CHAPTER SIX
A Magnum
of Miscellany

Natural Winemaking Stirs Debate

By ERIC ASIMOV

The world of wine is full of hornets’ nests. The minute you step on one, whether you nudge it accidentally or boot it with malice aforethought, the angry buzzing begins, rising to a high-pitched howl that would send anybody in search of shelter and a beer.

Prime among these are natural wines. These wines, which barely make up a tiny slice of the marketplace, effortlessly polarize, not least because of the implied repudiation contained in the word “natural.” If your wine is natural, what does that make mine? Unnatural? Artificial?

Even defining the term incites the sort of Talmudic bickering usually reserved for philosophers and sports talk-radio hosts. Generally speaking, though, it is intended to mean wines made of grapes grown organically, or in rough approximation, and then made into wine with a minimum of manipulation—nothing added, nothing taken away, the winemaker simply shepherding the grape juice along its natural path of fermentation into wine.

This would seem to be the kind of laudable idealism worth encouraging. Instead, in recent months natural wines and their adherents have been harshly criticized in newspaper and magazine articles, in conferences and on Internet bulletin boards. Some writers have warned of greenwashing, the practice of making false or exaggerated claims about ecologically virtuous practices in order to reap marketing gains. Others resent what they feel is a scolding, finger-wagging sanctimony inherent not only in the term “natural wines,” but also in the admirers of the wines. Most damning is the assertion that many wines regarded as natural are unclean, impure and downright bad.

“Natural Isn’t Perfect” was the headline in The Washington Post this spring for an article by the wine columnist Dave McIntyre, who wrote, “The minimalist approach of the natural-wine movement, taken to its extreme, can be an excuse for bad wine-making.”

For fans of natural wines, and I am one, the criticism can be profoundly frustrating. Most people who make or like the wines feel as they do simply because they enjoy the way the wines taste, not because they follow a particular dogma. When successful, natural wines can be superb, seeming bold, vibrant and fresh, graceful and unforced.

“Do you like raw milk cheese and dry-aged beef, do you prefer real sourdough over white bread?” asked Lou Amdur, whose wine bar in Los Angeles, Lou on Vine, took part last month in a series of seminars and discussions of natural wines. “These wines are in the same constellation.”

A lot is expected of natural wines, partly because of the term’s connotations of purity. Yet to criticize the genre because not all the wines measure up holds them to an unfair standard. Bad winemaking is bad winemaking wherever you find it. Mr. McIntyre could just as easily criticize mainstream brands for using their popularity and financial success to excuse atrocious winemaking.

I’ve had natural wines from the Loire and Beaujolais, where the movement began, that are as clean and crystalline as anybody might ever want. Others have been murky and funky, yet nonetheless enchanting. And yes, some have been microbiological disasters, refermenting in the bottle or worse. The mistakes have been few, though, while the good examples have been among the most beautiful, intriguing wines I have ever tasted.

“These are often experimental wines, and I love that people are risking their livelihoods making their wines,” Mr. Amdur said. “These people are not making a lot of money.”

Nonetheless, some producers are trying to capitalize on the growing environmental awareness of consumers by touting their wines as biodynamic or organic. Partly, this parallels the organic-food movement, in which big corporations, not wanting to cede the business, have instead tried to co-opt it by weakening standards and employing their marketing might.

“There are producers who say they are farming organically, but when you dig a little deeper you find it’s true only 85 percent of the time,” said Scott Pactor, who owns Appellation, a wine shop in Manhattan that carries a loosely defined collection of organic, biodynamic and sustainably produced wines. “Greenwashing creates cynicism.”

Indeed, some wine writers have used examples of this sort of greenwashing to batter the entire genre.

I’m not surprised to find exaggeration among those who claim to make natural wines, or any other kind of wine. The history of the wine trade is replete with fraud, adulteration and all manner of chiseling from antiquity to the present.

While the numbers of natural-winemakers and of restaurants, bars and shops that champion them is small, their influence is disproportionate. Like artists, musicians and writers in the avant-garde, the movement traffics in ideas that swirl far beyond the interests of the vast majority of ordinary fans. Nonetheless, their ideas may change the way people think of grape growing and winemaking.

Some of the winemakers might be primitive in their methods, but others are decidedly scientific in their craft. The fact is that making wine without benefit of chemicals or other technological shortcuts demands precision and exactitude. Far more so, perhaps, than in conventional winemaking. I find this passion and determination inspiring.

Not so long ago the organic and local food movements were condemned as the province of eccentrics and fanatics. Yet the proof was in quality and flavor, and many of their ideas have won out. The same may eventually be true in wine.

June 2010

New Wine in Really Old Bottles

By ERIC ASIMOV

Photo by Alice Fiorilli.

Josko Gravner has thrown it all away, more than once. When he started making wine 30 years ago outside this small town in the Friuli–Venezia Giulia region of northeastern Italy, he produced crisp, aromatic white wines in a popular style, using the latest technology.

But he was not satisfied making wines like everybody else. He replaced his temperature-controlled steel tanks with small barrels of French oak, and he won acclaim for white wines of uncommon richness. But not even that was sufficient, and Mr. Gravner began to experiment with techniques considered radical by the winemaking establishment. The hazy, ciderish hue of the resulting white wines, so different from the usual clear yellow-gold, persuaded some that the wines were spoiled. But one taste showed they were fresh and alive, with a sheer, lipsmacking texture.

Was he happy? Please.

Rejecting the modern trappings of the cellar, Mr. Gravner has reached back 5,000 years. He now ferments his wines in huge terra-cotta amphorae that he lines with beeswax and buries in the earth up to their great, gaping lips. Ancient Greeks and Romans would be right at home with him, yet his 2001 wines, his first vintage from the amphorae, which he is planning to release in September, are more vivacious and idiosyncratic than ever.

“With every change, I had clients who lost faith in me,” Mr. Gravner said. “The cantina was in a crisis. Now I’m out of crisis, but the rest of the world is in crisis.”

Perhaps it’s something in the air, or in the wine, but few places on earth have such a concentration of determined, individualistic winemakers as Friuli–Venezia Giulia, particularly in the low rolling hills that stretch across the border with Slovenia. To their fans they make deeply personal, almost artistic wines. To detractors they are fanatical eccentrics.

There’s Edi Kante, who in the mid-1980s tunneled deep into the limestone in the Carso region near Trieste to create a spectacular cavernous cellar and then trucked in earth to construct a vineyard, layer by layer, right over the top. There’s Stanislao Radikon, who, in the latest incarnation of his relentless experimentation, is determined to do without sulfur dioxide, a stabilizer considered essential by most winemakers for shipping wines.

And then there’s Ales Kristancic of Movia, an estate just over the border in Slovenia with vineyards that straddle the line. Mr. Kristancic, whose family has farmed the estate since 1820, is so adamantly rational in his natural approach to grapegrowing and winemaking, so steeped in the wisdom of eight generations spent among the vines and in the cellar, that everyone else thinks he is insane. That is, of course, until they taste his wines, which are astoundingly fresh and soulful.

“Great winemaking is a risk,” said Mr. Kristancic, a lean, charismatic man who seems to know the personality of every vine in his 50 acres of vineyard. “You have to walk on the border.”

The border here is as important literally as it is figuratively. The vineyards surrounding Oslavia have been the sites of countless battles and savage violence. The Habsburg empire ruled the region for centuries, Napoleon for considerably less time. More than 100,000 people died on battlefields here in World War I. Then came World War II, and famine afterward. An earthquake leveled many towns in 1976. In the 1990s wars in the Balkans threatened to spill over into Slovenia, then a part of Yugoslavia but tied to this region by the vineyards that stretch across the border regardless of political lines.

Now the land is peaceful, the vineyards replanted, but the turmoil remains under the surface.

“At the core of all this is the fact that these people are all about identity and not about ideology,” said Fred Plotkin, author of La Terra Fortunata: The Splendid Food and Wine of Friuli-Venezia Giulia (Broadway Books, 2001). “You find your identity in the soil, in what you produce from the soil and in what it says about you.”

Few areas in Italy embody so many paradoxes. From its southern extreme, the regional capital of Trieste, on the Adriatic, Friuli–Venezia Giulia stretches north through snow-capped Alps to Austria. The region itself is actually the combination of two areas: Friuli, which accounts for much of the land, and Venezia Giulia, in the extreme southeast.

More than any other region, Friuli–Venezia Giulia continues to make wines from indigenous grapes, among them ribolla gialla, a beautifully floral white; tocai Friulano, which can be crisp, refreshing and minerally; and refosco, which produces dark, fruity reds. Yet many wines carry familiar names like merlot, cabernet franc, sauvignon blanc, pinot grigio and chardonnay, French grapes that were introduced 200 years ago by Napoleon’s army.

“The French soldiers stayed here, married beautiful women and zak zak,” said Mr. Kristancic, employing a phrase he uses frequently to indicate the natural order of events.

Today some of Italy’s best white wines, clean, crisp and fragrant, come from Friuli–Venezia Giulia, from winemakers like Schiopetto in the Collio wine district, Lis Neris and Vie di Romans in Friuli Isonzo, Scarbolo in Friuli Grave, and Livio Felluga and Bastianich in Colli Orientali del Friuli. Reds, too, can be striking, although the aggressively herbal style of merlot, for example, that is favored in the region is far from the chocolate-covered-cherry style embraced by much of the world.

Yet it is the visionaries who give the region its special character, its touch of greatness. To hear Mr. Kristancic speak of why wine from a young vineyard cannot have the character of that from an old vineyard is to understand that making great wines is not something that can be done by hiring the right consultants or reading the right books. And to taste a bottle of 1963 Movia merlot, full of laserlike fruit flavors, is to understand that graceful yet intense merlot is not restricted to Pomerol.

Mr. Kristancic walks a path traveled by his ancestors, but Mr. Gravner is blazing his own trail. He seems the placid type, but when he speaks, it’s with a quiet, philosophical intensity, the sort that attracts followers because of its idealism but can drive them away by its single-mindedness.

“The problem wasn’t that the consumers didn’t like the wine anymore,” he said, explaining the quest that led him to the amphorae. “I didn’t like the wine anymore.”

Mr. Gravner began experimenting with amphorae in 1997 and made the leap with the 2001 vintage. “As soon as industry invents something new, the last thing isn’t good anymore,” he said. “I was looking for a way to make wine where I didn’t have to change something all the time.”

Of course you can’t just drive down to the local supply house for 3,500liter containers made in the ancient style. Mr. Gravner acquires them from the Caucasus mountains in Georgia, where such traditional winemaking is still practiced, and has the fragile vessels carefully trucked to a special stone-walled cellar he constructed just for them.

Thirty-one of the amphorae are currently buried there. He ferments the wine in them and then, just as unconventionally, leaves it to macerate with the skins, seeds and pulp for six to seven months before transferring it to large barrels of close-grained Slovenian oak.

