Wine As Sacred Cow

WINE TALK
1

For thousands of years wine has become increasingly refined as a beverage, as drinkers have lost their taste for concoctions that included figs, pomegranates and such in favor of pure fermented grapes. As a craft, wine has now reached a place usually reserved for From the Mountaintop texts and Mom’s apple pie: You just don’t mess with it.

I’m going to take the position of devil’s advocate with the understanding that the following practices are not employed here at Seavey, though there’s no moral clause against them. Hopefully this won’t read as a defensive stance. At Seavey, we do, in fact, keep tradition alive and hold to the suggestion that we not monkey around with something that works.

So, what is it about wine that resists technology? Why is it that some technological advances (heating the tanks, lightbulbs for the cellar) are more acceptable than others?

We know that winemakers in California reduce alcohol content before fermentation by adding water or after fermentation by sending the wine through a reverse osmosis filter. And then there is Europe, where winemakers fire up their concentrators to remove water and raise alcohol.

When nature frowns on a vineyard or when someone takes his eye off the ball, winemakers are in the woeful position of then selling a wine they don’t like or adding something to the wine to make it more pleasurable. Often that something is a little icky, like your grandmother’s brassiere, and includes tannins, lees, enzymes, and powdered albumin, for example, to change astringency, suppleness, color, and clarity, respectively.

When was the last time you heard someone complain that a restaurant manipulates its food? I know several chefs, and not one has been asked whether he adds water to his sauces. Believe me, he does. Does he add yeast to his bread? Probably. And he also adds acid, and salt and pepper and butter and all kinds of things with one goal: To make the food taste more delicious.

Grant Achatz has been lauded in the press for his inventive molecular gastronomy, and my meal at Alinea in 2007 was, in fact, fantastic. Yet I can sooner imagine a winemaker cutting off his finger than highlighting analogous techniques such as reverse osmosis and wood chips. As a rule, wineries make a point of enumerating the things they don’t do, like fine or filter.


Why is wine different? I like to know the diet of the pig I’m about to eat, and I like to know whether some methylated nasty from the halogen family has been added to my strawberries to make them grow sans fungus. But winemakers are not adding anything unhealthy to wine (with the glaring exception of DMDC, which kills yeast and allows sweet wines to be bottled without filtration).


For the most part winemakers, like chefs, just want to make something singular and delicious. An argument could be made against adding things in the vineyard—fungicides, pesticides, and the like—but that is a fair question of all foods.

2

I am very sympathetic to this perspective, as I’ve always felt that the “manipulated” position is in fact the one that is more traditional and time-honored in wine. It’s obvious from the history of wine that massive amounts of manipulation and additions (from seawater and pine resin to sugar and alcoholic spirits) have been traditional for thousands of years.

On the other hand, I feel like the “natural” wine position has relevance from the simple point of view of taste and flavor. The addition of big, fun, flavors to food and drink has become so easy and cheap that it sometimes feels like a blessed relief to turn down the volume and have a more subtle, transparent experience. I like “big” wines in their place but it can get to the point where I feel like my wine glass is screaming at me. The lighter and more ethereal quality of aged and more acidic wines can be great – not because it’s more traditional and “real”, but because it offers a more subtle and intriguing experience.

3

Thanks for the thought provoking questions. I like the water in sauce comparison!

4

Some of us find that manipulations make wine less delicious, not moreso. . . . and we also value properties of wine other than deliciousness.

When was the last time you heard someone complain that a restaurant manipulates its food? I know several chefs, and not one has been asked whether he adds water to his sauces. Believe me, he does. Does he add yeast to his bread? Probably. And he also adds acid, and salt and pepper and butter and all kinds of things with one goal: To make the food taste more delicious.

And what of the sushi chef who adds nothing to a piece of otoro besides a little dab of soy sauce? Sure, you could use that slab of fish as an ingredient in a dish designed to highlight the creativity of the chef, if you wanted to. But when the fish is absolutely perfect, you might prefer to let the ingredient express itself with as little manipulation by the chef as possible. Once the fish starts to smell funny, then you’re probably better off letting the chef throw a lot of other things at it.

5

Welcome, Jeremy. This is an interesting topic, but has been discussed here so often, including last week. I’m pretty much argued out on the topic. Perhaps others are ready to do it all over again. You seem to take the position that all these interventions are good for wine quality, but you don’t use them, so I wonder why not?

