Frank and his tanks (Anfore)

I meant fractal in the sense that closer study doesn't lead to firm, bounded conclusions, but rather as-yet untapped complexities and/or mysteries that must in turn be explored. It's praise, of a sort (something like, oh, Oyster Bay Sauvignon Blanc would be the opposite of a fractal wine, as it has one idea and that idea is discernible in microseconds), but says nothing about whether or not one likes the components of the irreducible complexity. It could, for example, be a Coturri-like experience in which the peeling back of each flaw reveals a new one.

Would you prefer Mandelbrotean?

And hey...next October/November, are you in Bangkok or Singapore?
 
I dig what your saying, Thor. I would describe it as "playing the spaces", myself.

Maybe Frank C.'s wine are now almost in tune, much like when tuning an analog radio, the static seems loudest just before the station signal comes in strong.
 
originally posted by Thor:
I meant fractal in the sense that closer study doesn't lead to firm, bounded conclusions, but rather as-yet untapped complexities and/or mysteries that must in turn be explored. It's praise, of a sort (something like, oh, Oyster Bay Sauvignon Blanc would be the opposite of a fractal wine, as it has one idea and that idea is discernible in microseconds), but says nothing about whether or not one likes the components of the irreducible complexity. It could, for example, be a Coturri-like experience in which the peeling back of each flaw reveals a new one.

Would you prefer Mandelbrotean?

And hey...next October/November, are you in Bangkok or Singapore?
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I still don't understand; I don't think of fractals (as defined by Mandelbrot) as being particularly noisy. Maybe if it was double-blind...

I'm based in Hong Kong for the foreseeable future, although will be passing through both Bangkok and Singapore in the next few weeks. Do you mean the coming October/November, i.e. 2010? If so, I can arrange to be in Singapore for work, given enough notice. Bangkok is a bit more of a stretch.

Much more likely to be in Europe (primarily Mosel) in May/June, and depending on how the British peso does, will fit in a side trip somewhere.
 
I didn't say fractals were noisy, I said that the picture we're getting of Cornelissen's wines is fractal (vs. increasingly clear) despite him doing less. What I referred to as noisy were the wines themselves, not our perception of them. (Prof. Loesberg, take your fingers off the keyboard.)

The rest I'll take to email when I have something useful to communicate, but yes: 2010.
 
originally posted by Thor:
I didn't say fractals were noisy, I said that the picture we're getting of Cornelissen's wines is fractal (vs. increasingly clear) despite him doing less. What I referred to as noisy were the wines themselves, not our perception of them. (Prof. Loesberg, take your fingers off the keyboard.)

The rest I'll take to email when I have something useful to communicate, but yes: 2010.
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Yes, I'd misread and misremembered. But I still don't think of fractals as being unclear.

How did we get into this in the first place?
 
originally posted by Yixin:

How did we get into this in the first place?
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Basically what happened was, Bernini's younger brother was robbing the cookie jar while Bernini was out of the kitchen, Caravaggio had been involved, and they were sharpening the guillotine to bring about some dead ends. But then the light cycles from Tron broke out of the grid and into the clear in a volcanic burst of fractals.

At least I think that was it.
 
No matter what the issue is, I blame Brad. But obviously, I didn't explain myself at great enough length, which is usually the case. Let me fix that!

I didn't propose "fractal" as the opposite of "clear" in my earlier post (though I muddied the two in a later reference), I only used it to describe a situation in which simpler actions (doing less) are not resulting in a simpler outcome as they do in many other areas like music, but instead the opposite. It's like peeling an onion and finding what's left bigger than what you started with, or at least the same size. It's not the same as plain complexity. It's irreducible complexity. I don't think "fractal" is an unreasonable stand-in for that concept, any more than "sharp" is an unreasonable way to say "high-acid" rather than "liable to slice soft tissue."