It’s a technique that requires exquisite care in the vineyard. “You can’t correct the wine once it’s in the amphorae,” Mr. Gravner said. “Whatever is good or bad will be amplified.”

So far the results have been spectacular. A 2001 ribolla gialla, which will be released in September, is so vibrant it practically leaps out of the glass, while an ’01 Breg, a blend of several white varietals, has a concentrated floral, honeyed flavor yet is profoundly dry.

Like all the Gravner wines, the amphora wines can be disconcertingly cloudy. Mr. Gravner shrugs.

“The color of a wine is like the color of a man,” he said. “What matters is what’s underneath.”

Others have followed Mr. Gravner, but have not pushed the boundaries as far as he. Castello di Lispida in the Veneto makes an amphora wine, but not with the prolonged aging Mr. Gravner gives his. In the Collio Damijan Podversic, who began making wine in 1998, says he hopes to use amphorae but cannot yet afford them. Nicolò Bensa, who with his brother, Giorgio, owns La Castellada in Oslavia, has adopted some of Mr. Gravner’s vineyard management techniques but has hesitated at adopting longer maceration times.

“The public resists the deep color,” he said.

Perhaps none of Mr. Gravner’s admirers have gone as far down an individual path as Stanislao Radikon. Like Mr. Gravner, Mr. Radikon has replanted vineyards and discarded chemical pesticides, steel tanks and small oak barrels, and though he has not adopted amphorae, he has his own radical notions. He wants to do away with conventional 750-milliliter bottles and instead sell the wines in half-liter bottles (for one person) and one-liter (for two). And he has stopped using sulfur dioxide as a stabilizer, which makes it risky to ship his wines unless they are very carefully handled.

Tasted at his small family winery, the Radikon wines are alive with fruit. An ’03 ribolla gialla, aging in a large wooden barrel, had the flavor of ripe strawberries. “We’re working on a very dangerous border,” Mr. Radikon said. “But it’s a maximum expression of nature.”

As an experiment, a 2002 chardonnay had been left to sit in a demijohn for two years, as his great-grandfather might have done. Would it travel? Who knew, but it had the lovely fragrance of meadow flowers and lemon compote.

“Why shouldn’t we discover these things?” he asked. “When you make wines like these, it’s hard to like others.”

May 2005

A Thinking Man’s Wines

By ERIC ASIMOV

As with many small, utilitarian wineries in California, barrels and tanks practically spill out of Tenbrink, home of Scholium Project, here in the Suisun Valley, just east of Napa Valley. Yet to call Scholium Project a winery and its proprietor, Abe Schoener, a winemaker is a little like calling Salvador Dalí a painter. It’s true, but it does not begin to capture his visionary character.

No winery in California is more unconventional, experimental or even radical than Scholium. Half the wines it makes in any given year are exquisite. The other half are shocking and sometimes undrinkable. All of them are fascinating, which is exactly the way Mr. Schoener wants it.

From his intuitive winemaking practices to the obscure names he gives each cuvée to his almost heretical approach to winery hygiene, Mr. Schoener marches to his own muse. In the winery, for example, he insists on using only cold water, no soap, to clean equipment and the plant itself.

“Maintaining a complex microbiology is the best way to make wine,” he says.

He is a fount of such gnomic sayings. Perhaps not surprisingly, Mr. Schoener, 47, was a philosophy professor at St. John’s College in Annapolis, Md., when he caught the winemaking bug. While on sabbatical in 1998 he took an internship at Stag’s Leap Wine Cellars and never looked back. By 2000 he was making tiny lots of his own wine, and now, in 2008, Scholium (pronounced SKOH-lee-um) Project is a full-fledged cult wine, although surely the most idiosyncratic cult wine around, with sales driven by curiosity and word of mouth rather than critical approval.

By the dictionary, Scholium, derived from the Greek word “scholion” for school or scholar, refers to marginal notes or commentaries intended to illustrate a point in the text. On his Web site, Mr. Schoener, whose Ph.D. is in ancient Greek philosophy, describes it as “a modest project, not a pre-eminent one, undertaken for the sake of learning.” In other words, winemaking by discovery.

My first encounter with a Scholium wine was, alas, an undrinkable one. It was a 2006 pinot grigio that went by the name Elsa’s Vineyard School of the Plains, inspired, Mr. Schoener said, by an experience in the Collio, in Friuli-Venezia Giulia in northeastern Italy, one of his favorite wine regions.

This pinot grigio was like none I’d ever had. It was huge: 16.6 percent alcohol. The aromas were piercing, almost painfully so, and while the wine was dry, it was excruciatingly powerful and overwhelming.

I said as much in my blog. The next day I received an e-mail message from Mr. Schoener, with whom I had never spoken.

“I am so sympathetic to your reaction to my wine,” he wrote. “I don’t think that you said anything unfair about it. It is a kind of behemoth.” He suggested that a roast chicken and a minimum of four people would make such a big wine more bearable.

Most winemakers tend to rival politicians in their efforts to stay on message and spin catastrophe into triumph, but Mr. Schoener freely and cheerfully discusses his failures, which made me receptive to his invitation to try some of his other wines. He makes 10 or so different wines each year, and a total of about 1,500 cases.

So, on a trip to Northern California this summer, I spent a day with Mr. Schoener, visiting tiny vineyards in Sonoma and the Suisun Valley, where he buys grapes, and Tenbrink, where today, long after most of the 2007 whites in California are either finishing their aging or are on the market, his 2007 whites are still struggling to complete their fermentation. “I learn by accident, through inattention,” he says.

The wines ranged from massive and far out to almost classically delicate. Another 2006 Collio-inspired pinot grigio, called Rocky Hill Vineyards San Floriano del Collio, was in a style completely different from the first one. It had a lovely cidery color, which came from macerating the wines with their skins, and a captivating tannic texture.

Even more impressive was a 2006 Farina Vineyards the Prince in His Caves, inspired by the eccentric Alberico Boncompagni Ludovisi, prince of Venosa, who made astonishing wines at his Fiorano estate outside of Rome before tearing his vines out in the 1990s. Mr. Schoener’s wine, a sauvignon blanc, is serious, textured and complex, intense but not heavy, and, in contrast to his pinot grigios, only 13.3 percent alcohol.

While Mr. Schoener carries the tools of the modern California wine guy—pruning shears, iPhone and laptop—the resemblance to other winemakers ends there. After his internship at Stag’s Leap, he was hired by John Kongsgaard, a prominent Napa winemaker who was then at Luna Vineyards, to home-school his son. In return, Mr. Kongsgaard taught Mr. Schoener about winemaking and great wines.

In 2002, with Mr. Kongsgaard gone to focus on his own wines, Mr. Schoener took over at Luna. “It was a radical choice—he was a real freshman,” said Mr. Kongsgaard, who has remained Mr. Schoener’s mentor. “But we did it because he’s my favorite of my students, even though he’s not a very respectful or obedient student.”

Many of Mr. Schoener’s techniques may seem eccentric in California. He prefers natural fermentations, using minimal amounts of sulfur dioxide as a preservative, and while most California producers exalt bountiful fruit flavors in their wine, Mr. Schoener does not. In the course of his cellar work, he said, “I do everything to banish fruit flavors.”

Occasionally, his methods don’t succeed, as with his 2005 cabernet from Margit’s Vineyard.

“I blew it,” he says. “I had made cabernet before and done it by the book, and it was very good. So I said, I’m going to make it even better now. But I blew it. In 2006 I got it right, though.”

California is apparently not large enough to contain Mr. Schoener. He has another winemaking product in Maury, in the Roussillon region of France, and an unlikely consultant’s job at a facility that is to make wine in Red Hook, Brooklyn, from New York grapes.

“That is it,” he says. “Nothing in Ohio or Brazil yet.”

September 2008

The Truth About “Suitcase Clones”

By ERIC ASIMOV

You heard the one about the suitcase clones, no?

It goes like this: In the black of night a guy sneaks into a famous Burgundy vineyard—let’s say La Tâche, but it could just as easily be Le Musigny or Clos de Bèze. He takes some cuttings of pinot noir vines, wraps them in wet cloth and smuggles them back to California. He propagates the vines and, voilà! He’s got grand cru pinot noir.

Dubious? It supposedly happens all the time—the smuggling part, at least—if we are to believe the marketing for dozens of American wineries. Their promotional materials tell the story of the suitcase clones, or the brand-name version, Samsonite clones. In some variations, it was a friend of a friend who obtained the clones. Either way, vineyards all over the West Coast associate themselves in their marketing with Burgundy’s greatest.

Such stories may excite gullible consumers who are looking for something, anything, to distinguish one of the myriad pinot noirs from another.

But the truth is that the origin of a vine, whether from a clone boldly swiped from Domaine de la Romanée-Conti or meekly purchased from the local nursery, is at best meaningless. The grand cru association is a little like picking up a guitar like one Jimi Hendrix used and expecting “Purple Haze” to burst out. Fat chance.

And by the way, it is illegal to import agricultural material without proper quarantining.

Yet the continued fascination with suitcase clones, and with the arcane issue of grape clones in general, hints at the desperation of consumers to gain some sense of control over where their wine dollars are going. The more we know about the clonal selections, soil composition, rootstocks, trellising techniques, pruning methods and degree days, the better we can guess what’s going to be in the bottle, right?

To an extent, yes, but even well-informed wine drinkers have a difficult time making sense of many of the technical details of winemaking, especially when it comes to clones. So let’s take a closer look at clones and the actual role they play in what’s in your glass, regardless of their origin.

Vines grow grapes because they want to reproduce the old-fashioned way, by enticing birds or other critters to eat the sweet fruit, a natural means of transporting the seeds to a new location for planting. Such methods prove inefficient to meet human needs.

The scourge of phylloxera, for one thing, makes it impossible for most vinifera grapevines to grow on their own roots. This makes growing from seeds cumbersome, so instead growers propagate vines from cuttings of parent plants.

The time-honored technique was a mass selection, in which growers would take cuttings from many different vines. The result was a diverse vineyard that produced grapes of many varied characteristics, particularly if that grape was pinot noir, which is somewhat genetically unstable and mutates far more easily and frequently than, say, cabernet sauvignon or syrah. This is why most suitcase clone tales are about Burgundy and pinot noir.

Many growers in Burgundy still believe a mass selection is the best way to plant a vineyard. Since many if not all of the great Burgundy vineyards are mass selections, the folly of filching a few dozen or even a few hundred cuttings is clear: it can’t approach the diversity in the original site.

Meticulous growers used only particular vines for their cuttings. Perhaps these vines were the healthiest or produced the most flavorful grapes. Short-sighted growers might have singled out the most vigorous vines. Either way, by narrowing the clonal selection they were emphasizing their preferred characteristics.

By the late 20th century, scientists had grown expert at isolating clones that produced particular aromas and flavors, that were early ripening or slow to mature or were resistant to disease or produced wine dark in color.

