Thoughts on Wine
October 16, 2021
Good day. My name is Randall Grahm, late of Bonny Doon Vineyard as well as Popelouchum Farm in San Juan Bautista, and most recently, winemaker for the somewhat unusually named project, “The Language of Yes,” a joint venture I’ve been working on with a small outfit out of Modesto, CA, called E & J Gallo. I have been working with wine for so long that it is now virtually a mother tongue for me, as it were, but I realize that for a lot of people, maybe yourself, it is still quite mysterious. The most important thing to remember is that the word “wine” encompasses a vast range of things - from the most basic, simple beverage made from grapes and perfect for, say, washing down a pizza or spaghetti and red sauce of a Wednesday evening - to the most sublime, rarified, mystical, magical potion of incomparable complexity, life-changing sometimes, and one that would make one wish to genuflect in wonder and awe (if one were given to genuflective behavior). And, of course, everything in between, which really represents the majority of the field.
There are a lot of ways to think about this ontological distinction. (Ontology, by the way, is the philosophical study dealing with different orders of “being,” which is what we’re dealing with here.) There are any number of ways of thinking able out these distinctions: You can imagine some wines made by an essentially industrial production process; this is not necessarily a 100% bad thing. Total “control” of the grape growing and winemaking process also encompasses “quality control” and a certain kind of consistency, which is not a bad thing at all, and maybe something that we do particularly well in the New World. Anyhoo, grapes go into the winery - lots of them from possibly many different vineyards throughout the state. A very carefully controlled process - selected yeast, addition of certain chemicals - maybe the addition of some tartaric acid to improve the acid balance and the judicious addition of something else that enhances the color and body of the wine. But the point is: the winemaker is making a very conscious effort to create a specific, mostly replicable product with a style that he/she is trying to guide. If the winemaker is successful, he/she will end up with a bottle that tastes not too dissimilar to the bottle of a previous vintage that you may have tried a year or more ago. The wine, if it is a red wine, might contain a bit of residual sugar (or not) - this would be a stylistic decision that the winemaker has made to perhaps appeal to a certain customer base that responds well to that style. If the wine was made by a large winery, you can be fairly certain that a number of iterations of the wine were presented to a tasting panel to determine what was the most popular.
What I’m getting at - hopefully not too judgmentally - is that this style of wine would be what the French call a “vin d’effort,” or a wine of effort, one where the winemaker has controlled as many of the variables as he/she possibly could, to produce a wine that he/she has had a strong influence on the style. “Wines of effort” can be the most basic, least expensive wines that you’ll encounter but can also be breathtakingly expensive Napa Valley Cabernets that sell for more than $100 and only available on a mailing list for which someone dies or stops drinking for a new subscriber to be admitted. The point is that the winemaker is strongly guiding the winemaking process to create a particular outcome; you can say he has a strong stylistic hand. Allow me to contrast this genre with a different way of thinking about wine, what the French would call, “vins de terroir,” or wines of place. This is a kind of wine that will generally be more expensive than your most basic “wine of effort,” but it needn’t necessarily be crazy expensive. The point of difference is that in this case, the winemaker is still working very hard to make a good and delicious wine but he/she has a slightly different objective - to capture and express the true originality of the wine, the personality of the place from where the grapes are grown - a quality that exists out of the winemaker’s direct control; this generally means grapes that come from a singular vineyard. The winemaker is working to honor, to evoke something larger than himself or herself, to somehow try to capture and express the singular complexity of nature itself.
This idea may be a little difficult to wrap your head around, but I’ll try to explain: The qualities that we find in wine come from many different factors - from the primary flavors of the grapes, qua grapes, but also from the magical new compounds that are formed through the process of fermentation and ageing process. Then, there are the contributions from certain other elements that touch the wine - the contribution of perhaps oak barrels or even some additives (gasp, yes!) that a winemaker might add to enhance the body or the structure of a wine. (For the record, I am myself not a great fan of wine additives - they’re like certain food additives; they occlude some of the more natural flavors of the wine itself, but they’re added because a lot of people seem to like those taste sensations, the same way that palates grow acclimated to processed foods; they make things go down “smoother,” if you will. The French call this macquillage, or make-up. It is definitely a matter of taste as to whether one favors a very put-together look or one that is more naturalistic.