6

So, we’re to interpret your position that the most pure expression of fish is raw and completely “unadulterated,” and that you would always choose sushi over any other preparation?

Must be nice to have such purity of essence.

7

Having reading comprehension problems?

8

Is there any better fish than a perfect piece of raw otoro?

9

Post Number:#5 Postby Lewis Dawson » Wed Apr 06, 2011 10:21 pm
Welcome, Jeremy. This is an interesting topic, but has been discussed here so often, including last week. I’m pretty much argued out on the topic. Perhaps others are ready to do it all over again. You seem to take the position that all these interventions are good for wine quality, but you don’t use them, so I wonder why not?

Thanks for the welcome, Lewis. As a lover of (some) Italian bikes and (some) French wines myself, and because I have owned a Ducati Pantah and still own a BSA and a BMW, here are my replies. First, with respect to finding interventions good for wine quality, I don’t. Nor do I find them bad. I had hoped with that post to stimulate discussion about why wine is judged differently than food, and, yes, I find the two eminently agreeable for comparison.

As to the second post on alcohol, I apologize for offering you a retread. I had hoped the piece would frame the so-called debate somewhat differently.

10

Fair enough, Jeremy. Any topic is OK to post about, and perhaps there are new twists or perspectives. I can see, upon re-reading my post, that it seems a little snarky, and I apoligize for that. No BSA in my garage, but there is a Triumph alongside the Duc.

11

Perhaps so. Maybe you can explain how I have misinterpreted your position?

12

For reasons I pointed out in the other thread, I don’t think the cooking/wine-making analogy is a very good one. There are times when cooking can be over-manipulative (molecular gastronomy when it doesn’t “work”), and while nobody complains about a chef adding water to a sauce, I’ve read before that there’s a generations-long debate in Italian cooking about whether it’s okay to ever add sugar to a tomato sauce, with equal vehemence on both sides. And if I found out the chef was using artificial substitutes instead of more “natural” ingredients/techniques – say, using bullion cubes rather than bothering to make stock the hard way, or adding msg or something – I wouldn’t be too pleased.

So I don’t think that analogy really gets us anywhere or proves anything. It can be used to argue either way.

The broader issue of whether the use of technology is good or bad in winemaking is a separate and more interesting question. And this depends ultimately on a) what you want to get out of wine – pure hedonsim, or some deeper intellectual experience, or both, b) and what your subjective taste preferences are. Since the resolution of both of those issues depends on subjective preferences, there is no “right” answer to the use of technology. Any answer is only right or wrong relative to a particular evaluative framework.

Also, although these issues often get lumped together, it’s worth pointing out that the tech debate is entirely separate from the ripeness/alcohol debate. You could make high-acid/low-alcohol wines using watering back/spinning cones/reverse osmosis/or whateverr, and you could make glycerin fruit-bombs using entirely “natural” old-fashioned techniques.

13

Hey Jeremy,

This thread would have been worth it if for no other reason than it generated a Dr. Strangelove reference. Which I will add to. I don’t see RO and concentration as doomsday machines in and of themselves. But why not be like chefs – whose cookbooks set out all the ingredients in the dish – and state on the back wine label exactly what manipulations have taken place? My mind remains open on the topic, even if I fear that the use of certain technologies will smooth out some charming quirks along the way. If I could tell at a glance what had been done in the cellar, I’d be in a better position to judge whether to my tastes particular manipulations had a universal or at least general deleterious effect on wine, including whether they robbed wine of distinctive and desirable varietal or site characteristics.

14

What of him? Well, he’s just done a disservice to that piece of otoro. But of course, that’s just my opinion.

