Exactly. And I think you’d be interested and surprised to see what both “artisinal” and “industrial” winemakers do with their wines, and especially interested to see which techniques are and are not used by both. It’s certainly not cut and dry.
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Almost afraid to throw this oar in the water, but I touched a bit on intervention in this topic. I’m still thinking about it!
Thinking About, Part 2 – IPA – In Pursuit of…Authenticity - WINE TALK - WineBerserkers
Terrific discussion so far, enjoying the read.
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The intervention topics are interesting to debate and I can’t add too much more on that. But I just want to be sure that everyone knows that there is way, way more that separates large-scale wine making vs artisanal than intervention. I make my cider and vermouth at a relatively large scale facility (for Willamette Valley) and visited many more. I make my wines at a small scale artisanal winery. (The small winery doesn’t have space or care for vermouth or cider in their space : (
Here are just some of the issues/differences I have seen at larger facilities:
No fruit sorting; and all must be destemmed and pumped into large tanks for fermentation (no opportunity for whole cluster fermentation or for ferments of individual, smaller blocks on the vineyard). A propensity to use mechanical harvest (not always for sure, and also the harvesters have improved over time, but still, I notice more leaves and other non-grape plant material). Larger-scale tank ferments are just difficult to control for temperature (even glycol-cooled tanks) so this provides higher extraction of tannin, polyphenols, etc. Hey, some winemakers love high extraction. Not judging here, but just noticing that it would be difficult to do otherwise. More acetic acid (VA) issues. As work tasks are backlogged due to staffing, logistics and scheduling issues (etc) these wines in tank can quickly become flawed and I have seen the RO contract truck at the facility, many, many times. There’s a fair amount of head space in a large tank (post-ferment) and I remember UC Davis researchers telling us that tanks need to be topped with inert gas every two days (Nitrogen mixes with air). This is expensive, and at best I see this being done once a week. Once the wine is in barrel, these folks are perhaps not topping barrels as frequently as needed. They have thousands of barrels and it’s pretty easy for other tasks or employee availability issues to intervene. I use a fair amount of old, neutral barrels, and I can tell you that some require topping every two weeks. I think to head this off the larger winery sulfurs at a very high rate. But still. And this can blunt aromatic and flavor expression IMHO. There are more issues with cellar hands that are not as engaged and vested in the end product, make mistakes, etc., but let’s end with racking from barrel, filtering and bottling. Some larger facilities that I am familiar with have their own (very old) bottling lines that just are not state-of-the-art equipment (to limit O2/oxidation).
I’m sure a well-financed, well-managed larger producer can overcome all these issues, but they are substantial in my opinion. One last note. Most larger facilities will have more than a few SKUs at entry-level pricing and will need to be sure their cost-of-goods are very low for these. This kind of cost control mentality can permeate the entire culture at the winery. It would be hard not to really.
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If the idea is to somehow make a ‘perfect’ wine in someone’s opinion - removing anything that’s ’less than perfect’ to whomever making the decision - then in their mind, they are not intervening at all . . .
To me, it removes the ‘highs and lows’ that make wine more ‘analog’ and less ‘auto-tuned’ . . .
Cheers
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Can’t you adjust the parameters and sensitivity of the sorting to get some of those “highs and lows?”
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After reading the very educational responses so far, I’m thinking I don’t care that much about the quantity of interventions the wines I drink have been subject to, but I do care about the quality of those interventions and how they affect what’s in the glass.
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I don’t disagree with any of what you’ve said but it’s painting with an awfully wide brush. Just to provide a counter example, I would guess the average grower contributing to Alto Adige co-ops is farming around a single hectare of grapes. Harvest is done by hand. Grapes get inspected very closely by lot. No VA issues at Terlano, Santa Maddalena, etc.
I don’t think Estezargues uses any wood, it’s all stainless and concrete. 2,000,000 bottles. Not heavy on the sulfur or extraction. And going back to the Alto Adige co-ops, there is beautiful aromatic and flavor extraction.
OTOH, I know of smaller wineries that are held in high regard on this board that are practically seen as “natural” and they’re dumping things like glycerin in the wine.
Yup. One of the things I like about larger facilities is it there is so much on the line. It’s a different game. Not necessarily better or worse.
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yup-- certainly not implying that all large wineries do any or all these things, especially the marquee producers, but they are more likely to occur IMO. I just wanted to mention that there are other process issues to consider (not just “intervention” per se)
No offense but most of what you’re doing here is creating a binary equation of “one” or “the other”.
Small means hand bottling out of mushroomy barrels.
Big means using inert gas at bottling and a hyper fancy state of the art stainless steel bottling line to bottle.
Honestly, bottling is about the worst area to try and differentiate between small and big wineries.
