I still love natural wine
- Thread starter Levi Dalton
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Levi Dalton
Levi Dalton
Do you feel like the lambic notes are more noticeable in the '06s?
U
Unknown
Guest
didn't get a chance
they threw me out after I asked about lambic
Lou Kessler
Lou Kessler
I've been working on it studiously and it's close to perfection don't let the cat out of the bag.
Steven Spielmann
Steven Spielmann
I am very happy, though, with Eric's contribution to this thread, because it helped me understand why certain 'naturally made' wines might not be counted as 'natural'. If we understand a natural wine as one which expresses/displays the trace of the natural conditions - variety/ies, site, and climate, at a minimum - of a particular vintage, then excessive richness, concentration, alcohol may obscure that even if you didn't use industrial yeasts, plowed by horse, etc.
Whether we restrict terroir to site or take a more expansive definition, this seems like a pretty important point.
Also, it may be that in the narrower definition of terroir, any grape _could_ in principle express it on any site and in any climate - I don't know - but surely we don't want to say that it will. I'm pretty sure I know of a few winemakers who could make an anonymous international-style pinot out of La Tache grapes.
Whether we restrict terroir to site or take a more expansive definition, this seems like a pretty important point.
Also, it may be that in the narrower definition of terroir, any grape _could_ in principle express it on any site and in any climate - I don't know - but surely we don't want to say that it will. I'm pretty sure I know of a few winemakers who could make an anonymous international-style pinot out of La Tache grapes.
You make a good point, but I'd go a different direction.
It seems to me obvious that terroir (and here I'm using my preferred definition) is an agricultural phenomenon. It's the chemical and physical makeup of the agricultural product that results from a given site's characteristics, differentiated from another site's different characteristics by the chemical and physical makeup of another agricultural product. Assuming identical farming techniques, plant identity, and plant age, what's left, as the agricultural product leaves its food source (tree, root, vine, whatever), is what terroir brought to it.
If that's the case, then it follows that an agricultural product must express terroir. It has no choice. Even if we abandon the theoretical crutch of controlled variables (farming techniques, etc.), the chemistry and form of the agricultural product is still influenced by the mesoclimate, the soil chemistry, and all the other inputs we include in terroir. It doesn't matter if pinot noir, syrah, chasselas, or turnips are planted on Romane-Conti...they will have, as part of their chemical and physical makeup, differences from the same thing grown on the Sonnenuhr. I would be surprised if anyone actually disagrees with this, in fact...but if they do, they're free to plant bananas in the Mosel or riesling in the Amazon and share their results, which might possibly show differences -- physical and chemical -- with the reverse case.
Because of this, I believe that grapes must express terroir. They have to. It's an agricultural certainty. There are (far too) many ways to mask that terroir, both in the vineyard and in the cellar, and obviously some grapes are far more transparent to site differentiation than others, but the grapes left the vine with a terroir signature of some sort.
I'm insistent on this as terroir, rather than one's ability to detect terroir in a finished product, because of all those natural and unnatural ways in which terroir might be obscured for the consumer of that product. If you took twelve identifiably different sites and planted cabernet sauvignon on all of them, controlling for every variable that can be controlled, a lab could show the difference where a palate might not, were the differences not large enough for the blunter and fallible instrument of the palate to detect. But the sites are still forcing differences in the grapes. And thus, there's still terroir. Some consider this a meaningless thing to assert because they don't believe it exists (or is meaningful) if they can't detect it, but consider this: uproot that cabernet sauvignon and plant sylvaner. Let's now assume the differences are apparent to both lab and palate. Did the influences of the site on the product just magically appear between plantings?* Of course not. And frankly, I don't want to rely on the fallible and variable instrument of the palate -- yours, mine, anyone's (well, maybe Claude's) -- to be the final arbiter of whether or not there's terroir.
* In Eric's conception, I think it did. Which is the fundamental difference between the way he and I are thinking about it: for him, there's no terroir without a product expressive of that terroir. For me, there's terroir whether or not the product expresses it. As I noted above, I prefer my definition not because I think his is invalid (again, how can it be?), but because it allows me to talk about what the other influences on a product (farmer, winemaker, clone, seasonal weather, ladybug infestations, etc.) did to the wine, without quite so much ambiguity about who did what. It allows me to challenge the assertion that a 16.2% pinot noir is the natural expression of a given terroir, because the other guy buying grapes from the exact same vineyard is taking fruit at 14.3%, and while both are making quality wine I obviously prefer one over the other. If I have no clear idea of what choices are forced by the site and what choices are actual choices, I don't have any grounds (other than reactionary ones) to challenge that assertion, and it's especially hard to draw other than caveman-level conclusions about the influences of land and hand.
