Love that Clark Smith

[The Latin Liquidator]

originally posted by Marc Hanes:

Yo MC. Well, the lesson for me is live to be 120 years old. But, as is easily discernible, I'm dense. If not worse. Menschliches, Allzumenschliches.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, I'm lame and need to download more tunes. What can I do but appeal once more (yawn) to human temporal finitude and, more importantly, financial finitude. I literally ("for real?" as my five year old niece would put it) have $1.08 in my bank account. So, taking chances on wine, music, new restaurants, brands of laundry detergent are for a more well-heeled class than I.

LoDR

Oh, come ooooon! The internet is all full of free stuff. You can't imagine how easy it is to acquire (in a perfectly legal fashion, I should add) a Terabyte's worth of questionable songs by indie bands. And then you get lazy and don't really sift through them to see what's really worth your time and memory space. Or you delude yourself into thinking you may one day DJ a set where a pathetic remix of yet another Cure-soundalike could provide a nice touch of obscuty. HUge music libraries happen, man...

As far as living to be 120 years old, well, don't know whether that would be so nice. But what does that have to do with anything? I was talking about general dismissals of vintages and how unproductive they can be and favoring a more relativistic, use-value approach, or, if you like, simply adding my "Hear, hear!" to what SFJoe stated.

Best,

LL

 

[The Latin Liquidator]

The real issue for me with Clark and Brian & Co. is that much of this technology is in the pursuit of aesthetic ends that are divergent from my own. I believe them both when they say that many of the most famous names in Napa are busy customers, but I may be left to suspect that this may be related to the underlying reasons that I don't much like the wines from many of the famous names in Napa. Or in my more subtle moments, that they may be using these practices to let them achieve higher ripeness, more frootiness, and so on. That a different total mindset might put us all in a place where we have less call for R/O and yet have more wines under 13%.

I may have said this before, so forgive me if it's a repeat, but I see this whole thing as technological correctives applied to create an illusion of "balance" within an aesthetic paradigm that precludes the possibility of true balance. In other words: We need to keep in mind what screws up the wines in the first place, then read Mr. Smith. Or that nice Loring guy.

Best,

LL

 

[SFJoe]

originally posted by mlawton:
Back to the nose jobs - Joe, do you think the surgeon who did the work on the recently departed Mr. Jackson ever did any good work? I don't know for sure, but I'd guess he must have. (?)

As with wine, the key is knowing when to stop tinkering. It's usually best to stop pretty early even if think you need just a bit more symmetry or what have you.

 

[Marc Hanes]

The internet is all full of free stuff.

Counsel suggests I not answer this. I did however recently buy Wooden Shjips "Dos" and White Williams "Smoke" and both are darn good.

As far as living to be 120 years old, well, don't know whether that would be so nice. But what does that have to do with anything?

While I don't want to have to wait three months via tecknology, conversely I don't want to wait 80 years for the glories to be revealed. Great for the grandkids but my personal human finitude will have me selfishly and ignorantly spending my money elsewhere Idon't believe in god or reincarnation). And to think I used to work at Chambers Street...

Smooches,

Lo*R*DR

 

[Florida Jim]

originally posted by SFJoe:
The real issue for me with Clark and Brian & Co. is that much of this technology is in the pursuit of aesthetic ends that are divergent from my own.

Ditto.

Bruce,
I will give you that the man blows hot and cold. What he's selling is "different" and in a field where "tradition" is currency.
But I have been listening to salesmen most of my life; I weight their information accordingly and take what I need. And I am not above doing a little research to find out both what I need and what they know.
His techniques are tools - the choice to use them (and the chooser) is where we get down to it.
Best, Jim

 

[Sharon Bowman]

originally posted by The Latin Liquidator:
I may have said this before, so forgive me if it's a repeat, but I see this whole thing as technological correctives applied to create an illusion of "balance" within an aesthetic paradigm that precludes the possibility of true balance. In other words: We need to keep in mind what screws up the wines in the first place, then read Mr. Smith. Or that nice Loring guy.

I also get the sense that the correctives are in the service of an immediacy. This product now. Do these techniques affect how the wine will age, etc.?

(One hates to retreat back to the flashy plastic surgery metaphor, but hell, you only live once: I get the image of an eighty-year-old woman with huge, perfectly spherical tits.)