But returning to the subject of terroir, the quality that is sometimes found in many Old World wines and generally not so much in those of the New World, what I’m talking about is the contribution of the physical characteristics of the place where the grape is grown - the characteristics of the soil, for example. Some kinds of soils - limestone, granite, schist, for example, seem to make a very strong contribution to the flavor profile of the wine, and others not so much - still theoretically present but less expressive No one yet really has posited a cogent explanation of how soil characteristics seem to end up in our wine, but connoisseurs can very often reliably identify not just the grape variety from which the wine is made (that’s relatively easy) but also the soil type in which the grapes were grown. I, myself, am a great lover of wines of place - it’s a sort of intellectual frisson to be able to key in on those soil characteristics. But it’s virtue is not the onanistic satisfaction of a well-played parlor game; the qualities of terroir can give a wine a sort of dimensionality - not just the taste of a jumble of flavors, but a kind of temporal sequencing of the flavors; it imposes a kind of order or organization to the wine, if that makes any sense - a crystalline geometry, to be slightly poetic.
But I’ll give you this caveat: Many American palates really don’t grok the virtue of the phenomenon of a vin de terroir, or wine of place. The wines can often seem slightly austere, hard or unprepossessing when they’re first opened. “Steely,” “flinty” or “mineral-rich” are other descriptors that are sometimes used. One might even be tempted to anthropomorphize them and attribute to them human characteristics. European wines are a bit like European people - a bit stand-offish perhaps at first, but potentially possessing a lot more depth after one has gotten to know them better. To be totally honest, these flavors can be a bit of an acquired taste to the American palate, especially after tasting a lot of New World wines, many of which are very fruity and can sometimes come off as being a bit confected, if not over-ripe. Acquiring a taste for Old World wines is a bit like cultivating a tolerance for a degree of bitterness or astringency that you find in radicchio or the earthy flavor, geosmin, found in beets. But if you can get to the point to begin to appreciate it as a feature not as a bug, you might find that this is the kind of wine that may well be more companionable with a meal, say. In the same way that you might find that a conversation with someone who does not necessarily agree with everything you say (but in a pleasant way) will likely be more satisfying than one with a person who contributes no new information, agrees with everything you say, and who is utterly conflict-averse.
One last word on wines that exhibit these so-called soil characteristics. As I mentioned, they largely derive from certain kinds of mineral-rich soils. But how they are grown - how restricted they are in their yield (with less fruit carried per vine, you’ll get a stronger impression of soil characteristics) and how healthy is the soil microflora - does the vigneron eschew the use of herbicides and fungicides, such as you might find in wines “made from organically grown grapes.” It’s a much longer conversation to have about all of the issues surrounding “natural” or “organic” wines, but for now, suffice to say that wines made from grapes grown in microbially alive soils, will show a greater degree of vibrant “life” in the bottle. This is generally a very good thing, but can be quite confusing to all but the most sophisticated and experienced wine drinker.
Wines, especially “great” wines that are full of life tend to be a lot more resistant to oxidation, i.e. they have bigger appetites for oxygen after they’re open and if unopened, will tend to live a long time. You will definitely want to open these bottles well before - usually a few hours or sometimes the previous day - before drinking. Yes, I know, this has to drive the novice wine lover totally crazy; how can one possibly know precisely how many hours before serving the wine do you want to open it? Well, let’s just say for now, you’ll want to decant this kind of wine before serving and pay attention to how it changes in the glass. A great wine will very often be very shy in the glass when it is first poured - the nose may not yield much, the body might seem light. But with air, the wine’s aromas will emerge, it will actually seem to grow in the glass, seemingly becoming deeper and richer. I’m not mentioning the fact that wine can undergo such dramatic changes in how it presents itself as a means of freaking you out. (How can anyone ever know that they’re drinking the wine under optimal circumstances?) Rather, I’m trying to alert you to the fact that the most interesting wines are worthy dining companions; they will absolutely change and evolve in the glass, talk to you in their own way and can be emotionally moving the way that any great art can be. If you have the time and resources, it’s an interest that is supremely worth cultivating. But I might wish to sketch out a few suggestions before you jump in head-first:
Some (New) Rules:
Wine and time. As I mentioned before, the most interesting wines require time to develop in the bottle and in the glass. You can often not tell what a wine is really all about from the very first sip. In fact, and I’m sorry if this might drive people crazy, in fact, the most interesting wines of all are often very inexpressive, “dumb,” we sometimes say when they are first poured. Wines are like people in a sense as they go through different stages - in the bottle, a process which is in a sense mirrored by the kind of development they go through in the glass when it is poured. Again, New World wines, especially ones that have been filtered are less prone to these sorts of dramatic shifts in their expressiveness. They will tend to show well immediately after they’re poured, and I suppose that this is not necessarily a dreadful thing.