In Dijon, France, a series of pinot noir clones became available with such designations as 113, 114 and 115, which were not only free of grape viruses but also emphasized the aromas and flavors of red fruits like cherry and raspberry, and 667, 777 and 828, which were reminiscent of darker fruits.

Regardless of the attention paid to suitcase clones, these Dijon clones have become the dominant selection among California pinot noir growers, particularly recently, when the number of acres of pinot noir planted in California has almost doubled, to 29,191 in 2007 from 15,514 in 1999.

An over-reliance on these clones has troubled some wine writers, like Matt Kramer of Wine Spectator and Allen Meadows of Burghound.com, who have singled them out as one reason that so many California pinot noirs taste the same and lack complexity. Both writers, in fact, used the same word: boring.

It stands to reason. In a vineyard with a wide array of pinot noir clones, some will ripen faster, some slower. Some will taste like red fruits, others like black fruits, and some, maybe, will have fresh herbal touches. Blended together, they would most likely produce a wine of more complexity than a wine made from a small number of clones.

Mr. Meadows, in his latest issue, argues that the Dijon clones in particular taste pretty much the same regardless of where they are grown, which further contributes to uniformity.

Both writers have urged growers to aim for a greater mix of clones, not just the numbered Dijons but also older clones that go by names like Swan, Pommard, Mount Eden and Calera. There are quite a few others, some of which, in fact, originally came to California as suitcase clones.

One of the best-known suitcase couriers is Gary Pisoni, who owns vineyards and a winery in the Santa Lucia Highlands. The story of his 1982 vineyard rifling has been told so often and in so many different ways that it’s difficult to separate fact from myth. These days Mr. Pisoni prefers to play down the whole episode, insisting wisely that clones are just a small component of the larger picture, which includes rootstock, soils, trellising and all the rest.

“Don’t forget, Burgundy’s had hundreds and hundreds of years to find out which clones grow best in which area,” he told me by phone. “We’re just getting started here in America.”

October 2008

Lack of Sex Among Grapes
Tangles a Family Vine

By NICHOLAS WADE

For the last 8,000 years, the wine grape has had very little sex. This unnatural abstinence threatens to sap the grape’s genetic health and the future pleasure of millions of enophiles.

The lack of sex has been discovered by Sean Myles, a geneticist at Cornell University. He developed a gene chip that tests for the genetic variation commonly found in grapes. He then scanned the genomes of the thousand or so grape varieties in the Department of Agriculture’s extensive collection.

Much to his surprise he found that 75 percent of the varieties were as closely related as parent and child or brother and sister. “Previously people thought there were several different families of grape,” Dr. Myles said. “Now we’ve found that all those families are interconnected and in essence there’s just one large family.”

Thus merlot is intimately related to cabernet franc, which is a parent of cabernet sauvignon, whose other parent is sauvignon blanc, the daughter of traminer, which is also a progenitor of pinot noir, a parent of chardonnay.

This web of interrelatedness is evidence that the grape has undergone very little breeding since it was first domesticated, Dr. Myles and his co-authors report in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The reason is obvious in retrospect. Vines can be propagated by breaking off a shoot and sticking it in the ground, or onto existing rootstock. The method gives uniform crops, and most growers have evidently used it for thousands of years.

The result is that cultivated grapes remain closely related to wild grapes, apart from a few improvements in berry size and sugar content, and a bunch of new colors favored by plant breeders.

Cultivated grapes have almost as much genetic diversity as wild grapes. But because there has been very little sexual reproduction over the last eight millenniums, this diversity has not been shuffled nearly enough. The purpose of sex, though this is perhaps not widely appreciated, is recombination, the creation of novel genomes by taking some components from the father’s and some from the mother’s DNA. The new combinations of genes provide variation for evolution to work on, and in particular they let slow-growing things like plants and animals keep one step ahead of the microbes that prey on them.

The grapevine fell extinct through much of Europe in the phylloxera epidemic of the 19th century. The French wine industry recovered from this disaster only by grafting French scions, as the grape’s shoots are called, onto sturdy American rootstock resistant to the phylloxera aphid.

Despite that close call, grape growers did not rush to breed disease resistance into their vines. One obstacle is that wine drinkers are attached to particular varieties, and if you cross a chardonnay grape with some other variety, it cannot be called chardonnay. In many winegrowing regions there are regulations that let only a specific variety be grown, lest the quality of the region’s wine be degraded. More than 90 percent of French vineyards are now planted with clones—genetically identical plants—certified to possess the standard qualities of the variety.

The consequence of this genetic conservatism is that a host of pests have caught up with the grape, obliging growers to protect their vines with a deluge of insecticides, fungicides and other powerful chemicals.

This situation cannot be sustained indefinitely, in Dr. Myles’s view. “Someday, regulatory agencies are going to say ‘No more,’” he said. “Europeans are gearing up for the day, which will come earlier there than in the U.S., for laws that reduce the amount of spray you can put on grapes.”

At that point growers will have three options. One is to add genes for pest resistance, risking consumer resistance to genetically modified crops. A second is to go organic, which may be difficult for a plant as vulnerable as the grape. A third is to breed sturdier varieties.

Breeding new grapes takes time and money. The grower has to plant a thousand seedlings, wait three years for them to mature, and then select the few progeny that have the desired traits. But a new kind of plant breeding now offers hopes of an efficient shortcut.

The new method depends on gene chips, like the one developed by Dr. Myles, that test young plants for the desired combination of traits. The breeder can thus discard 90 percent of seedlings from a cross, without waiting three years while they grow to maturity.

The new method, called marker-assisted breeding, or genomic selection, is already being used in breeding corn. “We can predict flowering within a couple of days by looking at the DNA,” said Edward S. Buckler, a leading corn geneticist at the Agriculture Department’s research lab at Cornell.

Dr. Buckler said he felt the government’s large collections of crop plants could be used much more efficiently by analyzing the genomes of each species. He recruited Dr. Myles to work on the grape genome.

In major crops like corn, rice and wheat, “everyone is shifting to these new technologies,” Dr. Buckler said. He expects grape growers to follow the trend. Wine drinkers’ insistence on their favorite varieties need not necessarily be a problem, because with enough genetic markers the breeder could identify and maintain the genes responsible for the taste of varieties like chardonnay or merlot. Genomically selected grape varieties may be ready for market in about a decade, said Dr. Buckler, who is a co-author on Dr. Myles’s report.

M. Andrew Walker, an expert grape breeder at the University of California, Davis, said that there are “ample pest- and disease-resistance genes” in the grapevine genus, which has about 60 species, but few in Vitis vinifera, the particular species to which wine and table grapes belong. He agreed that it will be necessary to introduce many of these genes from other Vitis species into vinifera. “Consumers and wine promoters will have to move beyond dependence on traditional vinifera varieties,” Dr. Walker said.

So far Dr. Myles has only 6,000 useful genetic markers on his grape gene chip, and needs a larger chip to identify all the traits of interest to breeders. He started his scientific career working on human genetics at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany. On a bicycle tour of German vineyards he decided the grape’s genome might hold as many surprises as the human one. The pursuit fit in well with another aspect of his life—his wife is a winemaker in Nova Scotia.

Canada might seem too far north for vineyards to thrive, but the growing season is like that of Champagne in France, Dr. Myles said. “For high-acid grapes that don’t fully ripen, which is the Champagne strategy, you can make fantastic sparkling wines in Nova Scotia and lots of good whites.”

January 2011

The Earliest Wine:
Vintage 3500 B.C. and Robust

By JOHN NOBLE WILFORD

Long before Noah supposedly planted his vineyard after the Flood or the first toast was drunk to Dionysus on the shores of Homer’s wine-dark sea, the taste of the grape was one of life’s pleasures. Indeed, archeologists have now found chemical evidence that people were making and drinking wine at least as long ago as the fourth millennium B.C., the earliest established occurrence of wine anywhere in the world.

And a robust vintage it must have been, to have left a trace at all. The bouquet was long gone, of course. But there inside an earthen jar from Sumerian ruins excavated at Godin Tepe in western Iran were red-colored deposits, a residue that chemists determined was rich in tartaric acid and so almost certainly was the lees of an ancient wine. Tartaric acid is found in nature almost exclusively in grapes.

“We’re 95 percent sure,” said Dr. Patrick E. McGovern, an archeological chemist who directed the analysis at the University Museum of Archeology and Anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania. The results, determined by a technique known as infrared spectroscopy, are reported in the current issue of a museum publication, Research Papers in Science and Archeology.

Anthropologists said the findings carried a further significance, yielding insights into the economy and stability of a society able to indulge in the production of a luxury item like wine. This should help fill out the cultural picture of the fourth millennium B.C. in the Middle East, a time of social innovation with the invention of writing, the introduction of copper metallurgy and irrigated agriculture and the rise of urban centers.

In fact, Dr. Solomon H. Katz, an anthropologist at the University of Pennsylvania and specialist on the early history of beverages, postulates that the dramatic cultural changes of the period encouraged not only production of wine but its consumption. People probably imbibed to relieve the stresses of living in an increasingly complex and urbanized society.

If the chemical analysis is correct, it confirms the existence of wine in the midfourth millennium, about 3500 B.C. “We’ve broken the Bronze Age barrier,” Dr. Katz said, suggesting that the origins of winemaking probably extend back several thousand more years.

In Vintage: The Story of Wine (Simon & Schuster, 1989), Hugh Johnson, a wine expert, wrote, “We cannot point precisely to the place and time when wine was first made any more than we can give credit to the inventor of the wheel.”

Grape pips from the seventh millennium B.C. have been found in the Caucasus, near the Caspian Sea in what is now the Soviet Union, but it is not certain that these were from domesticated plants. The earliest firm evidence for wine had been in Egyptian texts referring to wine at the beginning of the third millennium, the dawn of the Bronze Age. The Sumerian epic of Gilgamesh from the same millennium celebrated the enchanted vineyard whose wine was the source of immortality. Wine must have been common by the time of Hammurabi, the Babylonian king in the 1700s B.C., because his laws are explicit on the subject of when and how people could drink.

The new findings will be evaluated by anthropologists and historians at a symposium on wine’s role in the cultural and economic development of earliest human societies. The participants, invited by the University Museum, will get into the spirit of their scholarship by meeting at the Robert Mondavi Winery in Oakville, Calif.

The telltale residues were discovered by Virginia R. Badler, a graduate student in archeology at the University of Toronto. In research on the Uruk period of Mesopotamia, she pieced together shards from pottery excavated at Godin Tepe in the Zagros Mountains of western Iran between the modern towns of Hamadan and Kermanshah. This was the site of a trading outpost or fortress on a trade route that later became known as the Silk Road. The outpost had economic links to the Sumerians who lived to the south in the valley of the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers.