 

[Yixin]

originally posted by Marc Hanes:
Leibniz

Using a single, linear dimension elides the type and amount of variation between vintages (and wines). I'm all for vintage shorthand, but would prefer it in multiple dimensions rather than just "better" or "worse"

And hence my qualifier, "If you want to get granular and talk about this producer or that vineyard in vintages X and Y it is an entirely different discussion."

I don't understand. E.g. I wouldn't be able to choose between 2005 and 2007 along a single better/worse dimension in the Mosel-Saar-Ruwer. No need to get into vineyards or producers. To be clear, I'm not invoking use-value either. It's just that collapsing the differences in balance, structure, mouthfeel and phenolics into a single scale is beyond me.

Some other pairs: '82 and '83 Bordeaux. '95 and '96 red Burgs.

 

[SFJoe]

originally posted by Sharon Bowman:
I also get the sense that the correctives are in the service of an immediacy. This product now. Do these techniques affect how the wine will age, etc.?

Bordeaux might be a good place to consider this, though I suppose the R/O has been more to concentrate must than to remove alcohol. They've been early and wide adopters. I don't drink enough of the recent stuff to have an informed view. Anyone?

 

[The Latin Liquidator]

I also get the sense that the correctives are in the service of an immediacy. This product now. Do these techniques affect how the wine will age, etc.?

(One hates to retreat back to the flashy plastic surgery metaphor, but hell, you only live once: I get the image of an eighty-year-old woman with huge, perfectly spherical tits.)

Can't say for sure how the assistance of these remedial technologies affects the aging potential of many wines. This because too many producers are so hush-hush about using the technologies. But if it helps, some Bordeaux addresses that have hired certain machine-happy consultants have begun making wines that are tasty when released, but fall to pieces pretty quickly. This, mind you, from chteaux that used to make lovely, long-lived wines before.

And well, since we're talking Napa, I haven't had anything from any big name in the last, say, ten years, that has seemed to me even remotely cellarworthy.

Problem with the fake-tit analogy is that, at least in the teched wines I'm imagining, even the tits don't hold up.

Best,

LL

 

[SFJoe]

I can imagine that different manipulations would have different effects. R/O on the must to boost froot and perhaps alcohol, could be one thing, R/O to remove alcohol after you've harvested extra-ripe froot and gotten a little hot could be different.

Don't really know.

 

[SFJoe]

originally posted by mlawton:

Somewhat tangentially, I had a French winemaker of some renown tell me that the reason "they can't make good wine in the US is that they all use irrigation". Of course most american vignerons will tell you that the vines would never survive without irrigation, but maybe that was his point. Is irrigation "manipulation"? If so, how come we tilt at the RO/Spinning cone windmills, yet never talk about irrigation methods.

Actually, there is a lot of discussion of irrigation.

I find it hard to be dogmatic about it. You can obviously use irrigation to make terrible wine, but it's a different thing in a place where it usually rains a lot in the summer than it is in a place where it pretty nearly never does.

I think there are quite a few vineyards in CA that used to be dry farmed but aren't any more because of falling water tables, but I can't give you a citation.

 

[Brian Loring]

originally posted by SFJoe:
The real issue for me with Clark and Brian & Co. is that much of this technology is in the pursuit of aesthetic ends that are divergent from my own. I believe them both when they say that many of the most famous names in Napa are busy customers, but I may be left to suspect that this may be related to the underlying reasons that I don't much like the wines from many of the famous names in Napa. Or in my more subtle moments, that they may be using these practices to let them achieve higher ripeness, more frootiness, and so on. That a different total mindset might put us all in a place where we have less call for R/O and yet have more wines under 13%.

When it comes to alcohol levels, I would imagine that there are people doing exactly what you say. But I think that it may be the folks trying to create the "13% and under aesthetic" that are more likely to fine tune than many of us who are completely comfortable making 15% wines. And as such, and not to beat the poor dead horse too much, you might prefer those wines to non-spun wines that are over 14%. Without valid data, you'll never know for sure.

The only times we've spun a wine was due to a stuck fermentation. And those times weren't necessarily a case of us walking too fine a line trying to make higher alcohol wines, but rather because of heat spikes that caused sugar levels to shoot up faster than we could pick. A couple of times it was because we did a bad job at sampling the must in the fermenters and didn't add enough water (ie winemaker error). Granted, you could claim that we should have picked sooner in those cases, and maybe we should have. But those were mostly in our ealier vintages when we were still in the steep portion of our learning curve.