How to Learn about Wine: You can try to find a suitable wine tasting course through a wine shop or school, but if you are serious about learning more about wine you should really try to be systematic about it. The real problem is that the very diverse, heterodox universe of wine can just randomly come at you. You need a sort of mental filing system. I’ve found that the best way to begin to retain wine knowledge is to find some like-minded people to taste with so you can begin to create a sort of vinous data base. You will want to form a tasting group if you’re up for it, ideally with 6 to 8 people; this is really the optimal size, in my opinion. Finding the right tasting partners is a bit like finding a marriage partner. You want folks who a) have comparable wine buying budgets to yourself, and b) are willing to actually speak up at tastings and offer their impressions, and of course you want people you enjoy hanging out with. The advantage of an intimate tasting group is that you can taste a number of bottles of a particular genre of wine - 6 or 8 New Zealand Sauvignon Blancs for example at a single go, or 6 or 8 bottles of Meursault. In this way, you have a chance of really forming a good impression of what a particular variety or region might be like. Obviously, you can start with the more common and accessible categories - Russian River Pinot Noirs, for example, but don’t forget that it’s a very big wine world out there and make sure to spend an evening dedicated to Hungarian Furmint and one to oddball varieties like Pignolo or Schioppettino from Friuli. Oh, one more thing. In your tasting group, try to find at least one person who is super-anal, i.e. highly organized and might even be willing to collate tasting notes on the stuff that you’ve tasted. Trying to remember it all yourself is impossible for most people.
Which brings me to a very important lesson I’ve learned. As tempting as it might be, when you’re starting out, don’t go hog wild and buy too much of a given variety or wine style. If you stick with the path of wine discovery, there is one certainty and that is your tastes will change. If you absolutely adore a given wine, buy 3 bottles, not a case. By the time you’re on the third bottle, you will be ready to move on to the next thing.
Accessories and other Crucial Tips: How could you imagine that you would not need at least a few accessories to optimize your experience? Here are the things you should not stint on: Buy yourself some proper wine tasting glasses. Don’t get the hand-blown ones - they’ll break your heart as they will crack if you look at them sideways, but the machine made Riedel all-purpose tasting glass, Schott Zwiesel or Zalto are all fine. You will also need a proper decanter and corkscrew. Lastly, if you ever get into serious collecting, you really want to hold your wine at the proper temperature. You really don’t want your bottles to ever get much above 70 degrees F. if you can help it. A steady temperature ideally in the high ‘50s is ideal if you can swing it.
Continuing education: You want to get some proper wine books, ideally the ones that can unlock some of the more mysterious areas: You should look at the classics: Hugh Johnson’s World Atlas of Wine, The Oxford Companion to Wine. The British writers generally are best: Jancis Robinson, Andrew Jefford, Jonathan Livingston-Learmonth, Clive Coates, but don’t overlook Kermit Lynch’s “Adventures on the Wine Route” or Jon Bonné’s “New Wine Rules.” Alas, the American wine journals are mostly pretty dull. Wine and Spirits by far the best. Look at the English publications - Decanter Magazine and The World of Fine Wine for some real wine scholarship.
This next bit of advice is perhaps the most crucial.: You will need to find a wine merchant whom you can trust implicitly. I will share with you a very intimate secret. I have been in the wine business now for more than forty years, have some reputation as someone who knows his wines, and it has taken me virtually this long to find a few merchants I can trust, who will no longer try to bullshit me. I will walk into a wine shop, describe in excruciating detail the style of wine that I like, and I still (AND STILL!) as often as not I will end up with clunker bottles. Your life will improve greatly when you can identify this person; it’s not an easy process but it’s worth it. What’s really tricky is that, for the moment, you should really try to make yourself open to a diverse range of wine styles until you can hone in on certain styles or producers that you might favor. You’re looking for excellent wine and no merchant will admit to selling anything less. You need to find the geekiest, most sincere merchant you can, look them in the eye and try to determine if they’re giving it their best shot. The best indication of how serious a wine merchant is the vinous company he or she keeps. Look carefully at the selection. If Rombauer Chardonnay or Meiomi Pinot Noir or The Prisoner are stacked up high, run, don’t walk out of the store and don’t come back.
