Un-Parkerized wines

My CruForge colleague, Dave Halsted, directed my attention to Mike Steinberger's Slate article, "The Wino in Winter: Robert Parker's influence is on the decline". It's a good, balanced article, but once again, I think there are much more interesting things to discuss than Robert Parker's influence. This quotation near the end of the article admirably sums up why:

While the number of 'Parkerized' wines (lavishly fruited, lavishly oaked) has unquestionably exploded, there are still plenty of winemakers unwilling to cater to one man's palate, and I still find plenty of subtle, distinctive reds and whites on my local retail shelves.

Me too, and not just at Paul Marcus Wines, the Oakland wine shop where I work part-time. The San Francisco Bay Area, at least, is blessed with lots of restaurants and wine stores that offer a wide range of interesting, distinct, food-friendly, not overblown wines. For example, Bodegas Luberri Rioja 'Albiker' 2004 (just to mention one bottle that I've enjoyed frequently in recent weeks).

Plums and cherries, tar and roses

More on the question of tasting notes and the modern tendency to recite a litany of fruit flavors: In issue #58 (Summer 2001) of The Art of Eating, Edward Behr writes: "The flavors that have been noted most often in Barolo in the past have been violets, tar, faded roses, and perhaps, leather. Curiously, fruit isn't on the list, but fruit is very much present, often including plums or cherries."

(An aside - I've always thought that someone in Barolo should start a heavy metal band named "Tar and Roses".)

Behr is right on both counts. How fascinating that fruit isn't on the list, despite the fact that fruit is very much present in the wines. The classic descriptions seem to studiously ignore the fruit associations in favor of other aroma and flavor analogies. It would be interesting to know how and when the classic descriptions developed.

Joe Dressner, in his blog entry Wine Tasting, expresses the skepticism that I'm feeling about modern wine tasting notes. He suggests instead:

Why not just sit down with one great bottle. Learn everything you can about the region and producer. Go visit them on a vacation. Immerse yourself. Learn to enjoy wine.

Bravo.

Bold and ultraripe

While everyone else in the wine world chatters about the new Robert Parker biography, The Emperor of Wine, and Tony Hendra's review [registration required] of same in the New York Times August 17 Book Review, I'm going to harken back to a little article in the May 19 San Francisco Chronicle: High-end buyers like their wines 'bold and ultraripe'. These kinds of articles are low-hanging fruit, but here goes anyway.

"Consumers said darker wines were more appealing than lighter-colored ones."

The current color fetish is silly. There is no reliable correlation between flavor intensity and color. And it's not necessarily the case that more intense flavor is better. As importer Terry Theise points out, "More is not better; better is better." The second part of this formulation is of course a tautology, though of the koanic kind. The first part is simply true.

"The descriptor 'tangy with crisp acidity,' ... drew more negative reactions than positives among all respondents."

This is probably the most depressing part of the article for me. "Tangy with crisp acidity" practically defines a good white wine (and rosé), and it's a positive attribute in most red wines. I have no quarrel with people who like to drink ripe, jammy wines - as one particular style of wine. To quote Terry Theise again, "Happiness is discovering that you're ticklish in more than one place."

But more generally, I find it depressing when people react negatively to acidity. This is my main quarrel with Robert Parker. That he praises big, ripe wines is fine with me. That he thinks low acidity is a positive characteristic in wine is screwed up! (If you need to be convinced, read Acidity Is Your Friend.)

It seems to me that "tangy with crisp acidity" is exactly the characteristic of many successful new world wines - for example, many of the wines from California's Central Coast. They're rich and high in alcohol, and I don't particularly want to drink them with dinner, but their acidity keeps them from seeming ponderous.

Some 55 percent of high-end wine drinkers were 'very interested' in purchasing a wine described as 'bold and ultraripe.' 'Rich and opulent' didn't have the resonance of 'bold and ultraripe.'"

This part is simply puzzling to me. Why exactly doesn't "rich and opulent" have the resonance of "bold and ultraripe"? I guess it's another facet of "more is better"?

Then again, there are all kinds of problems with this kinds of study. 307 people isn't a large sample, and 79 "high-end consumers" is a particularly dinky group. The article says that the study defines a "high-end consumer" is someone who frequently buys red wines priced more than $15 per bottle. There is of course nothing wrong with drinking under-$15 bottles of wine - red or otherwise - but this seems like a weird definition of "high-end consumer".

Thankfully, most of my CruForge clients, Paul Marcus Wines customers, friends, and dinner guests comprise a much more varied and open-minded group.