Uruk, on the Euphrates, was one of the earliest urban centers of the Sumerians. They had a thriving agriculture in the river valleys of what is now southern Iraq, but had to look elsewhere for such raw materials as minerals, metals and timber, as well as wine. The Godin Tepe site was presumably one of their outposts in their trading for copper, semi-precious stones and other products in the eastern regions of present-day Iran and in Afghanistan.

Dr. Steven W. Cole, an assistant professor of Assyriology at Harvard University, said: “It’s amazing how far flung the Sumerian trade was in the Uruk period of the fourth millenium. They had to reach out to fill their needs.”

When Ms. Badler reconstructed one large jar from Godin Tepe, she noticed the red stain on the interior at the base and on one side, evidence that the vessel had contained a liquid and been stored on its side, presumably to keep the seal moist and tight and thus prevent wine from turning to vinegar. Other suggestive evidence included the shape of the jar, with its narrow mouth and tall neck that seemed suited for pouring out liquids, and the presence of earthenware stoppers and funnels.

Similar jars were found in one room that appeared to have been where the wine was made or at least stored. Across a courtyard, opened jars were excavated in what seemed to be the residence of people of some affluence, judging from the luxury items like a stone-bead necklace and a marble bowl fragment found there.

“Almost from the start, wine is a high-end item, a status symbol,” Dr. Katz said.

In previous studies, Dr. Katz traced the origin of beer, brewed from barley, to the time soon after the introduction of agriculture in the Middle East about 10,000 years ago. Since grain could be grown more widely and be stored for long periods, beer became more readily available than the seasonal, more perishable grapes. These apparently grew only in northern regions like the Zagros and Caucasus Mountains and had to be traded for and shipped great distances.

Dr. Katz said in an interview that he was developing a hypothesis on the early history of wine. Even before modern agriculture, people could have discovered ripe wild grapes that had fallen to the ground and fermented. The yeast for fermentation comes naturally to grapes, as the waxy white stuff on the skin. People who tasted these grapes got a glow on, and figured out how to get more, first from wild grapes crushed in a bag and then by domesticating the vines for higher production.

With the introduction of agriculture, people became more settled and could produce more than they needed for subsistence. For the first time, Dr. Katz said, people “had enough security and stability and foresight to be willing to invest in the future.” He noted that the olive tree is the classic example. “It is said, you grow olive trees for your grandchildren,” he observed, “and it’s much the same with vineyards.”

In their report, Dr. McGovern, Ms. Badler and Dr. Rudolph H. Michel, also of the University Museum, concluded, “Godin Tepe during the Uruk period would appear to fit the model of a society that has evolved to a sufficient level of complexity to engage in horticulture, specifically that of the grapevine.”

Dr. Lawrence Stager, an archeologist at Harvard, contends, however, that large-scale winemaking did not begin until the outset of the Bronze Age after 3000 B.C.

A similar chemical test on an amphora from the fourth century A.D., found at a tomb at Gebel Adda in southern Egypt, identifed tartaric acid in a vessel known to have once contained wine. This encouraged the scientists in their interpretation of the sediments from the Godin Tepe vessel.

Archeologists said many questions remained about the early history of wine. Were these local wines? Had viticulture advanced far enough to support an export trade with the urban centers to the south?

“For the time being,” Dr. McGovern’s group wrote, “the earliest wine ever found must remain a delicious foretaste of future archeological and chemical discoveries to be made.”

April 1991

Cave Drops Hints to Earliest Glass of Red

By PAM BELLUCK

Scientists have reported finding the oldest known winemaking operation, about 6,100 years old, complete with a vat for fermenting, a press, storage jars, a clay bowl and a drinking cup made from an animal horn. Grape seeds, dried pressed grapes, stems, shriveled grapevines and residue were also found, and chemical analyses indicate red wine was produced there.

The discovery, published online in The Journal of Archaeological Science, occurred in a cave in Armenia where the team of American, Armenian and Irish archeologists recently found the oldest known leather shoe. The shoe, a laced cow-hide moccasin possibly worn by a woman with a size-7 foot, is about 5,500 years old.

These discoveries and other artifacts found in the cave provide a window into the Copper Age, or Late Chalcolithic period, when humans are believed to have invented the wheel and domesticated horses, among other innovations.

Relatively few objects have been found, but the cave, designated Areni-1 and discovered in 1997, is proving a perfect time capsule because prehistoric artifacts have been preserved under layers of sheep dung and a white crust on the cave’s karst limestone walls.

“We keep finding more interesting things,” said Gregory Areshian, assistant director of the Cotsen Institute of Archaeology at the University of California, Los Angeles, and the co-director of the excavation, which is financed by the National Geographic Society and other institutions. “Because of the conditions of the cave, things are wonderfully preserved.”

Experts called the find a watershed.

“I see it as the earliest winemaking facility that’s ever been found,” said Patrick E. McGovern, an archeological chemist at the University of Pennsylvania Museum, which is not involved in the project. “It shows a fairly large-scale operation, and it fits very well with the evidence that we already have about the tradition of making wine.”

Some of that evidence was identified by Dr. McGovern and colleagues, who determined that residue in jars found at a northwestern Iran site called Hajji Firuz suggested that wine was being made as early as 7,400 years ago.

But “that’s just a number of wine jars that we identified,” said Dr. McGovern, author of “Uncorking the Past.”

“Just how elaborate this one is suggests that there was earlier production” of a more sophisticated nature.

Stefan K. Estreicher, a professor at Texas Tech University and author of Wine: From Neolithic Times to the 21st Century (Algora Publishing, 2006), said the Armenian discovery shows “how important it was to them” to make wine because “they spent a lot of time and effort to build a facility to use only once a year” when grapes were harvested.

The wine was probably used for ritual purposes, as burial sites were seen nearby in the cave. Dr. Areshian said at least eight bodies had been found so far, including a child, a woman, bones of elderly men and, in ceramic vessels, skulls of three adolescents (one still containing brain tissue).

Wine may have been drunk to honor or appease the dead, and was “maybe also sprinkled on these burials,” he said.

The cave, with several chambers, appeared to be used for rituals by highstatus people, although some people, possibly caretakers, lived up front, where the shoe was found. Researchers have also found two “dark holes, essentially jars filled with dried fruit, including dried grapes, prunes, walnuts and probably the oldest evidence of cultivating almonds,” Dr. Areshian said.

And there is evidence of a 6,000-year-old “metallurgical operation,” including smelted copper and a mold to cast copper ingots, he said.

Mitchell S. Rothman, an anthropologist and Chalcolithic expert at Widener University not involved in the expedition, said these discoveries show “the industry and technology developing,” and “the very inklings of some kind of social differentiation.”

It is “the sort of thing where ritual becomes not only part of the desire to appreciate the gods, but a way in which the people involved in that become somehow special,” added Dr. Rothman, who has visited the cave.

The winemaking discovery began when graduate students found grape seeds in the cave’s central chamber in 2007, and culminated last fall. A shallow, thick-rimmed, 3-by-3½-foot clay basin appears to be a wine press where people stomped grapes with their feet. The basin is positioned so juice would tip into a two-foot-deep vat.

Scientists verified the age and function with radiocarbon dating, botanical analysis to confirm the grapes were cultivated, and analysis of residue for malvidin, which gives red wine its color.

Dr. Areshian said scientists are undertaking “a very extensive DNA analysis of the grape seeds” from the cave and “our botanists want to plant some of the seeds.”

January 2011

In Wine Country,
Pruning Isn’t Just a Part of the Job

By JESSE MCKINLEY

Photo by Jim Wilson.

It may be the world’s most boggling spectator sport. Each February and March, hundreds of farmhands with razor-sharp shears take to the vineyards to battle for the ultimate prize in agricultural athletics: the county pruning championship. Once just a back-breaking, mind-numbing exercise in field management, pruning has become a sort of boutique sporting event across Northern California, complete with regional qualifiers, nail-biting finishes and strutting superstars.

“This is my sport,” said Manuel Chavez, 34, a two-time county champion. “I want to be back. I’m ready.”

But on Friday, a new top Sonoma County pruner was crowned, after a showdown of 10 finalists that drew 150 spectators to a sun-drenched farm here, about 50 miles north of San Francisco, in just one of several wine-rich California counties to hold the contests. Competitive pruning even has an international flavor, with a bigger contest held in France this weekend, drawing about 350 of Europe’s finest vine-shapers.

Fans of the Sonoma competitions, which started eight years ago, say they shine a light on a little-respected but vital part of the horticultural—and economic—process. And, of course, they have also led to more than a little gamesmanship down on the farm.

“Pruning is really the first time you have to affect the quality of vintages,” said Dana Grande, the president of the wine growers association in the Alexander Valley in northern Sonoma. “And we dominate at it.”

And while pruning lacks the tourist-drawing glamour of the fall harvest, those on the front vines of California’s $125 billion wine industry say it is one of the last skill sets that demand a human hand in an age of increasingly mechanized agriculture. Every winter, thousands of workers fan out to fields across California’s wine country to prepare the vines for the coming year, usually working from just after Thanksgiving to early March.

“If harvest is the No. 1 job, then pruning is No. 2,” said Joe Dutton, a fifthgeneration Sonoma County farmer. “The money comes from the harvest, but you have to have that money to pay these guys to prune. It’s a big circle.”

It is a grueling process, with crews of a dozen or more men working each ranch eight hours a day, methodically going from plant to plant, on acre after acre, cutting back dead or dormant vines to allow new grapes to grow.

In competitive pruning, however, the game is accelerated: each contestant is given five vines to groom and is ranked on both speed and quality, with deductions for things like poor-quality cuts and “mummies,” or desiccated grapes left on the vine. A good pruner can trim five vines into shape in about four minutes, or about the time it takes a world-class runner to finish a mile.

But judges at these competitions say the more important quality is precision and cleanliness, which can mean the difference between a vine stocked with healthy bunches of grapes and one rife with bunch rot. In general, each of the vines is expected to carry 11 “spurs”—essentially offshoots of the main vine—which are expected to produce two bunches each. But too many spurs can cause overcrowding on the vine, increasing the possibility of potentially devastating diseases spreading from grape to grape. Too few spurs, meanwhile, means not enough product.

“If you screw it up here, you’re going to be paying for it all summer,” said Nick Frey, the president of the Sonoma County Winegrape Commission, which has sponsored the competition for the last seven years.

Mr. Frey said the level of interest and number of competitors had been growing ever since the first competition in Sonoma in 1999. “This is the biggest pruning event we have ever had,” he said. “The quality and speed of the pruning was exceptional.”

Spectators say the events are oddly riveting, especially for anyone with a passing interest in how wine gets made. Like at most big games, the crowd in Sonoma was predominately male and occasionally rowdy, clapping and cheering as the pruners snipped, hacked and yanked a series of rugged chardonnay vines into shape. Unlike most athletic crowds, however, the spectators here could talk you into the ground about plant biology, soil acidity and the relative merits of cane versus spur pruning. (Don’t even ask.)