That someone, anyone, or everyone might make a mockery of a terroir by the time the wine is bottled is irrelevant to my definition. (Not irrelevant to me as a consumer, of course.) The terroir is. As for the wine, that's a much more complicated discussion. But somewhere in there, whether naked and in your face or buried by MegaPurple, enzymatic nursmaidening, and crafted yeast, is terroir...its existence not invalidated because of what happened later, or because of my or anyone's inability to taste it.
As for that particular usage of "natural," I admit that it has always grated, because it's coming very close to redefining the word to mean "wines that I like." And if someone wants to use the word that way, OK for them, but then they're conceding that the word doesn't mean anything, can't mean anything, and hasn't ever meant anything apart from "wines I like," in which case it's of no use as a shared concept, and I wonder why we bother talking about it at all...whether or not some are recanting their usage. We already have an obnoxious way to refer to wines we like while pretending we mean something else: unspoofed. Why do we need another?
I take Eric's point on this issue to be a little more nuanced: "natural" or not, there's no way a grape pushed to and beyond its limits (whether by nature or by man) is going to express terroir as well as a grape to which this hasn't occurred, whether or not the winemaker is making what some might call "natural" wine. By his definition, this obviously follows, because he's considering a whole, finished, and cultural product. But even from mine, it does in the sense that we're talking about the expression of terroir (which I understand to be the ability to sense it in the wine), not terroir itself. I don't think the views are incompatible, in the sense that whether one embraces or rejects the tenets of "natural" winemaking, one is not released from the obligation to arrange the marriage of site and variety/ies with care, should one wish to make a good, terroir-revelatory wine.
It seems to me obvious that terroir (and here I'm using my preferred definition) is an agricultural phenomenon. It's the chemical and physical makeup of the agricultural product that results from a given site's characteristics, differentiated from another site's different characteristics by the chemical and physical makeup of another agricultural product. Assuming identical farming techniques, plant identity, and plant age, what's left, as the agricultural product leaves its food source (tree, root, vine, whatever), is what terroir brought to it.
If that's the case, then it follows that an agricultural product must express terroir. It has no choice. Even if we abandon the theoretical crutch of controlled variables (farming techniques, etc.), the chemistry and form of the agricultural product is still influenced by the mesoclimate, the soil chemistry, and all the other inputs we include in terroir. It doesn't matter if pinot noir, syrah, chasselas, or turnips are planted on Romane-Conti...they will have, as part of their chemical and physical makeup, differences from the same thing grown on the Sonnenuhr. I would be surprised if anyone actually disagrees with this, in fact...but if they do, they're free to plant bananas in the Mosel or riesling in the Amazon and share their results, which might possibly show differences -- physical and chemical -- with the reverse case.
Because of this, I believe that grapes must express terroir. They have to. It's an agricultural certainty. There are (far too) many ways to mask that terroir, both in the vineyard and in the cellar, and obviously some grapes are far more transparent to site differentiation than others, but the grapes left the vine with a terroir signature of some sort.
I'm insistent on this as terroir, rather than one's ability to detect terroir in a finished product, because of all those natural and unnatural ways in which terroir might be obscured for the consumer of that product. If you took twelve identifiably different sites and planted cabernet sauvignon on all of them, controlling for every variable that can be controlled, a lab could show the difference where a palate might not, were the differences not large enough for the blunter and fallible instrument of the palate to detect. But the sites are still forcing differences in the grapes. And thus, there's still terroir. Some consider this a meaningless thing to assert because they don't believe it exists (or is meaningful) if they can't detect it, but consider this: uproot that cabernet sauvignon and plant sylvaner. Let's now assume the differences are apparent to both lab and palate. Did the influences of the site on the product just magically appear between plantings?* Of course not. And frankly, I don't want to rely on the fallible and variable instrument of the palate -- yours, mine, anyone's (well, maybe Claude's) -- to be the final arbiter of whether or not there's terroir.
* In Eric's conception, I think it did. Which is the fundamental difference between the way he and I are thinking about it: for him, there's no terroir without a product expressive of that terroir. For me, there's terroir whether or not the product expresses it. As I noted above, I prefer my definition not because I think his is invalid (again, how can it be?), but because it allows me to talk about what the other influences on a product (farmer, winemaker, clone, seasonal weather, ladybug infestations, etc.) did to the wine, without quite so much ambiguity about who did what. It allows me to challenge the assertion that a 16.2% pinot noir is the natural expression of a given terroir, because the other guy buying grapes from the exact same vineyard is taking fruit at 14.3%, and while both are making quality wine I obviously prefer one over the other. If I have no clear idea of what choices are forced by the site and what choices are actual choices, I don't have any grounds (other than reactionary ones) to challenge that assertion, and it's especially hard to draw other than caveman-level conclusions about the influences of land and hand.
