Was at Ravines in July and met with Morten. Very nice guy.
His Rieslings were excellent. bought 6 SV’s.
Did not taste any reds in the finger lakes as I have PLENTY!!!
Mont, it’s been a long time since I briefly met you at a tasting in NYCity, but I am so glad to see that you have moved from PN to CF, because that’s what many of us in the Finger Lakes felt all along. Lemberger is the other red wine for the cool climate region. In fact, CF and L blending is quite exciting, and I remember arguing with Thomas Henig Kling back in the 90s that he was wrong about Lemberger in the Finger Lakes…he was correct.
Not to sidetrack you guys, but I found the merlot is better at Ravines than the cabernet franc, according to my tastings. But y’all would rather talk about angels on pins and that matter.
How 'bout angels on fruit flies, or the other way round?
Why do you say this is intentional? The quote from them makes it sound like it occurs naturally. And brett, i understand, is extremely difficult to eradicate. It isn’t just a matter of washing the equipment.
And why would allowing brett to develop be more interventionist than allowing malolactic fermentation to occur on its own? Or do you consider malo interventionist?
My concern is not that Brett is allowed but that once it is allowed to flourish, I hope the winemaker knows to what extent it is there, but also has a handle on which type of Brett is there or dominant. Depending on the level and type, the wine can do strange things in the bottle, which is why many winemakers are afraid of Brett in the first place.
As for ML: not every wine is prone to spontaneous ml.
I think innoculating for malo is clearly interventionalist no matter how defined. I guess my point is that brett is a flaw - sort of like VA - that arises naturally and can be prevented with good santiary practices. To the extent brett is common in wines from the Loire, its because of a winemaking culture that arose organically in France, and not because some guy is purposefully avoiding best practices to make a facsimile of honest wine.
Put differently, this is not Manhattan.
You still have said nothing to address John’s point about whether it is purposeful. You are just assuming it is.
Also, for the sake of argument, let’s say it is intentional. Whether a hint of Brett is a flaw is a subject of debate and stylistic preference. Also not something to be assumed. Many people believe it is a flaw; others believe that it adds complexity to the wine. Yes, it risks Brett blooms which can ruin a wine completely, but I haven’t had any of those issues with Eminence Road wines so far. It is clear you learned nothing from the “Does Texier suck?” debacle, or you might have phrased your description of Brett in the wine as something you personally do not like, rather than as something “which is exquisitely obnoxious”.
For an ongoing internet argument this might set a record for civility with the amount of dogma being discussed. Bit of rehashing but good to review all the points.
My question was whether you think allowing a naturally occuring malo is interventionist. It’s hard to see what the difference is conceptually between allowing a natural malo and allowing brett if the winemaker likes the result.
So if there’s a long tradition of the flaw, it’s not intervention to allow it?
It helps that Michael and David worked in the same law firm and David is in a tasting group I host. If it got out of hand, we might actually meet face to face – the most dreaded thing for on-line trash talkers.
This discussion, while interesting, pretty much confirms my view that it doesn’t make much sense to evaluate wine in terms of the level of intervention that went into making it.
Well, I would argue its not a matter of stylistic preference. I’ve tasted wines with you where I -and, IIRC, others - found the wine irredeemably bretty, and you only conceded there was some brett after first insisting the wine was sound. It was a Chinon, I think - perhaps a Baudry? You don’t have sensitivity to whatever causes the off aromas in brett, and god bless, but that doesn’t mean you have a “preference”, just that your palate isn’t sensitive in that way. My fiance doesn’t really perceive citrus aromas/flavors for some reason, both in wine and food, but that doesn’t mean that lemony wines are bad, it means she has an screwy palate.
Though that’s really secondary to my main point, which is that fake rustic winemakers making fake bretty wine to appeal to young’uns who have been programmed to act just like the Parkerites, but with a different set of idols, are just as bad as the folks making purple, toasty swill out of Malbec/Pinotage/Merlot etc all over the world to appeal to Wine Advocate / Wine Spectator. I’ll never understand how you, Snowball and Napoleon can’t recognize the “four legs good, two legs better!” aspect of your wine ethos.
That’s kind of my point - defining wine as interventionalist - or a technique as either intervention or “natural” - is meaningless. Personally, I think a distinction can be drawn between a flaw which is part of a long organic tradition and a flaw which is intentionally introduced (or allowed to persist) to imitate someone else’s wine. In so far as “authenticity” matters - and that’s what the interventionalist thing is a back-door way of getting at, no? - I think Ravines probably does as good a job as any winemaker in the state at making a authentically New York wine… The Argetsinger Riesling is delicious, doesnt taste like faux Germany, and is all the better for it.
That’s just annoyingly tendentious. They apparently don’t want to intervene to stop something that’s occuring on its own whose results they like. Just because you have a personal aversion to the result doesn’t make them “fake winemakers.” Give us a break!
You’re must making up the intentional part. The website language you quoted was "“Elizabeth’s Vineyard cabernet franc reliably develops some Brettanomyces just after bottling …” That implies that it occurs without introduction.
So you’re left saying that they should have intervened to stop it. How do you think they should have done that? And how does their failure to do so make them “fake winemakers”?
He thinks they should have cleaned their equipment and sterilized the winery using whatever means necessary, including bleaching everything, drowning it in sulfur, and irradiating the surrounding 3 mile area, if necessary, in order to get rid of a little Brett that makes the wine interesting. Their failure to do so is clearly them trying to mimic a French style of wine liked by people that don’t understand what flawed wine tastes like and whose palates are beyond hope if they haven’t learned by now not to enjoy something that David doesn’t like.
Lets talk about it as VA - like brett, an objective flaw in sufficiently high amounts. If a winemaker was letting VA happen - which is really f’in easy to do, because bacteria are always really enthusiastic about making VA - in an attempt to replicate Musar, would that wine be more natural and authentic, less natural and authentic, or would it not matter either way? IMO, letting the flaw occur on purpose is obnoxiously derivative - it illustrates that artifice that underlies all these natural wines.
Brett isn’t much different. Brett isn’t perhaps as ubiquitous as VA, but its easy enough to screw up and get it too - my homemade cider 3 years ago had horrible brett issues, and it wasn’t from the uptown Manhattan terroir. I presume that pretty much everyone making, bottling, storing wine has to keep an eye out for brett; if you’re choosing not to do that, that’s fine, but its not terroir.
How do you think wine is made? You DO have to sterlize the shit out of everything. It’s the single most important thing. You have to be the Pol Pot of bacteria.
