernet survived the early rains, and many 1989 Cabernets turned out fine. Or take the absurdity of this same chart’s ranking of New Zealand vintages 1998 (95) and 1999 (91). These ratings may be okay if you rank only Cabernet, but with Sauvignon Blanc, that nation’s greatest wine, the 1998s were dreary and dull because of too warm El Niño weather conditions. But the 1999s were superb.
Another point: the one major problem with vintage charts is that in some areas (such as California and Chile) they have little meaning, and in others (Portugal for Port, Champagne, and Burgundy) they are far more meaningful. Yet even in the latter case, there are exceptions. For example, though 1992 was a poor year for red Burgundy, chances are a bottle from Domaine Dujac would be a better bet today than any 1994 (a better year) from an unknown producer.
Indeed, that is one of the great fallacies of the vintage chart mentality: region to region, the meaning is likely to be blurred by facts that do not evidence themselves. A great example is the 1984 and 1985 vintages in Napa Valley for Cabernet Sauvignon. A summation of the charts would show that 1984 Cabs received a relatively poor score of 88. But the 1985 vintage was awarded a 95. Is this true?
I found some strange anomalies when wines from the two vintages were being released. One tip-off was the fact that the Hess Collection, which has vineyards on the east-facing side of Mt. Veeder, made a superb Reserve Cabernet Sauvignon in 1984, but no reserve was made in 1985. So I asked Randal Johnson, then the winemaker, and he said that the 1985 vintage was a lot better on the valley floor and on west-facing slopes. But his 1985 grapes came in with barely enough “stuffing” to make a good 1985 regular bottling. No reserve was produced.
So I did some further digging and found that Spring Mountain, Smith Madrone, and a handful of other properties from Spring Mountain down to Mt. Veeder, all with some east-facing exposures, were blessed in 1984 with a far better year and that 1985 was lean and not as voluble. So what do we say about the accuracy of the vintage charts facing that absurd scenario? As goes the old saying, there are no great wines, only great bottles of wine.
[Edited from a 5/11 Slate.com posting by Mike Steinberger]
Do high alcohol levels hurt a wine? One of the hottest issues in wine circles is heat — as in too much alcohol. Obviously, wine wouldn’t be wine without the alcohol, and the buzz it delivers is part of the pleasure. But alcohol levels have been climbing, much to the chagrin of some oenophiles, who find higher-octane wines overbearing and exhausting to drink. I sympathize: I am not a fan of syrupy Cabernets and Syrahs [and Zinfandels] that leave me wishing I’d brought a pillow to the dinner table. However, I also think way too much dogmatism and vituperation has crept into the discussion. Taste is personal; some wines hold their alcohol better than others, and there are plenty of wines to suit every palate. Whatever happened to just agreeing to disagree?
All this ferment has its roots in the fermentation process which converts the sugar in grapes into alcohol. Sugar is a function of ripeness, and the more sugar there is in the grapes, the more alcohol you end up with in the wine. Alcohol, in addition to getting you mellow, adds body, texture, and a perception of sweetness to wines. As the alcohol content increases, those qualities get ratcheted up. Grapes such as Zinfandel and Grenache naturally yield wines that are fairly high in alcohol, as do warmer regions like the southern Rhône and the Barossa Valley. But alcohol levels have been rising in a number of places. Oenologists recently told Britain’s Decanter magazine that increased potency is threatening the character of Bordeaux's wines. Similar concerns are being voiced elsewhere.
Yet it is California that has become the main flash point in the debate over alcohol. Visit any wine shop and you’ll quickly see why: the shelves are groaning with California wines in excess of 14 or even 15 percent alcohol, and the labels may not even be telling the full story. Under U.S. law, wines 14 percent or under can vary as much as 1.5 percent from what is stated on the label (as long as the actual content does not surpass 14 percent), and those above 14 percent are permitted a one percent margin of error. Although California has always produced its share of floozies (I’m talking about wines), Napa Cabs and Merlots generally weren’t as heady in the past. A recent study led by UC-Davis professor Julian Alston found that sugar levels in California grapes have jumped 9 percent since 1980.
What accounts for the spike? Climate change is often cited, and it certainly appears to be a factor in other regions. However Alston and his colleagues suggested that the higher sugar levels in California were mainly the result of farming practices. They speculated that different rootstocks and new planting systems may have had a role, and they also raised another possibility: producers harvest riper fruit in order to craft wines that appeal to critics, namely to Robert Parker. They noted that the largest sugar increases have been for premium grapes — Cabernet, Merlot, Chardonnay — and in premium areas such as Napa and Sonoma. They wrote that this “could be consistent with a ‘Parker effect,’ of wineries responding to market demand and seeking riper flavored, more intense wines.”
Parker has wielded extraordinary influence, and his California scores have long indicated a yen for ultra-ripe (read: high alcohol) wines. In 1999 and again in 2000, he blasted Tim Mondavi, Robert’s son, for making wines he considered too light and restrained. He accused Mondavi of “going against what Mother Nature has given California” and said the strength of California wines “lies in power, exuberance, and gloriously ripe fruit.” In 2007, he launched a similar broadside against California vintner Steve Edmunds. “What Steve is doing appears to be a deliberate attempt to make French-styled wines [mon Dieu!],” he said. “If you want to make French wine, do it in France.” Considering the power of Parker’s ratings, it would stand to reason that many producers took the unsubtle hints and delivered the kind of wines he favored.
Robert Parker’s thirst for hedonistic fruit bombs even extends to Pinot Noir! In Burgundy, where Pinot is the signature red grape, the cool northerly climate makes ripeness a challenge. As a result, the wines tend to be modest in alcohol and emphasize elegance over power. But with Parker’s blessing (prodding?), California Pinot has evolved in a very different direction. The wines are often very ripe and lush, with alcohol levels pushing 15%. Echoing Parker, proponents of this style contend that it is a natural expression of California's sun-splashed terroir and that comparisons with Burgundy are misguided. Apples to oranges, they say.
In fact, though, California can also do Pinot in a lighter, more delicate vein, and recent years have seen a jump in the number of wines that evince a Burgundian spirit. Some come from vintners who have renounced the fruit-bomb approach. Others, such as the incredible Pinots of Rhys Vineyards, are derived from sites that yield ripe grapes at lower sugar levels. This encouraging development demolishes the idea that boozy confections are inevitable or somehow more authentically Californian. With Parker’s recent decision to hand over California coverage to associate Antonio Galloni, the movement toward greater finesse may well accelerate.
But the battle over Pinot and alcohol rumbles on. Ironically, at just the moment Parker is quitting the scene, the same intolerance that he exhibited towards the Mondavi and Edmunds wines seems to have infected the other side. One writer recently lashed out at “prune-colored California Pinots that taste like over-oaked, top-heavy Syrahs” and labeled them a “wine crime.” Another declared that Pinot’s “reckless era of fame” was coming to an end as “Pinot masquerading as Zinfandel is properly kicked to the curb.” A Central Coast winemaker described the grapes used to make higher-alcohol Pinots as “raisined garbage.”
While it’s fine to trash wines you don’t like, I don’t see what purpose is being served by attempts to delegitimize a particular style. Aren’t diversity and choice good things? California Pinot is still very much in the trial-and-error stage. There are no right answers, just preferences, and there is no reason why Burgundy-inspired Pinots can’t exist alongside more zaftig renderings. Moreover, the alcohol issue is not so clear-cut. Critics of higher-alcohol wines tend to frame the issue as a question of balance, the implication being that wines above a certain threshold are inherently out of whack. But balance is a wholly subjective concept. Alcohol is merely one component that contributes to a sense of harmony or lack thereof, and some wines can deceive. Setting arbitrary cutoff points strikes me as an especially bad idea.
This last point was convincingly demonstrated at a recent World of Pinot Noir event. A panel discussion on alcohol and balance included winemaker Adam Lee of Siduri Wines and Rajat Parr, a San Francisco sommelier who has a policy of not serving Pinots that are above 14 percent alcohol at one of his restaurants. Unbeknownst to the other panelists, Lee had switched the labels on the two wines that he served. One had 13.6% alcohol, the other 15.2%. Parr, a formidable taster, strongly preferred the 15.2% wine! Parr was gracious about the ruse, but Lee’s stunt underscored the perils of litmus tests when it comes to the alcohol issue.
There’s another thing to consider. A lot of people enjoy buxom wines, a fact that has largely been ignored in all the frothing over alcohol levels. One of the gripes about full-throttle wines is that they can be difficult to pair with food, which is true. High-alcohol wines tend to be low in palate-cleansing acidity, but this isn’t a problem for many wine enthusiasts. A recent survey found that most of the wine consumed in the United States is not drunk with meals; instead, wine is mainly used as a cocktail beverage. The result shocks some, but I think it reinforces the point that diversity is good. We’ve just come through a period in which winemakers were under enormous pressure to conform to a certain aesthetic. With Parker no longer on the California beat, there’s now a chance for a variety of styles to flourish. Let a thousand Pinots bloom!
What kind of Pinot drinker are you? Here’s one way to find out. Go to your local wine store and buy two Pinots with significantly different alcohol levels, say, 13 percent and 14.5 percent. Next, find someone who can open and pour the wines and serve them to you blind. [I would also suggest tasting them with food to see which pairs best.]
Dirt is dirt, you say? Yet we all know that despite having similar climates, some wine regions make better wine than others. Why? To paraphrase a famous presidential campaign dictum, it’s the soil, stupid.
There is no more dramatic example of the importance of soil than that of the famous Chateau de Beaucastel of Châteauneuf-du-Pape. The property is bisected by a road, and vineyards are planted on both sides of the road. The grapes are farmed identically, and the wines are made identically. Yet the grapes from one side make the majestic Beaucastel Châteauneuf ($115). The grapes from the other side make a very good wine (Coudoulet de Beaucastel, $32), but it doesn’t approach the quality of the Châteauneuf. The following is an edited version of an article by Sunny Brown that appeared on www.winegeeks.com.
Wine lovers and makers alike droll on about how one vineyard has subterraneous tufa, while another vineyard boasts a blend of calcareous marl and limestone clay. Even without a degree in geology, it is easy to see that certain places in the world are better for growing grapes than others.
Why? Lots of places have warm weather and low amounts of rainfall. There are plenty of fine winemakers who are not limited to the more famous regions. So what is it about Burgundy, the Mosel Valley, and the Rutherford Bench that set them apart from so many other quality areas?