The most important thing about wine is that it has to be fun. Don’t let it become another point of stress in your life. Resign yourself to the fact that not all bottles you taste will be brilliant; that’s why a tasting group is so cool. Also, don’t moan that the greatest wines of the world are now obscenely priced and you may never taste a bottle of Romanée-Conti or Petrus. There is still a vast range of great wines out there that are within reach, now more available than ever; arguably we are living in a sort of renaissance of fine wine and there’s been no better time to jump in.
I am remiss in failing to cover some of the basic aspects of the winemaking and grape-growing process. Here’s what I think you need to know about winemaking: As you may likely already know, white wines and red wines are generally made in different ways, but in fact, this has not always been the case, indeed, historically, the divergence only really occurred a few hundred years ago in the so-called modern age of winemaking. There has been a modest movement afoot - the so-called “orange wine” phenomenon, whereby white grapes are handled much as red grapes are. Orange wines are consumed by hipsters in Brooklyn and Berkeley and oddly enough, Scandinavia, who cannot seem to get enough of them. Many of them are in fact just delicious but an equal number of them are not terribly pleasant and some drinkers just pretend to enjoy them. But I digress. Here’s the salient difference between most red and white wines. Red grapes are most often fermented on their skins so as to extract the tannins and anthocyanins (that’s the colored material) from the skins, imparting density, weight, texture, and astringency to the wine, not to mention color and fragrance. The fermentations generally take place in tanks or bins and the skins, which are forced to the top of the vessel by the evolution of carbon dioxide in the fermentation process and in some fashion need to be re-submerged or otherwise wetted down to aid in the extraction of flavors as well as to keep the fermentation temperature under control. The vigorousness of the re-submerging of the skins - “punching down” or “pumping over'' is generally described as the “extraction” in the winemaking process. A small editorial comment: Many novice drinkers seem to respond well to wines that have been vigorously extracted - they are generally darker in color, denser in flavor and arguably more astringent. With a bit more experience, many wine drinkers will come to appreciate a degree of restraint in the extraction process. Such restraint does not necessarily equate to anemic wines, but often to real elegance and finesse - qualities that one appreciates, especially as you get older.
But returning to the differences between red and white: Red wines are thus generally far more astringent than whites, which gastronomically speaking, makes them more appropriate for pairing with meats or denser proteins. Generally the denser, more astringent the wine, the more appropriate for pairing with a denser meat. Thus lighter reds - Pinots, for example, go better with lighter protein - poultry and lighter cuts of meat whereas Cabernets and Merlots will be a good match for, say, steak. White wines, as I mentioned, are produced in a slightly different way. They are generally not fermented with their skins, rather the grapes are pressed off right away and the juice ferments off the skins, typically in a temperature-controlled stainless steel tank or in barrel. White wines can vary enormously in style, from very light-bodied, almost evanescent in sensation, meant for early consumption, often in summer, to very rich, full-bodied, age-worthy wines (white Burgundy, for example), which can be as complex as great red wines. The winemaker has all sorts of tricks up his or her sleeve to create or enhance certain qualities in a wine, the use of certain kinds of yeast or the manipulation of fermentation temperature, to mention a few. The winemaker can also add certain things to the wine - tannin or tartaric acid for example - to “correct” certain winemaking deficits. But, all things being equal, if a winemaker has the great fortune to work with grapes that do not require heroic interventions, he/she will end up producing a more seamless, harmonious wine.
But let me just share with you the most important thing you need to know about wine: The adage about wine being made in the vineyard is 100% accurate. Winemakers can use their winemaking legerdemain to create certain special effects, but real complexity and soulfulness comes from the grapes themselves - from vineyards that have been farmed carefully and sensitively. Let me describe some of the factors that go into the creation of great grapes.