One spectator, Rosa Brown, an office manager at the local Kendall-Jackson winery, said she had tried pruning once and was impressed by the men’s skills and endurance. (For now, pruning seems to be a male-only sport.)

“It’s amazing what they do,” Ms. Brown said. “I went out there for an hour, and I came back and my arms were sore, my back was sore, my shoulder blades were sore. And they do it eight hours a day.”

Considering the size of the American and French wine industries—and the long-standing rivalry between the two—it is not completely surprising that there are pruning competitions in both countries. The French held their national event this weekend in Charente-Maritime, on the country’s Atlantic Coast.

And while the Americans value speed, the French, of course, have a much different focus, with a written exam, an oral exam and a slow-moving practical exam in the fields.

Stéphane Poggi, the director of marketing for Felco, a Swiss company that specializes in pruning equipment, said he attended championships in California in 2005 and was impressed by the pace of play.

“In terms of quality, however, it’s another question,” Mr. Poggi said. “French pruners are very good in quality, but they are not fast. I suppose it is a question of whether you are looking for quality or quantity.”

A win at the county championships can mean instant fame on the farm. Mr. Chavez, for example, is well known on his ranch because of his win. “Everybody knew him,” said Celene Torres, a co-worker who helped cheer him to victory in 2005. “Everybody knew about him winning.”

It is also lucrative, with winners receiving prize money and bonuses from their employers. The winner at Friday’s competition earned a little more than $2,200, or about a month’s wages for an average farmworker.

But winners also speak of the pride of their hard work being recognized. “My whole body was vibrating,” Mr. Chavez said about his county win in 2005. “It was very beautiful, and I was very happy.” Alas, Mr. Chavez’s chances for a third championship ended last month when he was eliminated during a regional qualifier after winning a preliminary round at his ranch.

Like many farmhands, all of the finalists on Friday were Mexican or of Mexican heritage. (The competition’s rules were given only in Spanish.) They ranged from the young and brash—23-year-old Gustavo Rico, who wore torn jeans, a scruffy beard and a baseball cap cocked to one side—to Pedro Figuenoa, 61, who started pruning in Sonoma in 1971, before Mr. Rico was even alive.

Neither man, however, could keep up with Samuel Campos, a 34-year-old who finished his vines in four minutes flat and impressed judges with his clean cuts and mummyless vines. His winning score was one of the highest in competition history.

In addition to the prize money and a plaque, Mr. Campos received a bundle of agricultural swag, including gloves, T-shirts and, of course, shears.

“I’m happy,” he said, moments after winning, as a mariachi band played in his honor. “I’m going to have fun with it.”

March 2007

When Velvety Red Is Only Skin Deep

By ERIC ASIMOV

What color is your red wine? This is not a trick question, like asking about George Washington’s white horse. For many wine professionals the color of a red wine is serious business.

Implicit in the varied hues are all sorts of clues about the quality and characteristics of the wine. You can tell, as a red wine arcs from bright and brilliant to dull and faded, whether it is young, aging gracefully or over the hill. You can sense whether it has matured in new or old barrels, and whether it’s been filtered to the point of sterility.

Yet when producers today consider the colors of their red wines, they may think of them more as a marketing tool than anything else. Somewhere along the way consumers have come to equate darker red wines with better red wines.

“People are absolutely obsessed with color, and I think it’s a mistake,” said Neal Rosenthal, who imports wines, largely from France and Italy. “It has been said that the deeper the color, the more concentrated the wine. That’s clearly inaccurate.”

Anyone can confirm Mr. Rosenthal’s point by tasting a traditionally made Burgundy or Barolo, wines of intensity and concentration that are from the paler side of the red spectrum.

To describe the myriad shades of red, you need a 64-crayon box of terms. Different hues can appear in varying degrees of intensity and luminosity, depending, of course, on the quality of the light and the background. Lighter red wines, like Beaujolais Villages or Valpolicella, can be pale ruby, not much darker than the darkest rosé. The darker reds, like young syrahs, petite sirahs and cabernet sauvignons, can be practically blue-black. In between are subtle, incrementally different shadings from copper to crimson.

But winemakers today seem to view deep, dark colors as paramount. Indeed, red wines of all sorts tend to be darker nowadays than they used to be. The brick red of a traditionally made Chianti, for one, is just a pale patch on the darker Chiantis that prevail today. California reds have also gotten noticeably darker than they were, say, 15 or 20 years ago.

“There’s no question that winemakers in Italy are making darker reds,” said Burton Anderson, who has written about Italian wines for 30 years. “I’ve seen it everywhere in Italy over the last 15 years or so, from Barolo to Valpolicella to Brunello to Chianti to the deep south.”

Mr. Anderson said he believes the darker wines are a byproduct of a trend toward stronger blockbuster styles, which so many critics seem to favor and so many consumers seem to want. To make these wines, many growers favor very low yields from densely planted vineyards. The competition among vines and the low yields produce grapes of great richness and concentration, as well as more intense pigmentation, which contributes to a darker color.

Modern winemakers have other ways to get dark colors: clones that produce more richly colored grapes, equipment that prolongs the juice’s exposure to pigment-rich skins and limiting the use of sulfur as a preservative.

So while a darker color may signal a big wine, it doesn’t guarantee one. The context is crucial. A pale garnet may signal a problem in a young cabernet, which is traditionally dark, but not in a Burgundy. “Côte de Beaunes tend to be this beautiful light cherry color, which I think is charming, but nowadays people say it’s too light,” Mr. Rosenthal said.

Like almost every characteristic of wine, color is subject to myth and misinterpretation. Though color may tell more about a wine than the legs that climb the inside of a glass, color offers far less information than a sniff and a taste.

As the winemaker for Turley Wine Cellars in California, Ehren Jordan makes zinfandels of rare intensity and power, yet they tend to be closer to cherry red than ultradark. Under his Failla label, he also makes subtle pinot noirs and syrahs.

“There’s no doubt that people are fixated with color,” Mr. Jordan said. “People seem to equate darker wines with better wines. For me it always seems odd, and it’s maybe because I like Burgundy and I enjoy pinot noir, and pinot is not about color.”

For a while, back in the 1980s and early ’90s, pinot noir, the grape of red Burgundy, was about color. Many producers back then experimented with an unconventional technique that produced dark wines. They postponed fermentation, leaving grape skins to leach pigment into the juice for an unusually long period, producing a darker wine. But many winemakers turned away from this technique, feeling it dulled nuances in the wine rather than bringing them to life.

In California, the dark color of some pinot noirs has led some critics to question their makeup. Josh Jensen, the Calera Wine Company’s winemaker, who makes intense, long-lived pinots, said he believes that some producers achieve dark colors by adding other grapes to their pinot noirs. It’s legal in California, where a wine has to contain only 75 percent of a particular grape to be named for it, but for pinot noirs based on the Burgundy model of 100 percent pinot noir, this is close to heresy.

“I know of winemakers who have admitted adding 5 percent syrah,” Mr. Jensen said, without naming names. “Of all the things you can do, that’s an absolute no-no.”

Blending grapes for color’s sake is not without precedent. Mr. Jordan has found that in many of the oldest vineyards he uses for Turley, dating back 100 years or more, zinfandel is interplanted with small amounts of alicante bouchet or petite sirah, grapes that produce darker wines than zinfandel.

“Why else except for color?” Mr. Jordan asked, suggesting that this was a concern back when the vineyards were planted. “If somebody farmed it for that long, there must be some logic behind it.”

May 2005

A Zin Oasis in Mexico’s Dusty Hills

By ERIC ASIMOV

Nothing about the tan, boulder-strewn hills and the occasional cinderblock dwelling, deserted in the noonday sun, remotely suggests that grapes are growing nearby.

The prickly pear cactuses looming alongside a road instead inspire a thirst for Tecate, the namesake beer brewed in this city east of Tijuana in Baja California. But the brewery and the city seem a million miles away.

Crawling slowly up a dirt path in a four-wheel-drive Ford Explorer, with only the occasional ground squirrel and lizard for company, the brown expanse seems more desert than anything else.

Then the long, winding road leads to the top of the hill, and from there, like a mirage in a valley in the middle of nowhere, grape vines burst forth, lots of them, an oasis of green rows against a background of dry brown hills.

The trunks and canes are gnarled and contorted, characteristic of the headtraining technique that is found in so many old vineyards. Twisting vines emerge, each bearing one or two tight bunches of grapes that are just ripening, turning from green to purple. These are zinfandel vines, and not just any zinfandel, but vines that are decades old, judging by the girth of the trunks.

How did this precious old zinfandel vineyard, the kind that California winemakers spend years seeking out, come to be in this valley hidden from view in a place that nobody knows? Winemakers scour the back roads of Sonoma, of Paso Robles, of the Sierra Foothills, of Arroyo Grande, looking for old vineyards, peering into fields overgrown with blackberry vines and decrepit refrigerators, talking to old-timers, poring over county records, but why would anybody think of looking in Mexico, of looking here?

“You think you’re just being led on a chase, and then you crown the hill, and, my God,” said Ehren Jordan, the winemaker for Turley Wine Cellars, which makes burly, voluptuous much-in-demand zinfandels from old vineyards all over California, and now, from Mexico, too. Next month it will release its 2004 Rancho Escondido zinfandel, made from this vineyard, appropriately named Rancho Escondido, or hidden ranch.

The story of Rancho Escondido parallels the story of Mexican viticulture, which nowadays is thriving in Baja California but which practically didn’t exist in 1930, when a farmer named Leonardo Reynoso first planted what would eventually become the 200-acre Rancho Escondido vineyard.

Why there? “Who knows,” said Camillo P. Magoni, the chief enologist of L. A. Cetto, a big Mexican winery that purchased the vineyard in 1968. “Because it was cheap? Because he found a remote area for quiet living? Or he had the perception that this hidden valley had special conditions for zinfandel grapes?”

Whatever the reason, the old farmer made a fine choice. “The fact is, Escondido Ranch has a particular soil that I haven’t found elsewhere in my 40-plus years in Baja,” Mr. Magoni said. “I classified it as eolic, moved by winds through the millenniums, because of its fine texture. Of course, the base is mostly decomposed granite from the surrounding hills, but it is so deep that we found roots at 30 feet. That is the secret.”

Indeed, the soil is sandy, with a crusty surface that helps to keep moisture from evaporating upward. The vines are not irrigated, and somewhere below ground is an ample water supply. Tiny sagelike plants grow between the rows, giving off a faint herbal aroma, and down the hill from the grapevines a grove of olive trees looks surprisingly Mediterranean in the Mexican sunshine. But while the sun is bright, the temperature is moderate. A cooling breeze consistently blows inland from the Pacific, bending the vines to the northeast, like coastal cypress contorted by the ocean wind.

In the 1940s and ’50s, Tecate was an important grape-growing area, Mr. Magoni said, planted mostly with mission, alicante bouchet, carignan and other, lesser wine grapes. But as the city of Tecate expanded, almost all of those vineyards were torn up. Nowadays, the center of Mexican viticulture is the Guadalupe Valley, about an hour or so to the south. In the Tecate area, Rancho Escondido is one of the few survivors.

