Brainless Wine-making is making wines boring

WINE TALK
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Brainless Wine-making is making wines boring





I have encountered in the past twenty years a trend of nice wines that score around 90 points, but are boring due to brainless wine-making… so what is brainless wine-making ?



Brainless wine-making is when the fruit is grown in regions that produce 90 point wines from several producers within a point or two of each other, until someone comes along blows the score out by over 5 points higher… either judged professionally and published or not… my point today is not to shame producers inc. myself or anyone specific … it’s just a wakeup call to the industry and kind of open letter… “Brainless Wine-Making” is boring the paints off the consumer…



It now seems the point scale has shrunk with the plethora of 90 point wines on the market from the 10 point scale (90-100) to the (95-100) point scale…



Who is to blame …?.. first the growers are doing the best job in modern history growing high 90-100 fruit consistently… the growers have done their job alone with improved feeds, limited tonnage per acre and skills to deliver the best fruit in history to wineries… they are the true wine-makers not us that then diminish the quality by fermenting the wine vintage and destroying the perfect fruit, albeit still producing respectable wines, but ones that are not equal to the wonderful fruit growers have grown for us … it’s really just not fair to the growers as the expression of wine translates into homogenized wine and similar scores…



playing it safely in the winery has killed the art… we all need inc. myself to become better wine-makers if you can even call one who curates over fermentation such a title… the French have the right idea … there is no such thing as a wine-maker … my hat goes off to the true " Vigneron" who has to cringe at the very prospect of their fruit being diminished in any way…

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Bump.

C’mon, Berserkers, this is important! newhere

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pity post

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Seriously…and don’t call me Shirley.


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Did you make any wine while you were… um…“away”

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What’s worse is the homogenized consumer who lacks the basic inspiration to drink something interesting , something special and inspiring to the palate … With many drinking homogenized 90 point wines they fail to recognize that their palates have gone dull …

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I like homogenized Vitamin D milk…preferably from Borden.


Moooo.

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Farms? In Berkeley? Moooooooooooooooooo!
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Great post!..

And Tex is posting again?

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John,

I don’t see where the “brain-less” wine making comes in. Are you talking about cookie cutter wines that are mass produced? Are you talking about wine-making by formula?

Would an example be the myriad of wines from grapes of the Beckstoffer vineyard? 31 wineries producing a Beckstoffer Cab that relies on the grapes rather than the wine-maker’s vision, preferences and expertise?

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Forget it, he’s on a roll.

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Randy,


It’s the lack of innovation as many play it very safe and copy each other … Learn cookie cutter wine-making and produce cookie cutter wines…Not just the mass produced wines… They are bad enough … I am talking about the so called smaller producers who score within a point or two of each other… It’s the lack of maintaining the expression of the very high scoring fruit… It seems in the vilification that points are subtracted at the hand of the wine-maker… This has been my observation …

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Is there a shelf tag for ‘brain-less’ winemaking? It would be good to recognize, you know, at retail.

[shock.gif]

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Is that a machine from Ricoh or Xerox?

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maybe the terroir only “allows” a wine up to 90 points, i.e. a certain level of quality and that is why the scores are similar.
alan

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Freudian slip of the year!

Maybe it’s brainless winemakers that is the problem! (Not you, John, I don’t know you)

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Out of puuure curiosity…exactly how many of your wines have garnered 90 or more points from an established or respected wine critic?

TIA

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John, I think there are plenty of ‘same’ wines out there, and plenty of unique wines - I think you are grossly over-generalizing

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The wines I drink, I drink because I like the way they taste :slight_smile: