How I Overcame my UC Davis Education
November 16, 2021
I was asked a few years ago to return to UC Davis, where I had studied many years ago, and to talk to one of the Vit classes. I titled my talk, “How I Overcame my UC Davis Education.” (For the record I haven’t been invited back since.) But I thought I might use that talk as a basis in talking to you about how to broaden your minds beyond the formation of an academic training.)
I began my talk with a recounting of my career at Davis:
When I was a student at UC Davis, I was a holy terror - or actually a holy terroir, come to think about it. I had a million questions, most of them about pinot noir- what about clonal diversity, what about close spacing, what about skin/juice ratios? And about those limestone soils - why do 50 million Burgundians think that limestone is important? Most of my professors were not so interested in answering my barrage of questions. They would get a very worried look when they saw me coming down the hall and would tend to duck into the nearest janitorial closet for cover.
As a would-be viticultural francophile, I assumed the role of the defender of the French paradigm - to the extent that I understood that paradigm - which in retrospect, seems like a bit of a stretch. I had this perverse desire to torture my professors. After class, I would sometimes assemble a very small cadre of tolerant listeners and try to systematically rebut all of the points the prof had made in his lecture. I do wince at the incredible arrogance I displayed, but I was just a kid, and a rather snotty one at that.
As I said, every single waking moment of every day and actually much of my dreaming moments were spent in reverie about pinot noir. Pinot noir was my mantra, my obsession, my idée fixe. I ended up in the Bonny Doon area of the Santa Cruz Mountains trying to grow the Great American Pinot Noir. I bought some pinot from Oregon state in 1983 - this was back when people weren’t too sure about Oregon - schlepped it back to Santa Cruz and found the grapes to be infinitely more interesting than the ones I was growing in Santa Cruz. Bummer. But it did lead me to discover the wonderful grapes of the Rhône, and the Rhone has been very good to me.
There is actually an important lesson to be learned. We New World grape growing human beings have the illusion that we can control things - we’ll just simply grow some great grapes, out of sheer will, that’s what we’ll do. I was so incredibly naive. One can be a cowboy, buy a huge parcel of land, move heaven but more typically earth, to plant this great vineyard of the latest grape variety du jour, but often the smallest amount of patience and observation would yield an infinitely more satisfying result - read, save millions of dollars. I can not say it any simpler: “Look before you leap.” This may sound odd coming from someone who is or at least was sometimes portrayed as a viticultural wild man, the Dr. Gonzo of grapes – one who will try absolutely anything, at least once. My suggestions to anyone who will listen to me: Look around. Do some research. Think, meditate and pray for inspiration. But also, call FPS and the National Germplasm Repository as well as some of the smaller, more adventurous nurseries and see if they happen to have some teroldego, ciliegiolo or nero d’avola. Go through the process of finding some interesting grapes in Europe and figure out how to bring them in, while observing the salient regulatory guidelines. Field-bud a couple of vines to 20 or 30 varieties that in your imaginings might be interesting on your site. Try a few things. Then leap. Look at what your neighbors are doing and if you want your wines to taste a lot like theirs, follow what they do. If you want them to taste totally different, you will have to engage in a lot of deep thought, meditation and prayer. I’ll talk in a little while about the very highly unusual project I’m conducting now at Popelouchum, which I’m convinced will likely enable me to produce wines rather unlike anything ever tasted in California. Let’s hope - in a good way.
One really does need to open one’s eyes - to see really where you are on this planet. My great critique of California winemakers and grape growers is that they are willfully naive. They truly don’t care to know where they stand in the scheme of things. Some of this naiveté expressed itself as a sort of arrogance on the part of the Davis faculty some years back when I was a student there. There was a sort of smug, self-congratulatory attitude in the industry - almost like a religious fundamentalist’s self-satisfaction. We are saved and regrettably, everyone else, especially those primitive Europeans, is going to hell. Here’s rude revelation #1: California wines are as good as they are, I would argue, largely out of nothing in particular we are doing. It is generally, I would argue, a function of the absolutely outstanding weather that we enjoy - weather that Europeans would kill or maim for. I think that we have, as an industry, largely grown lazy and complacent. We do not feel any particular impetus to improve or change what we do. I could cite the pitiful amount of money that is invested for grape research. I think it is something on the order of a fifth the amount that Australia invests in wine research. Why should we want to change when some of us are or at least were selling our wines for sixty or seventy dollars a bottle? (That number has now gone up to north of a hundred since I gave my presentation at Davis.)
The Greeks have a word for this. Hubris. In Yiddish, it is chutzpah. Our wines sell well in the States for a number of reasons that we can discuss but they are not particularly competitive on the world market and are becoming less so. Moreover, there are vast vineyard holdings in southern France, southern Italy, Spain, Portugal and South Africa that have the potential to make absolutely stellar wine on the serious cheap.
