Wine's naturalistic fallacy

[Rodrigo_B]

Assume we’ve all stipulated (I hope) that every wine has its winemaker’s stamp on it, big or small. There are lots of examples of producers who make wines from multiple sources (or terroirs, if you prefer). In some cases, tasting through those wines you can perceive noticeable differences across the wines, and in some cases you first notice the winemaking stamp, then the source differences at almost a more background level. Maybe there are some wines (I guess the natural inclination would be to say Grand Cru Burgundies) that can absorb that heavier stamp, and still show the source, particularly with age. In my experience, the sense of place can be more or less apparent, depending on the winemaking choices. Is Ramonet’s Montrachet the best representation of its source? or is it more a great representation of winemaking? Isn’t that the question? Assuming someone believes the Ramonet version to actually be the “best”; I don’t drink at that level, so I have to recuse myself from that conversation

I don’t think the winemaker’s stamp need necessarily be big for it to be apparent. As you noted, plenty of winemakers make wine from multiple sites that are blended together. Yet I’d still argue that many of those are able to retain the characteristics of both the broader appellation or region and the winemaker, which I think you and I are on the same page on.

Your point on which “stamp” one notices first, whether it’s the winemaker’s stamp or the terroir or regional stamp is certainly a valid one and touches on the debate of which is more important or influential: location/terroir or producer. Though that’s not what I was getting at. Rather, it is to say that there are wines that can do both, irrespective of which order you notice those stamps. And I’d argue that those—wines that leave you with both a sense of place and those who made it—are the most interesting wines, to me at least.

Discussing who makes the best example of a particular cru is probably a topic for another thread. I too don’t drink Ramonnet and Jayer to be able speak to that end. I merely noted them as well-known examples of wines that have a clear “stamp” of both place and winemaker.

[Mike_Grammer]

Enjoyed the article very much, William, and the discussion so far. My immediate thoughts swing to an analogy–maybe not as far-fetched of one as it seems on first blush because it’s a different kind of art. A movie can have great actors and have a great story. But doesn’t it take a great director to turn it into a great movie?

At a different fundamental base, I have a feeling that the winemakers whose products I would likely enjoy the most are those who have the most respect and reverence for the materials they have been given to work with. That does not mean that they should not play a part, and an important one, in the final product in the bottle, but that part starts with this idea of being a…talented servant?..to what comes to their hands.

One of the most enduring conversations with a winemaker I have had was a short one with Byron Kosuge who works (or worked) in Paul and Kathryn Sloan’s facility at Small Vines. He expressed his philosophy to me basically this way. That, unlike the usual job in which somebody does the same task many times a day and thousands of times a year…in winemaking, if you’re lucky, you get about 50 chances to get it right. Each harvest becomes a precious thing in that way. I really found myself resonating with that thought process, a way of looking at it that I had never considered before.

For sure, you don’t need to bounce across to this thread, but I had a little of this thought process, maybe, when I posed this question

https://www.wineberserkers.com/forum/viewtopic.php?p=2959790#p2959790


Kwa Heri

Mike

[Alan_Rath]

There are lots of examples of producers who make wines from multiple sources (or terroirs, if you prefer). In some cases, tasting through those wines you can perceive noticeable differences across the wines, and in some cases you first notice the winemaking stamp, then the source differences at almost a more background level.

I think—and this was really the argument of the piece—that this is a false choice. We notice some winemaking “artifacts” because we have been trained to recognize them, and we ignore others that have become (to repurpose your formulation) part of the “background”. But this is all about context. Most of Chablis is vinified in stainless steel; most Meursault is vinified in oak barrels. Meursault vinified in stainless steel would taste very, very different, and by contrast Meursault vinified in wood would reveal a strong “winemaking stamp”. To prove the point in the other direction, Chablis vinified in wood often tastes totally disorienting (even Raveneau and Dauvissat, remember, ferment in steel before they age in mostly used wood).