Big wineries use great bottling lines that keep wines fresh and risk free…because they have to. If they make 200,000 cases per year, bottling 2,000 cases per day would take them over 4 months to bottle.
As a small winery making 4000-5000 cases per year, I also use a fancy pants bottling line, steam cleaned and using inert gas the entire time, and an inline filter if needed. It’s a mobile line, operated by a friend who’se local, and it works fantastically well.
I also have better barrels than almost ANY big winery you will find that isn’t charging more than $60-100 bottle. Because the barrel bill for 100,000 cases of red wine is astronomical and the CFO is really intrigued by the idea of using tannin adds in the cellar and at bottling to help with cash flow.
Soeaking of which, most big wineries don’t do small fermenters for red wine. The winery staff for 85% of the year is considerably smaller than the winery staff needed for harvest. Big wineries tend to have longer tentacles for finding interns, but in the end…interns do not have the experience to make wine with precision following your definition in the OP. They’re in the “enthusiasm” part of their career, and hoping to gain experience and at big wineries usually getting experienced at cleaning rather than experience in understanding terroir and fermentation.
I’d also point out that in 24 years, I have NEVER once had to turn a fermenter to fill it again. Almost all big wineries do. And this year in the Willamette Valley, the acids dropped quickly as harvest passed, so those having to delaying picking because their earlier picks hadn’t wrapped up (or rushing the first ferment to clear space) are not low intervention (or if they are, that’s worse).
Being able to handle the fruit coming in during a compressed harvest, is one of the crucial differences in where your own definitions apply. At my winery the three people smelling, looking at, tasting, and knowing the ferments have 24 years, 14 years, and 17 years in experience. No one else is involved. Our assesments are quick, precise, experienced, and there’s no game of telephone with someone who has spent less than a month in the building to try and react to the experienced persons needs (which is the case in a big winery).
I’ve been in a big winery where every fermenter is small, but the punchdowns were done by one guy (very fit by end of harvest) who didn’t have any winemaking experience. The one true chance for the chef to stir the soup and it was the low man on the totem pole doing the work…
…and they pressed the white fruit and froze the juice so they could ferment whites after the craziness of Pinot fermentation slowed down. Small intervention? 
I dislike ferment tanks with temperature control. The story is…”we get complete control!” The reality is that bigger ferments create a LOT of heat and cooling the ferment is mandatory. You don’t really control it because the tank wall in a bit is cooled and the center is usually still hot. There’s other ways to help out these days but in the end…yeast produce different esters and compounds at different temps. Having a range of temperature shifts through the daily cycle of ferment, in my opinion, adds to the layering and nuance in the finished wine.
Meanwhile, lets get to pulse air…big winery usually=big tank. Pulse air is a way to move/submerge the cap back into must by running a big air bubble up from the bottom of the tank. It basically hits the bottom of the cap, lifts it, fracturing it, and the cap folds over and drops back down into the must (simplification). One intern with no skill set can do it by pushing a button. A local big winery has two 32 ton tanks and can turn the cap twice a day in 20 minutes. The tanks ferment in about 7 days (see turning tanks above). Those two tanks hold more Pinot Noir than I make. But I have 22-30 1.5 ton fermenters and we punch them down by hand twice a day during peak ferment (it’s a very gentle process…) and it’s 4-6 hours per day for close to a month (not all fermenters come in at the same time). Megan and I generally do the large majority of punchdowns.
There so much more happening in a punchdown than just wetting the cap, so my expense is worth it to me. And I make way more interesting wines than the big company does.
But at a big company you can’t “look” into a 32 ton tank. It’s too tall and producing a truly ridiculous amount of CO2. Harvest is at speed, and the logistics of big are of minimizing the process, because they can’t keep up otherwise, using warm bodies to fill the increased work hours, preventing flaws through methodology of zero risk allowed (also called paint by numbers), and fixing things with additives from the winery supply store later on…
Another friend of mine worked at a big California winery making Chardonnay. Juice was pressed, then put through a centrifuge to spin it free of any sediment (rather than settling), racked to tank, inoculated for primary and finished in two weeks, then racked to barrel for “flavor”.
If you want thoughtful or experienced, there’s places big and small where it can happen. But once a certain production is attained, it gets very hard to have the experienced people actually in all of the work. They wind up more like helicopter parents. And wineries like Tabls Creek and Ridge really should be held up for the amazing work that they do.
Lest we forget though…the big winery is also more likely to have someone saying that x consumers like it sweeter, y consumers like it darker and riper, and z consumers like it smoother…which often turns into an intervention of it’s own. Whereas the experienced smaller winery is probably staying small so they don’t have to care about that bs.
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Devil’s Advocate:
How is an optical sorter maximizing potential?