Yet another wine blog

How about some real comments about real wines? I've created MarkM@PMW, a separate blog to talk about the wines that I sell, taste, and drink at Paul Marcus Wines. First up: The Quixotic terroirs of Nierstein, La Mancha, and Ribera del Duero.

Nota bene / nota male

In the summer 2005 issue (#69) of The Art of Eating, Patrick Matthews argues in his article "The Revolution in Wine Is Not That Simple" that the current form of most published wine tasting notes - essentially a string of aroma and flavor analogies, many of them referring to fruits - influences what people look for in wine:

"Consumers started to expect wine to be filled with readily identifiable fruit aromas, so winemakers learned to make highly aromatic wines. Wines in less fruity styles - such as sherry and the other traditional 'rancio' or 'maderized' wines from around the Mediterranean, or mineral wines such as the best Chenin Blanc - fell by the wayside." (page 38)

This is an intriguing argument, and it got me thinking about tasting notes. Matthews writes that the very notion of articulating a sensory experience in a tasting note is a fairly recent thing. Assuming that this open Pandora's bottle is not likely to be recorked any time soon, I suggest that there are three ways of going about writing the sensory experience tasting note: the scientific, the solipsistic, and the poetic.

The scientific approach probably is best exemplified by Dr. Ann Noble's Aroma Wheel. Dr. Noble developed not only a standardized set of terms for describing wine aromas, but recipes for creating the reference standard aromas to which the terms refer (e.g., to find out what "Black olive" on the Aroma Wheel refers to, put 4-6 mL brine from canned black olives in 25 mL white or red base wine). There are all kinds of methodological and philosophical problems with this approach, but the intent is clear - to create a more-or-less common and reproducible vocabulary for what people (or scientists, anyway) smell in various wines. How such a vocabulary, even if it's achievable, might help me understand, buy, or enjoy wine isn't clear, but that's probably not its intent.

The solipsistic approach eschews all pretense of objectivity and instead proclaims the taster's own experience of the wine during the moment of tasting. This approach is a curious assemblage of humility ("it's just my experience...") and arrogance ("...and all of my adoring readers are dying to hear about it!"). From the pen of a talented writer, solipsism can be entertaining, but it's seldom informative.

Thus we are left with the poetic approach. My friend and wine industry colleague Chad Arnold is fond of describing Loire Valley chenin blanc as smelling like "wet concrete in November" (or October - depending on the wine). It so happens that Chad is a poet as well as a wine nerd. Is his description better than "wet minerals, honeycomb, and ultra-ripe pears"? I don't know. I do know that when I taste Loire chenin now, wet sidewalks after a late fall rain often are what I think of first.

Forge

"Forge" - a less mysterious word, but still one with a whiff of ambiguity. It's the fiery fount of creation and the act of creating. But it's also the act of fake creation, of making things that pretend to be what they are not. Winegrowing and winemaking exist in this same land of ambiguity. How to create in a way that respects and expresses the materials at hand, be they this particular iron or these particular grapes grown in this particular patch of ground?

There is as well a pleasingly utilitarian ring to "forge". It's where useful things begin to be shaped. Of course, there's no reason that useful things can't also be beautful. Just down the street from my house is Clausen Sculptural Iron, where Eric Clausen fashions lots of beautifully useful things.

Here at CruForge, we try to do the same.

Cru

"Cru" - an odd, tiny word. In the wine world, we usually translate it as "growth", referring to a place where vines have grown particularly well for a particularly long time. Thus crus are vineyards capable of producing wines excellent and distinctive enough to merit having particular names attached to them.

And yet, my French-English dictionary lists a melange of other meanings for "cru": raw, unpasteurized, harsh, blunt, uncompromising. Context is everything in figuring out what words mean, of course - few would find harshness or bluntness in a Burgundy from Chambertin or a Barolo from Cannubi. But in the winegrowing notion of cru there is something uncomprising and even raw (in the sense of pure and untransformed - think steak tartare or carne cruda alla piemontese). It's the desire to maintain vineyards and wines of distinct personalities - sometimes subtly distinct personalities - even when it would be easier and maybe more economically advantageous to do otherwise.

Some words show their muscle by being adopted in other languages - schadenfreude, aficionado, OK.... The Italians at least have adopted cru as their own. I don't know whether to marvel more at the lack of such a word in most languages or at the realization that such a word is necessary (and readily borrowable from French). I'm inclined towards the latter.