I don’t think the VA analogy helps your case. Many winemakers believe that, in moderation, it adds something and “lifts” the aromatics, in particular. They don’t promote it but they accept it and find a certain amount beneficial. And these aren’t just “natural wine” types. Some fairly mainstream California winemakers posted about this a few years ago, here or on eBob – I don’t recall. A good portion of wines have measurable VA.
Agreed, but how many will admit to it? Remember, my point is not that a slightly brett infected wine is worse, it’s that the brett is winemaking artifice to imitate European wine. If the point is that everyone is futzing around with their wine to make it taste like they want it to, then we’re in agreement; if the point is that there’s nothing intrisically better or worse about one kind of futzing compared to another, we’re also in agreement. Separately from that discussion, I’m critiquing a winemaker who, IMO, is aping the style of another region in an affected way, but not because I don’t agree with intervention on principle, I just think that putting one type of intervention on a pedestal over others is silly.
Despite this fine discussion about interventionist wine making, I’m still pissed someone put Cali Pinot Noir in my Finger Lakes Cab Franc bottle. ![[soap.gif]](/uploads/db3686/original/2X/a/a7ea1fffd3ef237e8f19d17a83270ad8452218ca.gif "soap"){kind=small}
Try the Eminence Road Cab Franc next time. I think you’ll like it better and find that it doesn’t taste like Cali Pinot.
I posted a query over in Cellar Rats about brett that has elicited a lot of informative posts: What do you do to prevent or eradicate brett? - Cellar Rats (ITB) - WineBerserkers
Highlights:
-Some people find that they have it only in wines from certain vineyards, so it may not always originate in an uncleansed cellar.
-If you are careful in the cellar it doesn’t have to spread (that seems to be the story at Ravines).
-The only solution if it is in the wine is to sterile filter or dose it with Velcorin, an antimicrobial used in soft drinks.
It seems there is a UC Davis prof who argues (controversially) that brett problems occur because of excessive sterilization in the cellar, which allows some microbes to flourish at the expense of others!
Controversial indeed, but probably akin to what happens when we use those super-sanitizing hand cleansers too often. There’s thinking in the medical world that the proliferation of many diseases in children might have a lot to do with us having sanitized the environment with antibiotics, et al, to the point where “friendly” bacteria are wiped out at the expense of our health. Taken to wine health, why not the same possibility?
First, thanks to this forum, I went to couple good wineries during a recent Finger Lakes trip.
I don’t remember the 2011 Cab Franc from Ravines beeing like Cali Pinot noir, although it was quite fruity for sure, still had some nice acidity. It won’t pass for a Chinon, and lacking grip for me.
Globally, I felt that for Finger Lakes red wines, the Cab franc is showing the best. As for Eminence Road, don’t they source grapes from Bloomer Creek?
Bloomer Creek was clearly the highlight of my trip. Their carb maceration cab franc (vin d’été) is delicious ! 
Bloomer Creek’s wines are generally memorable because the winemaker and owner loves to experiment and that gives his efforts a distinction.
This thread is great for Mort. Front page of WB for days = free advertising!
I was offline most of the weekend, but was pondering this horse/thread and thought it needed a bit more flogging.
What do you think of Belgian beers where brett is a crucial part of the flavor?
I ask because your argument seems to assume that brett is inherently bad, as opposed to something you don’t like or (as more people would say) is bad in big quantities. If it produces a desired flavor in some beers (desired by some people anyway), who’s to say it’s inherently/always a flaw in wine?
(1) Brett is objectively considered a flaw, at least in most wine judging forms I’ve seen.
(2) I don’t assume brett is bad, I just think its no different than overoaking or overstemming or leaving the grapes on the vines till the skins are falling off. All of those winemaking decisions have their fans. All of them are messing with the wines. Your implied point is well taken that defining VA or brett as a flaw, but overripeness as a “style” is arbitrary, but, thats how it is done. If we want to say, “intentionally making your wine in a style to copy Chinon and marketing it accordingly” to avoid the loaded word “flaw”, then I think that’s a perfectly reasonable reframing.
