I quoted her post from the other thread because I enthusiasticly support what it is she said, in this thread.
Gotta love CT for dimension and exposure to things my normal day fails to deliver.
Found this on my CT splash page where wines you have are noted by other members. This on is for 2012 Sojourn PN Sonoma Coast. Put some terroir in it man!
“Ok. Good fruit and smooth, but no distinctive taste. The winemaker should have incorporated some terroir into this wine. It is almost too bland without any distinctive taste. Come on’ man. Make a stand and put something in it to distinguish it. Too conservative.”
![[rofl.gif]](/uploads/db3686/original/2X/a/a7452fcd8e675af869f8da01174474a545b03944.gif "rofl"){kind=small}
Vincent–There are aspects of the photography analogy I like, but they sort of take you in a different direction. If you go to Yosemite, you can stop and take the same photo of the valley that everyone stops and takes. Or you can decide to wait until you’re down in the valley itself, and you can frame a completely different perspective with Half Dome in the background. You can adjust the lens to zoom in or zoom out; you can adjust the shutter speed and other settings to get crisp shots of a waterfall or blurry shots of the water falling. Whether you’re aware of it or not, there are hundreds of decisions you can make just in the process of getting ready to snap the picture in the first place, even before you get to alterations in Photoshop.
Even with photography, the photographs don’t take themselves.
Bruce
Someone needs to ask a grapevine what it aspires to produce–seeds or wine?
One of the big problems with these discussions is that people attempt to argue through analogy far too much. Making wine is not cooking, it is not photography. I understand the value of comparative discussion but it doesn’t really get you there, it can only help to facilitate greater understanding by likening the more unknown to the more known.
Like Lewis, I like my wine with minimal touch and I like to know if it isn’t, but to be honest, I think we all kind of know when it isn’t. Despite Clark’s assertions (and those who join) I think that wine that has been “handled” tastes polished, filtered, and manufactured more often than not. Debating whether using power in the winery crosses a line is a classic angels on the heads of pins situation. All I know for certain is that the wines I like least are the ones that taste anonymous, as if they could have come from anywhere, and lack a distinct sense of anything.
The best analogy I have ever heard on the subject of winemaking. Did you come up with that yourself?
You say that like it’s obvious. Not to me. I think wine is cooking. It’s food. The winemaker starts with ingredients. The winemaker has a recipe, which may be modified during the process based on an evaluation of the ingredients and the product at various stages, tasting along the way. After a series of transformations to the ingredients takes place, the winemaker ends up with something that will be consumed as a beverage.
How is that not cooking? Making bread is a very different process from roasting a chicken (making bread has a lot of similarities to making beer and also involves fermentation). But both are cooking.
Right over your head my point went. The author went so far as to say good cooking was reliant on the right pan to which I responded the pan is just a tool, as a camera to a photographer. My analogy did not go far enough to be understood I guess…
The origial article being discussed is weakly written. Focus there.
Mitch, I love analogies and that one came to me as I wrote. Most analogies only go so far. I always hope people won’t take them so literally. I like them as tools to help get closer to understanding difficult subjects. Thanks for your response.
I suppose it’s valid criticism to say analogies actually make unknowns more difficult to know, but I disagree. But I’m an English major, not a scientist. There are many answers, not one.
And wine is cooking to some extent. Get in a hot fermenter and it might be more clear. There are so many connections and I find them helpful to understand better what I’m doing and experiencing, and then when talking to the lay person about it.
Vincent–Playing a bit more with the photography analogy, take the example of Ansel Adams. If you asked most people which photographer they most associate with “natural” photography, I’m sure Ansel Adams would be either at the top or near the top. Yet, his photos are quite manipulated–he often used filters to help achieve much greater drama in the finished photo than you would see in real life with the naked eye:
http://www.anseladams.com/new-modern-replica-monolith-face-half-dome/
So his early photo Monolith, Face of Half Dome is rather “manipulated” compared to the actual scene you would have seen by yourself. Indeed, his career was notable for his willingness to strive for unnatural contrast and drama in the finished photo.
