
On the Nature of Wine - Turukawa
https://thebreakthrough.org/index.php/journal/no.-8-winter-2018/on-the-nature-of-wine
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cmrdporcupine
This is a pretty good article, though it might be hard for people to grasp who
aren't already keen observers of the wine industry.,

I personally like the so-called "natural" wines mostly because they are
_different_ in a world of same-same. I don't buy the 'natural' designator so
much, but I've made wines from my own vineyard in this 'orange wine' style;
they are difficult wines to consume but rewarding in their own way. But I use
sulfites, so they're not "natural".

The "international style" of wines that has taken over everything since the
success of California and Australia on the world market (and the ossification
of European wines behind ridiculous regulations) becomes boring to some after
a few years of consumption. I have no interest in drinking yet another
Cabernet Sauvignon, And as an amateur wine maker in a difficult climate, I
can't grow that anyways.

Frankly, if these wine makers in Europe were truly concerned with going
eco/natural, they'd eschew the use of the pure Vitis vinifera species and the
classic clonal varieties which are sometimes over a 1000 years old (the actual
individual plant! cloned millions of times!) and require a continual chemical
cocktail of intensive fungicides to merely survive. They're horribly mal-
adapted to the actual 'natural' world and die horribly if not constantly
coddled. No, instead they'd grow modern hybrids with North American species
which have superior fungal resistance and better cold hardiness to boot. In
the dry European climate North American hybrids would require almost no
spraying. But the EU has made them illegal. For basically awful essentialist
quasi-"racist" (to abuse the term) reasons.

But as this article points out, the contradiction here is that "natural" is by
no means natural -- there is a peculiar European obsession with a 'pure
tradition' which manifests in wine in this constant obsession with traditional
varieties and techniques -- when in fact wine as we know it is an entirely
Modernist invention. Sure, wine was consumed in the middle ages and Roman
times -- but we'd hate those wines, even the natural wine lovers would.

~~~
dejv
Hybrids are not illegal at the EU, those hybrids (say Hibernal or hundreds of
other) which are created by cross polination of vitis vinifera with another
specie within vitis familly are fine. What is banned is growing non-vinifera
vines. Fungal resistance of those grapes are much better than old varietals,
but you still need couple of sprays most of the years. The problem with those
varietals lay in quality of wine, which is usually not on the par of
traditional varietal.

Anyway: being Bio/Eco/Natural certified has nothing to do with spraying or
adding sulfites (which are created during fermentation anyway). It can mean
anything, most of the winemakers go with use just little amount of SO2 and
bentonite or egg whites for clarification. No selected yeasts or artifical
additive. In vineyard there are many different kind of inputs you have to use,
you usually go with sulphur and copper, but there are many other allowed
preparations (from herbal teas, seaweed based stuff, yeast derivative kind of
stuff).

~~~
cmrdporcupine
What you're talking about (vinifera-vinifera crosses) is not typically called
a hybrid but a cross. Though I'm confused because you mention Hibernal, which
is an inter-specific hybrid. Except the Germans have done this sneaky trick of
calling interspecific hybrids vinifera in certain circumstances to get around
their own stupid laws.

Staying high vinifera content is pointless because the vitis vinifera species
is the problem. It has basically no resistance to the fungal problems that are
out there in the real world, which are mostly introduced from North America.

But regardless, when I start seeing appellation wines with hybrids in them,
I'll be flabergasted.

The perception of 'quality' you're speaking of is a subjective/cultural thing.

I grow about an acre of modern hybrids. And I do my own hybrid crosses. So I
know quite a bit about this.

(EDITED for clarity on Hibernal and some grammar)

~~~
myrandomcomment
Thanks for that explanation.

What area do you grow in?

~~~
cmrdporcupine
Southern Ontario, hobby farm just above the Niagara Escarpment. About USDA
hardiness zone 5. Just a hobby, grow a smattering of different things, mostly
hybrids bred by the University of Minnesota ("Marquette" chiefly)

~~~
myrandomcomment
Intersting. Just did some reading on that grape. I am going to have to try to
find a bottle of it try. My wife and I have a large wine collection and we
always love finding new varieties we have never tried.

~~~
cmrdporcupine
Shelburne Winery in Vermont makes a reasonable one. With hybrids, you're
always fighting acidity and low tannins, so the wine maker really needs to be
excellent. They are not forgiving grapes, and because they are often pitched
as cheaper bulk grapes (because they are easier to grow) they are often made
into low quality cheap country wines, sweet wines, etc. Which gives them an
even worse reputation.