It isn’t because they were there first or because of dumb luck that certain regions have become famous. For centuries winemakers have plotted out through trial and error specific sites that grow the finest wine grapes in the world. They tend to have unique geological compositions.
A quick primer on soil types:
Alluvial - A combination of clay, silt, sand, and gravel that forms over time from mineral deposits left by running water.
Calcareous - A soil primarily composed of calcium carbonate and high in chalk or limestone as well as fossilized shells.
Granite - A hard and granular rock with a high content of crystals, particularly quartz.
Jory - A volcanic soil composed mostly of basalt, which is in turn a hard and dense soil that often has a glassy appearance.
Limestone or Chalk - A soft soil made primarily from fossilized seashells.
Loam - A crumbly mixture of clay, sand, and silt.
Marl - A crumbly mixture of different clays as well as calcium and magnesium carbonates with fossilized shells mixed in as well.
Sandstone - A combination of silica and sand compacted together by pressure and time.
Schist - A metamorphic rock derived mostly from clay, but it can be made from several other rocks. Schist is a soft rock that flakes and breaks easily.
Shale - Layers of clay-like, fine-grained sedimentary rock. On the surface, where the shale breaks, it often forms beds of sharp fragments.
Tufa - A mix of silica, calcium carbonate, and sometimes volcanic ash that has been deposited over time by streams, lakes, and other water sources.
10 – Mendoza, Argentina
While the combination of sand, granite, schist, and alluvial deposits is hardly unique to Argentina, these soils in conjunction with the ridiculously high altitudes at which the grapes are grown have created a unique growing environment. Grape growing begins at 2,500 ft. up in the foothills of the Andes, a height well above all but a scant few European vines, and continues in many places to over a mile up or more.
Lots of sunshine during the day, very cool temperatures at night, and lots of dry mountain air combine to provide a very long growing season for the spicy Malbecs, rich Cabernets, and full-bodied Bonardas of Mendoza. The wines of Argentina are said to boast very high concentrations of resveratrol and antioxidants due to the long hang time on the vine. All that flavor and health benefits, too? I'm hooked.
9 – Coonawarra, Australia
The visually arresting Terra Rossa, or red earth soil of Coonawarra also occurs in a few places around the Mediterranean, but this swath of earth some 10 miles long and less than a mile wide is quite the oddity in Australia. The soil, which is literally red, is formed by a unique combination of events: This area was once a seacoast, and the limestone soil lies over the top of a sandstone base. The limestone has dried over the course of many millennia, and the breakdown of the soil as it starts to erode has caused iron deposits within the soil to oxidize, thus imparting the deep orange and red hues.
The resulting soil is rich in nutrients and minerals, drains very well, and provides a thin layer over the limestone beneath. Many wineries have found this to be a perfect growing environment for Cabernet Sauvignon, with Bowen, Parker Estate, Wynns, and Highbank Vineyards among some of the best.
8 – Priorat, Spain
Around the foothills of Montsant (the Holy Mountain) resides an almost otherworldly soil type that cannot be duplicated anywhere else on Earth: Llicorella. This mix of dark slate and quartzite that developed in Paleolithic times is dark in color but glitters in the sun from the high crystal content. It is rocky, porous, and free-draining which forces the roots to dig way down deep (up to 25 meters) into the bedrock to find pockets of water and nutrients.
One of my favorite stories in the wine world is that of the cost of the local donkey in Priorat. Almost abandoned as a wine region in the 1970s because the hills are so steep and must be worked entirely by hand, innovative winemakers from across the world have settled in this area today to take advantage of the unique combination of soil, climate and old vines of Syrah, Grenache, and Carignan. Though lots of new investment has flooded into the region, the vines must still be worked by hand so the price of the local burro has gone up tenfold!
7 – Tuscany, Italy
Soil purists will tag me here since Tuscany is actually comprised of several different soil types that range from tufa and volcanic soil to sandstone and limestone clay. But it is in this diversity that the beauty of Tuscany lies: There are so many different sub-soils that there is a perfect home for each individual grape variety, no matter what type of soil it prefers.
The higher altitudes of vineyards around San Gimignano make a great home for Vernaccia. The rocky, low-vigor soils of Chianti and Montalcino are perfect for Sangiovese, while other areas boast more sand, clay and alluvial deposits, a great spot for international varieties that make up the backbone of the great Super Tuscans.
6 – Châteauneuf-du-Pâpe, France
The best vineyards in the new home of the Popes are covered with galets, or pudding stones as they are often called. They are smooth, oval-shaped stones that were formed from the many centuries of floodwaters that poured through the Rhône Valley after the last Ice Age. The galets collect and retain the heat of the sun that they then radiate back onto the vines during the cool of the evening.
The resulting wines are spicy, rich, full-bodied, and higher in alcohol than many of their brethren elsewhere in France. If you like Grenache and Syrah but haven’t yet tried a good Châteauneuf-du-Pâpe, then you haven’t yet begun to live. As a side note, it is a good thing that the vines take so readily to this soil since some of these vineyards are so rocky that they look like the bottom of an aquarium. What else on earth could grow there?
5 – Alsace, France
Many would argue that Alsace should be #1, but I think the argument could be made for almost any of the top five, a testament to just how famous these places are. It is clearly the soil that makes the wines in Alsace. Yes, they have a break from the weather provided by the rain shadow of the Vosges Mountains, but the real beauty of this 70 mile strip of grape deliciousness lies in the mix of 20 different major soil compositions that line these east-facing foothills.
The Grand Crus of Alsace read like a laundry list of famous soils: the sandstone of Kitterlé; the limestone of Zinnkoepflé; the granite of Brand; the warm volcanic soils of Rangen. The list goes on and on. Over the years, each vineyard has developed a reputation for which grapes grow best within its hallowed grounds. The Grand Cru of Schlossberg, or Castle Hill as it is translated from German, is free-draining, stony, and rich in granite. Riesling is a natural choice here, while just a few hundred yards away, Furstentum Grand Cru - with a higher proportion of limestone clay - is famous for juicy and rich Gewürztraminer.
Many of the famous vineyards in Alsace trace their wine-growing heritage back to the 1300s. Despite wars, changes in climate, nationality, and even phylloxera, this strip of vineyards barely a mile wide continues to crank out world-class white wines.
4 – Rutherford, Napa Valley
Perhaps André Tchelistcheff (2001-2094) said it best: “It takes Rutherford dust to grow great Cabernet.” While the man many consider to be the founding father of great American wine [he made the sublime BV “Georges de Latour Private Reserves” from about 1940 until 1973] was not referring to one particular soil type, there is no disputing the importance of Rutherford in American winemaking or in the world of wine as a whole.
So what is Rutherford dust? Well, I can tell you what it is not. It is neither an actual soil type nor an additive to the wine. It is a dusty and spicy berry element that can be found in all great Rutherford Cabernets. Some have described it as mocha, others as allspice, but regardless of specific flavor descriptors, it is an ever-present, ethereal nuance that sets the wines of Rutherford apart from its prestigious neighbors of Oakville and Saint Helena.
This is not to say that Rutherford is without merit in terms of soil. There are three distinct alluvial fans that were formed from the runoff of mineral deposits left in the valley floor over eons. They range from gravelly to sandy to loamy, and some of the most famous vineyards in the U.S. sit atop the shattered sandstone and limestone base. Bosche, Martha’s Vineyard, Bella Oaks, and the Opus One vineyards are more than enough to keep any collector happy.
3 – Bordeaux, France
Without even mentioning the clay soils of the Right Bank, Bordeaux still boasts some of the most hallowed vineyard hills on earth. The croupes, or mounds of gravel that spread out like ripples on a pond in the Haut-Medóc, have for centuries provided wine lovers with many a muse. Most of the area was swampy marshland until the 17th century when Dutch engineers drained the waters revealing a rocky gravel soil rich in minerals and perfect for growing grapes.
Since then the best examples of Bordeaux have been considered the greatest and most expensive wines in the world. The first growths command such respect that the wines are sold at staggering prices from the wineries long before they are even bottled.
Farther to the south, fine white wines are produced along with some exceptional reds in the arid, sandy, and gravelly soil of Graves. And if that were not enough, Sauternes and Barsac produce some of the greatest, richest, and most decadently sublime dessert wines on the planet.
2 – Mosel, Germany
There are other famous spots in Germany for Riesling (Rheingau), but no spot holds as many famous vineyards in such a short stretch of river as the steep slate slopes that line the Mosel River along western Germany. Valley walls protect the vines from harsh weather, and the steep angle provides more exposure to the sun as well as the sunlight that reflects off the river onto the vines. The slate warms quickly and retains the heat of the day late into the cool evenings.
These factors provide a long, slow ripening period for the fickle Riesling. No other grape is more reflective of the soil in which it is grown. Riesling seems to absorb every nuance of nutrient and structure of the soil and parlays them into the glass with such clarity and focus as to seemingly scream the soil from whence it came. Rieslings separated by just a little bend in the river will taste entirely different, no matter the similarities in production methods or ripeness.
Of the great vineyards, Wehlener Sonnenuhr boasts deep, blue-gray slate, while Erdener Prälat has dark red slate. The red volcanic soils of the Urzinger Würzgarten (Spice garden) create wines that are just as they sound - spicy and with depth of character. The list goes on and on. I urge you to try each vineyard. The subtleties of each individual soil type will become apparent, and you will be drinking some of the greatest white wines on earth.
1 – Burgundy, Champagne, and the Loire Valley, France
A basin of limestone marl starts in England and runs all the way down through the vineyards of the Loire Valley, Champagne, and ultimately Burgundy. The best vineyards lie on this Kimmeridgian ridge. The soil varies from hill to hill, but all contain at least some of this limestone clay which is heavy with nutrients from the ancient fossils of shellfish.
The success of the vineyards atop this chalky soil has been known for centuries. Champagne was famous long before a certain monk accidentally put a few bubbles in the bottle. The Grand Crus of Burgundy are separated by walls that date back to monastic times. The Grand Cru of Corton-Charlemagne was the king’s favorite vineyard some 1200 years ago. The best vineyards of the Loire mix limestone, clay, and silica to form a flint and sand mixture known as silex.
Attempts have been made to duplicate the success of these soils. After much frustration and effort, quality Pinot Noir and Chardonnay are now being made outside of Burgundy, but they never reach the heights of the best Burgundies. The same is true of tasty sparkling wine. And the best Loire Valley wines hold a haunting mix of earth, fruit, structure, and nuance that has not been duplicated. It is in this spirit that I feel that the Kimmeridgian soil is the most famous and important on earth when it comes to fine wine. The quality, longevity, and unique features of this particular blend of limestone and clay have driven the wine world for centuries. Battles have been won and lost, fortunes come and gone, and even nations have been created and remade in the time these wines have been famous. And for that, there is no comparison.