So, here’s the deal. To succeed, we have to understand where we are and also who we are. What are our strengths and what can we do best? And ultimately, we must try to find some core of originality, something that sets our work apart. In France, there is the appellation controlée system, which is my wont to ridicule because I generally hate all rules and regimentation. Despite the fact that the appellation system is a bit corrupt, and historically sensitive to political influence, it remains, in my humble estimation, a rather valiant attempt to recognize and organize differences that are site-specific and therefore infinitely precious and more or less immutable, though with the advent of global warming, perhaps all bets are off. The notion that the appellation Morey-St. Denis in Burgundy will eternally possess characteristics that set it off from an adjoining appellation, should, in principle, insure its survival because as human beings, what ultimately we crave are differences. What a French vigneron strives for is typicity - to make a wine that transparently is what it is. You should all meditate on this notion.
And where does typicity come from? To thine own terroir be true. There is no such thing as typicity without terroir, the unique set of attributes that are associated with the physical attributes of a site. A quick word on terroir: By definition, every place possesses some degree of terroir, but not all terroirs are created equal; some are far more expressive than others. A great, that is to say, eloquent terroir tends to have several characteristics. The primary one is that its hydrologic and chemical profile tends to solve the vine’s issues more successfully than adjacent sites most of the time, in other words, possessessing geophysical characteristics that lead to a great degree of homeostasis. Like the Goldilocks paradigm, a soil that supports the right amount of water and fertility most years - not too much and not too little. A receding water table that parsimoniously doles out water to the plant during the growing season, or a soil that has good water holding capacity but the water is tightly held. Often the most expressive terroirs tend to be associated with available minerals - with some component of rock in the process of decomposition. I won’t even try to explain the phenomenon of the great mystery of “minerality” except to say that I think it is a real phenomenon. I don’t know how the flavor of earth ends up in wine, but somehow sometimes it does. I can’t begin to posit the mechanism but a vibrant soil microflora (i.e. no herbicide or fungicide sprays) seems implicated, and roots - lots of them coupled with a relatively modest amount of fruit - seem to give the greatest likelihood of the emergence of soil characteristics above they chatter of varietal expression. (There was a study done in Chianti a number of years ago that showed that the ratio of root mass to fruit volume was the single best predictor of grape quality.)
For me, a wine that can express its terroir is perhaps the most satisfying wine that one can experience and I believe a wine that will have true sustainability. But I know that this is definitely a minority opinion. New World palates are not tuned in to terroir – we want lots of jammy fruit, lashings (or gobs) of fruit, high alcohol and tons of wood. I don’t know how much longer Americans will insist on wines like these; viticultural virtue is not typically rewarded, nor enological iniquity punished. These wines fool our senses in a certain way, in the same way that our primate physiology responds to the sugar and fat in doughnuts and McDonald’s burgers. I don’t think that the craze for these wines – especially the very expensive ones will last forever. They are vacuous, bimbo wines – perhaps satisfying to go out with once but murder if one attempts a serious conversation.
Before I go any further, I’d like to offer you a construct that I think is very useful to consider in thinking about wine. The French make the distinction between what they call vins de terroir or wines of place and vins d’effort, or wines of effort. You can think about this distinction as a sort of dichotomy but it’s really more of a continuum. A wine of effort, by the way, the kind of wine that we tend to do very well in the New World, is one where the winemaker has controlled as many of the variables as he or she possibly can - irrigation, yeast type, fermentation temperature, etc. The winemaker has a strong hand in the determination of the wine style; the wines therefore tend to be predictable and consistent, generally a good thing in the land of commerce. One could possibly argue that the stylistic consistency of New World wines has been a great factor in their success among New World drinkers, who are mostly not looking for surprises in what they drink.
Vins de terroir, on the other hand, are made with a slightly different intention. It’s not as if the winemaker is goofing off and taking it easy, but the winemaker is in some sense submerging his/her stylistic predilection and really trying to work out how he or she can best articulate the unique characteristics that are associated with the site itself. The winemaker is working in service of something beyond him or herself, almost a sort of religious pursuit. At first when I would hear great winemakers brush off the compliments by saying, “Pouf, it’s not me, monsieur, it’s the vineyard that is making the wine,” I would imagine it was a sort of false modesty. No, they really mean it. A great vineyard really does make a winemaker seem a lot more clever than he or she really might be. I don’t yet think most American palates are really quite ready for vins de terroir. They’re often lean fussy and reticent, slow to emerge from the glass. You never know if they need 30 minutes or 4 hours or two days of aeration. They’re infinitely vexing, but once you grow to appreciate them, predictable “controlled” wines tend to come off as slightly banal.