------
krylon
I admit that I do not get at all why people make such a fuss about wine. At
the end of the day its purpose is to get people drunk and not taste too bad
along the way. Turning it into a sorta-science seems silly to me, as the
endgame is getting wasted. ;-)

OTOH, I used to be like that with tea, especially Green Tea and Oolong. When
it comes to tea, I can be a real snob, and with good reason. With tea there
really _are_ so many subtle nuances it boggles my mind to this very day. If
you are in the position to do some research, spend some money on fine teas,
you can experience tasty pleasures that are beyond what words can describe.
And I can go on and on and on about that, without noticing that people who do
not care about tea that much get bored really fast.

So to some other people, wine is what tea is for me. And in fairness, I have
not much experience drinking fancy wines. But I have no desire to, either.
When I want sophisticated nuanced sensual pleasure, I drink Tea. When I want
to get blotto, I drink wine.

These days, I am more pragmatic about it, but I still shiver at the sight of
teabags.

~~~
jaredhansen
_> I admit that I do not get at all why people make such a fuss about wine. At
the end of the day its purpose is to get people drunk and not taste too bad
along the way._

"I admit that I do not get at all why people make such a fuss about sex. At
the end of the day its purpose is to make babies and not be too unpleasant
along the way."

~~~
IntronExon
We’re pleasure-seeking animals with an incredibly strong sex drive. I don’t
see how that’s remotely comparable to drinking one of a vast array of tasty
intoxicants.

------
borkt
I see natural as good term that can be used to describe the idea of vinifying
fruit with the minimal intervention. My issue is that wine that anyone would
ever want to drink has to involve an artificial process to some degree. Even
in most serious "natural wine" there is care taken to tend the vines before
during and after the growing season. There is a picking decision made by the
winemaker. I am not too well versed in specific producers but I am pretty sure
at least one is fermenting the wines in barrels or some other vessel in the
vineyard in which they grew. Every year or so a small segment of natural wine
producers seem to create another breakthrough that makes their wines more
natural than the last.

All of this is to say that the natural wine moving taken to its extreme
conclusion would end with an untended vineyard where fruit falls on the ground
after raisining and the juice ferments into the dirt. While this is the most
natural process, it is not something anyone would ever consider drinking. I
can show you a few places in my town where they have been unwittingly on the
cutting edge of the natural wine movement without ever giving a single thought
to the fact there is a vine on their property in years.

What I personally feel is the the spirit of natural winemaking style is to
produce a wine of distinction with minimal intervention. This is an
interesting style but I still believe it to be a fad no greater (or worse)
than the international style mentioned by cmrdporcupine.

What I see as the ideal winemaking style is to produce a wine from a specific
vineyard that most accurately conveys its sense of place and the vintage in
which it was produced. It takes a winemaker with a wide range of experience,
one familiar with all of the possible tools they may use to intervene, but
extremely hesitant about using them. They can be byodynamic, they can be
organic, and they can even use conventional pesticides and fertilizers
provided the winemaker has selected them specifically to express what he or
she feels is the essence of the vineyard.

------
barrkel
I don't expect this article to give rise to insightful commentary; articles on
wine invariably have two kinds of commenters, the dismissives and the
aesthetes, and they usually talk past one another.

The dismissives mention things like blind taste testers not being able to
distinguish red from white or blind tasters preferring cheap wine to
expensive. Look into this a bit further, and you find that the first study was
actually about phrases used to describe wine falling into two categories, one
associated with reds and another associated with whites, and the colour of the
wine appeared to be the distinguishing factor in which set of phraseology was
chosen; while the second has curious echoes of Coke vs Pepsi leading to New
Coke. Small samples don't give the full effect of a wine, wine will taste
different when you have it with different food, or in a different order
compared with other wines, on a cold palate vs a warm palate (i.e. is this
your first taste of alcohol of the evening - first is usually harshest), or
straight out of the bottle vs aerated, and indeed it'll taste different
depending on what you think the relative price is - especially so if you have
fewer other criteria to judge it with.

