Vetting Vietti and musing on the Janus face of modernity

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Oswaldo Costa

Oswaldo Costa
Circa 2004, after a wine expo, the same distributor who sold me half a case of 99 Monprivato sotto il tavolo said "Psst, have I got a deal for you, half a dozen Vietti Barolos for $150." I took the bait, and they have been occupying space in my wine fridge ever since. Over the week I opened two. At this point in my wine mis-education, I wasn’t so much anticipating pleasure but wanted to make space, relieve my curiosity and test how modern they are.

2000 Vietti Barolo Lazzarito Serralunga d’Alba 14.0%
Long and beautiful cork (at least they care, or spend). Decanted for an hour. Dark berries, hint of tar, light whiff of oak. No violets or roses, sigh. Mouth shows more oak than nose, but not egregious. Mixed with lard. Alcohol unobtrusive. Well resolved tannins. Surprise, surprise, refreshing acidity. The latter, hopefully natural, made it quite drinkable. Right after pouring, the fruit tasted fresh; after 15 mins, it began to taste pruney; I began to fear this be no friend to oxygen; after another 15 mins, it went back to fresh. Puzzling. On day two, the remaining third went back to pruneland, so three strikes against one.

2001 Vietti Barolo Lazzarito Serralunga d’Alba 14.0%
Plenty of oak on the bottleneck. Decanted for an hour. Monochromic but clean and elegant fruit aromas, steely, ramrod, aquiline. The oak, alas, remains obtrusive. Mouth shows same refreshing acidity of the 2000. Grippy tannins. Very pure fruit, not jammy or stewed. All compromised by excessive wood. Thanks to the lovely fruit, this was a pleasure to drink, but I had to keep overlooking the oak. On day two, the remaining third remained fresh, and the oak was less present. The fact that the fruit was potable this young may be due to 4 months in barriques before 32 months in botti, so wood flavor may be the price (most people are quite happy to pay) for not having to wait another 5 or 10 years. But the waiting, I want to believe, would have generated something even finer. But modernity, here, is less objectionable than most of what I taste from the new world.

Writing about these two got me thinking about modernity, a stance I love in art but spurn in wine. I have little patience for art reactionaries, so how did I get to become a wine reactionary? Am I being inconsistent? Does this mean I have to, say, abjure De Chirico's metaphysical phase in favor of the prancing horses of his neoclassical "return to order" years? Or, more likely, are we wine reactionaries simply the new vanguard of wine? Hmm, I like that, but perhaps I flatter ourselves.

More practically, what do I find so objectionable in wine modernity, taste-wise? If future magic is swapped for early gratification, how do these accelerators manifest themselves to the senses? I don't know enough about the consequences of different maceration vessels, temperatures, durations, floating v. closed cap, rotofermenters, reverse osmosis, cryoextraction, artificial micro-ox, cold stabilization, filtration, fining, The Color Purple, etc., but I can list the handful of manifestations I don't care for, and speculate about how they came about:

1) Baked/stewed/cooked/jammy flavors; suggests overripe picking
2) Insufficient (natural) acidity; suggests overripe picking, requires acidification
3) Salient alcohol; suggests overripe picking (aha, a trend)
4) Too much oak flavor from new barriques and/or over toasting; suggests, at worst, a desire for oak flavor or, at best, a desire for maximum barrel oxygenation

So, overripe picking seems to be my bogey man. I seem to mind acidification much more than chaptalization, perhaps because I think I can detect the former but not the latter. More likely, the nature of modernity is such that it requires acidification much more frequently than it does chaptalization.

This may also be a personal backlash against Andean garbage, but the truth is overripe picking is possible anywhere.
 
This may also be a personal backlash against Andean garbage, but the truth is overripe picking is possible anywhere.
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Another factor is picking from vines that are perfectly, perfectly healthy -- not contending with leaf roll, a half-dozen other de-vigorating diseases, and 150 kinds of bugs -- so they have nothing else in the world to do but shove more stuffing into grapes.

Which sounds like a good thing. And it is a good thing. But one can have too much of a good thing.
 
On being avant-garde in one's taste in art but not modernist in one's taste in wine, the consistency is that the two don't have much to do with each other. I won't go into my usual rant about why wine isn't art, because, setting that aside, it's at least the case that the category of the natural has nothing to do with art since art starts by not being natural, not to say by being anti-natural. So the opposite of avant-garde in art, as you say, is neo-classical, not non-interventionist. Maybe even more important, the watchwords of aesthetic modernism were to make it new and to make it different. The watchwords of wine modernism is to make it taste good to everybody (the basis for Parker's claim to objectivity is that, except for the ideologically biased, we all like the same tastes) and to make it taste good young for everybody (grapes must endure their being picked now as their being picked then; ripeness is all). So it only sounds as if you have conflicted preferences because of an accidental homonym in the word modernist. They really don't have anything to do with each other.
 
Every so often the art world goes through an "International" or "Academic" style where what is supposed to be good all seems too familiar because a certain recipe is being followed, irregardless of local context.

That is the period we are coming out of in wine.
 