So, what is to be done, or to be doon, as I might have once said? From my perspective, our greatest strength is the fact that we do not have a tradition that enlightens or enslaves us. And more importantly, we have the perspective to learn from a diverse array of traditions and sources. We are utterly free to experiment with a wide range of grapes - not entirely wide enough in my humble estimation - where and how we see fit. This is an amazing gift. That is why it is so utterly exasperating to me that with all of this freedom, so many people are marching, lemming-like, down the same path. We have the freedom to create our own unique styles - what would tannat and dolcetto taste like blended together?
One cannot minimize the great blessing we enjoy with our superlative climate. We really don’t have disastrous wipe-out vintages and our grapes do seem to consistently ripen. We should be looking at grapes that love the sun, but also ones that could be grown essentially under cooler conditions here in California relative to their traditional residency and benefit from the preternaturally long growing season that much of California enjoys. This could be one strategy to arrive at a new and unique expression of a grape, distinct from its Old World paradigm.
Having said all of that, here are thirty odd things I wished somebody had taught me when I was at Davis:
Wine is not infinitely manipulable. You can only add so much acid, so much bentonite, tannin, gelatin, take the wine for a spin on the spinning cone, subject it to hypothermia, before the sum of the wine’s parts adds to zero. It’s like the old joke. Doctor – I broke my leg in three places. What should I do? The answer is stay out of those places. If you are working with grapes that compel you to make wholesale manipulations, maybe you should stay out of those places.
Filtration can often tragically compromise wine, especially if it is not done carefully. Take the time to make sure that your wine is very filterable before filtering it, as otherwise, it can be a traumatic experience for the wine. If you have a raging brettanomyces infection in your wine, a careful cross-flow filtration may be a totally rational thing to do. But you want to make sure that there is some life-force in your wine – more on this in a moment – this may allow your wine to survive filtration.
Merlot actually does suck - and it is not particularly “soft.” (I think I’ve backed off on this pronouncement since I wrote this, as in fact much of the dreadful Merlot in California has disappeared - only to be replaced with dreadful Pinot. We do tend to overdo things.)
The presence of perfect “numbers” is no assurance that the wine will be any good. Ultimately, people drink wine and not numbers. Brix will only tell you how much alcohol you might expect, not whether your grapes are ripe. (Hint: look at the maturity of the seeds and taste the grapes.)
The absence of defects in wine does not necessarily equate to the presence of quality.
If you surrender to perceived economic “reality,” you have still surrendered.
Don’t follow leaders, don’t be a slave to pH meters, and don’t go with the pack. The pack has no idea where it is heading. Think for yourself; develop your own palate. You will be more successful if you make wines to please yourself rather than others. Then, try to figure out how to communicate what it is that you’ve done.
Efficient is not always better. I was taught that the sooner one completed ML fermentation the better. My experience has taught me the reverse. A long, slow malolactic will protect the wine in the cellar and allow you to use substantially less SO2 in the end.
You absolutely, positively, cannot have it all - high yields and high quality. Get over it now.
Drip irrigation is not the savior of the grape industry - it may perhaps even be the Vintichrist. Drip is a very interesting idea from a water conservation standpoint, but locating the drip irrigation in-row and irrigating frequently for short periods may not be very clever at all. It encourages weed growth, shallow rooting and a constricted root zone. Much more clever would be to use micro-sprinklers and irrigate away from the vines or contrive to inject the water at a depth of several feet, as far away from the vine as you can manage. As I said earlier, lots of roots, not so much fruit. (We tend to do the opposite in California.
Big-time shifts in the wine’s chemistry or its physical milieu -whether it be rapid temperature changes, large draughts of oxygen (unless during fermentation, when you generally can’t give the yeast enough), big doses of SO2, tartaric acid etc. tend to leave lasting scars. Small, incremental changes tend to preserve the integrity of the wine.
SO2 also really sucks and should be used with the lightest possible hand, but know that you will likewise have to get a real handle on what is going on microbiologically lest you end up with a Science Fair experiment gone terribly wrong.
It is not necessary to burn down the winery in the event of a brettanomyces infection. It does happen in the best of families. I suspect that maybe, just maybe, we may begin to think of brett as a tertiary fermentation and may well be inoculating our wines with benign strains of brett. Analogously, if some virus is detected in your vineyard, it may not be necessary to napalm it to Kingdom Come.
The belief that your cultured yeast strain is actually fermenting your grapes is truly a matter of faith. I might also add that as a rule, purchasing cultured yeast may end up being a great waste of money. Indigenous yeast, if used correctly (try pieds de cuve) will give you a lovely inefficient (from an alcohol conversion standpoint) fermentation, resulting in more reasonable levels of alcohol in the wine.