I'm on the aesthetes' side. I'm far from an expert, and only drink about 20
bottles a year, but when I do it's either in a taste test situation, or as
paired wines in a tasting menu, or vintages selected from appellations and
grapes chosen for their typical character. I wish I could find whites that
taste like reds, but I dislike almost all unaccompanied whites, with some
exceptions around sauternes, some Rieslings, Gewürztraminer, etc.; and I wish
I could find cheap reds that taste like intense Cote Rotie syrah or savoury
Burgundy pinot noir, but the same grapes grown elsewhere come nowhere close.
Most New World syrah / shiraz is too alcoholic, while pinot noir is a
completely different beast when it's grown in too sunny a climate. Slovenia
has come closest to making some decent Burgundy-style pinot noir to my taste.

My point being that the "hierarchy" in wine is, to my mind, at least a local
optimum or close to it. Within the appellations that I prefer most, I've
observed a reasonably strong correlation between price and my preferences. I
think winemakers have been doing a kind of local gradient ascent as technology
improves their product - it would be unusual for them to do otherwise - and
the argument that preservatives etc. improve ageing ability as well as
transport is fairly strong to my mind, as my preferred vintages are usually
not younger than 4 years. I'm not big on fresh fruit flavours.

I would expect "natural" wines to have higher variance (though unblended wine
has a fairly high variance between vintages already). If the winemaker is
good, and the product is good in spite of less ability to control the end
product, great; whether such wine could survive hanging around Amazon's
warehouses and reaching customers in good condition, I'm less convinced - I've
had bad tawny port from Amazon, it takes some effort to make such a hardy
product go bad.

So all in, I think this article is mostly a marketing effort for the few
winemakers who think they can create a decent product following the schtick; I
don't think it's likely to actually produce a significantly better product; I
don't buy that the existing hierarchy is particularly wrong (but it is warped
by big money in things like Bordeaux, for sure); and I don't think I'll be
inclined to buy more natural wine since I think the probability it turns out
mediocre is much higher.

~~~
lisper
> My point being that the "hierarchy" in wine is, to my mind, at least a local
> optimum or close to it.

The problem I have is with the implication (not made by you, but made by the
wine industry in general) that if your tastes don't align with this hierarchy
that there is something wrong with _you_. There isn't. My wife and I are semi-
serious oenophiles. We drink about 100 bottles/year. We have a 200+ bottle
cellar, which tops out around $150 (I refuse to pay more than that for a
bottle of fermented fruit juice on general principle). We've tried wine from
all over the world, and we keep coming back to California reds. We like jammy,
fruity deep dark reds, and California does them better than anywhere else.

One of our favorite wines is Barefoot cabernet, which retails for about $6 a
bottle. We discovered it in a blind horizontal tasting of California cabs,
where the Barefoot was put in as kind of a joke. But among 12 people
participating in the tasting, _all_ of them (including us) picked the Barefoot
as their #1 or #2 favorite of the lineup. The top-end wine, a Silver Oak, came
in dead last. 20 years later, we still like it. (We had a similar experience
years later with a delicious white that was served to us and six other people
at a B&B that turned out to be Gallo Rhine Wine in a box.)

Despite this, we would still be a little embarrassed to serve Barefoot to
guests. To some extent, wine is a Veblen good. It really is more than just
fermented fruit juice. It's steeped in history and ceremony. There's value in
the sound of a popping cork and in the joy of exploration and discovery. But
the most important thing is to never ever let someone else tell you what
you're supposed to like.

~~~
coldtea
> _My point being that the "hierarchy" in wine is, to my mind, at least a
> local optimum or close to it. The problem I have is with the implication
> (not made by you, but made by the wine industry in general) that if your
> tastes don't align with this hierarchy that there is something wrong with
> you._

It's very democratic and individualistic (and fashionable) to say that there
isn't, but I like to entertain the idea that many times, there is.

Even in matters of taste, people can be crude and ignorant -- and oftentimes,
they have little familiarity with a field to be anything else anyway.

This is not the same as them saying 2+2=5, they are not wrong in the absolute
sense, but they're still wrong in a similar way within their country's or
global culture -- they same as someone that openly farts during a first date
diner is doing something wrong.

~~~
lisper
> Even in matters of taste, people can be crude and ignorant

That is certainly true. But it does not follow that there is a universal
quality metric for everyone. Whatever your tastes are, you can get there from
a position of ignorance, or you can get there from a position of knowledge.
But just because you got where you are with knowledge doesn't mean you're
going to end up in the same place as everyone else.

------
bitwave
Thought it is about WINE [https://www.winehq.org/](https://www.winehq.org/) :)