Why do so many inexpensive California wines taste so similar?
Meanderings by Joel and a synthesis of information from several sources
While researching this article, I had a flashback to an encounter with a customer that took place several years ago. A woman looking for a cold white wine was dismayed at how few chilled wines we had under $10, and she was quite vocal about it. “I can get great wine for under $10!” she emphatically said. “Lady,” I said to myself, “you’ve never had a great wine. Either that or you have a lousy sense of taste. Perhaps both!” (What a wonderful word - lousy. It obviously derives from “infested with lice,” but it has come to mean “mean,” “contemptible,” or, as in this case, “wretchedly bad.”) Of course, I didn’t say that. I merely said that there are many pleasant wines for $10 or less, but that truly great wine was always much more expensive. She ended up with a $9.99 wine, but she wasn’t happy, and I haven’t seen her since.
I’ve been thinking about the selection of wines that we carry at Beekmans and the selection that customers see at other outlets, particularly supermarkets and big box stores. I’m sure those places have many wines for $12 or less. We have a very few. Ours are, for the most part, wines that I think are pretty good (a precious few are very good), and I could enjoy them in a social setting even if they aren’t the wines I want to drink on a regular basis.
Call me an elitist or a snob, but I drink wine because I enjoy the taste, enjoy experiencing and learning about the different types, and enjoy the synergy between food and wine that makes dining much more pleasurable; in addition, a vital part of the experience for me is the opportunity to share interesting wine and the whole gestalt with others who are also appreciative.
Really cheap wine? Why bother? Vodka is cheaper and can be doctored in numerous socially acceptable ways that would only be embarrassing if used to cover up the taste of cheap wine. Two Buck Chuck? I’d rather drink water.
Cheap wines have two general problems that are not mutually exclusive. Most low-priced wines are mass-produced and devoid of character and flavor due to excessive yields. The better wines come from vineyards that yield less than four tons of grapes per acre. Very good wines can can come from vineyards yielding five to sometimes seven tons per acre. But the yield for cheap wines is invariably ten or more tons per acre. This produces diluted, weakly flavored wines. And it may not be legal, but many wines are made less expensive by dilution with water.
Second, many cheap wine actually taste cheap because they are flawed. Sometimes it’s because the grapes are grown in poor, often hot locations incapable of producing good quality. Sometimes it’s because of poor techniques or poor hygiene in the vineyard or the winery. When things go wrong, the wine is often sold off at a distressed price. Manipulation in the winery can partly conceal some of the flaws , but most show through to an experienced taster.
We now move to the heart of this article: what do the producers of flawed or diluted (naturally or not) wine do to make their wines palatable. As with hot dogs, you may not want to know.
Tricks of the Trade
The most obvious trick of the trade is to add sugar to a flawed wine. Sugar covers many flaws, but you are left with some sweetness in the wine. (Not that I have anything against high quality sweet wines; I love the acid/sugar/fruit balance of a good German, Austrian, or Finger Lakes Riesling.)
The second well-known trick is to add oak flavoring to a diluted or flawed wine. This is usually done by throwing oak chips or racks of oak wood into a large tank of wine. None of the slow oxidation benefits of oak barrels are conferred to the wine - nor is the cost in labor and materials - but the vanillin and related flavors from the wood can partially hide flaws or give a wimpy wine at least some flavor. This is one reason that so many cheap wines taste similar.
A less well-known method is the subject of the remainder of this article. Have you ever heard of Mega-Purple? Neither had I until recently. Sugar and oak flavoring are commonly used techniques, but more recently a product called Mega-Purple has become ubiquitous among cheap (and some not so cheap) California and other red wines.
What is Mega-Purple? It is a grape concentrate most likely made by vacuum distillation, fractional distillation, or solvent extraction techniques. It is made from deeply pigmented grapes, and it is very sweet. It is the best known of a series of concentrates marketed as kosher food additives with names such as Mega Cherry Shade Grape Juice Concentrate, Mega Purple Grape Juice Concentrate, and Mega Red Grape Juice Concentrate. Mega-Purple is made by Constellation Brands (a huge conglomerate that owns or imports Arbor Mist, Blackstone, Black Box, Clos du Bois, Corona, Estancia, Franciscan, Hardys, Hogue, Kim Crawford, Manischwitz, Monkey Bay, Mount Veeder Winery, Mouton Cadet, Negra Modelo, Nobilo, Pacifico, Paul Masson, Ravenswood, Rex Goliath, Rioja Vega, Robert Mondavi, Ruffino, Schenley, Simi, St. Pauli Girl, Svedka Taylor, Tsingtao, Vendange, and Woodbridge among a slew of other brands).
What does the addition of Mega-Purple do to a cheap red wine? Briefly, it gives the wine more color (the public incorrectly associates more color with more and better flavor), softens it (because of the extra sugar), hides some of its flaws, and gives it more flavor (although the particular flavor is not one associated with fine wine).
Who uses it? Very few wineries admit to using it, but some industry observers believe that the majority of California wines selling below $20 per bottle use Mega-Purple or something similar! Most of them taste that way.
More detail from Dan Berger
What if someone told you there was a substance you could put into a red wine that 1) made the wine darker than you could get naturally; 2) covered pyrazine [a family of heterocyclic aromatic organic compounds found in bell peppers and asparagus that gives a nice greenness to Sauvignon Blanc but that gives a vegetal character to red wines, especially underripe Cabernet]; 3) masked some elements of brettanomyces [“Brett” is a yeast that adds complexity to a wine in small doses, but is viewed as a flaw in larger doses. It gets established in wineries when hygiene is less than optimal]; 4) added a textural element that made the wine “sweeter” in the finish; and 5) was reliable because it made wines taste more uniform. Would you use it?
Apparently, thousands of wine-makers around the world have answered this not-very-theoretical question in the affirmative. In interviews with a dozen winemakers and wine company executives, I learned that such a substance does indeed exist. Sounding much like a magical potion that improves many wines into which it is blended, Mega-Purple (and similar products) are thick concentrates derived from Teinturer grapes [varietals that have color in the pulp as well as the skin] that are aimed strictly at filling gaps in red wines that have color and/or flavor deficiencies, a procedure that otherwise might be accomplished by blending in a darker wine.
Assume you have a Syrah that finished fermentation with a paler color than you believe to be desirable. (Assume the wine is aimed at the $30 price range and its color suggests it is lacking in flavor.) In the past, winemakers would add some Petite Sirah or Alicante Bouschet to plump up the color. Now, instead of having to buy a small amount of such wine from the bulk market, wineries are resorting to Mega-Purple, which sells for about $135 a gallon.
That sounds expensive, but the substance is highly concentrated, and a little goes a long way. [At concentrations typically used, that gallon is enough for 250 to 500 bottles - 25 to 50 cents per bottle.] If you haven’t heard much about Mega-Purple, there’s a good reason. It flies below the radar intentionally; winemakers are reluctant to discuss their use of it.
Indeed, many winemakers feign surprise that it even exists. The reasons they seem reluctant to mention it are many. A couple of them said, confidentially, that to admit using such an additive implies that their grapes are less than superior. Only deficient wines would need an additive like Mega-Purple.
Two other winemakers admitted that they rely on Mega-Purple only for those wines that are weak in one area or another and that they use only tiny amounts, but there are winery owners who are fearful of revealing that such a substance ever crossed their wineries’ thresholds. Yet one Monterey County winery president confided, “Virtually everyone is using it. In just about every wine up to $20 a bottle anyway, but maybe not as much over that.”
A longtime Sonoma County winemaker said, “Sure, I use it, but very infrequently and only for some of my (lower-priced) wines. Look, Mega-Purple has residual [sugar], so it adds a bit of texture, and that adds a little weight, and it pops the fruit.” He said he uses no more than .06% of the final product. “More than that, and you run the risk of getting overripe characteristics.”
The Monterey County winery executive said, "You don’t want to go above .2%, so you’re below the sweetness threshold." He said his winemaker knows that “when you get it up to .3%, .35%, you’re going to smell it. And at .45%, (the wine) comes out really sweet.”
Mega-Purple is produced by Constellation Brands and sold by third-party vendors. It is made by concentrating the Teinturer grape Rubired, a cross between Alicante Ganzin and Tinta Cão. As such, say winemakers who use it, the concentrate has a distinctive aroma that smells a bit like what they called “Central Valley red” [what I call “that cheap smell and taste”] with hints of a foxy sort, not unlike a native American grape.
Napa Valley winemaker Scott Harvey was fascinated by Mega-Purple. In an interview he said: “I don’t use it, but any winery you talk to will say they don’t. One reason I don’t like it is it has a distinctive flavor to it that I think is identifiable. So you can see what’s wrong with using it. If everybody uses it, they’re adding the same flavor.” Harvey said that if Napa Valley Cabernets are being criticized for having an overripe character, “I suspect part of that is Mega-Purple, sort of a jammy taste, but with no fruit to it. It has a kind of richness, a kind of weight to it, and it’s kind of, like, syrupy--that flavor you get from some (hot climate) Alicante Bouschet.”
Winemaker Clark Smith, the founder of Vinovation, a wine analysis and consulting firm in Sebastopol, Calif., said, “Sure, I’ll admit to using it. It touches up color, and I think when it’s overused, it makes the argument that’s in [the movie] ‘Mondovino,’ that it covers up regional character.” Smith uses Mega-Purple only for wines that are truly deficient in some aspect that the concentrate would fix, but because it has 68% sugar, he believes it is best added before fermentation so the sugar ferments out. “Mega-Purple has a way of homogenizing flavors and aromas,” he said. “And that’s a danger. It makes wines very similar to one another. You don’t want the book you read this week to be the same as the book you read last week, do you? So shouldn’t wines offer different characteristics too?”
Smith once made a Pinot Noir that was very light in color, but it had an attractive perfumed aroma and loads of minerality, “nothing like an American Pinot. And there was a lot of pressure to make it fleshier and darker, more acceptable to the expectation of California Pinot. So we used a little Mega-Purple, and when we got to the point at which it got in the way of the flavor profile of the wine, we backed off. The key question there was, ‘Do you want it big and stupid, or do you want to see the richness of the wine?’ You just shouldn’t use too much of it.”