Excellent points, gentle men. Jeff, interesting how, with humans, there's much less of a backlash against the desire for perfect health. Jonathan, bingo on homonymity. Levi, you make me look forward to the future.
 
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"The watchwords of wine modernism is to make it taste good to everybody (the basis for Parker's claim to objectivity is that, except for the ideologically biased, we all like the same tastes)..."

The Parkerators and many marketers would like to believe this. Even some foes of what you refer to as wine modernism fear that this is possible, at least for those who have not "educated" their palates. Ironically, modern sensory and flavor research has shown the notion of a linear quality scale to be nonsense.
 
originally posted by Christian Miller (CMM):
"The watchwords of wine modernism is to make it taste good to everybody (the basis for Parker's claim to objectivity is that, except for the ideologically biased, we all like the same tastes)..."

The Parkerators and many marketers would like to believe this. Even some foes of what you refer to as wine modernism fear that this is possible, at least for those who have not "educated" their palates. Ironically, modern sensory and flavor research has shown the notion of a linear quality scale to be nonsense.
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Ancient flavor researchers came to the same conclusion: de gustibus non disputandem. I wonder what sort of R&D budget they had?

Mark Lipton
 
originally posted by Jeff Grossman:
originally posted by MLipton:
Ancient flavor researchers came to the same conclusion: de gustibus non disputandem.
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And we're back to phenomenology, right?
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I remember reading in the Science pages of the NY Times (I know, I know) that modern researchers have found that we literally don't all have the same taste sensations from the same things. Some people experience tastes more intensely, for instance, and those people don't become wine tasters because, logically, they tend to prefer blander foods.

Despite that, I expect that at a very low level--sweet, sour, bitter, salty and that other thingy--most of us have at least similar taste apparati. Whether we get pleasure from a given taste or not is another issue, however.
 
My understanding is that Vietti is not a modern producer, but one that straddles the line and offers both more modern interpretations of Barolo, as well as more traditional ones. The Lazzarito is a modern example and is not a bottling Luca makes that I particularly like. The Rocche and Brunate Barolo, however, are typically amongst my favorites.

I was also under the impression that they generally farm organically, though are not certified and that Luca's been experimenting with biodynamic practices in certain vineyards, though I'm not sure which ones.
 
originally posted by Oswaldo Costa:
That's useful, though odd that they wear different hats for different crus. Where does the Castiglione fall in the spectrum?
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More traditional. I guess I should amend my comment about the Brunate. It apparently sees six months in old French Barrique before going into Slovenian oak casks. I've never found them remotely modern in style, though.

Btw, here's a link to their site, which provides a lot of technical information on their various bottlings.

Vietti wines.
 
If you taste the Castiglione, Brunate or Rocche in a lineup with Monprivato, Capellano and Giuseppe Rinaldi, they will appear a bit more polished certainly but will still look pretty good.

If you taste them in a lineup with Paolo Scavino, Luigi Pira and the like, they'll seem pretty old school and they'll look damned good.

If you taste them in a lineup with Sandrone and the like they'll look positively amazing and pure.

My take is that they're great wines but I, personally, don't find value in the Brunate or Rocche, despite really liking them, so I buy only sporadically when I see great deals. I like the Castiglione quite a bit and think it's a great wine and a good value but there are others for just $10 more that I prefer, so I don't buy a lot of it either.
 
Interesting, the site acknowledges that Lazzarito is intended as the most modern. But, tellingly, even for Lazzarito, the amount of months spent in barriques has been coming down steadily (with one exception) since 2001. For the Brunate, they specify "old" barriques. For the Lazzarito, they just say barriques. For the Castiglione, there is no mention of barriques. Perhaps they want to have something for everyone.
 
originally posted by Jonathan Loesberg:
On being avant-garde in one's taste in art but not modernist in one's taste in wine, the consistency is that the two don't have much to do with each other. I won't go into my usual rant about why wine isn't art, because, setting that aside, it's at least the case that the category of the natural has nothing to do with art since art starts by not being natural, not to say by being anti-natural. So the opposite of avant-garde in art, as you say, is neo-classical, not non-interventionist. Maybe even more important, the watchwords of aesthetic modernism were to make it new and to make it different. The watchwords of wine modernism is to make it taste good to everybody (the basis for Parker's claim to objectivity is that, except for the ideologically biased, we all like the same tastes) and to make it taste good young for everybody (grapes must endure their being picked now as their being picked then; ripeness is all). So it only sounds as if you have conflicted preferences because of an accidental homonym in the word modernist. They really don't have anything to do with each other.
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I normally recoil at the "there's no such thing as natural wine because grapes don't pick and bottle themselves" argument, but it's apropos here. If "art starts by not being natural," the same is true for wine. Wine as we know it doesn't exist without someone to craft it.

There are certainly some important differences between wine and art. There are also some important things they have in common. In both cases it is appropriate to evaluate them by how beautiful they strike us. We talk about wine in aesthetic terms, and a simple assertion that wine isn't art doesn't stop anyone from doing so.

Can anyone offer a definition of "art" that categorically excludes wine under all circumstances but includes the entire menagerie of what's been passed off as art over the last few decades?
 
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