It was just by luck that Turley learned of the existence of this vineyard. Following in the tradition of California zinfandel pioneers like Ridge and Ravenswood, Turley seeks out old vineyards to make its zinfandels. Assuming a vineyard is well situated and well managed, most winemakers would agree that the older the vines, the better the potential for the wine. Young vines, under 20 years old, are like teenagers: gawky, unruly and unpredictable. But as the vines age, they seem to mature and become self-regulating. They are better able to deal with weather extremes, and they begin to yield fewer but more intense grapes.

As vines pass 50 years, the yields diminish further and the grapes become even more concentrated. The oldest known zinfandel vineyards, like Old Hill in Sonoma Valley and Grandpère in Amador County, are about 125 years old, which makes the 75-year-old Rancho Escondido middle-aged, perhaps, but old enough to draw Turley’s attention.

Credit goes to three alert young Turley workers, Pat Stallcup, Brennen Stover and Karl Wicka, who were attending a zinfandel convention in early 2004 when they were approached by a man who represented several Mexican wineries. He asked them whether they would be interested in seeing some old Mexican zinfandel vineyards. It rang a bell with Mr. Stover, who recalled seeing some photographs of an old Mexican vineyard in a book, A Zinfandel Odyssey (Practical Winery & Vineyard, 2002), by Rhoda Stewart. They agreed to take a trip.

“We’re always prospecting,” Mr. Jordan said. “It never hurts to kick some dirt around.”

So, in June 2004, the three took a day trip to Mexico. They first went to Guadalupe Valley, looking at one vineyard after another. All were disappointing. Finally, Mr. Stover said, they drove up to Rancho Escondido. “I thought it was just beautiful,” he said.

“It was exactly what you want to see after searching all day and not finding anything.” Mr. Stallcup added. “It looked just like what we do.”

They immediately called Mr. Jordan and Larry Turley, the owner, who visited as soon as they could. They walked the vineyard, met Mr. Magoni, and Luis Agustín Cetto—Don Luis—the proprietor of L. A. Cetto, which was founded by his father, Angelo Cetto, an Italian immigrant. They had lunch at the Cetto winery in the Guadalupe Valley, maybe the only winery in the world with a bullfighting ring on the premises. They decided they definitely wanted grapes.

“You figure, three generations of people have gone to a lot of trouble to farm this vineyard,” Mr. Jordan said. “I mean, it’s not exactly convenient. Even just for curiosity’s sake, we wanted to make wine from these grapes.”

Turley specified that their grapes would come from the oldest section of the vineyard. Cetto, which generally blended the grapes into their light-bodied, inexpensive zinfandel, saw the deal as an opportunity to demonstrate the potential of Mexican wines when made by a top boutique producer like Turley.

“It’s a good opportunity for us,” said Marco Amador, a Cetto spokesman. “People get a little upset about Mexican wines. They believe in Turley. They don’t believe in us, yet.”

Turley did not get a lot of grapes, just about three and a half acres’ worth, which translates to about three and a half tons, or about 225 cases of wine. That may be all the Rancho Escondido for a while; Turley plans to make the wine each year, but Cetto declined to sell them grapes in 2005, saying the vintage was poor.

It has been almost two years since the 2004 grapes were picked, and now the wine was ready to taste over lunch at La Diferencia, a fine Mexican restaurant in Tijuana. The zinfandel, labeled Rancho Escondido, Baja California, Mexico, is made in the typical Turley style, which means a huge wine, with plenty of alcohol. This one clocked in at a hefty 16.3 percent, yet it differs from the more typical fruit-bomb zin. This one has aromas of anise and sour cherry, but there is a definite herbal element, too, reminiscent of those sagelike plants in the vineyard. The flavors last in the mouth forever.

The wine doesn’t really go with the first course, crunchy fried crickets on a blue corn sope, with cotija cheese and spicy salsa verde. The chili pepper clashes with the wine’s soft tannins. But it is superb with the last course, tender steak with a light green squash sauce and huitlacoche, the Mexican corn fungus delicacy, which brings out the wine’s cherry kirsch flavors.

But something else makes this wine compelling, something that cannot be measured by a score or a rating. Each sip casts the mind back to those brown, boulder-strewn hills and to the farmer who decided to plant right there. It’s a wine that makes you wonder, that asks questions rather than answers them.

“You look around the vineyard and you say, who came here and decided it was a great place to grow grapes?” Mr. Jordan said. “I mean, it’s not exactly welcoming terrain. I wish I could go back in a time capsule and see why they chose it. You have to wonder whether we lack that instinct today.”

August 2006

Illegal Sale of Rice Wine
Thrives in Chinese Enclaves

By KIRK SEMPLE and JEFFREY E. SINGER

The restaurant looks like so many others in the roiling heart of Chinatown, in Lower Manhattan: a garish sign in Chinese and English, slapdash photos of featured dishes taped to the windows, and extended Chinese families crowding around tables, digging into communal plates of steamed fish, fried tofu and sautéed watercress.

But ask a waitress the right question and she will disappear into the back, returning with shot glasses and something not on the menu: a suspiciously unmarked plastic container containing a reddish liquid.

It is homemade rice wine—“Chinatown’s best,” the restaurant owner asserts. It is also illegal.

In the city’s Chinese enclaves, there is a booming black market for homemade rice wine, representing one of the more curious outbreaks of bootlegging in the city since Prohibition. The growth reflects a stark change in the longstanding pattern of immigration from China.

In recent years, as immigration from the coastal province of Fujian has surged, the Fujianese population has come to dominate the Chinatowns of Lower Manhattan and Sunset Park, Brooklyn, and has increased rapidly in other Chinese enclaves like the one in Flushing, Queens.

These newcomers have brought with them a robust tradition of making—and hawking—homemade rice wine. In these Fujianese neighborhoods, right under the noses of the authorities, restaurateurs brew rice wine in their kitchens and sell it proudly to customers. Vendors openly sell it on street corners, and quart-size containers of it are stacked in plain view in grocery store refrigerators, alongside other delicacies like jellyfish and duck eggs.

The sale of homemade rice wine—which is typically between 10 and 18 percent alcohol, about the same as wine from grapes—violates a host of local, state and federal laws that govern the commercial production and sale of alcohol, but the authorities have apparently not cracked down on it.

A spokesman for the New York State Liquor Authority said the agency had recently received complaints about illegal Chinese rice wine and was looking into them, though he offered no further details. New York police officials said the department had never investigated the trade.

The Fujianese wine sellers are reminiscent of an earlier group of immigrant entrepreneurs: During Prohibition, Jewish and Italian immigrants were among New York City’s most active bootleggers. But several ethnologists and sociologists said that these days there did not seem to be an equivalent illegal brew—made and sold in New York—among any other immigrant population.

The rice wine, which is almost always a shade of red, is the result of a fairly simple fermentation process involving glutinous rice, red yeast rice and water. Its taste varies from producer to producer and, of course, from drinker to drinker. The best versions recall sherry or Japanese sake. The worst, vinegar.

“Don’t underestimate this alcohol,” cautioned a winemaker in Chinatown, who would give only his surname, Zhu. “You’ll get drunk.”

In Fujian Province, people make rice wine in their houses, drinking it themselves, serving it to guests or using it in cooking. In New York City, many Fujianese immigrants do the same—a legal practice as long as the product does not enter the stream of commerce.

There are about 317,000 Chinese immigrants in New York City, according to census data, but that figure is widely regarded as an undercount. Zai Liang, a sociology professor at the University at Albany who has studied the tightly knit Fujianese population in New York, estimated that as many as 40 percent of the Chinese who immigrated to New York in the past two decades were from Fujian Province.

The underground trade in rice wine is foreign even to many Chinese from other provinces.

Since rice wine can go bad after excessive exposure to heat, it is widely regarded as a winter beverage, and vendors flourish in Fujianese neighborhoods during the colder months. But even in the depth of summer, a glass of it is never hard to find.

Indeed, many Fujianese are more than happy to talk about rice wine, explaining how it is made, describing its delights and extolling its virtues as an all-around elixir.

“If you drink this, you’ll stay young,” explained Chen Dandan, a retired garment factory worker from Fujian Province. “It helps you with your circulation.”

“If you drink this, you’ll live to an old age,” said Lin Yong, a long-distance bus driver who lives in Flushing. He said his grandfather, who died several years ago at the age of 99, lived by a simple dictum: It is all right to forgo a meal, but it is not all right to forgo a glass of rice wine.

Many said that even though legal rice wine is commercially available, they prefer homemade brews because they are said to have fewer additives.

But finding consumers is one thing. Tracking down moonshiners is another.

Over the past several weeks, interviews with dozens of Chinese store owners, restaurateurs and street vendors yielded prevarications, obfuscations and otherwise fraught conversations.

Nearly all said they were simply selling a product that others had made. Some spoke mysteriously of unnamed wholesalers who materialized once a week with supplies. Others seemed less concerned about the legality of the product and more concerned about the competition.

“What if you were to learn how to make it and set up shop across the street?” asked one restaurateur in Flushing.

In some places, it appears, anyone can buy bootlegged rice wine, as long as you know what to ask for and hand over money, usually between $3 and $5 a quart. But in other places, a non-Chinese person, even one fluent in Chinese, might not get far.

When the manager was asked for rice wine at a store on Market Street in Manhattan’s Chinatown, fear swept over her face, and she said she did not have any. What about those unmarked containers sitting in a soft-drink refrigerator next to the Coca-Cola and Gatorade? “Not for sale!” she blurted.

At a store on Allen Street, a cashier first said she did not stock rice wine and went back to watching a video on a laptop. But when it was pointed out to her that several quarts of rice wine were stacked on the counter next to the cash register, she looked flustered and exclaimed: “It’s for cooking, for sautéeing!” Then: “It’s only for the Fujianese!”

A vendor below the overpass of the Manhattan Bridge on East Broadway said he did not know who had supplied him with the rice wine stacked on metal shelves on the sidewalk. But several containers were affixed with a small label for a Fujianese food supplier on Catherine Street.

At that address, a Fujianese man wearing an apron came to the unmarked door. Shown the label, he said it was the wrong address. Then he said that it was the right address, but that the business on the label had moved.

Finally, he admitted that the business on the label was his, but he insisted that he did not make rice wine. With that, he said he had to get back to work, and shut the door.

July 2011

Japanese Wineries Betting on a Reviled Grape

By CORIE BROWN

The Japanese have made wine for years; it is just that no one outside Japan wanted to drink it, particularly if it was sweet swill made from a native table grape called koshu.

But Ernest Singer thinks koshu deserves a place among the world’s fine white-wine grapes.