15

Corey,
I’ll stand by the wine and food comparison as wine is often described as a food and is occasionally drunk with food. The sushi chef might stand apart from a French or Italian or Vietnamese chef in that when he serves otoro, for example, he’s relying on the eye of the guy who purchased the fish. If the fish glistens just right and if its flesh has not been damaged during the catch, he’s in luck. All is has to do next is make the plate attractive. Further, I can’t say that I’ve ever tasted anything over-manipulative. I’ve tasted foods that have been undersalted and oversalted, cooked too long or not long enough, too tart or not tart enough, etc. But each of these complaints lies in what the chef has done to the food. And what he has done to the food makes it a “dish.” A perfect otoro is such by nature. The sushi chef does have some leeway, I’d guess, in how clean he wants the dish to taste; that is, how much sweet/sour/salty sauce he wants on it. The following are analogies to winemaking, briefly: The scallop is selected as the grapes are selected. The right pan is chosen, as the right size fermentor is chosen. The heat for cooking and the time for cooking are based on the size of the scallop and the style of the dish, as the fermentation temperature and the length of maceration are chosen based on the physiological state of the grape and the style of wine the winemaker intends. Ultimately we want the consumer to be elevated by what we have served.

16

Jeremy,

There are of course parallels between cooking and wine-making, I never meant to deny that. The issue is whether those parallels tell us anything useful about the application of technology and related techniques to winemaking. You seem to be arguing by analogy:

  1. Nobody complains about tech/manipulation in cooking.
  2. Cooking and winemaking are similar such that, if tech/manipulation in cooking is okay, then it’s okay in winemaking too.
  3. Therefore nobody should complain about tech/manipulation in winemaking.

I don’t think that’s a good argument. 1 and 2 can both be challenged. As for 2, tech/manipulation might be good in cooking but bad in winemaking. Or the other way around. And as for 1, people do complain about manipulation in cooking.

For a good example of food being “over-manipulated”, a couple of weeks ago on Top Chef one of the contestants made fried chicken by cooking the chicken breast sous vide before battering and frying it. All the judges agreed this was unnecessary and detrimental to the final result, since it prevented the batter from properly adhering to the skin. Or what about, say, McDonald’s french fries, which use all kinds of additives (esp. beef tallow I think) to manipulate your physiological gustatory responses, but lots of people love them. I’ve also had dishes where there was just too much going on – too many different components and techniques and flavors that didn’t harmonize, when a simpler approach would have been better. I’d probably consider this “over-manipulation” too.

Of course at some level all cooking and winemaking is manipulation, and the real problem is just “over-manipulation”. But this just adds confusion because manipulation has multiple English definitions, some of which are pejorative and some of which are not. It can mean either “to handle with skill” or “to falsify for one’s own advantage”. We should be clear about which definition we are using when.

17

We have a favorite tomato sauce recipe, it’s very intense and spicy, calls for additions of sugar and vinegar, and reading this thread it suddenly occurred to me, our sauce is totally spoofulated. It’s maybe a way to rescue some all too common low-quality tomatos. I have an Italian friend who thinks it’s an abomination. I admit I have a completely different sauce recipe, which a much lighter touch, for when I get fresh tomatos out of my own garden.

My example and the sushi example above does indeed show some parallels, between winemaking and cooking, but I think the comparison can be overdrawn. I think the more proper analogy would be between e.g. Scharffenberger and Hershey’s Kisses. The former is an artisinal expression of chocolate, while the latter is an industrial attempt at imitating some of those flavors.

If you frame the question in terms of putting water in sauce, I imagine you won’t find many people who’ll argue it’s a bad thing. However, reveal whatever it is Hershey puts in its Kisses, I doubt you get too many people arguing it’s a good thing.

18

In the far east, there is one quick and easy way to make food taste better…add monosodium glutamate. Many of the better restaurants will claim that they do not add MSG.

19

Wine is about place more than almost any other consumable. Touch it too much, and you taste just the winemaker and not the place. After tasting about 300+ wines in BDX this week, I taste an a** load of “consulting” and very little place-- Disappointing. But, I’m about to drop some celery in liquid nitrogen, because a FR stick of celery and one from CA taste pretty much the same.

20

Other than MSG, there are also other things added to food which might be objectionable.

  • Boric Acid is a really objectionable additive that is used as an additive to increase elasticity of noodles and is banned in the US.
  • Melamine in food. How quickly one forgets.
  • Formaldehyde added to dried foods as a preservative (?)
  • I believe there are dyes that are illegal for food (but have been found to be used in food). I also believe levels of certain colouring in food is regulated in some countries (and yes, food will colouring exceeding permitted levels have been found).

I’m sure it stands to reason that it is certainly not carte blanche in terms of chemicals that are permitted to be added to food.