They sort everything but the perfect fruit, and then the wines taste narrower in scope. Bigger, more monochromatic (even if it’s a pretty chrimatic), and ultimately-in my opinion- more about minimizing issues with inexperienced sorters or worry wart winemakers who don’t have enough time to just do the job and so it’s yet another mechanized semi-solution.
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No disagreement in the statement. I enjoy low intervention winemaking, but if I make a mistake I get an eraser.
But experienced small winery winemakers get to see what needs to be done with their wines much quicker. From my experience, it’s far more likely that a small winemaker is saying, “this is what I did with this wine” and a larger ones, “this is how we make the wines”.
There’s a lot of grey in my statements but generally speaking they’re not wrong.
I don’t disagree with you either but vs David’s broad brush, yours is fairly narrow.
Collectives are kind of like a big winery but not exactly. Ther’s also not very many of them reknowned for making great wines. While many do make quite solid to very good wines, there’s not that many setting the bar for great wines. And the OP is on the Berserker board, as opposed to a general audience.
In the end, almost every big winery has more on it’s plate than it can handle. So “best practices” rule the day (in the good ones) and wines are made according to the process in place. If those “best practices” look a bit more like Grandpa(from the OP) and, when you have a farmer per hectare that’s Grandpa not the “big” winery, you’ll get the inconsistencies that allow for nuanced and culture/site specific wines (read interesting). Hopefully the winemaking allows that to come through, and in the style of wine that Alto Adige produces-crisp dry whites as a majority of production-that’s easier for wineries to keep up with.
At a small winery, you will get wines made according to what the wine needs and wants. Because…time is a thing.
A lot of grey 
- I’ve led from 200-14000 tons, and would agree on some of those sentiments. It’s been my experience it is far more driven by variety than size. No one is more “making the wines” than a Napa Cab producer (6 years in custom crush with everyone up and down Napa Valley) - while I would say the majority of Pinot noir producers are far more “this is what it was.” I’ve taken that sentiment to the largest winery I was involved with, and have seen the smallest done the most manipulation.
It’s so winemaker driven, with personal ethos - but if I was to generalize, in my 20 years, it’s those who have the most necessity to stay within their style, are using all of the tips and tricks.
Not generalized to large and small, but agreed with your point - when it goes from a one person army to a winemaking team of 5-9, it’s definitely a bit more consensus driven, moving towards a style. Unless that leader is VERY adamant about something - it’s easier to give in to the system of the largest wineries.
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Well put!
A very interesting statement - and one that kind of goes against the concept of ‘terroir’ and more aligns with the concept of ‘winemaker terroir’ - or ‘creating and maintaining a style’ regardless of what mother nature provides.
Cheers
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At some point all winemakers need to make decisions. I’ve always strived to do as little as possible, and intervene when necessary. Other winemakers are about intervene first, before something happens to push it in a direction. Each have their place (can’t imagine some wines being made otherwise) in the pantheon - and there is something to be said for wines made by both camps. I’ve had great, and seriously flawed wines from both camps. Transformative is another question.
I hope the former is as close to a “terroir” approach can be, whereas the latter philosophy is likely an expression of “winemaker terroir.”
It’s what makes the wine world so diverse, and fun!
Not a winemaker, but I’d rather have alchemical art than chemical engineering; the former makes wine more interesting to me. That said, I like some natural wines, but some are made in too careless a fashion, with too much VA showing and gone on day 2. If I want kombucha, I’ll drink kombucha, as a wine seller told me. Better artisans can make them not like that. Neither do I want the wine’s “place” erased by commercial yeasts, Mega Purple, and other leveling methods that reduce topography to a two-dimensional product chart with a marketing synopsis. I think it’s not a matter of scale, but approach and care.
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Thanks for fleshing out all these points much better than I could muster in my short take. On this particular point, I visited a large winery and the wine maker told us that they need to finish ferments in 3 days due to space limitations. (Lots of nutrient adds to the juice, including DAP and others, and lots of O2 pulse air per 24hrs)
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Yep, and sometimes it depends upon vintage and the types of varieties that one works with.
I remember the 2006 harvest in our area - it was colder than usual then we hit a bunch of heat during harvest, leading to a very very condensed vintage. We had pinot coming in at the same time as many rhones, requiring us to make some challenging decisions. We still treated our ‘best lots’ with ‘kid gloves’, but some other lots were fermented quickly to turn tanks - and in some other cases, fruit was left to ripen even further since we did not have an open tank (including a specific lot of syrah that came in at 28 or 29 brix and fermented dry at nearly 18% - and believe it nor not, it was not ‘hot’ or ‘out of balance’ . . .
Cheers
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Congratulations on your new gig at WVWA!
You have a tough road ahead of you, as they have completely obfuscated their mission to support small wineries, but I think you’ve got the most hustle in that room.
Sincerely, good luck.