So, to my mind, it is really a fruitless task to start trying to parse where the terroir ends and the winemaking begins. It’s more interesting to talk about how compelling a producer’s chosen aesthetic is—with, certainly, a strong case to be made for understatement, elegance etc by all means. Is this mere semantics, you might ask? And I would reply that, no, I see producers making less characterful, personal wines because they are so anxious to efface any kind of winemaking “signature”. Herwig has given one example above, for his palate, and I can think of others. This is a very personal thing, which is why I permitted myself to use to first person in my essay, but I am happy to learn about the winemaker as well as the vineyard when I drink a bottle of wine, and I don’t believe these are mutually exclusive. To be clear, I am not saying it’s great if Nuits-Saint-Georges tastes like over-oaked, but rather that I’m happy for it to taste, diversely, like Chevillon, Mugneret-Gibourg, or Mugnier.

To take approach, and to make things more concrete, which are the producers you have in mind where you feel that the winemaking takes a backseat to the site?

William, first, I greatly enjoyed your essay, and find it an argument that shouldn’t get much disagreement, in a general sense. I’m only following the discussion into some nooks and crannies. Your first paragraph describes more what we’ve come to agree is the “standard” for certain regions; if Chablis and Burgundy switched their winemaking approaches long ago, maybe we would have come to accept that as the standard. I will most definitely agree with the last sentence of your first paragraph, all wines that I like quite a lot, though I have a preference for Gibourg and Mugnier over Chevillon. That’s actually a really interesting example, since (to my tastes) Chevillon always has a distinct flavor profile different from those other two, pretty much across the portfolio. Perhaps it’s something about how they farm, or the native yeast in their winery, or fermentation temperatures, or something else entirely. But it’s there as a winemaker’s stamp.

As for examples? I would give the wines of Bernard Moreau of 10-15 years ago, and of Mongeard-Mugneret in the same vein even today, as wines where the oak treatment too often masks the underlying terroir, especially when young. Or, in a different sense (again, for my tastes, and no doubt an unpopular opinion given their desirability), Fourrier, whose wines I find overly ripe, to the point that they tend to mask their terroir.

[David_Bu3ker]

Interesting Alan. I would have never figured you for much of a Gibourg fan. Given the examples you cite, I feel like your personal, stylistic preferences are being substituted for transparency, with styles you do not enjoy being labeled as stamped.

I actually find the Fourrier style to be quite transparent, and Chevillon as well. They are transparent in quite different ways to my taste.

[Kevin_Porter]

I find so little to argue with here that I am torn between admiring the brilliance of the argument and the beauty of the writing, and dismissing it as syllogistic.

[Kevin_G]

Fantastic article, William. I admire your depth of knowledge and i envy your command of words.

Several years ago, i published a couple of articles on Lars Carlberg’s website that traced a similar argument. At once, terroir diminishes the physical and intellectual labor of winegrowers and wine sellers while also facilitating the language of differentiation that winegrowers and wine sellers rely on to market their products.

Human-Nature on the Middle Mosel – Lars Carlberg: Mosel Wine

First as Tragedy, then as Farce?: A Short Story about Natural Wine – Lars...

[Alan_Rath]

There are lots of examples of producers who make wines from multiple sources (or terroirs, if you prefer). In some cases, tasting through those wines you can perceive noticeable differences across the wines, and in some cases you first notice the winemaking stamp, then the source differences at almost a more background level.

I think—and this was really the argument of the piece—that this is a false choice. We notice some winemaking “artifacts” because we have been trained to recognize them, and we ignore others that have become (to repurpose your formulation) part of the “background”. But this is all about context. Most of Chablis is vinified in stainless steel; most Meursault is vinified in oak barrels. Meursault vinified in stainless steel would taste very, very different, and by contrast Meursault vinified in wood would reveal a strong “winemaking stamp”. To prove the point in the other direction, Chablis vinified in wood often tastes totally disorienting (even Raveneau and Dauvissat, remember, ferment in steel before they age in mostly used wood).

I want to come back to this, because there are no bright lines, it’s a continuum. Where the line of separation is for one person (if there even is one) will be very different for someone else.

Trained? Of course! Without experience and knowledge most people can’t distinguish and describe the simplest of differences in wines. I hope you’re not claiming that experience is irrelevant.

Let me make a stretch and give an analogy: if you’ve ever been in a dining room with a piano player, it can be a very pleasant experience, or really annoying, and of course anywhere in between. If the piano is just right, matches the din of the room, the music is appropriate, it can be fun, and an enhancement of the experience. Or it can be too loud, music that doesn’t match the environment, and nothing more than a distraction that detracts from the experience.

