TLDR: Postmodern Winemaking

Firstly: Thank you, Joe, for the detailed and thoughtful review.

originally posted by SFJoe:
It's also worth remembering that the wines that I care about are in most cases an insignificant part of the market, and the debates about how they should be made will never change the major part of the market.
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This was what ran through my head while reading your review. I think you mustn't underestimate this point: We and he are in different vinous worlds. Our favorite wines are handmade, for all intents and purposes, whereas I think CS is talking about how to sell oceans of wine. He needs to make the best plonk (my word) possible, whatever it takes.

A few data: The Foucault brothers make about 2,500 cases per year. Gallo's initial run of their Martha Stewart Vintage label was 15,000 cases in the first year. Joel Gott likes tetra-paks so he puts wine into them to the tune of 300,000 cases per year. And I haven't even touched the big labels (Sutter Home, Moet, Yellow Tail, Barefoot, etc.).
 
I just heard about this conversation and decided to take time from the wineberserker boards where I am this week under intense interrogation to read through your reflections here.

I have to say that I am honored by the intensely thoughtful and balanced viewpoint put forth here in examination of my book. I guess I’m an optimist, but I’m inclined to think we rather do enjoy the same things, and I hope to sit with some of you and actually compare and discuss impressions with some wines in front of us instead of a feast of words.

Outside of that difference of opinion about our prospects as colleagues, I only have a couple remarks. I can’t leave unchallenged the assertions about phenolic chemistry, which while true enough, were very carefully considered. I have insisted from the first that a book about wine structure must begin with technical principles before it can begin to address the philosophical stuff in the second half, so we led up for five chapters to this very challenging discussion of phenolic oxidative polymerization, the engine of wine structure which proceeds through a very enigmatic reaction called the ortho-diphenol cascade.

To treat it at all, we had to trim it to the essence, sort of like those minimalist James Thurber sketches. So we elected to start with phenolate ionization and move on to the more specialized diphenol reaction with oxygen, glossing over some minor distinctions that didn’t carry enough water to be worth mentioning. It was a risky manoever which I tried to explain in the introduction, and frankly I never expected to be called on it. I guess I should have realized that in a provocative book, oponents would seek to discredit the science, but your discourse is so even-handed that I am disappointed that you chose this rather cheap shot.

You must know as well as I do that phenolic pKa’s vary all over the place. While phenol itself has a dissociation at 10, there isn’t any phenol in wine, and the phenolic derivatives we are generally dealing with are substituted and tend to have lower pKas which when further substituted through oxidative polymerization drop still lower. The ones around 9 are the ones present in significant enough quantities to react, and once they do, they drop to around 8.5, thus speeding up their reactivity. The low pKa in the B-ring of catechin/epicatechin, the principle flavonoid in grape skins for example, is 8.77.

Did I oversimplify? Perhaps. It was my attempt to try something nobody does to try and bring the working parts of this important reaction within the grasp of the lay wine lover. I chose to draw the simple structure of phenol itself, without the extraneous and confusing claptrap, as an introduction to the diphenol cascade, a tricky subject. Vern Singleton had no objection to the way I put things when I originally published it in Wines and Vines, because he thought I had caught the essence.

Quite frankly, in light of your quite balanced treatment of my book in general, I am surprised that you should seize upon this detail and speak so authoritatively in an area where your peers can hardly check out your pronouncements in an area even you admit hardly matters.

One other detail I’ll take issue with. I hardly ever work for the big boys. I have for the last six years, been championing the small wineries of the U.S. and Canada, largely without pay, as director of the Best of Appellation panel for AppellationAmerica.com. I am a champion of the little guy, and each of them has their own story to tell. All I have done is to tell mine, and al little bit of a few others such as Randall Grahm and Gideon Beinstock to illustrate how even close friends always take different and unique paths. That’s the postmodern way.

What I really like is that now we are talking. That is the real purpose of the book, to get the discussion happening again between winemakers and wine lovers. I really don’t advocate for the way I make wine, and the book is not a cookbook. It’s nothing more than a single example of a winemaker coming as clean as he can about what he does, especially when those practices are unpopular.

I am not a proponent of MOx. I am skilled in its use, but it is just a tool. A carpenter is not a advocate for the saw, the hammer, the screwdriver. He just knows how they work. In my work, I am an artisan, not a politician. If I want to change the world, it is through communication. There I can be a proponent of openness, generosity and curiosity.
I advocate strongly the use of chips for winemakers who are currently flavoring their wines with 200-year-barrels, but I do not advocate for general use of oak, and in my own wines, I strive for it to be invisible. I feel I make some very fine and exceptionally interesting wines, many of which I use oxygen and alcohol adjustment on, and you guys can try them if you are curious.
 
originally posted by Clark Smith:
Hi Everybody! Devil here!
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Oh, c'mon, take off those cheesy horns.

I just heard about this conversation and decided to take time ... to read through your reflections here.
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Welcome.