Mr. Singer, a wine importer based in Tokyo, said koshu captured his imagination nearly a decade ago when he tasted an experimental dry white wine made from the grape. Light and crisp with subtle citrus flavors, it was a match for Japan’s cuisine, he said, and could become the first Asian wine to draw international recognition.

With grapes from local growers and expertise from France, he began making his own wine, seeking to help koshu reach its potential. Now he and a clutch of family-owned Japanese wineries working under the banner Koshu of Japan are racing one another to be the first to produce koshu good enough to succeed in the world market.

“We have shown you can make real wine in Japan,” Mr. Singer said. The question remains, he said, whether established vintners will change their wine-making practices or “continue to sell their schlock.

“The good news is that I’ve encouraged a small number of young winemakers,” he said. Even his chief rival, Shigekazu Misawa, the owner of Grace Wine and a leader of Koshu of Japan, said that without Mr. Singer, it was unlikely that anyone would even think of exporting koshu.

“It was Ernie’s idea to raise quality to improve the position of koshu in the world market,” Mr. Misawa said. “He knew that koshu could become a wine that represents Japan to the world.”

Ever since Japan discovered European and California wines during the 1970s economic boom, the country’s homegrown wines have been losing ground to imports. In the mid-1990s, a few Japanese winemakers began trying to make better wine with koshu.

Japanese fine-wine drinkers, however, are haunted by what koshu has been for the past 150 years. Found almost exclusively in Yamanashi Prefecture at the base of Mount Fuji, koshu is a tart, gray grape. Growers would dispose of damaged and rotten fruit by making wine with heavy doses of sugar.

Yet, while Japan’s climate, with rainstorms common throughout the summer and fall, conspires against most wine grapes, koshu is well suited to a wet world. It resists the rot that plagues vinifera grapes in Japan. Late ripening, it retains its natural acidity.

Mr. Misawa was one of the first Japanese vintners to reject the idea of sugary koshu.

“I am the fourth-generation owner of Grace Wine,” Mr. Misawa says. “Koshu is two-thirds of all of the wine we make. And we needed to make it better.”

Yet, while he and other vintners traveled to Europe and Australia to learn modern winemaking methods, progress was slow. Viticulture methods from dry regions did not translate. And no one outside Japan had ever heard of koshu, a hybrid of Vitis vinifera—the species responsible for the world’s most popular wines—and an unidentifiable wild variety, according to DNA research at the University of California, Davis.

“I learned to make wine here,” said Mr. Koki Oyamada, the winemaker at Château Lumière, affiliated with Koshu of Japan. A new generation is pioneering new methods, he said. “We support each other, discuss problems, find solutions. We are improving quality.” After his first taste of dry koshu, Mr. Singer gambled big on it, flying in Denis Dubourdieu, professor of enology at the University of Bordeaux, to work on his first four vintages (2004 to 2007), which were made at Mr. Misawa’s winery with grapes he helped provide. To secure a steady supply of high-quality fruit, Mr. Singer leased land in three central Japan prefectures and now has nine koshu vineyards, a huge landholding for a nonfarmer in Japan.

Mr. Singer’s confidence in koshu is due in no small part to the wine critic Robert M. Parker Jr. The two men have worked together since 1998 when Mr. Parker hired Mr. Singer to be his representative in Asia. Mr. Parker tasted Mr. Singer’s 2004 koshu at the Grace winery in December 2004 and gave it a score of 87/88 on a scale of 100 in what Mr. Parker refers to as “an educational tasting.”

That first vintage was produced with grapes grown on old-fashioned pergola trellises. The canopies of these vines can stretch 50 feet in all directions from a mother vine the size of a tree. Mr. Singer says that his new vineyards, which are planted with vines planted closely together in neat rows with new shoots trained up, a system common in Europe and America, are producing smaller grapes with more-concentrated flavors that will make even better wine.

In setting up the winemaking protocol for Mr. Singer’s koshu, Mr. Dubourdieu eliminated what was once the only thing that made koshu drinkable: sugar. The wine is bone dry with a very low alcohol content. He accomplished this by getting rid of the grape’s bitter skin early in the process.

“I tried to extract nothing from the skin,” he said. “The bitterness of the koshu skin is extreme.”

The wine is bottled in the spring to be sold fresh and young.

With such a simple wine, Mr. Dubourdieu said he was surprised that it pleased Mr. Parker, who is usually seen as a fan of full-bodied wines.

“I was afraid,” he said. “I was not sure he could like a wine with 10.5 percent alcohol. That’s not exactly the wine he ranks well. But he was enthusiastic.

Still, Mr. Dubourdieu is skeptical that koshu will prove to be a valuable wine.

“It is simple, clean, fresh, nice,” he said. “That, and no more. It is a big mistake to think you can produce Montrachet in Japan. Koshu is more of a vinho verde.”

The Bordeaux producer Bernard Magrez is distributing a small amount of the Katsunuma Jyozo winery’s koshu in Europe and the United States. But the executive director of the winery, Youki Hirayama, said that beyond that, his company is focusing on Asian markets.

“This is Asian wine for Asian food,” he said, noting that the subtle flavors do not overwhelm delicate dishes.

Mr. Parker remains upbeat about koshu. “Up until this year, it was the best one I’ve tasted,” he wrote in an e-mail response to questions about Mr. Singer’s wine. “Now Bernard Magrez has one that is dry, crisp and very tasty, and much in the style of the Dubourdieu koshu. I think the wine, if made in these styles, has a quasi-Muscadet character—light-bodied and very refreshing.”

But there are wide variations in the new koshus, with some vintners experimenting with oak-barrel aging and each winery relying on a different level of chaptalization—adding sugar before fermentation—to increase alcohol levels along with adding weight and body to the wine. It is impossible, however, to be certain what Japanese wineries add to their wines. The country’s wine labeling regulations require that only 5 percent of the wine in a bottle be from Japanese grapes. The rest can be from anywhere.

Mr. Singer, Katsunuma Jyozo and the wineries of Koshu of Japan insist that their wines are 100 percent koshu.

But jaded Japanese wine drinkers have been slow to believe that they are worth their price tags of $20 and up.

After their first shipment to Europe this summer, the Japanese vintners involved in Koshu of Japan are hoping to gain international appreciation that would give koshu cachet in Asia.

On a recent trip to Japan, Michael Cimarusti, the chef and owner of Providence in Los Angeles, tasted a koshu produced by Katsunuma Jyozo and was so impressed that he added it to the wine pairings on his tasting menu.

But in New York, Mr. Singer’s importer, Robert Harmelin, said koshu had been a hard sell at $50 a bottle on restaurant wine lists. “No one knows the wine,” he said.

Mr. Singer asks for more time. “I’ve been in Japan for 50 years,” he said, “this movement is going to blossom.”

October 2010

Wines Have Feelings, Too

By ERIC ASIMOV

Almost from the moment humans began putting goblets to lips, they have challenged themselves to describe the experience of consuming wine. It has not been easy.

What does a wine smell like, anyway, and how does it taste? Does it remind you of fruit or flowers, or mushrooms and brambles? Possibly those metaphors are too literal. Maybe the overall effect is of a symphony, or a string quartet, or a Jimi Hendrix solo, or crumpled sheets the morning after. You could, of course, just say, “It smells like grapes and tastes like wine,” but you’d be laughed out of the tasting club. And to differentiate among wines, even if just for yourself, you at least have to make the effort.

Trouble is, most efforts focus solely on aromas and flavors, which seems to make sense because they are a wine’s most immediately striking characteristics. But another important distinguishing feature is not detectable by eyes, nose or taste buds. That is texture, the tactile sense of wine on the mouth, tongue and throat. If it’s difficult to find words for the aromas and flavors of wine, how much tougher it is to describe the feel.

Think about it too much, and you might find it embarrassing to describe a liquid as crisp, or steely. But that’s really no sillier than calling wines harsh or smooth; most wine drinkers know those sensations, whether the components that produce them are apparent or not.

The idea of texture in a liquid is so difficult, in fact, that wine experts cannot even agree on what to call it. You won’t find the word “texture” listed in the encyclopedic Oxford Companion to Wine, for example. Instead, you must settle for the unwieldy term “mouthfeel” and its constituents: body, density, weight and, for the truly geeky, viscosity. Joshua Wesson, chairman of Best Cellars, a chain of eight wine shops, uses the term “umami,” a Japanese word for the elusive, indescribably delicious quality that goes beyond salty, sweet, sour and bitter.

Whatever you call it, great texture is a crucial though undervalued characteristic of the best wines. It’s a crackling vivacity that insinuates itself in your mouth, almost demanding that you take another sip simply because it feels so good.

“It’s the same seduction that one first feels when touching cashmere or fur,” Mr. Wesson said. “Nobody touches fur once, or cashmere once. With wine, you want to keep it in your mouth, you want to play with it, you want to roll it around until you get it.”

Almost all the most memorable wines I’ve tasted in the last year or so have had beautiful textures in common, wines as diverse as a ’92 Puligny-Montrachet Les Pucelles from Domaine Leflaive and a ’94 Hillside Select cabernet sauvignon from Shafer in the Napa Valley.

These are world-class bottles, with three-figure prices, but a wine doesn’t have to be expensive to feel great in the mouth. I can think of a luscious ’02 Austrian riesling from Hirsch in the Kamptal for $28, a minerally ’02 Sancerre from Etienne Riffault for $20, and a smoky ’98 Tuscan sangiovese from Montevertine for $27. All had a mouthwatering quality that, whatever the price, both refreshed and entranced.

It’s a rare winemaker who, unbidden, actually speaks about texture, but recently Richard Geoffroy, the cellar master for Dom Pérignon Champagne, told me that for him the quest for the proper texture was the supreme goal in his winemaking.

“That feel, that chew, that third dimension: that’s really what I’m working on,” Mr. Geoffroy said, grasping for words in English, his second language, and coming up with some evocative ones.

For Mr. Geoffroy texture is sort of a conveyor belt that carries the aromatic and flavor components through the mouth from sip to swallow and beyond. Champagne’s effervescence offers a different textural experience from that of most wines, of course. Some people, trying to explain why Champagne goes so well with fried or spicy foods, talk about the bubbles’ “scrubbing” the mouth. I don’t know about that, but I do know you can feel the difference between a lively, vibrant Champagne and one that fatigues the mouth. It’s texture.

“I’m always amused that people are so interested in aromatics,” Mr. Geoffroy said.

Obtaining a deeper understanding of texture is not easy. Wine books devote scant attention to it, and a research foray can easily lead to terms like “polysaccharides” and “anthocyanins,” from which there is little hope of escape. In an effort to codify the textural experience of red wine, the Australian Wine Research Institute developed something it calls the mouthfeel wheel, with a vocabulary including words like “parching,” “grippy,” “watery” and “sappy.” Frankly, consulting the mouthfeel wheel is about as appealing as contemplating a mouthful of polysaccharides.