That someone, anyone, or everyone might make a mockery of a terroir by the time the wine is bottled is irrelevant to my definition. (Not irrelevant to me as a consumer, of course.) The terroir is. As for the wine, that's a much more complicated discussion. But somewhere in there, whether naked and in your face or buried by MegaPurple, enzymatic nursmaidening, and crafted yeast, is terroir...its existence not invalidated because of what happened later, or because of my or anyone's inability to taste it.
As for that particular usage of "natural," I admit that it has always grated, because it's coming very close to redefining the word to mean "wines that I like." And if someone wants to use the word that way, OK for them, but then they're conceding that the word doesn't mean anything, can't mean anything, and hasn't ever meant anything apart from "wines I like," in which case it's of no use as a shared concept, and I wonder why we bother talking about it at all...whether or not some are recanting their usage. We already have an obnoxious way to refer to wines we like while pretending we mean something else: unspoofed. Why do we need another?
I take Eric's point on this issue to be a little more nuanced: "natural" or not, there's no way a grape pushed to and beyond its limits (whether by nature or by man) is going to express terroir as well as a grape to which this hasn't occurred, whether or not the winemaker is making what some might call "natural" wine. By his definition, this obviously follows, because he's considering a whole, finished, and cultural product. But even from mine, it does in the sense that we're talking about the expression of terroir (which I understand to be the ability to sense it in the wine), not terroir itself. I don't think the views are incompatible, in the sense that whether one embraces or rejects the tenets of "natural" winemaking, one is not released from the obligation to arrange the marriage of site and variety/ies with care, should one wish to make a good, terroir-revelatory wine.
Oswaldo Costa
Oswaldo Costa
Word(s).
Oswaldo Costa
Oswaldo Costa
But very cowabunga. I also dig the measured, self-reflective parentheticals.
Ian Fitzsimmons
Ian Fitzsimmons
So tighten it up.
U
Unknown
Guest
I've tried before, and have miserably failed:
"A spectre is haunting Europe... Winemakers of all Apellations, Unite!"
Steven Spielmann
Steven Spielmann
Hi Thor -
I thought you thought that. I think it's not so clear as you make out. Quickly, here are a couple of issues:
Thesis 1: All agricultural products bear physical traces of the soil, nutrients, climate, etc. where they were grown.
Thesis 1 might be true in some trivial sense but it's an empirical question whether it's true in various interesting senses. It may be true in different ways for different plants, etc.: for example growing certain plants in very different soils with similar fertilizers might obliterate soil traces. I don't know - it's a science question. The one that concerns us is grapes.
However, I wouldn't treat Thesis 1 as relevant to expression of terroir, which is an aesthetic concept I think in most of the varying senses under debate. Let's look at three kinds of traces soil and climate might leave:
1) Overt traces which are passively noticed by the majority of human beings.
2) Traces which can be found through active attention by at least one human being.
3) Traces which are undetectable in principle by any human being.
If Thesis 1 were true and the traces in question were in class 3, then they wouldn't be relevant to terroir-expression in any sense that needs concern a wine nerd.
One might hold that class 3 was empty. It's possible, I don't know. But it's another thesis that needs arguing. But anyway, what I think you actually need to say that all wines must express terroir in a non-trivial and aesthetically relevant sense is
Thesis 2: All agricultural products bear perceptible traces of the soil, nutrients, climate, etc. where they were grown
and it's not so clear that this is true to me. Of course if you make perceptible weak enough and allow that all-non-specific sorts of traces belong in a 'generic trace' which can be assigned to everywhere that does not have a more specific trace, you can defend Thesis 2, but not in a way that I think anyone should care about. The harder questions are: if not defaulting to a generic variety-type, etc., what sort of site-individuation is necessary to count as terroir expressive? Whose perception is the one which matters - everyone's? The person with acute senses and wide experience? etc. This is all traditional aesthetics stuff that applies to wine evaluation too.
But anyway it's not so obvious to me that we are dealing with a necessity of expression here, even if I grant (which I am not sure of) that there is a necessity of trace.
I thought you thought that. I think it's not so clear as you make out. Quickly, here are a couple of issues:
Thesis 1: All agricultural products bear physical traces of the soil, nutrients, climate, etc. where they were grown.
Thesis 1 might be true in some trivial sense but it's an empirical question whether it's true in various interesting senses. It may be true in different ways for different plants, etc.: for example growing certain plants in very different soils with similar fertilizers might obliterate soil traces. I don't know - it's a science question. The one that concerns us is grapes.