(3) That being said, I think valuing wines on how closely they ape the Chinon-style is silly. The reason there’s brett in “rustic” French wines is because of who was making those wines and how they were traditionally made, as opposed to some sort of marketing “natural wines” catnip. By declaring one style of wine to be Supreme Over Others, ex post rationalizing why the chosen style is objectively superior, and then ramming the style down the throats of other regions with different terroir, climate, and winemaking traditions, the folks who once were reacting to Parker and his acolytes are now assuming their pigheaded rigidity, but with a different ideology.
Thank you for that.
If there is such a thing as terroir, then wine produced from the same grape variety SHOULD be different when produced in different places. By comparing it to another place, the taster often actively discounts or disadvantages what’s in the glass.
David - You’ve ignored the evidence that the brett in this case seems to be particular to this single vineyard, and not from the winery, and thus perhaps not under their control absent sterile filtering or chemical dosing. Instead you simply repeat again your characterization of this as a “intentional” effort to mimic Loire wines in some phony way.
But do let me thank you for rising to the occasion so quickly to help in the continued flogging. I knew I could count on you!
We need a 
emoticon for David to use. Instead of having to type out “intentionally making your wine in a style to copy Chinon and marketing it accordingly” each time, he could just insert the emoticon and we would all know what he means. And then there could be another one, where someone hits the with a bat, which could be the rest of David’s post instead of all those words. The whole thing would be much more efficient for him to type and us to read.
LOL! Let’s talk to Todd about upgrading the functionality.
If you can provide evidence that brett is related to a vineyard, then I’d love to see it. I understand it derives from barrels or winery cross-contamination. The closest you can say is that nutrients in the must from a vineyard might lend themselves to a brett infection, but brett is a wineryor equpiment contamination issue, not a terroir issue.
Grape juice doesn’t naturally become palatable wine, it becomes a microbial soup with lots of off aromas and other chemicals generated in an uncontrolled fermentation and bacterial contamination process. Its important to remember the nasty wine that generally results without scrupulous sterilization and other winemaking techniques to constrain what grows in the juice - there is no “base” of non-intervention. The VA analogy remains - VA isn’t a “vineyard” / terroir attribute, though it certainly arises more readily in wines with a certain profile that correlate with certain geographic regions. So too with brett. They’re attributing it to the vineyard as a marketing ploy.
See my post #45 above and the comments in the Cellar Rats thread which that summarizes. Finger Lakes isn’t the only place that reports it site-specific examples.
I looked at that thread - the site-specific examples are attributed to the nutrient composition of the must, not the origin of the brett. The brett itself is attributed to the winery or the barrels they came from.
If you think certain vineyards are harboring brett, then OK, I’ll agree that would have a terroir element, but if brett is whatever the winery got infected with from the last batch of barrels, then it’s just a winery overprint that some folks find appealing.
Citing Overnoy-Houillon as a “baseline” just shows how silly and useless the interventionist/non-interventionist categories are:
In the cellar Manu is an obsessive, patient winemaker, but he is no dogmatist and he would probably laugh if anyone was to refer to him as a ‘non-interventionist.’
The wine is vinified in a variety of containers, including large format wood containers, older barriques, stainless steel, and a colossal 30 hectoliter concrete egg that has to be seen to be believed. Depending on the vintage, different containers will be used on different wines (the 2009 poulsard, for instance, is all stainless steel, which was not necessarily the case in previous vintages). When it comes to making wine, Manu doesn’t believe that there are any hard rules in the cellar including (and this surprised the hell out of me, as I’m sure it will others) chapitalisation. He doesn’t like doing it, but he freely admits to it when the year is thin and the wine isn’t going to amount to much. Unlike sulfur, he understands chapitalising wines (a common, accepted and traditional practice in many appellations) and feels he can get better wines in certain vintages by the addition of sugar.
source: Emmanuel Houillon, Vigneron at Maison Pierre Overnoy, Arbois-Pupillin | saignée