Bruce
Bruce makes a very good point and I find the analogy.
In the world of photography we accept filters, strobes…older techniques. But photoshop?? Now this may be a bad analogy because perhaps there is a Picasso of Photoshop and he will be famous some day.
In the wine world we accept new kinds of presses, pumping over, punchdowns, fining, filtration, chaptalisation, etc., but at a certain point, Is it RO, concentrators, flash détente…we get a little nervous.
![[smileyvault-ban.gif]](/uploads/db3686/original/2X/4/426cc97ad8dd530c8304b0918ca75ff841d4d950.gif "[smileyvault-ban.gif]")
Worth reading.
It’s a good analogy, Bruce, but it doesn’t work for fine wine IMO. Genuine complexity and distinctiveness comes from site expression. I’m really not interested in what can be added by winemaking techniques. The wrong choices in winemaking can create a lesser wine, but there is really very little opportunity to make it better. Given healthy grapes from a quality site, the winemakers job is to not screw it up. And if the wine is from a lesser site, not even the latest/greatest rockstar winemaker can create a truly quality product. JM2C.
Another good analogy, but I disagree for the same reasons I stated just above. Chef = Winemaker? Not for me.
It’s not intended to be an analogy or a matter of opinion. Winemaking is cooking, at least as we typically use that term.* Your post above doesn’t differentiate winemaking in any way. For example, the whole culinary localism trend is all about the quality and “terrior” of the ingredients. The fact that lots of chefs want to make food that primarily expresses the quality and distinctiveness of their ingredients does not make what they do something different from cooking, even though their concerns and processes differ from chefs who are into molecular gastronomy.
One way I might boil down my point is a hypothetical question: I think we all agree that both a restaurant chef and a winemaker could make a consumable “product” from the exact same grapes. Both could, if they wanted, design their processes so that the result expresses the distinctiveness of those particular grapes. The chef could also use lightly toasted french oak as a flavoring agent. Hell, the Chef could create a jam from the grapes and let it ferment using natural yeasts. He could then serve his fermented jam at his restaurant alongside some wine that was made from the same grapes using the same french oak. When the chef made his jam, was he doing something categorically different from (a) the other stuff going on in his local, organic, ingredient-focused restaurant kitchen, or (b) what the maker of the wine did? If so, how?
*Of course, we could have a semantic debate about what “cooking” is, and technically, it probably refers to the process of using heat to transform ingredients. But that’s obviously overly restrictive when it comes to what we/cooks/chefs do to prepare food. If we instead use the colloquial understanding of the term “cooking” – which I think is understood to mean “food preparation” more generally – I don’t see how your post forces winemaking into a separate category.
Because it’s not cooking? It’s making wine. Making beer isn’t cooking either. You’re using a very broad, very reaching definition of cooking. I don’t think that it fits at all.
Vincent, I didn’t mean to suggest that analogy makes unknowns more difficult to know. I suggested that analogy attempts to make the less known better known through comparison through the better known. I just think that it has limitations, and that a key limitation involves understanding that the unique features of a thing are not always going to be understood by direct comparison to something else.
A good example is the winemaking and cooking thing. You can highlight the similarities involving ingredients and heat, for instance, but relying on those similarities apparently leads one to the conclusion that the degree of manipulation accepted as beneficial in cooking must also be beneficial in winemaking, because, they are the same. Right? But I don’t agree with that at all.
It’s a good analogy, Bruce, but it doesn’t work for fine wine IMO. Genuine complexity and distinctiveness comes from site expression.
Define “genuine” in this context.
Define “complexity”.
Define “distinctiveness”
Define “site expression”
I hope you see the point and if not, there is no need to go further.
You seem to be of the opinion that wine beauty that we perceive with our eyes, nose, mouth and brain is different from nature which we perceive with our eyes and brain.
The source of the pleasurable qualities and what contributes to that source is irrelevant for purposes of the analogy, ATMO.