That’s how I feel about winemaking. It can be an enhancement, or a distraction.

[Cris_Whetstone]

Thanks for the article, William. It distills many of my thoughts over the years in a more coherent and expressive way than I ever could. I’ve often been very frustrated with the tenor expressed when it comes to winemaking and “intervention” over the years. I think many lost sight of what a huge intervention any production of wine is in the backlash against the extravagances of techniques that became popular in the mid-90’s to early aughts. All wine is made probably with 90% of it’s technique in common. The rest is twiddling knobs and dials on the margins. In such a system twiddling them less is just a decisive and imparts as much as pushing techniques to their extremes.

Planting a vineyard is a massive intervention but there is often the general attitude that each vineyard is some perfection of nature that is to be cradled and directed into making some purity that doesn’t exist in nature without man’s tastes. All the varieties we are used to drinking are a product of our domestication. Vineyards are places where we destroyed the natural flora and fauna in order to plant a very specific vine. Being a vine we have to train it grow in such a way so that it will support the fruit we want from it. And on and on.

The only non-interventionist wine would be those from some historic vines growing in a forest somewhere without the hand of man being involved. There the grapes were free to fall from the side of the tree they grew next to into the bottom of a broken, fallen log. The juice from the crushed grapes could have gathered and momentarily created the greatest elixir ever until some animal or insect was attracted to it. But maybe those critters were disturbed by the influence of that log on the fermenting juice and argued that the truly glorious beverage was on the next slope over where the grapes freefell into a depression into the rock it grew above rather than fermenting in wood.

[Marcus_Goodfellow]

Just published a free-to-read Tuesday morning provocation on The Wine Advocate site. Would be interested to hear everyone’s thought!

The précis is that I argue that the notion that wines “make themselves”, and that any producer signature amounts to “makeup” is mistaken; every wine is the product of intention, as producers make choices in the face of almost infinite possibilities (even if these are, in practice, limited by logistics and conventions). The argument by which the essay stands or falls is this one: “To acknowledge that terroir is a text to be interpreted and not a law that demands adherence is also to accept that any winemaking style that seems to be more “transparent,” offering a less obviously mediated expression of grape and place, is in fact only a subtler and more deceptive form of artifice.”

Robert Parker: The Wine Advocate

I don’t trick or deceive others.

Implying that “naturalistic” process is a more subtle version of artifice, can only be argued regarding the marketing of wine.

As opposed to the making of wine.

Every winemaker at the beginning of vintage, is like a downhill skier atop the hill. You’re going down the hill one way or the other. What route you take is a combination of choice, logistics, training, gear, and conditions. But whatever that route is, the run is in the bottle. If you go down without skis or poles…that’s still your run, and some people may love that version. And some may go down on a snowmobile. Some are people are impressed by that.

The artifice is in the talking about what a great skier you are after the run is over.

But the run is in the bottle, and the bottle will tell you what the mountain was like just as much as it will show exactly what type of skier someone is as well.

All the rest of it is talk.

That said, if you hang to 30 Brix, cold soak for 15 days, water back 15%, add a bunch of enzymes, hammer through ferment with a high tolerance commercial yeast, slap 50 gallons of Mega-purple into the back end of ferment, then hit barrique for 7-14 months, fine with egg whites, gelatin, and casein, then add a custom blend of finishing tannins, RO the alcohol down to 14.0%, and drop in a coconut before bottling…then it’s likely that any story you tell about your run will be marketing horse manuer. And the terroir of your wine will definitely be about the winemaker…

[Marcus_Goodfellow]

There are lots of examples of producers who make wines from multiple sources (or terroirs, if you prefer). In some cases, tasting through those wines you can perceive noticeable differences across the wines, and in some cases you first notice the winemaking stamp, then the source differences at almost a more background level.

I think—and this was really the argument of the piece—that this is a false choice. We notice some winemaking “artifacts” because we have been trained to recognize them, and we ignore others that have become (to repurpose your formulation) part of the “background”. But this is all about context. Most of Chablis is vinified in stainless steel; most Meursault is vinified in oak barrels. Meursault vinified in stainless steel would taste very, very different, and by contrast Meursault vinified in wood would reveal a strong “winemaking stamp”. To prove the point in the other direction, Chablis vinified in wood often tastes totally disorienting (even Raveneau and Dauvissat, remember, ferment in steel before they age in mostly used wood).