To test what Mega-Purple does to wines, I asked Napa Valley winemaker Scott Harvey to stage a blind tasting of two of his wines that had been “adjusted” with Mega-Purple and another red additive. Harvey added large amounts to his 2004 Cabernet Sauvignon and Zinfandel, ranging from .2% to .8%, four levels for Mega-Purple and four for Ultra Red. He then put two control glasses in among the 10 glasses, and a panel of judges ranked the wines.
The tasters included John Buechsenstein, winemaker and UC Davis instructor in sensory evaluation; winemaker Kerry Damskey; Harvey; Clark Smith; and Dr. Richard Peterson, former winemaker at Beaulieu and long a fixture in the California winemaking scene.
The “additive” wines were clearly plumper and a bit more full-bodied than the control samples in both cases, and they seemed to work best in the Cabernet Sauvignon. The Cabernet in this case wasn’t very dark in color, so the additive wines bolstered the red color. But even at the lowest levels, I found the wines to be a bit fatter and less characteristic of Cabernet. For me, the Zinfandels were most hurt by the Mega-Purple because it compromised the varietal spice.
Most of the comments from the tasters were interesting, noting that they could see how a winemaker would choose to use an additive to improve the color of a color-deficient wine, but all said that the use of such elements is very tricky.
Damskey said he has used Mega-Purple a couple of times, “but the addition has to be a lot less” than we used in our blind tasting. “And you have to be very careful. The downside is that it mutes the aroma.” Peterson said he could see how a wine might be improved a bit if Mega-Purple were added, notably a wine without much flavor development. He actually liked a few of the additions he tasted. “I liked the softening effect that the sugar adds,” he said.
Harvey pointed out that in some of the wines with the additive, “the ‘sweetness’ in the Cabernet made the tannins more astringent,” because, he said, the sweetness was out of sync with the rest of the wine. He also got a licorice or jug character from them.
“There’s no question that Mega-Purple adds a fruit component all its own,” Smith said. “If you can do it transparently, then fine. But winemakers should ask the question, ‘Are all my wines aimed at the same thing? Do I want them to taste pretty much like each other?’ If not, then they should be very careful about using it.”
“In my trials,” Damskey said, “high levels such as these didn’t work at all. Even in lower-level red wines, there is a jammy, overripe component. And despite the fact that there’s more sugar there, you tend to lose that delicate ‘sweetness’ that grapes give you. At lower levels, I think the sweetness brings something to the table.” He said the downside to using Mega-Purple is that the wine loses some aromatics, and the varietal nature is a bit compromised. He said he would never go over .1%, and more likely would use it at levels of .06% or less.
Smith said, “I think it’s ridiculous to add residual sugar to red wine. And Mega-Purple seems to give the wine a jugy, tooty-fruity aroma. And it changes the texture. I didn’t like the parching quality of the tannins. And it also seems to cover some of the terpenes and thiols that are attractive in wines.” Buechsenstein agreed that the additions changed the mouth feel of the wines, softening in one way but making the tannins seem awkward and out of place.
John Williams of Frog’s Leap used it only once. He dislikes “all the crutches that winemakers have come to rely upon, instead of working on what they should be working on--which is not irrigating the vines.” Williams’ concern, he said, is that color additions like Mega-Purple might someday “become part of the regular winemaking regime.”
Update: Mega-Purple - it's not just being used for inexpensive wines
We might think that additives like Mega-Purple are used only on less expensive wines, but I'm not sure that's the case. There is one particular California wine producing family whose wines taste suspiciously like they are doctored with something akin to Mega-Purple. These wines appear under several brand names and range from $20 to $90 per bottle. One of them is famous.
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The wine industry is not without its secrets, and some cheap wines use additives to improve color, flavor, and mask flaws. Mega-Purple, a grape concentrate made from deeply pigmented grapes, is one such additive commonly used in cheap California and other red wines. It is produced by Constellation Brands and is sweet, giving the wine more color and softening it due to the extra sugar. Mega-Purple masks some wine flaws, but its flavor is not associated with fine wine.
While some winemakers admit to using Mega-Purple sparingly to fill gaps in color or flavor deficiencies, many are reluctant to discuss its use. The substance is highly concentrated, so a little goes a long way. However, overuse can lead to homogenized flavors and aromas, making wines too similar to each other. Some argue that wines should offer different characteristics.
Critics fear that the use of additives like Mega-Purple could compromise the authenticity and uniqueness of wines. Some high-priced wines also raise suspicions of potential use. One family in particular makes wines under several brand names, one of which is expensive and famous. Yet it tastes suspiciously manipulated. However, not all winemakers employ additives, and some believe that focusing on grape quality and winemaking techniques ismore important.
The secrecy surrounding the use of additives highlights the importance of understanding the wine you're buying and supporting winemakers who prioritize genuine craftsmanship. Despite the presence of cheaper wines with added substances, there are still many high-quality wines available for those who seek a more authentic and diverse wine experience.
by Jan Shrem
We owe our modern wine packaging to the Romans who developed both the wine bottle and the cork. However, despite this auspicious beginning, cork was forgotten after the fall of the Roman Empire and was not rediscovered until the late 16th century. During Roman times glass bottles were small and fragile receptacles. Wines were stored in amphora until barrels were invented by the Celts in the 3rd century C.E. From the barrel, wine was served either in wine horns, wooden or pewter bowls, or assorted containers rarely made of glass. And once the air entered the barrels, it began to oxidized the wine, ruining the taste.
Tiny, fragile, and expensive though they were, the glass bottles slowly increased in popularity. The fragility of the glass was due in large measure to its wood-fired production. It took an edict by King James I of England, (yes that one, who had the Bible translated) in the early 17th century to make our present bottle possible. With the growing use of glass for making windows, bottles, and drinking glasses, the English Crown became concerned about the destruction of woodlands to fuel the increasing number of glass furnaces. King James forbade the use of wood-burning furnaces for the production of glass.
In the 1630s, Sir Kenelm Digby of England, an extraordinary courtier, author, alchemist, and pirate (!), started making bottles that were much thicker, heavier, and darker - as well as much cheaper - than any known before by using coal rather than the now-forbidden wood to fire the glass.
At first the bottles were blown into a globular shape, much like a bubble with a narrow, tall neck ending in a rim where the stopper was tied. But this shape was awkward to carry and store. As it was learned that wine aged more gracefully if the bottle lay on its side, the bubble shape gradually became the bottle shape we know today.
(by Nicholas Wade, The New York Times, 1/25/11, reprinted with minor editing)
[There is some confusing terminology and errors of fact or emphasis in this article, but overall it is an important contribution to the understanding of wine and its origin. 1) I’ve seen no evidence that Chardonnay is closely related to Pinot Noir.* 2) Technically Wade uses the term “clone” correctly**, but most writers use it to refer to sub-varietals; for example, over 40 “clones” of Pinot Noir are commercially planted. They are genetically very close, but not identical. 3) The history of post-phylloxera grape breeding is much more complex than is presented here.]
For the last 8,000 years, the wine grape has had very little sex. This unnatural abstinence threatens to sap the grape’s genetic health and the future pleasure of millions of oenophiles. The lack of sex was discovered by Sean Myles, a geneticist at Cornell University, who developed a gene chip that tests for the genetic variation commonly found in grapes. He then scanned the genomes of over 1000 grape varieties in the Department of Agriculture’s extensive collection.
Much to his surprise, he found that 75 percent of the varieties were as closely related as parent and child or brother and sister. “Previously, people thought there were several different families of grape,” Dr. Myles said. “Now we’ve found that all those families are interconnected. and in essence there’s just one large family.”
Thus Merlot is intimately related to Cabernet Franc, which is a parent of Cabernet Sauvignon, whose other parent is Sauvignon Blanc, the daughter of Traminer, which is also a progenitor of Pinot Noir, a parent of Chardonnay.*
Dr. Myles and his co-authors report in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. that this web of interrelatedness is evidence that the grape has undergone very little breeding since it was first domesticated. The reason is obvious in retrospect. Vines can be propagated by breaking off a shoot and sticking it in the ground or onto existing rootstock. The method gives uniform crops, and most growers have evidently used it for thousands of years. The results: cultivated grapes remain closely related to wild grapes, apart from a few improvements in berry size, sugar content, and new colors favored by plant breeders.
Cultivated grapes have almost as much genetic diversity as wild grapes. But because there has been very little sexual reproduction over the last eight millenniums, this diversity has not been shuffled nearly enough. The purpose of sex, though this is perhaps not widely appreciated, is recombination, the creation of novel genomes by taking some components from the father’s and some from the mother’s DNA. The new combinations of genes provide variation for evolution to work on. In particular they let slow-growing things like plants and animals keep one step ahead of the microbes that prey on them.
The grapevine fell extinct through much of Europe in the phylloxera epidemic of the 19th century. The French wine industry recovered from this disaster only by grafting French scions, as the grape’s shoots are called, onto sturdy American rootstock resistant to the phylloxera aphid. Despite that close call, grape growers did not rush to breed disease resistance into their vines. One obstacle is that wine drinkers are attached to particular varieties, and if you cross a Chardonnay grape with some other variety, it cannot be called Chardonnay. There are regulations in many wine-growing regions that let only a specific variety be grown, lest the quality of the region’s wine be degraded.
More than 90% of French vineyards are now planted with clones** — genetically identical plants — certified to possess the standard qualities of the variety. The consequence of this genetic conservatism is that a host of pests have caught up with the grape, obliging most growers to protect their vines with a deluge of insecticides, fungicides, and other powerful chemicals.
This situation cannot be sustained indefinitely, in Dr. Myles’s view. “Someday, regulatory agencies will say, ‘No more,’ ” he said. “Europeans are gearing up for the day, which will come earlier there than in the U.S., for laws that reduce the amount of spray you can put on grapes.”
At that point growers will have three options. One is to add genes for pest resistance, risking consumer resistance to genetically modified crops. A second is to go organic [which many have done], which may be difficult for a plant as vulnerable as the grape. A third is to breed sturdier varieties. Breeding new grapes takes time and money. The grower has to plant a thousand seedlings, wait three years for them to mature, and then select the few progeny that have the desired traits. But a new kind of plant breeding now offers hope for an efficient shortcut.
The new method depends on gene chips, like the one developed by Dr. Myles, that test young plants for the desired combination of traits. The breeder can thus discard 90 percent of seedlings from a cross. The new method, called marker-assisted breeding, or genomic selection, is already being used in breeding corn. “We can predict flowering within a couple of days by looking at the DNA,” said Edward S. Buckler, a leading corn geneticist at the Agriculture Department’s research lab at Cornell.