I'm also not saying that's what the wines are, but rather that it's the direction Cornelissen's working philosophy seems to be moving...doing less and thus revealing how much more there is to do than there was before. He's tried to make some wines that interest him, but rather than having achieved that and expressed satisfaction, he's now talking about the need for multi-generational projects whose outcomes he probably won't see; this isn't coming about because he's expanding, or because he's been successful and can now afford to experiment, but because he's on a deliberate path of doing less.
 
originally posted by Thor:

I'm also not saying that's what the wines are, but rather that it's the direction Cornelissen's working philosophy seems to be moving...doing less and thus revealing how much more there is to do than there was before. He's tried to make some wines that interest him, but rather than having achieved that and expressed satisfaction is now talking about the need for multi-generational projects whose outcomes he probably won't see; this isn't coming about because he's expanding, or because he's been successful and can now afford to experiment, but because he's on a deliberate path of doing less.
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"Reinhardts strategy of denial echoed his conviction that Modernism itself was a negative progression, that abstraction evolved as a series of subtractions, and he was creating the last or ultimate paintings. Rather than forecasting the death of painting as a viable art form, however, Reinhardt was instead affirming paintings potential to transcend the contradictory rhetoric that surrounded it in contemporary criticism and the increasing commercial influences of the market. As art historian Yve-Alain Bois suggests in his study of the artist, what Reinhardt hoped to realize recalls the aspirations of Negation Theology, a method of thoughtevident in Platonism, Neo-Platonism, and early Christianityemployed to comprehend the Divine by indicating everything it was not. The artists attraction to the mystical side of negation arose from his appreciation of Eastern art and religion, namely the abstract, all-over patterning of Islamic design, the poetically reductive space of Chinese and Japanese landscape painting, and the meditative, ascetic quality of Zen Buddhism. The last he encountered through his friendship with the poet Thomas Merton, who was also a Trappist monk and authority on Zen. Reinhardt saw his own dark canvases, with their classic, geometric compositions, monastic repudiation of anything extraneous, and contemplative depth as a fusion of Eastern and Western traditions.

However hermetic Reinhardts black paintings may seem, they were not created in a vacuum. The kind of profound, self-reflexive abstraction he advocated was partially a product of, and reaction to, the climate of Cold War America. Despite the iconoclasm of his aesthetic discourse, Reinhardt was actively engaged in political and social issues throughout his life. During the early 1940s, his editorial cartoons appeared in the leftist newspapers The New Masses and PM. Later, he participated in the antiwar movement, protesting against Americas involvement in Vietnam, and donated his work to benefits for civil rights activities. An aesthetic moralist, Reinhardt sought to create an art form thatin its monochromatic puritycould overcome the tyrannies of oppositional thinking."

-Nancy Spector for the Guggenheim Museum Catalog Entry on Ad Reinhardt

link here
 
originally posted by Levi Dalton:

Just to note a few other things Frank told me:

His anfora were sourced from Spain, and they have been layered inside with an enamel or epoxy. He specifically doesn't want an anfora taste note in the wines, which is something he would see as an interference. He also doesn't want to use sulphur to clean the inside of the anfora, and he feels he can avoid that by lining them. He said the lining process is quite costly, and that he had considered a beeswax lining as another option. He also said that he has experimented with fermenting in anfora, but no longer does it.
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An epoxy lining is creating a basically inert vessel. All things being equal, it would seem that the same results could be had with stainless steel or concrete tanks or for that matter, epoxy lined wooden vessels. Curious.
 
originally posted by Ned Hoey:
As to the noise description, I see what you mean now. By pulling away from the obscuring or masking effects of "winemaking", more of the true potential of the land and grapes are revealed or expressed. The intensity of what's revealed may strike some as a cacophony or it may be a complex polyphony.
A different way to think about it might be to use the terms differently. If what exists there to be expressed
is the signal, the various inputs and manipulations by man could be called the noise. People have often used the word pure when describing his wines, by which I think they mean lots of signal and very little noise. I have experienced that sense on rare occasions from other "natural" wines. It seems to require
truly masterful levels of skill and discipline to craft with "no hands".
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Ned,

Would you say that Cornelissen wines are pure in intention or pure in terms of precision of terroir expression?

I know some people are able to sit in their couch and listen to Dolphy or Coltrane, sipping a glass of Evian.
I can't. I have to be in an underground cellar smoking cigarettes and drinking booth.