(If you read enough of the board to get a flavor, which I recommend before you waste too many precious moments here, you will learn that the traditional greeting to the n00b used to be a hearty "Fuck You!", though this has fallen somewhat into desuetude lately. Not that you shouldn't waste your precious moments here, but you should see what you're getting into.)

I have to say that I am honored by the intensely thoughtful and balanced viewpoint put forth here in examination of my book.
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Cheers, for my part.

I guess I’m an optimist, but I’m inclined to think we rather do enjoy the same things, and I hope to sit with some of you and actually compare and discuss impressions with some wines in front of us instead of a feast of words.
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I would take the other side of that bet financially, but personally am willing to take the risk.

Outside of that difference of opinion about our prospects as colleagues, I only have a couple remarks. I can’t leave unchallenged the assertions about phenolic chemistry, which while true enough, were very carefully considered.
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Don't quite follow you here.

To treat it at all, we had to trim it to the essence, sort of like those minimalist James Thurber sketches. So we elected to start with phenolate ionization and move on to the more specialized diphenol reaction with oxygen, glossing over some minor distinctions that didn’t carry enough water to be worth mentioning. It was a risky manoever which I tried to explain in the introduction, and frankly I never expected to be called on it. I guess I should have realized that in a provocative book, oponents would seek to discredit the science, but your discourse is so even-handed that I am disappointed that you chose this rather cheap shot.
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As I noted in my OP, it bugged me. Maybe it's a PoMo/Enlightenment thing, but in my world when you attach a label to an object, I like them to correspond. Speaking as a has-been chemist, dienones don't react like quinones, because they don't get to be aromatic when they reduce. I thought it was more a typo than a deliberate choice to omit the rest of the structure, but the compound you picture wouldn't react the way you want it to. It doesn't mean that your argument is wrong, as I note above, but it means that your picture is an unwelcome distraction to anyone who actually knows what it means, and misleadingly authoritative to anyone who doesn't.

Also, I am not an "opponent" (my sic), necessarily. You have a great deal to say in your book, and I agree with parts of it unreservedly, have no opinion about other bits, think some of it is likely wrong, and think some of it is "not even wrong," as Pauli once said.

You must know as well as I do that phenolic pKa’s vary all over the place...
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Sure. It was more a linguistic bit of carelessness, I feel, on your part. "This phenolic compound has a pKa of 9," say, would have satisfied me totally. Rather than, "Phenol has a pKa of 9," which is just wrong. So find a way to write it that is correct without overcomplicating it, IMO. It lends credibility. And it keeps you from being quoted to your disadvantage by your "opponents."

Quite frankly, in light of your quite balanced treatment of my book in general, I am surprised that you should seize upon this detail and speak so authoritatively in an area where your peers can hardly check out your pronouncements in an area even you admit hardly matters.
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As a new poster on the board, you are unacquainted with my peers, several of whom are much more qualified to opine than I am, but are perhaps busier or more discreet.

Anyhow, I look forward to opening some bottles with you sometime. I rather imagine that it would be more productive than the abstract discussion.
 
originally posted by Clark Smith:

You must know as well as I do that phenolic pKa’s vary all over the place. While phenol itself has a dissociation at 10, there isn’t any phenol in wine, and the phenolic derivatives we are generally dealing with are substituted and tend to have lower pKas which when further substituted through oxidative polymerization drop still lower. The ones around 9 are the ones present in significant enough quantities to react, and once they do, they drop to around 8.5, thus speeding up their reactivity. The low pKa in the B-ring of catechin/epicatechin, the principle flavonoid in grape skins for example, is 8.77.

Did I oversimplify? Perhaps. It was my attempt to try something nobody does to try and bring the working parts of this important reaction within the grasp of the lay wine lover. I chose to draw the simple structure of phenol itself, without the extraneous and confusing claptrap, as an introduction to the diphenol cascade, a tricky subject. Vern Singleton had no objection to the way I put things when I originally published it in Wines and Vines, because he thought I had caught the essence.

Quite frankly, in light of your quite balanced treatment of my book in general, I am surprised that you should seize upon this detail and speak so authoritatively in an area where your peers can hardly check out your pronouncements in an area even you admit hardly matters.
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First of all, you should be careful what assertions you make about his peers' ability to parse the language of organic chemistry. As someone who teaches the subject (and has performed oxidative 2,2'-dimerization of phenols in the lab) I think that I can follow the gist of both of your arguments. What you say about simplification for the sake of clarity is an argument familiar to anyone who's looked at an organic chemistry textbook (or most any other textbook, for that matter). So, I'll give you a pass on that one. Though I have not examined your book, I do take seriously my erstwhile colleague's criticism of your quinone representation, as he should be able to distinguish a quinone from a garden variety dienone. That may be attributable to nothing more than sloppiness or poor copy editing, though, and doesn't impute any sense of malice to your arguments.

Mark Lipton
 
originally posted by SFJoe:


Anyhow, I look forward to opening some bottles with you sometime. I rather imagine that it would be more productive than the abstract discussion.
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Now we're getting somewhere!
 
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