Dr. Buckler believes the government’s large collection of crop plants could be used much more efficiently by analyzing the genomes of each species. He recruited Dr. Myles to work on the grape genome.
In major crops like corn, rice, and wheat, “everyone is shifting to these new technologies,” Dr. Buckler said. He expects grape growers to follow the trend. Wine drinkers’ insistence on their favorite varieties need not necessarily be a problem because with enough genetic markers, the breeder could identify and maintain the genes responsible for the taste of varieties like Chardonnay or Merlot. Genomically selected grape varieties may be ready for market in about a decade, said Dr. Buckler, who is a co-author on Dr. Myles’s report.
M. Andrew Walker, an expert grape breeder at the University of California, Davis, said that there are “ample pest- and disease-resistance genes” in the grapevine genus, which has about 60 species, but few in Vitis vinifera, the particular species to which wine and table grapes belong. He agreed that it will be necessary to introduce many of these genes from other Vitis species into vinifera. “Consumers and sellers will have to move beyond dependence on traditional vinifera varieties,” Dr. Walker said.
So far Dr. Myles has only 6,000 useful genetic markers on his grape gene chip but needs a larger chip to identify all the traits of interest to breeders. He started his scientific career working on human genetics at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany. On a bicycle tour of German vineyards he decided the grape’s genome might hold as many surprises as the human one. The pursuit fit in well with another aspect of his life — his wife is a winemaker in Nova Scotia. Canada might seem too far north for vineyards to thrive, but the growing season is like that of Champagne in France, Dr. Myles said. “For high-acid grapes that don’t fully ripen, which is the Champagne strategy, you can make fantastic sparklers in Nova Scotia and many good whites.”
1. Plan your trip carefully. Make a list of the wineries you would like to visit. Use a map to sequence visits that are relatively close to each other. Distances can be misleading.
2. If you have already been to the famous wine districts, consider areas that are off the beaten path such as Mendocino, Monterey-Santa Cruz, Livermore, and the Sierras in California. Many of the wineries there don’t even charge for tasting. The experience will be more intimate, but it may not be as polished.
3. Call ahead to the wineries for tasting room hours as well as the tasting fee. An appointment may be required at smaller wineries.
4. Don’t be a a slave to your plan; leave room for flexibility. You might just pass an interesting looking winery. Go for it!
5. The larger wineries will offer slick tours and fancy tasting rooms, but they get a crowd and can’t give you much individual attention. Plan on some large/famous wineries with their beautiful gardens and estate-like grounds but don’t miss some smaller, more intimate, rustic, and charming wineries. The tasting rooms can be as simple as a converted garage or an elegant, polished, and stately venue.
6. Although the main attraction at each winery for most people is the tasting room, look into some other experiences such as private tours, barrel tastings, library wine tastings, cave and cellar tours, and food pairing demonstrations.
7. Plan on visiting no more than three wineries a day. This may not sound like many, but take into consideration driving between each, tasting time at each, and lunch. That makes for a full day; after all this should not be a marathon of how many wineries you can visit in one day or how much wine you can drink.
8. Speaking of drinking, professionals taste and spit, amateurs drink. You are not obligated to taste every wine, nor are you obligated to drink all the wine that is poured. Make use of the dump/spit buckets! You might want to practice at home. With just a little practice, tasting and spitting can yield nearly as much sensory information from a wine as swallowing.
9. It isn’t classy to walk into a wine tasting room inebriated. If you do swallow, pace yourself, drink plenty of water, and pack or plan a lunch for each day. And most importantly, don’t drive if you think you’ve had too much. Hire a driver or bring a designated driver with you. Especially in a tourist area like Napa Valley, the local police may be waiting for you.
10. When you enter the tasting room, go to the tasting bar where there will typically be special containers or dump buckets for spitting or dumping and a tasting sheet listing the wines available for tasting that day along with tasting notes and prices. Some tasting rooms will also have crackers or cheese to nibble between each tasting.
11. The wine tasting staff will guide you through the tastings. They serve approximately one ounce of each wine; whites first, followed by reds (lighter to fuller-bodied) and then dessert wine if available. Take your time and taste each wine slowly, savoring each sip. Refer to the tasting notes provided by the winery to help evaluate the aromas and flavors of each wine.
12. Ask questions if the staff are not inundated with visitors. If they are busy, don’t hog the staff. Be considerate. If you ask good questions and seem to care about learning (and not just drinking), they may pour some special wine(s) for you.
13. NEVER ask for a second pour; it is considered rude. This is a tasting, not a drinking. Also, don’t name drop about other wineries. You are here to learn about this winery, not to show off.
14. Most of the wines offered for tasting are also available for purchase. It is not necessary, but it is good etiquette to purchase a bottle or two if you enjoyed what you’ve tasted. Tipping is not expected, but use your judgment.
15. We have some specific winery recommendations. Contact us.
[Edited from The Economist print edition, December 2009]
The birth of the cult of fine wine can be dated precisely. On April 10, 1663, Samuel Pepys, diarist and man-about-London, noted that he had enjoyed “a sort of French wine called Ho Bryan that hath a good and most particular taste that I never met with.” He had drunk what is now called Château Haut Brion at the Royall Oak Tavern in the heart of London, one of many such establishments that had sprung up after the rerestoration of the monarch three years earlier. These establishments offered such new delicacies as tea, coffee, and classy wines. The hedonistic atmosphere of the times was responsible for the introduction not only of “Ho Bryan” and the other great wines of Bordeaux, but also of Port from the Douro Valley in Portugal, the sparkling wines of Champagne, and brandy from a little French town called Cognac.
As Pepys was savoring his potation, big economic shifts were underway. London was on the rise, starting to replace Amsterdam as the hub of world trade. Its merchants were growing in power, wealth, and appetite for claret (red Bordeaux), among other luxuries. By the 18th century, Londoners were the world’s biggest consumers of good claret.
Previously drinks became famous and popular because of their royal connections. The court of France’s King Louis XIV, who himself drank Burgundy and the still wines of Champagne, was the arbiter of most alcoholic taste. Now for the first time, a wider social group, including both aristocrats and commoners with fashionable aspirations such as Pepys, set the tone.
The English had been drinking claret for five centuries before Pepys’s time; but it was poor stuff, shipped in cask immediately after the harvest and drunk quickly before it turned to vinegar the following spring. As late as the end of the 17th century, it continued to be drunk mostly by those who wanted “claret to cool their port” in the words of one observer. Much of it was fake. A poet calling himself Satyrical Dick wrote how a “jolly wine-cooper” could combine a “pint of old port” with rough Spanish wine and “could counterfeit claret the best of the sort.”
The Pontacs, the top winemaking family at the time, were the owners of Ho Bryan and founded a fashionable London restaurant called Pontack’s Head in 1663. Philosopher John Locke, whose theory of the social contract inspired America’s revolutionaries but who had worldlier interests too, spotted the reasons for the superiority of Ho Bryan on a visit to the vineyard in 1667. He found “a little rise of ground...white sand mixed with a little gravel; scarce fit to bear anything.” He added that “they say the wine in the next vineyard to it, tho’ seeming equal to me, is not so good.” [They were probably referring to La Mission Haut Brion.]
Locke had seized on the concept of terroir, the combination of soil, subsoil, drainage, and microclimate providing conditions for the making of fine wine. Another connoisseur, 18th-century economist Adam Smith, noted “The vine is more affected by the difference of soils than any other fruit tree. From some it derives a flavour which no culture or management can equal.”
Claret was getting more popular partly because it was getting better. The craft of winemaking had developed. By the early 18th century, claret was made to be kept for years - not months - by being carefully stored in oak casks. Better corks allowed wine to be stored longer and more safely. Bottles were produced that could be “binned”—laid down on their sides to mature.
By Smith’s time the shape of the industry was established for centuries to come. Advertisements in the London Gazette at the time noted the sale of wines from four châteaux: Haut Brion, today a green oasis in Bordeaux’s suburbs, and Latour, Lafite, and Margaux, all on the gravel banks above the Gironde estuary in the Médoc, the peninsula north of Bordeaux. The four estates remain the greatest brands in wine. Their main competitors, then as now, are a handful of tiny vineyards in Burgundy.
The British appetite for French wine was growing in the early 18th century, but so too were the obstacles to getting it. Britain, Portugal, and their allies were at war with France and Spain. Port (from Portugal) was, therefore, considered the patriotic drink. In a 1714 comedy called The Winder, one character protested that, “I have been drinking Claret and Champaign and Burgundy and other French wines, Sir, but I love my country for all that.” Many vendors claimed that their supplies were captured by British ships in the fighting, but they probably weren’t.
In the 18th century, drinking claret helped the rich to distinguish themselves from England’s port-sodden squirearchy. Port was not only the more traditional drink, but also—because it attracted much lower duties—far cheaper. John Hervey, the first Earl of Bristol, spent four times as much on claret as on port; whereas the lusty trenchermen who gathered in the Barbers Hall in the City of London spent a mere £2 on claret as against £850 on port.
After Britain made peace with France in 1713, claret became more accessible, and the wine trade flourished. Claret was pricey, but rich Londoners, who were also by then big spenders on theater, spas, and music, consumed conspicuous quantities. Sir Robert Walpole, Britain’s first prime minister, used navy ships to smuggle his favorite wines from France. The most expensive one he bought was old burgundy, but that was available only in tiny quantities, so he relied largely on claret, buying four hogsheads of 24 dozen bottles of Margaux and one hogshead of Lafite every three months. His wine bill in a single year amounted to over £1,200 (£100,000 today). British consumers bought the best stuff and paid top prices. By the time of the French Revolution, the British were paying five times as much for their claret as the wine’s other main customers, the notoriously parsimonious Dutch who preferred the cheaper, lower-grade stuff.
In Britain, claret was no longer drunk or even bought when young: in 1714 Walpole was buying bottles of the 1706 vintage of the classier wines. His sophistication was echoed by that of his clerk, who notably spelled all four estates correctly. In most 18th-century accounts, Lafite rarely had a single f or t, Margaux was spelled Margoose, Margose, and Margon, and O’Brian (for Haut Brion) led to constant speculation over the years that the owner was Irish.
Claret was still largely for the prosperous well into the 19th century. In Every Man His Own Butler, published in 1839, Cyrus Redding, a wine merchant and author, wrote, “Claret for a bishop, port for a rector, currant for a curate, and gin for the clerk.” The fine-wine merchant was an unusually respectable figure—for a tradesman. In a newspaper article Anthony Trollope described one of them, “Mr. Prettyman,” as “a handsome old gentleman with grey hair, always well-dressed.” Three of his contemporaries survive today—Corney & Barrow in the City of London, Justerini & Brooks, and Berry Bros & Rudd in St. James’s Street.