But alcohol removal is only one possible use of technology. Don't forget things like VA and 4ep/4eg (brett flavor) removal. Those are things that actually help restore the normal aesthetic. We've done both of those a couple of times as well - with very good results.

So, for me, the nose job analogy isn't quite right. The analogy I'd use would be laser eye surgery.

 

[SFJoe]

Brian,

How does the 4ep/4eg removal work? They don't pass an R/O membrane, surely?

 

[Brian Loring]

originally posted by SFJoe:
How does the 4ep/4eg removal work? They don't pass an R/O membrane, surely?

4ep/4eg, VA, smoke taint, etc are all removed in a similar manner. The wine is first filtered by reverse osmosis through a membrane and is separated into two parts; a permeate and a concentrate. The permeate is mostly water and alcohol, but also contains the taint as well. Then depending on the type of taint you're trying to remove, you use a specific ion exchange treatment column to filter out the taint. Then the resulting permeate is re-combined with the concentrate. The process doesn't remove 100% of the taint in a single pass, and therefore needs to be done in a series of passes to get the levels below threshold. The trade-off is that the more passes you do, the more it can affect the other components of the wine. So you have to monitor the whole process very carefully, and it's always better to do it sooner than later (before taint levels get too high).

It sounds awful, doesn't it? I was scared shitless the first time we tried it. But it does work. Still, I wouldn't use it for anything other than emergency situations, because just like investments - past performance is no guarantee of future results.

 

[Brian Loring]

In describing the RO process above, you can see how alcohol can be removed. If you replace a certain percentage of the permeate with straight water, you reduce the alcohol level.

 

[SFJoe]

I am very surprised that 4eg passes the membrane. It's not so different in size from a monoterpene or small ester, the sort of thing that you would think would be important flavor components.

Also, it's not really going to be bound by an ion exchange column, but there would be other ways to remove it.

 

[MLipton]

originally posted by SFJoe:
I am very surprised that 4eg passes the membrane. It's not so different in size from a monoterpene or small ester, the sort of thing that you would think would be important flavor components.

Also, it's not really going to be bound by an ion exchange column, but there would be other ways to remove it.

Some ion exchange resins are basic enough to ionize a phenolic hydroxyl, so you could choose a resin that would bind both 4ep and 4eg. Could that RO membrane discriminate not (strictly) on the basis of size, but also on lipophilicity?

Mark Lipton

 

[SFJoe]

originally posted by MLipton:

originally posted by SFJoe:
I am very surprised that 4eg passes the membrane. It's not so different in size from a monoterpene or small ester, the sort of thing that you would think would be important flavor components.

Also, it's not really going to be bound by an ion exchange column, but there would be other ways to remove it.

Some ion exchange resins are basic enough to ionize a phenolic hydroxyl, so you could choose a resin that would bind both 4ep and 4eg. Could that RO membrane discriminate not (strictly) on the basis of size, but also on lipophilicity?

Mark Lipton

I suppose. I figured it would be easier to distill the permeate.

But if you pass lipophilic things with 8 carbons, don't you give up a fair bit of flavor?

 

[Kevin Roberts]

originally posted by SFJoe:

originally posted by MLipton:

originally posted by SFJoe:
I am very surprised that 4eg passes the membrane. It's not so different in size from a monoterpene or small ester, the sort of thing that you would think would be important flavor components.

Also, it's not really going to be bound by an ion exchange column, but there would be other ways to remove it.

Some ion exchange resins are basic enough to ionize a phenolic hydroxyl, so you could choose a resin that would bind both 4ep and 4eg. Could that RO membrane discriminate not (strictly) on the basis of size, but also on lipophilicity?

Mark Lipton

I suppose. I figured it would be easier to distill the permeate.

But if you pass lipophilic things with 8 carbons, don't you give up a fair bit of flavor?

Absolutely, your flavor compounds are my off notes...

 

[MLipton]

originally posted by SFJoe:

I suppose. I figured it would be easier to distill the permeate.

People might get squeamish about heating the permeate, though I guess that's what they do to reduce EtOH, isn't it?

But if you pass lipophilic things with 8 carbons, don't you give up a fair bit of flavor?

On the basis of people's experiences with the Saran Wrap TCA extraction, I'd say yes. But how else can one explain permeation of a membrane by 4ep and 4eg? All of your good acids (malic, tartaric, lactic) have smaller hydrodynamic radii than those things.

Mark Lipton