Same for these hypernatural wines : I'd rather drink them at Terroir arguing with Luc or VLM about some shit (Salut Luc je serai bien l en avril), than alone in front of my glass.
Then cacophony can become polyphony. And noise part of the game.
Thanks to sensuality. Not to intelect.
This is the way I feel
 
originally posted by Brzme:


Same for these hypernatural wines : I'd rather drink them at Terroir arguing with Luc or VLM about some shit (Salut Luc je serai bien l en avril), than alone in front of my glass.
Then cacophony can become polyphony. And noise part of the game.
Thanks to sensuality. Not to intelect.
This is the way I feel
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It seems that terroir extends beyond the vineyard and cellar.
 
originally posted by Brzme:
Would you say that Cornelissen wines are pure in intention or pure in terms of precision of terroir expression?
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Having not visited or met him, all I can say is it seems like his intention is to pursue purity as he
sees it. Before I ever was able to try his wines myself, two wine professionals I know who had visited him, used the term "pure" to describe his wines, independently of each other. I took them to mean that the
wines were terroir expressive. My experience since doesn't conflict with that.
 
originally posted by Thor:
It's true for other things as well, no doubt. Music's what I know far better than paint, and the next note is not only a result of the ones before it, it's affected and sometimes significantly changed by them, even though it's technically the same note.
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As a correlation to this analogy, I submit a tenet of free jazz discourse as it pertains to melody and harmony. Any individual note isolated from a string of melodic notes possesses countless harmonic possibilities. Adding a second note significantly reduces those possibilities. Add another, even fewer possibilities. Most recognizable melodies are limited to only a few harmonic structures. I hear Frank Cornelissen's wine-making as only a few notes, allowing for the naturally produced harmonic vagaries of all sources -- terroir, human interference, geomagnetism, et cetera -- to be heard.

Thanks for the compelling discussion!
 
A good analogy, Michael, and apropos. I sometimes think that the core problem with recipe or targeted winemaking isn't that the wines all taste more or less alike, but that its many points of meddling so constrain one's options that there's no other choice.

I wonder if this isn't part of why some people just don't respond to blended wines as well as they do their varietal counterparts. All those inputs lead to "more" by one sense of the term, and on the face of it blending would seem to be a palette of options, but maybe there's something else that's lost or submerged along the way.
 
Looking for a note on Domaine Lezin I stumbled on this thread from 11 years ago. Just amazing. Surely this was once the most interesting wine board on the planet.
 
Damn. I really did miss a lot around that time. All work and no play made .... and all that jazz.

But the world has changed and wine boards and avenues of discourse too. And some people have moved on, one way or another.

Yet, there’s still plenty to say and discuss. Onward?!

For example, I was a little trepidatious when opening 2017 Tiphaine Grange Côt VV last night for my BBQed lamb shank—herb-crusted, not East Carolina style. (I wish we had an easier way to insert photos on WD. Like click a button.) My last Tiphaine Grange 2 weeks ago was the Clef de Sol ‘18 that left me flat (again) on 2018 Touraine but also maybe a bit on the grower. But no need to worry about the grower. The Côt shows that 2017 combination of sunshine and structural sparkle that have made the vintage a joy to drink from many places around France. My brain was transported immediately to its special CRB sector. That’s purity. Delicious wine (berried and savory) and a nice match with the lamb, which turns out basically roasted after a slowish cook at 250 F for about 1.5 hours on indirect heat. I look forward to the rest of the bottle tonight.

Edited to connect better to this thread: I was listening to Marvin Gaye (again) last night, and really the world missed out on what he would have done with another few decades on the planet. For me, I Want You, Trouble Man, and Mercy Me are really a good match for any dinner and any wine. A couple nights ago, I was also pointed to Horowitz’s live performances of Rach 3 in NY in 1978 on the interwebs by another wine lover, Manolo Aguinaga in Madrid. Those performances however command full attention. Even in his mid-70s Horowitz was ridiculous.
 
originally posted by Jayson Cohen:
‘18 that left me flat (again) on 2018 Touraine but also maybe a bit on the grower. But no need to worry about the grower.
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The former, I suppose. Among places I pay close attention to, both 2003 and 2018 were toughest on the Loire. Did Horowitz ever do a transcription of Rimsky Korsakov's Flight of the Symbiotic Yeast?
 
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