But claret was beginning to flow down the social hierarchy. A free-trade treaty between Britain and France in 1860 drastically reduced the duty on French wines thus encouraging the British middle classes to ape their social superiors. In that year, the chancellor of the exchequer, William Gladstone, keen to stiffen the nation’s moral spine, cut the duty on table wines to 40% of the more intoxicating fortified wines such as Port and Sherry.
The following year came the Single Bottle Act allowing grocers to sell wine by the bottle. An enormously popular drink called “grocers’ claret” was born, with the result that between 1859 and 1878 annual sales of French wines, largely Bordeaux, rose six-fold to 36 million bottles. The Gilbey family, a commercial dynasty, franchised 2,000 grocers licensed to sell wine, largely claret. Their business grew so fast that in 1875 they bought Ch. Loudenne in the Médoc to hold their gigantic stocks. But as the middle classes turned to claret, so the upper classes began to abandon this increasingly common tipple in favor of Hock (German wine) and Champagne.
As the middle classes turned to claret, the upper classes abandoned this increasingly common tipple in favor of hock (German wine) and champagne. Then the fortunes of the claret business turned. In the late 1870s and 1880s, an attack of mildew tainted the wines: the reputation of Lafite was ruined when the 1884 vintage turned moldy after only a couple of years in bottle. At the same time, the phylloxera bug began to devastate Bordeaux’s vineyards.
Claret came back into its own in 1960 when the splendid 1959 vintage coincided with the arrival of big American buyers. Its popularity has risen steadily since. London remains at the center of the fine wine business, home of organizations such as the Institute of Masters of Wine, of Decanter and World of Fine Wine magazines, and of most of the world’s biggest wine auctions. Liv-Ex, the world’s first stock market for fine wine, is based in London, and its figures show that nine-tenths of the wine trade is still in “classified growth” (leading) clarets. Newcomers from vineyards in a dozen countries trying to launch their finest wines on the world market come to London first for validation. Though London may still have much of the knowledge and the market, as consumers the British [and the Americans] may be past their best. In 2009, 57% (in value) of the fine wine that Sotheby’s sold globally was bought by Asians; four-fifths of those buyers were from China and Hong Kong.
by Robert Sinskey
[Now more-or-less retired, Robert Sinsky was one of the early California winemakers to have consistent success with Pinot Noir. This older article is still relevant today. His references are to fruit-centric wine writer Robert Parker, who once admitted he didn't "get" red Burgundies, and to wines like Meiomi Pinot Noir, which have more juicy ripe fruit of mysterious origin than Pinot Noir character.]
I fear for Pinot Noir. The enchanting wine that first captured my imagination is in danger of earning a tarnished reputation. The California Pinot Noir story started innocently enough when a few daring vintners risked financial ruin to pursue a worthy rendition of the elusive red wine of Burgundy. These folks cut bud wood from the few existing heirloom Pinot Noir vines stateside, or they “found” European selections in their suitcases upon return from Pinot Mecca and then grafted these DNA-laden twigs onto rootstocks planted in their home vineyards.
While a few of these first-generation wines worked, most didn’t, and a drinkable one was a rare find. Happy accidents did occur, and when they got it right, the wines were sublime. What the early zealots lacked in skill, they made up in a deep appreciation and respect for what Burgundy stood for, both stylistically and spiritually. They knew how hard it was to find, let alone make a classically styled Pinot Noir, one that straddles the razor’s edge of ripeness, where bright acidity dances with sweet red fruit. A wine with a sense of place, kissed by a patch of earth that gave birth to its personality. A wine complex with hints of peat, forest floor, saddle sweat, and spice, whose story would slowly unfold, teasing, enticing, and ultimately thrilling. These early producers were not looking for accolades; they pursued Pinot Noir in the spirit of the pioneer with the reverence of the congregant and the commitment of the artisan.
Then a new preacher came to town who promised them a better way. He said, “Make wine in my image, and you will be rewarded with riches.” And many followed. They forsook the old ways and betrayed the land by planting clones that produced high-alcohol, low-acid, sweet-tasting wines. These wines found praise, and more followed. They learned to make wine in a laboratory to please the Critical One, then went forth and multiplied.
I am afraid because I’ve seen it before. I watched Chardonnay, the white grape of Burgundy, go from belle of the ball to class clown in little over a decade. The story is almost identical. An elegant, restrained, cuisine-oriented wine became a thick, high alcohol, low acid, oaky, sweet concoction that enamored the critics, while the committed wine drinker chanted, “A.B.C!” - “Anything But Chardonnay!” It took years for the wine to recover from its well-earned stigma.
When Miles screamed, “I am NOT drinking any f%*#ing Merlot,” he outed, on camera, one of the most popular wines of the nineties. His rant played chorus to the public’s silent but growing dissatisfaction with the grape, precipitating an unprecedented drop in Merlot’s popularity. Its rise and fall had an uncanny parallel to that of Chardonnay, only much more dramatic.
Many Pinot Noir drinkers have never tasted a classic rendition of the wine. A whole new generation exists without a point of reference. They only know the new, over-the-top styles that have as much elegance and restraint as vanilla cherry cola. I fear for my beloved Pinot Noir as it teeters on the precipice, poised to fall prey to the same fate that befell Merlot and Chardonnay. I am afraid that one day someone will have their close-up and blurt out, “Pinot Noir sucks!” and shove all Pinot Noir, both elegant and clumsy, off the cliff.
A classic should not suffer at the whim of fashion. I am hopeful that enough wine lovers know the difference and that growers will pursue their own vision instead of conforming to the tyranny and narrow palate of some critics. I am optimistic that foodies will discover classically proportioned Pinot Noir. I hope that as barrel costs increase, winemakers will turn to the quality and expression of their fruit to inform the wine rather than rely on the cosmetics of the cellar. I hope that as the organic and biodynamic movements take hold, training in the subtleties of farming will translate to elegance in the finished wine and minimize remedial winemaking.
I fear for Pinot Noir because, ultimately, we have no control over the marketplace. As a winery, all we can do is grow and make pure, honest wines we want to drink and share them with others who want to drink them as well.
Age of vine before producing useful grapes—3 years
Age of vine before full production—5 years
Age of vine before the best French producers will use the fruit for their premier wine—10 years
Productive lifetime of a vine in Napa—30-35 years (Quality improves, but yield declines)
Grape bunches needed to make a bottle of wine—4-6
Grapes to make a bottle of wine—500-600
Bunches on a vine—40
Grapes in a bunch—75-100
Vines per acre—500-1300 in Napa Valley; 3000-4500 in Bordeaux
Pounds of grapes produced by one vine—8-12
Tons of grapes per acre—4 (average in Napa Valley—can vary greatly)
Gallons (bottles) of wine per ton of grapes—120 (600)
Gallons (bottles) of wine per acre—500 (2500)
Barrels per acre—13.5
Bottles per vine—4-8
Bottles per ton—500—700
Bottles per acre—4,000
Cases per barrel—24.6
Glasses per acre—16,000
Glasses in a bottle—5-6
Bottles per 60-gallon barrel—300
Calories in a 5-ounce glass of dry wine—100-125
Fat in a 5-ounce glass of dry wine—0
Carbohydrates in a 5-ounce glass of dry wine—1-2
Cost of acre of new vineyard in Napa Valley—$300,000 to $1 million (as of 2023)
Cost of French oak barrel—$850-3600
Cost of American oak barrel—$360-550
Average age of a French oak tree used to make barrels—170 years
Number of years an oak barrel is used—5-8
Number of vineyard acres in Napa County (2022)—45,800 (Bordeaux has 8 times as much! 78% of Napa vineyards are red grapes, 22% white grapes)
Number of vineyard acres placed in Napa Land Trust, never to be developed—More than 20,000 in conservation easements, and 38,000 in agricultural preservation
Most popular varietals in Napa Valley (in order of popularity)
1. Cabernet Sauvignon (50%)
2. Chardonnay (14%)
3. Merlot (10%)
4. Sauvignon Blanc (6%)
5. Pinot Noir (6%)
6. Zinfandel (3%)
Proportion of total value at harvest of red varietals compared to white—Nearly 3:1
Number of wineries in Napa Valley—Approximately 500
Number of wineries in Napa Valley built since 1966—300 production facilities. The rest are cooperatively produced
Number of people directly employed in Napa Valley wine industry (wineries, vineyards, vineyard/winery services)—More than 8,000
Number of people directly employed in Napa Valley wine industry and resulting hospitality industry—More than 40,000
Year grapes first planted in Napa Valley—1838 (by George Yount)
First small winery built in Napa Valley after Prohibition—Stony Hill (1951)
First large winery built in Napa Valley after Prohibition—Robert Mondavi (1966). The wine industry in California had been devastated by prohibition; no one wanted to invest in it for 33 years! (The Louis Martini Winery had been built in 1933 just prior to the end of Prohibition.)
Biggest Napa Valley crop before grapes—Prunes
Vines per acre—500-1300 in Napa Valley; 3000-4500 in Bordeaux
Pounds of grapes produced by one vine—8-12
Tons per acre—4 (average in Napa Valley—can vary greatly)
Gallons of wine per ton of grapes—120
Gallons of wine per acre—500
Barrels per acre—13.5
Bottles per vine—4-8
Bottles per ton—500—700
Bottles per acre—4,000
Cases per barrel—24.6
Glasses per acre—16,000
Glasses in a bottle—5-6
Bottles per 60 gallon barrel—300
Calories in a 5 ounce glass of dry wine—100-125
Fat in a 5 ounce glass of dry wine—0
Carbohydrates in a 5 ounce glass of dry wine—1-2
Proportion of total value at harvest of red varietals compared to white—Nearly 3:1
Why Plastic Corks and Some Screwcaps Create More Problems Than They Solve
An edited article by Jamie Goode
[Many people are still confused as to why traditional corks are being replaced by plastic corks and screwcaps in most inexpensive wines. The simple answer is that the industry is looking for a cork replacement because of the high percentage of defective corks, specifically corks that carry a chemical called TCA. Corks that contain a particular harmless bacteria will produce TCA in the cleaning process during cork production. TCA contributes a moldy, wet cardboard smell and flavor to wines and robs them of their fruit. By most estimates, two to five percent of all corks contain some TCA.