A simpler way of thinking of texture is to keep in mind its integral components, which most often are acidity and, especially in red wines, tannins. Most wine drinkers are familiar with tannins. They are the astringent compounds that in a young, tannic red wine—a Barolo, say, or a Bordeaux—can seem to suck all the moisture out of your mouth. Ideally, the tannins soften over time, allowing other characteristics to emerge. Tannins come from the grapes’ skins, seeds and stems, and, if the wines are aged in new oak barrels, they can come from the wood, too.

Acidity is the juicy, zingy quality. Too much acidity, and a wine can feel harsh and aggressive. Too little, and it feels flabby and shapeless. During the making of a wine, the acidity can evolve from the crispness of malic acids in the direction of softer lactic acids. Interestingly, lactic acids often provide a creamy texture to a wine. Aging a wine without removing its yeast remnants can also add silkiness.

While descriptions of texture will never replace those of aromas and flavors in the tasting notes so dear to the hearts of consumers, the feel of a wine is worthy of more attention. Yet most people bypass texture and go directly from smelling to tasting, even well-meaning wine lovers who violently agitate the wine in their mouths before swallowing.

“When people chew wine, you don’t really get a sense of its texture because you’re putting it through the wash-rinse cycle of the mouth,” Mr. Wesson said. “On first sip, I just let it sit there. Then I push it around with my tongue. When you push it around slowly, you get a much better sense of texture.”

Then, maybe, you can figure out what to call it.

June 2005

Too Broad a Stroke for Labeling Wines

By ERIC ASIMOV

American winemakers have learned an awful lot in the last 25 years. For example, many of them used to believe that given rich soils and plenty of sun, they could grow whatever kind of grapes they wanted, wherever they wanted, and turn them into wine. As a result, in Napa Valley, pinot noir was planted next to cabernet sauvignon next to zinfandel next to chenin blanc, and an awful lot of pretty bad wine was produced.

Now, most winemakers understand that each grape has its particular characteristics and does well only under certain conditions. Delicate pinot noir may do well in a foggy coastal vineyard, with warm days and cool nights, where cabernet sauvignon may not ripen. But cabernet might flourish in a warm valley vineyard that would bake pinot into jam. Only a fool, or a cynic, would nowadays plant cabernet next to pinot noir in the same vineyard. The same is true for turning the grapes into wine. The techniques are as different as playing the guitar and playing the violin.

Given the clear distinctions in growing conditions and winemaking techniques required for various grapes, you would think the governmental labeling rules would differ for each varietal. Yet, as it turns out, one set of rules governs almost every type of grape and wine, sometimes to the detriment of the wines themselves.

Consider the rules for calling wines by the names of grapes. In the United States since 1983, any wine named for a grape, whether merlot, chardonnay, zinfandel, or any other, has to be made from at least 75 percent of those grapes. The well-meaning intent of that federal law was to give consumers truth in advertising. Before 1983, wines needed to be only 51 percent chardonnay to be called chardonnay, even if the remainder was made from cheap French colombard or some other lower-quality grape.

While the solution may have given consumers more truth, it did not necessarily give them better wine, and today the rule is simply anachronistic. It affects different wines in different ways.

Take pinot noir. In Burgundy, where pinot noir is the historic red grape, the law requires almost all red Burgundies to be made of 100 percent pinot noir. Though unscrupulous producers have always tried to stretch production by tossing in some cheap red from Algeria or Campania, most Burgundy lovers, who assume a pinot noir wine is 100 percent pinot noir, regard such adulteration as sacrilege.

In California, it’s a different story. Demand for pinot noir has increased significantly since the movie Sideways. With wine you cannot increase production on the fly. You plant vines, tend and nurture them, and maybe in five years you’ve got wine—not a timetable for capitalizing on quick consumer shifts. But can anyone doubt that producers, especially on the low end, are using other grapes—strictly legally—to meet the increased demand by blending some of those pinot noirs down to the 75 percent limit?

Blending may be taking place on the high end as well, for different reasons. Americans have come to equate darker red wines with better red wines, and pinot noir falls on the pale side of the spectrum. Josh Jensen of the Calera Wine Company and other winemakers have said they believe some pinot noir producers are adding syrah to darken their pinot noirs. Again, it’s strictly legal, but in the world of pinot noir it’s not ethical.

By contrast, grapes from the Bordeaux family, like cabernet sauvignon, merlot and cabernet franc, are traditionally blended, and they are affected by the 75 percent rule in a different way. In Bordeaux, producers adjust the blend of grapes each year, depending on the characteristics of the vintage. Most wines, it is fair to say, would never meet California’s 75 percent threshold, but who cares? Consumers select Bordeaux wines not by the grape, but by the label. They buy a Clerc-Milon, for example, not a cabernet sauvignon, and the winemaker for Clerc-Milon can use whichever blend makes for the best wine.

In California, though, winemakers don’t have that luxury, not if they want to be able to benefit from the powerful marketing advantage that comes with having a grape name on the label. California merlot in particular has suffered because of this rule. Even in Pomerol and Saint-Émilion, where merlot is the dominant grape, it rarely surpasses 75 percent of the composition. But a California winemaker may be forced to accept a weedy wine simply to call it merlot when it would have benefited from a higher percentage of cabernet sauvignon or cabernet franc.

California has created a category, Meritage, for Bordeaux-style wines that don’t meet the varietal threshold, but the mere existence of this category does little to discourage winemakers from trying to achieve the limit.

Common sense dictates that the rules ought to be different for each grape. The rules should require that pinot noir and chardonnay be made of 100 percent pinot noir and chardonnay, or the wine should be called something else. Oregon has raised the threshold for all grapes to 90 percent, except for cabernet, which stays at 75 percent. But that seems too inflexible. For non-Burgundian varietals, every grape that makes up 5 percent or more of the blend ought to be listed in descending order of percentage. Rather than forcing a wine to meet the 75 percent threshold to be called merlot, it would be called merlot-cabernet sauvignon-petit verdot, or whatever the blend dictates.

Admittedly, this would take some getting used to. Perhaps, by the law of unintended consequences, winemakers would put together a 95 percent blend to maintain the single-varietal name, but I doubt it. Australia has a rule like this and consumers don’t find its blends too complicated to understand. They might even learn something interesting, that some syrah producers blend their wines with viognier, a white grape, as they do in Côte-Rôtie. The point is to put the winemaker, not the law, in charge of the blend.

Many wineries would oppose such changes, thinking they would lose out on successful marketing tools. But they don’t mind stretching the idea of truth in advertising anyway.

The Wine Institute, a trade group, wants the federal government to relax from 95 percent to 85 percent the proportion of wine that must come from a particular vintage in order to place a vintage date on labels.

The change would affect wines from general appellations like California or Napa County, but not those from more prestigious American Viticultural Areas, like Russian River Valley and Napa Valley. The wine institute says American rules, which also govern imported wines, cannot be enforced overseas, so foreign producers can stretch good vintages with wine from bad years.

Apparently, beating them to the punch is the institute’s solution.

August 2005

The Rites of Vintage Assembly

By FRANK J. PRIAL

On a chill, rainy day in early spring, seven men gathered in the refectory of Château Prieuré-Lichine, in the tiny village of Cantenac, 20 miles north of Bordeaux. They had come here at the invitation of the owner, Alexis Lichine, to help him make a wine.

Awaiting them on a huge oak table in what used to be the monks’ dining room were some 200 glasses and 22 bottles of wine, samples from all the vineyards that are part of Prieuré-Lichine. Their task: to help Mr. Lichine fix the blend that would become his 1982 vintage.

The cycle of the vine—and the wine—begins with the budding in the spring, follows through the flowering of the vines in early summer, and goes on to the harvest and the grape crush in the fall. Each step is important, but none more than the assembly of the wine—the assemblage—some six months after the wine is made. It is the day when professional wine men bring all their skills to bear, the day they create a vintage.

The members of the group that morning were Émile Peynaud, director emeritus of the Enological Laboratory at the University of Bordeaux and probably the world’s most prominent enologist; Jacques Boissenot, a professional enologist and a specialist in the wines of the Médoc region; Patrick Leon, president of the Enologists of Southwest France, and, in his youth, a student and employee of Mr. Lichine; Jean Delmas, the director of Château Haut-Brion; Hugues Lawton, a Bordeaux wine merchant; Sacha Lichine, a Boston wine importer and Mr. Lichine’s son; Edmond Caubraque, the business manager of Prieuré-Lichine, and Mr. Lichine himself.

I had thought that a chateau’s vines were all treated the same. I knew there were different kinds of grapes—cabernet sauvignon, cabernet franc, merlot, malbec, petit verdot—but I thought that each property’s blend varied little from year to year. And I thought everything was mixed together at harvest time. Well, that’s not the way it works.

Prieuré-Lichine was once actually the priory of the Benedictine church in Cantenac. When Alexis Lichine bought it in 1951, it had been a wine property for several hundred years and was known as Château Cantenac-Prieuré. It was a rundown, ragtag, has-been vineyard that had not been properly tended for half a century. This is not uncommon in the Médoc, where owners die and heirs are indifferent. Absentee ownership, inept management, incompetent advice—all contribute to the deterioration and sometimes the destruction of once-proud wine properties. Some Bordeaux vineyards, famous a century ago, exist today in name only, in old books.

Many Bordeaux properties were decimated by legacies. Heirs divided and sold their parcels until some vineyards were crazy quilts of divided ownership. When Mr. Lichine arrived at the Prieuré, he found himself the owner of a jumble of vineyard patches and strips: a few vines here, a few vines there, a small good vineyard here, a big poor one there. He has spent the ensuing three decades wheeling, dealing, begging, borrowing, threatening and cajoling in an unceasing effort to create the kind of vineyard he thinks the Prieuré should be.

His experience is not unique. Some years ago, Baron Philippe de Rothschild talked about the rebuilding of Château Clerc-Milon, a property he owns adjacent to his famous Château Mouton-Rothschild in Pauillac, 20 miles north of Cantenac.

Over the years, Clerc-Milon also had fallen into disrepair. A key portion of the vineyard—in the very center of the best vines—was owned by an elderly woman who had no interest in wine but no desire to sell her vines, either. “Every year, I would invite her to tea at Mouton,” Baron Philippe said, “and every year I would ask her to sell. Every year she turned me down.” Eventually, she relented, but it took decades of the legendary charm and financial clout of a Rothschild to overcome the inherent French reluctance to part with land. Mr. Lichine’s resources are more meager than Baron Philippe’s. “I’ve picked up some good vines here,’’ he says, ‘‘traded a few of them for a less valuable piece of land there, then in turn sold that for a couple of very good vines somewhere else.”

The key is this: The town of Cantenac is adjacent to the town of Margaux, one of the most famous of all the French wine communes. Cantenac actually shares the right to use the name, or appellation, Margaux on its wine. So do several other small villages. So long as Mr. Lichine buys within the confines of the wine area of Margaux, his vines are legitimately part of the vineyard of Prieuré-Lichine.

June 1983