Punching down at least for most Mediterranean varieties is generally more interesting than pumping over, though pumping over or better yet, déléstage is interesting for varieties or particular lots that tend to produce sulfides during fermentation. Small lot fermentations are almost always better than large ferments, and if you can figure out how to ferment these small lots in a wooden vessel, so much the better. There are other really cool materials with which to fabricate a fermentation vessel – glass, cement and clay - clay amphorae or ovoid cement or porcelain eggs are particularly cool - I wish they weren’t so expensive. Stainless steel does have some things going for it – ease in controlling fermentation temperature being one, but apart from that feature as well as ease in cleaning, it is not so interesting as a storage vessel.
It is impossible to make great wine on a vast, heroic scale.
Microbullage is largely misunderstood and has been unfairly vilified in some quarters. If used wisely, it can actually enhance the longevity of a wine, not foreshorten it.
Oak is not a primary flavor in wine. Those who think so tend to think of ketchup as a vegetable. Many oak barrels these days represent a way to very expensively deform and distort one’s wine and should be used with the utmost discretion. Oak chips should also be used very sparingly, but can be quite interesting if used during the fermentation to help give structure to the wine and protect the anthocyanins.
Not all soils and vineyard sites are created equal. There are “smart soils” - ones that are sort of homeostatic in their water-holding and dispersing characteristics and there are “dumb” soil,” the effects of their dumbness which can be slightly mitigated through irrigation.
The viticultural reality that presently obtains is quite ephemeral and is largely due to historical accident. There really is no historical inevitability to the dominance of cab, chard and of course, the ubiquitous pinot noir.
The most interesting grape varieties are yet to be planted in California and I think that they will most likely come from southern Italy or Greece.
The Central Valley may be the savior of the California wine industry.
We will enjoy sound wines made without sulfur dioxide in our wine drinking lifetime.
Screwcaps totally rock, for a number of reasons, not the least of which is they enable wines to live longer and also allow the winemaker to make stable wines using lower levels of SO2; they will become extremely commonplace in our industry in the next three to five years.
There is likely no such thing as the best grape variety or best clone. A good variety is one that is well suited to its growing environment. A blend of clones will almost always be superior to one super-clone, and I’ll talk in a moment about a refinement of this idea.
Old-fangled is sometimes best. In a warm climate, for example, I believe we have not improved upon head-training for grapevines. Pergola trellising systems also seem to me to be particularly interesting for warmer climate areas as they are naturally cooling.
We know absolutely nothing about rootstocks. He who thinks he knows anything is grossly deluded.
Go spend some time in Europe before you get too tied down here. It’s not that they’re smarter or better than we are, they just have a very different perspective on things and the broader your vision, the more thoughtful a winemaker you will be.
Organic farming is cool; biodynamic is far more interesting and represents a more sustainable model. Regenerative agriculture, enhancing the tilth of the soil and sequestering carbon is the future.
The most important issue in wine was never addressed academically when I was a student and is only just now beginning to be thought about, and that is: Why do some wines live and some wines die after opening? You can call this quality “minerality” or “reductive tendency” or “life-force.” But, it is a quality in wine that is easily demonstrable, i.e. it is the ability of a wine to tolerate an oxidative challenge. If you open a bottle and drink a glass or two from it, then put the cork (or better screwcap) back in it or on it, the wine should in fact have the capability of staying fresh for the better part of a week. New World wines are generally dead in the water the following day, whereas Old World wines are not. No one has worked out the details of this mechanism, but I am convinced that it is related to minerals in the soil or perhaps to as yet unidentified micro-organisms from the soil biome. Again, I think that that derives from the way that the grapes are grown – a vibrant soil microflora is critical, certain kinds of mineral rich soils seem to enhance this effect, restricted yields, maybe smaller grape vines headed lower to the ground, and above all deep and wide-ranging root systems (i.e. no drip irrigation) all seem to help.
What is of obvious interest to me is how to dry-farm successfully in California and to do that one must look at how things were done 100 years ago. Think about old-fangled rootstocks, such as 110R, wider spacing, head-trained vines.
If there is a single notion that correlates to the making of a great wine, it might be this: Begin with the very best grapes you can grow or find. The “best” grapes will generally come from soils that are not so rich, with limited yields, mildly stressed but not stressed out vines, and from the coolest sites that will still allow them to come to complete ripeness. They will be grown on a site that seems to ripen them at the appropriate time most years out of ten, generally later in the season, as a lot of the most interesting flavor components are synthesized towards the end. Now, here’s the second part of the formulation: You’ve begun with fully ripened, intensely flavored grapes and now, very importantly, you will want to extract them as gently as you possibly can. This is sometimes a bit counter-intuitive to young winemakers, who might instinctively want to extract every molecule of flavor from the grapes that they can. (This can be a bit of an exercise in machismo.) But a gentle extraction allows for the expression of nuance and elegance. It really has taken me a long time to learn to curb my enthusiasm for extraction.
So, that was and is my list. Before taking any questions, I thought I’d talk briefly about my project at Popelouchum in San Juan Bautista, where I think I may really be on to something…