Alternative closures do not have a TCA problem, but it turns out that most of them have other problems. For wines that are meant to be drunk young, these problems will probably not surface. But even wines meant to be drunk young can sit around for a year or two, which is enough time for some bad things to happen.
Think of a closed bottle of wine as a living (and breathing) container of organic and inorganic compounds. Think of the changes that can take place in such a closed system. Remember from high school chemistry that changes can occur aerobically (in the presence of oxygen) or anaerobically (in the absence of oxygen). The changes that occur will be different in these two situations. More specifically, the changes in the wine bottle (aging) will be different if there is some oxygen present (even if it is microscopically small) than if there is no oxygen present.
In fact, wines age well with cork stoppers because cork allows a finite but very, very small amount of oxygen to migrate into the wine. Plastic corks do not. The liners of most screwcaps do not. Some screwcap makers are producing liners that closely mimic real corks in air transfer.
What this all means is that plastic corks and most screwcaps form an impermeable barrier that creates an anaerobic condition in a wine bottle. In this situation, undesirable changes may take place as the wine ages even for a relatively short time.]
Mercaptans and other volatile sulfur compounds in wine
Sulfites anyone? Remember that bugaboo that has people searching for sulfite-free wines in the mistaken belief that sulfites are bad for you? Sulfites are just one of many volatile sulfur compounds. These compounds, and specifically mercaptans, are a hot topic in the wine world because some of them are responsible for an olfactory (smell) defect known as “reduction.”
There are around 100 volatile sulfur compounds that have been identified in wine, but only a few of them are important to this discussion. First of all, they are smelly! Even at low concentrations, they can negatively impact a wine. Second, they are chemical chameleons able to change their form depending on the environment they are in. They may be undetectable in one form but may suddenly become noticeable in another, more smelly form. Third, they are not all bad. They are important contributors to varietal character in many wines, so winemakers should not just try to completely eliminate them.
Reduction vs. Oxidation
“Reduction” is a term used to describe the presence of volatile sulfur compounds in wine, but this is actually a secondary effect. The important concept here is that reduction and oxidation are opposites, but they are on a continuum much like the “opposites” of acid and base on the pH scale. This is really important for understanding wine production and aging.
The production and aging of wines involve chemical reactions. Electrons change hands, and as one compound is oxidized (the electrons are transferred from the chemical components in the wine to the oxygen), another is reduced. We tend to think of oxygen as a bad thing for wine, but it’s not that simple.
If there is plenty of oxygen around, chemical components in a wine will be gradually oxidized. The end result is an oxidized (spoiled) wine. Wine spoils by oxidation; it does not turn to “vinegar.” However, some oxidation is necessary for the production of wine. During fermentation the yeasts need oxygen, and a little oxygen is helpful in the early stages of red wine development because it allows the oxidation of some ethanol to acetaldehyde (also known as ethanal). This helps with the development of tannins and pigmented polymers that are important in building structure and color (this is the theory behind micro-oxygenation). After this, wine development is largely reductive: that is, it occurs best in the relative absence of oxygen; we shall see later that oxygen levels that are too low may be harmful to wine.
We now need to understand the chemical term “redox potential.” This is simply a measure of how oxidative or reductive a system, such as a wine in a barrel or bottle is, and it is measured in millivolts (mV). High readings are oxidative; low readings are reductive. Typically an aerated red wine will have a redox potential of 400–450 mV (high), whereas storage in the absence of air for some time will reduce this to 200–250 mV (low-middle). If levels get as low as 150 mV, there is a danger that reduction problems can occur. Exposure to oxygen through winemaking practices such as racking, topping up barrels and filtering, increases the level of dissolved oxygen in the wine and increases the redox potential which will then return to a safer 200–300 mV.
In white wines, this redox level will change much more rapidly than red wines because red wines have a higher concentration of phenolic compounds such as tannins which are able to interact with oxygen and act as buffers. Another variable here is the level of free sulfur dioxide (sulfites) in the wine which will act protectively by reacting with the products of oxidation. Yeast lees also absorb oxygen and protect the wine in a similar fashion, helping to lower the redox potential and create a more reductive environment. In modern winemaking, reductive conditions are encouraged: the protection of wines from oxygen by the use of stainless steel tanks and inert gases helps to preserve fresh fruit characters.
Reductive conditions—those in which oxygen is more or less excluded—can favor the development of smelly forms of sulfur compounds. This is where the term ‘reduced’ comes from. If this ‘reduction’ occurs before bottling, the addition of oxygen may correct the fault. However, these sulfur compounds can develop in wine even in non-reductive conditions. Further oxygen exposure may turn a smelly wine into a smelly oxidized wine. Equating the term ‘reduced’ with the presence of volatile sulfur compounds is, therefore, an oversimplification. The use of this term is scientifically imprecise and can be misleading. “‘Reduction’ is a simplification, a language abuse,” says Dominique Delteil, scientific director of the ICV in the south of France. “Tasters often link sensory sensations to chemical or physical states without being sure they are real or not. I prefer to call this concept ‘sulfur flavors’ rather than ‘reduction.’” Nonetheless, we will continue to use reduction as a shorthand for sulfur flavors.
Volatile sulfur compounds: a quick tour
The characteristics of reduction can be quite variable, but the following may be found in wine.
Compound Sensory Impact Notes
Hydrogen sulfide Rotten eggs, sewage The main culprit. Made by yeast
when they use a sulfur-containing
amino acid as a nitrogen source
Mercaptans (thiols) smelly (cabbage, rubber) produced when hydrogen sulfide
isn’t removed quickly. Big worry!
ethyl mercaptan burnt match, sulfidy Not always negative
methyl mercaptan rotten/cooked cabbage, implicated in screw-cap
(methanethiol) burnt rubber reduction
4-mercapto-4-methyl- Tropical fruit at low Common in Sauvignon Blanc
pentan 2-2-one (4MMP), levels, cat urine at high Contributes to blackcurrant
3-mercap-tohexan-1-ol(3MH), aroma in red wine.
3-mercaptohexyl acetate
benzenemethanethiol smoky/gunflint can be positive
Where do these sulfur compounds come from in the first place? It’s mainly from yeasts. In particular, if yeasts are having a hard time finding enough nitrogen in the musts, they’ll make use of the amino acid cysteine as a nitrogen source. Cysteine contains sulfur, and this sulfur is recombined chemically by the yeast metabolism to form the smelly sulfur compounds that are the subject of this piece. It is of great importance, therefore, for winemakers to make sure that their yeasts are happy and have an adequate nitrogen supply. ‘Yeast assimable nitrogen’ is the technical term that’s used here. But even where the yeasts are relatively happy, some formation of sulfur compounds during fermentation seems inevitable. And these compounds need careful handling by winemakers if they aren’t to turn into problems.
A key point:
Where do these potentially smelly sulfur compounds come from in the first place? It’s mainly from yeasts during fermentation. All plants and animals need nitrogen to make amino acids, proteins, and DNA. [For more background information, see our website.] If yeasts are having a hard time finding enough free nitrogen in the must (fermenting grape juice), they will make use of the amino acid cysteine as a nitrogen source. The problem here is that Cysteine contains sulfur, and this sulfur will be recombined chemically by the yeast metabolism to form the smelly sulfur compounds that are the subject of this piece. It is of great importance, therefore, for winemakers to make sure that their yeasts are happy and have an adequate nitrogen supply. ‘Yeast assimable nitrogen’ is the technical term that’s used here. But even where the yeasts are relatively happy, some formation of sulfur compounds during fermentation is inevitable. These compounds need careful handling by winemakers if they aren’t to turn into problems.
Why sulfur compounds in wine is a hot topic
Volatile sulfur compound chemistry is a hot topic in wine for two reasons. First, the closures debate has pointed the finger at screwcaps and plastic corks for sealing wines so tightly that the resulting wine environment has a low redox potential that encourages reduction. Second, one of the discussions among winemakers is whether the reduction is always a bad thing. Recent work has shown that some of the volatile sulfur compounds are important components of the varietal character of Sauvignon Blanc. They may also be important for other wine styles too and have been isolated from wines made with Gewürztraminer, Riesling, Colombard, Petit Manseng, Semillon, Cabernet Sauvignon, and Merlot, among others. And there’s some interesting evidence that low levels of “reduction” in the right context may be an important complexing factor. Could it be that what we think of as minerality in wine, which we attribute to the soil - terroir, if you will - could be about volatile sulfur compounds? Now there’s a thought!
Let’s first correct a popular misconception. Sulfur dioxide (SO2) - the infamous “sulfites” - is not a volatile sulfur compound, and is not really part of the “reduction” syndrome. SO2 is added to wine in order to provide microbiologic stability and perhaps more importantly to prevent oxidation. Actually, it’s a little more complicated than that. SO2 splits into various molecular forms in wine; only the free SO2 has any protective activity. It reacts with oxygen very slowly, and its role is to bind up the products of oxidation in wine so that the oxidation isn’t apparent, even though oxidation of the wine components will already have occurred. This is a complicated, but important story, but it isn’t terribly relevant to our discussion.
Now the really controversial bit. Sulfur compounds in wine - “reduction” - have been in the press lately. The Daily Telegraph carried a story titled “Screwcaps Blamed For Tainting Wine” which was also picked up by other news outlets. This was prompted by the results of the faults clinic from the 2006 International Wine Challenge (IWC). “In a number of cases the IWC chairmen validated a link between screwcap use and an unfavorable, vegetal/rubber flavored compound presumed to be a complexed sulfide,” reports Sam Harrop MW, one of the four IWC chairs. “At first glance, a percentage of 4.9% of total faults may not seem high, but when examined in the context of total screwcap figures, a more worrying rate of 2.2% [of all screwcapped wines] emerges. In the context of the 2006 IWC cork taint figure of 2.8% [of all-natural cork-sealed wines], this fault type is significant and should be given more attention by wineries using screwcap.” However, Harrop is keen to emphasize that he’s not equating the two: “While the IWC figures for screwcaps are a concern, there is no question in my mind that the continued incidence of cork taint is still a more serious issue.”
The potential problem with sulfides in screwcapped wines first came to the world’s attention with the closures study by the Australian Wine Research Institute (AWRI) in 1999 which has reported at regular intervals as a 1999 Semillon from the Clare Valley has developed in bottles using 14 different closures. Included in this study was a metal-lined screwcap. The liner is important here: the oxygen transmission properties of a screwcap are determined by the nature of the liner. The almost universally used liner in Australia and New Zealand has a metal layer in it (usually tin; sometimes aluminum). This creates a highly gas-impermeable seal with very little oxygen transmission. These liners are instantly recognizable because of their metallic appearance. The other commonly used screwcap liners for wine appear white. These are known as saranex-only liners and allow more oxygen transmission, although probably a bit more than is needed just to avoid reduction and likely more than we’d want of a closure for wines destined for keeping more than a few years.