It’s unfortunate but so many of our axiomatic truisms are predictably true. As with real estate, the most important factor for grape quality is location, location, location. And by that I mean all aspects of the location - climate, soil type, even exposure. (In areas that barely get enough sunshine during the growing season, southern exposures will typically yield the best result; in areas that are perhaps a tad too warm for optimal expression, north-eastern exposures are perhaps best). As far as climate, you need to find a place that is suitable both for the survival of the wine (no winter kill), minimal dangerous frosts, and a sunshine regime (both brightness and temperature) that is more or less optimal for the grape variety chosen; what is generally considered optimal is generally understood as the coolest possible area that will still allow the grapes to ripen completely. In fact, grapes can grow and thrive in a fairly large range of climates, but what is crucial is that the climate and chosen variety are a congruent match. You don’t want to grow Pinot Noir in the San Joaquin Valley (though unfortunately some do), nor do you want to grow Mourvedre, a grape of warm southern France on, say, the Sonoma Coast in California; it will end in sorrow.
Returning to the subject of soils, there’s a lot of quasi-mysticism about the subject. But the rule of thumb is that Europeans tend to credit certain soil types as being optimal for specific varieties and this is certainly true to a great extent, whereas New World growers tend to credit the importance of a particular climatic regime for the optimal expression of a given grape variety. Remember, that irrigation is generally not permitted in the great vineyards of Europe so it is indeed more crucial that the vineyard soils have certain hydrologic characteristics. The best sites will solve the plant’s water needs most of the time; when it’s too rainy, they drain well; when the weather is dry, they show good water-holding characteristics. In other words, they are the Goldilocks sites - hydrologically “just right.” Contrast this with New World where we have the right to irrigate if we so choose (and have enough water to do so). As a result, we control the soil hydrology and thus the water-holding characteristics of the soil become less significant. But note that everything comes at a price. We almost always drip-irrigate in California, which on its face seems like a cool idea - conservation of water, precise delivery of what the plant needs at any given moment of the year; in a sense, we’re playing God. But by the law of unintended consequences, when you continually drip irrigate in the same spot, the plant learns that it doesn’t really need to grow roots anywhere else but in that spot, so you end up growing grapes a bit like in a flower-pot. You don’t get the full expression of soil characteristics, as you would if the plant were exploring a larger soil volume, looking for water.
Which brings me to the last important point, which is a discussion of “wine quality” as it pertains to vineyards. As I mentioned, a winemaker can only achieve the degree of complexity in his/her wines pre-determined by the grapes he/she is working with. There are so many factors that go into the determination of grape quality - a great, that is to say, appropriate site, restricted yield, the thoughtful selection of grape varieties, and mix of clonal material, and of course the level of care taken in the cultivation of the vineyard. What I want to stress again is that apart from all of these other factors, an enormous component of wine excellence is the degree of microbial life or vitality in the vineyard soils and perhaps in the ambient vegetation as well. Many of us buy organic produce because we prefer not to have toxic chemicals sprayed on the food that we eat. But it’s also important to consider what is the positive aspect, not just the negative side of organically or biodynamically grown grapes. It’s not just that we’re looking for the absence of poison in our wine (that’s a start), but rather - forgive the California woo-woo here for a second - we’re looking for the presence of life-force in the wine. A vineyardist who eschews the use of fungicides, herbicides and perhaps also favors “no-till,” i.e. the retention of cover crop, will have more symbiotic soil microflora living in the roots of the vines. These microbial heroes actively transport minerals from the soil into the vines, helping to impart a more vivid impression of terroir, or the unique qualities of the site itself.
I don’t think I’m really allowed to say this but in my experience, vins de terroir, or wines of place, wines that somehow capture a sort of mineral quality, will generally be easier for your body to assimilate, and in my experience, will often make you feel better, all things being equal. Unless you have a particular allergy to sulfites, you should not freak out about their presence, but again, all things being equal, wines that are produced with lower levels of sulfites, indeed with lower (or ideally no) levels of additives, will be much easier for your body to assimilate. A deeper discussion of “natural” wines is beyond my purview. The only thing I will say about them is that if you enjoy them, you should drink them. But there’s no need to drink wines to publicly proclaim your virtue if you don’t truly enjoy them.
The reality is that the universe of wine is enormously vast, a veritable ocean. But it is a wonderful and beautiful ocean in which to swim, just try to steer clear of the sharks.