However, I wouldn't treat Thesis 1 as relevant to expression of terroir, which is an aesthetic concept I think in most of the varying senses under debate. Let's look at three kinds of traces soil and climate might leave:
1) Overt traces which are passively noticed by the majority of human beings.
2) Traces which can be found through active attention by at least one human being.
3) Traces which are undetectable in principle by any human being.
If Thesis 1 were true and the traces in question were in class 3, then they wouldn't be relevant to terroir-expression in any sense that needs concern a wine nerd.
One might hold that class 3 was empty. It's possible, I don't know. But it's another thesis that needs arguing. But anyway, what I think you actually need to say that all wines must express terroir in a non-trivial and aesthetically relevant sense is
Thesis 2: All agricultural products bear perceptible traces of the soil, nutrients, climate, etc. where they were grown
and it's not so clear that this is true to me. Of course if you make perceptible weak enough and allow that all-non-specific sorts of traces belong in a 'generic trace' which can be assigned to everywhere that does not have a more specific trace, you can defend Thesis 2, but not in a way that I think anyone should care about. The harder questions are: if not defaulting to a generic variety-type, etc., what sort of site-individuation is necessary to count as terroir expressive? Whose perception is the one which matters - everyone's? The person with acute senses and wide experience? etc. This is all traditional aesthetics stuff that applies to wine evaluation too.
But anyway it's not so obvious to me that we are dealing with a necessity of expression here, even if I grant (which I am not sure of) that there is a necessity of trace.
Zachary Ross
Zachary Ross
Love it! It's so nineteenth century.
Ken Schramm
Ken Schramm
Let's start the general variance question by asking, what percentage of people could taste the difference between a hothouse tomato and a soil grown tomato of the same variety, grown in the same county? Spectrally, that is the extreme example, but I think it safely establishes that growing conditions are qualitatively distinguishing. As I mentioned in the apple thread, it is generally accepted that certain varieties will present better in some areas of the country than others - Baldwin and Jonathan are considered to be in their sweet spot in Michigan, and others definitely not so, even if the requirements for GDD and moisture are met. Whether that's soil type or climate seems immaterial if they are both included in the accepted definition of terroir. The high end beer world is even starting to think about the barley they will use based on location of origin.
Apple growers, to the best of my knowledge, do not think of these differences in terms of what they are (terroir), they just accept that they are.
Meilgaard did a pretty impressive job of showing that organoleptic perceptive capacity can vary from person to person over an order of magnitude or more, and it is becoming increasingly evident that much of that is genetically established/determined. What a given input elicits as a perceptive response is a matter of both one's ability to discern differences and identify them. There can be no broad brush generalities about what everyone can taste. Some can be made about the majority, but even those have vastly differing taste thresholds as equivocating factors.
Fine wine drinkers seem to me a self selecting group of those capable of tasting at lower thresholds, save for the trophy collectors and status drinkers. At first blush, minimal intervention would appear the best way to preserve for them those flavor affecting compounds that the location would impart.
My questions are different. We know that what you grow over a long period of time affects the nature of the soil itself. Are vineyards creating their own terroir, by combining the innate properties of the site, as it existed before viticulture (soil type, drainage, exposure), with the changes in the soil that the vines themselves create individually, and those that vineyard practices create in the collective? Is terroir necessarily transient? Given that plants alter the ecosystem in which they live, it seems inevitable that viticulture would alter the nature of a given plot over 50, 100 or 500 years of continuous viticulture. I also wonder how a few decades will magnify the disparity in character between strip-and-pump agriculture and biodynamic or organic culture. The differences in vineyard practice, though, may be obscured by the fact that those with the proclivity for mischief in the vineyard are also predisposed to manipulations in the cellar.
Levi Dalton
Levi Dalton
Very Solaris!
Tarkovsky Solaris, of course. Not that Clooney claptrap.
Levi Dalton
Levi Dalton
I never read the book. I should. Have you?
Rewatching the film again recently, it was just so obvious that Tarkovsky is one of the greats of all (space and) time.
Of course a lot of people's greatest films were based on somebody else's book. Which isn't to say that Solaris is actually Tarkovsky's best, because it probably isn't.
Contempt was also based on a book. The best of Wenders were books first. Some of Bresson's best. Certainly Pasolini's best. And The Godfather, obviously.
One of the few dudes who works entirely originally, from his own notepad, and is all the better for it is Chris Marker. But he could have been a writer anyway. Fellini was also an original, but so much of that was autobiographical in inspiration.