After the wines had been in the bottle for 20 months, the AWRI reported that the tin-lined screwcaps performed as expected: with their tight seals they kept the wine freshest. Screwcapped bottles scored highest for fruity aromas, maintained the highest levels of free sulfur dioxide, and showed the least color development. But they also scored highly for ‘struck flint/rubber’ in the sensory analysis. This observation persisted for least 63 months post-bottling. Subsequent trials, which have examined the performance of metal-lined screwcaps, have reached consistent results, as have studies using sealed ampoules where there is no oxygen transmission at all: “reduction” seems to be a problem. The obvious explanation is that the low redox environment of the screwcap-sealed wine is causing some unwanted sulfur chemistry to occur, with sulfur compounds shifting from a less smelly (and thus unnoticed) form to a more smelly (and noticeable), reduced form.
What are we to make of this? Is it a real-world problem on a par with cork taint, or is it just a minor technical problem—a teething issue that just needs a bit of tweaking? The latter position has been consistently adopted by proponents of screwcaps, including many individuals and wineries that have signed up to the International Screwcap Initiative. They have invested emotional energy as well as several years’ of production of their wines, so their natural response to these sorts of data is to either fight or deny them. Others have been gunning for screwcaps to fail—none more so than the cork industry who see their livelihood threatened.
Since the publication of the first AWRI report in 2001, there has been just a trickle of data on the subject of screwcap reduction. But little by little a clearer picture has emerged, and the evidence suggests that the issue of mercaptans in screwcapped wines is problematic enough that some caution should be exercised in their use.
First, we have the consistency of observation: where people have been looking carefully at screwcapped wines, these mercaptans (or what people believe to be mercaptans from sensory analysis) have always been found. Then we have anecdotal observations from interested parties. Australian wine writer Campbell Mattinson reported on a tasting in which he encountered a number of reduction problems with screwcap wines. A comparative tasting of 24 white and red wines, screwcapped and cork-sealed, was reported by Ralph Kyte Powell in the Australian newspaper The Age (2/21/2006). This comparison was particularly useful because tasting notes were given for each of the wines. In reading these notes, two points are emphasized. First, the wines taste quite different in almost every case. Second, the number of descriptors indicative of the presence of mercaptans in the screwcapped wines is striking. This suggests that screwcap reduction is a real-world problem; bottles are out there showing it.
New Zealand winemaker (Stonecroft, Hawkes Bay) and Ph.D. chemist Alan Limmer has been a thorn in the side of the screwcap lobby. He has written widely on the subject, bringing his knowledge of wine chemistry to bear. Limmer believes that screwcap reduction is not a problem that can be completely eliminated by better winemaking as many have claimed. “In essence, we are talking about thiol accumulation post-bottling from complex sulfides which do not respond to pre-bottling copper treatment,” claims Limmer in response to the assertion that fining with copper removes reduction defects. “This reaction occurs in all wines containing the appropriate precursors, irrespective of closure type. But the varying levels of oxygen ingress between closures leads to significantly different outcomes from a sensory point of view.”
Limmer’s explanation for screwcap reduction is that sulfides present in the wine at bottling necessitate a very small level of oxygen ingress through the closure, otherwise, they can become reduced to thiols. Because sulfides are less smelly, a wine that is clean at bottling may taste reduced after bottling if the closure doesn’t permit enough oxygen ingress. So the use of a closure such as cork, which does allow a little oxygen ingress (but not too much), is a necessary concession to the vagaries of sulfur chemistry.
Of course, we’d rather not have the sulfides in the wine at all, which would then avoid problems with reduction to mercaptans at a later stage. But as Limmer points out, “Controlling fermentation so as not to produce the complex sulfides is beyond our means currently. This sulfide behavior during fermentation is more controlled by the yeast genetics than the winemaker,” he explains. “It is not the winemaker’s fault these compounds exist in the wine at bottling. We can minimize it to some extent by providing optimum nutrient conditions for fermentation and employing some specific winemaking regimes. But the research tells us this only has a slight impact on the complex sulfide pattern produced by the yeast.” Limmer reinforces his point: “The patterns are quite specific to each yeast type almost irrespective of nutrient conditions. Every wine contains these complex sulfides.” Even if we could eliminate all sulfur compounds from wine, that would be undesirable because some sulfides are important for varietal character in Sauvignon Blanc and other grapes.
The new cork taint?
We have to be careful not to overstate the potential threat caused by sulfur products in wines sealed by ultra-low permeability closures such as tin-lined screwcaps. The extent of screwcap reduction is currently unclear, and winemakers may be able to minimize its occurrence even if it can’t be avoided altogether. The IWC data indicating that 2.2% of screwcapped wines suffered from mercaptan problems are alarming, but remember that cork taint irredeemably ruins bottles while few consumers have a problem with low-level mercaptans in their wines. I doubt that most of the wine trade would spot this as a problem in all but the most extreme cases, so it is unfair to equate it with the very well-recognized problem of cork taint. Having said this though, screwcap-sealed wines affected by mercaptans should be a major concern for winemakers because the closure is modifying the flavor of the wine which is emphatically not reaching the consumer the way the winemaker intended. It would be dangerously complacent for the industry to take the view that if the consumer doesn’t notice it, then it doesn’t matter.
It is also possible that low-level mercaptans affect more than 2.2% of wines sealed with screwcaps. “They impact... towards the end of the palate,” claims Limmer, “imparting a mineral or bitter/hard/astringent aspect. This has the appearance of shortening or closing up the palate, so the wine does not display a fine fresh long finish, but ends abruptly and somewhat harshly.” This describes something I’ve certainly noticed in side-by-side comparisons of cork and screwcap-sealed wines. Is it happening all the time, but going more-or-less undetected?
Gregor Christie of membrane cork company ProCork has been concerned enough about this problem that he has sent wines for testing at ETS laboratories in California. Clearly, Christie has a commercial imperative for showing that ProCork is superior to tin-lined screwcaps in this regard, but even given this motivation, the results are interesting. Christie took the 2002 Clare Valley Semillon used in the commercial closure trial run by the AWRI, comparing ProCork with natural cork and screwcap and submitted bottles sealed with all three closures to ETS for testing for a range of volatile sulfur compounds. For methyl mercaptan, which has a perception threshold of 0.3 parts per billion (ppb), both the cork- and ProCork-sealed bottles were below detection limit. The screwcapped bottle, however, showed a level of 0.6 ppb.
A sense of perspective is called for. There’s a real danger that the message distilled by journalists from all this technical talk becomes a misleading “screwcaps taint wine” story. The picture emerging is a complex one, but such a simplification would be dangerous if it caused producers to back away from adopting alternative closure solutions, which would then remove any incentive for the cork industry to put its house in order and do all it can to reduce taint levels. However, complications like this mercaptan issue should put pressure on winemakers to be more curious about the closures they are using. They should ask more questions about issues like oxygen transmission and insist on seeing independently validated data on closure performance rather than accepting manufacturer’s testimonials or sales pitches unquestioningly.
Organic and Biodynamic methods of food production seek to minimize damage to ecosystems and create a stable agriculture into perpetuity. They respect the land and believe that the fauna and flora living in untreated soil are crucial to quality and healthy food production. Pesticides, herbicides, and artificial fertilizers are thought to disturb the natural balance of the soil.
What is organic farming and agriculture?
Organic farming is a system of agricultural techniques popularized and named by farmer and publisher J. I. Rodale in 1946. The word has several meanings, including “a whole system of interdependent parts,” “decomposed plant material,” and in chemistry: “chemical compounds which contain carbon.” Rodale established a demonstration farm in Pennsylvania and founded Rodale Press which publishes Organic Gardening magazine and many books.
Rodale was influenced by Sir Albert Howard’s work in India with composting. Cover cropping and composting are used to build organic matter in the soil, and synthetic inputs are discouraged. Organic farming emphasizes building soil fertility on the premise that a healthy, living soil produces healthy plants that are more resistant to pests and disease and have higher nutritional value. With the passage of the USDA National Organic Program (NOP), organic farms and vineyards in the United States can now achieve certified organic status with a rigorous yearly inspection from a USDA-certified inspection agency such as Stellar Certification Services. Generally a vineyard must be pesticide and herbicide-free for three years before its wines may be labeled “organic.” The European Union has slightly different standards for organic labeling.
What is Biodynamic farming?
Biodynamic farming is sort of super-organic farming; it encompasses everything organic, then takes it further. It is actually the oldest system of organic agriculture, for it was started in 1924 by German philosopher Rudolph Steiner. Biodynamic farms strive to be self-sustaining within the surrounding ecosystem. The name comes from the Greek “bio” which means life-energy. The worldwide Demeter Organization certifies Biodynamic farms. Demeter standards are generally stricter than organic standards and emphasize farm animals, soil and plant sprays, and specific compost preparations thought to enhance and regulate plant growth and fertility.
Biodynamic philosophy is, however, controversial, and some of its tenets are downright weird to the modern, scientific mind! For example, its adherents plant and harvest according to lunar cycles. Steiner’s instructions were occult, dogmatic, and cannot be proven scientifically. (For example, how do you show that you have harnessed “cosmic forces?”) And what is one to make of instructions to fill the horn of a cow with cow manure and bury it in the ground (40–60 cm below the surface) in the autumn. It is then left to decompose during the winter and recovered for use the following spring when this tiny amount is mixed with a lot of water and sprayed over the vineyard. Likewise crushed powdered quartz is stuffed it into a cow horn and buried in the ground in spring and taken out in autumn. One tablespoon is then mixed with nearly 60 gallons of water and sprayed on the crops to prevent fungal disease. As with homeopathy, there is no scientific evidence that such dilute preparations have any efficacy.
What is sustainable agriculture?
Many vineyards and other farms claim that they employ sustainable agriculture. Unfortunately, this term has no legal definition and anyone can use it. Generally sustainable agriculture implies environmentally friendly practices that pesticides and herbicides are avoided if possible and that attempts are made to be “green,” to allow the production of crops or livestock without damage to human or natural systems. However, there is no enforcement of this term, although there are a few certification systems in place such as Rainforest Alliance, Fair Trade, UTZ Certified, GlobalGAP, etc.