I want to come back to this, because there are no bright lines, it’s a continuum. Where the line of separation is for one person (if there even is one) will be very different for someone else.

Trained? Of course! Without experience and knowledge most people can’t distinguish and describe the simplest of differences in wines. I hope you’re not claiming that experience is irrelevant.

Let me make a stretch and give an analogy: if you’ve ever been in a dining room with a piano player, it can be a very pleasant experience, or really annoying, and of course anywhere in between. If the piano is just right, matches the din of the room, the music is appropriate, it can be fun, and an enhancement of the experience. Or it can be too loud, music that doesn’t match the environment, and nothing more than a distraction that detracts from the experience.

That’s how I feel about winemaking. It can be an enhancement, or a distraction.

And a large determination in the pleasantness or unpleasantness of the piano is dependent upon the mood, and tastes, of the guest. And in almost two decades of restaurant work, I don’t believe that I ever met a guest who felt that their annoyance at any particular piano player was not the general feeling. But some like it loud and some don’t. And some like it loud when they’re in with friends and not when they’re in with their family.

So often here it’s pointed out that wine is subjective at every level. While we have very generalized semi-consensus on some aspects of wine, it’s rare to find actual consensus as we get more specific.

I used the analogy of skiers simply to point out that you have to go through a basic process, growing grapes and fermenting juice to have any wine. But winemakers have to choose a path/style. To say, I make wine in a “naturalistic” fashion is just talk.

But if you do choose to make wine with less technological support, it will be a different outcome from someone who is making wine in highly technical way.

And for those who want to say doing nothing is the superior way to make wines…that’s a marketiing opinion. And if you find a group of people who believe you and like the smell of mouse pee in an armpit…rock on. If I was 26 and 90+% pf my wine experience was manufactured wines like Santa Margherita and Zabaco Zin, I might think funky wine was pretty cool. I kmow I used to like some pretty bretty stuff from more rustic European producers when I was 26.

The opinion isn’t the wine. So much of this particular argument is trying to justify a “right” position. But there isn’t one, it’s just opinions and bottles. Vino veritas, opinions…less so.

[LasseK1]

The best example for me is the discussion of adding sulfites. In the genre of “natural wine” i have never understood why this is seen as such a special no-go for many, when it comes to the perception of showing true terrior. It is not like other choices had not effect…
And what annoys me the most about it, is that it removes focus from what is important to me, farming the land we use for a luxury product, with care, while producing thrilling wines!

It’s an important exploration zone. As noted above, this has been an important movement, to learn, to expand horizons. SO2 isn’t neutral. It adds character, darkens fruit expression, adds structure, mutes aromatics, etc. Wines with no or low SO2 can be a glorious revelation, a new realm of expression. Of course, making an unstable or vulnerable wine is problematic or going too far. For a few years we made experimental no SO2 versions of a few (different each vintage) wines (using an isolated grape seed compound that served as an anti-microbial and anti-oxidant). Tasting these side by side, the no SO2 version was usually better by quite a lot, though one was a virtual tie in opinion and one was a clear loser.

So, there might be a lot of scare tactics, misinformation and hysteria on the side of the marketing, media and consumer, there’s a Holy Grail aspect to producers.

I agree with you.
SO2 is a very important design choice. And the “Sans Soufre Ajoute” wines is and has been very important. But it is that, a design choice. My point is that so many other choices have been taken already before it is added that all influence a wine. So why do we need to discuss it so much instead of how we treat the nature we farm, which for me is where the natural wine scene is really important and pushing boundaries.

[Marcus_Goodfellow]

Enjoyed the article very much, William, and the discussion so far. My immediate thoughts swing to an analogy–maybe not as far-fetched of one as it seems on first blush because it’s a different kind of art. A movie can have great actors and have a great story. But doesn’t it take a great director to turn it into a great movie?

At a different fundamental base, I have a feeling that the winemakers whose products I would likely enjoy the most are those who have the most respect and reverence for the materials they have been given to work with. That does not mean that they should not play a part, and an important one, in the final product in the bottle, but that part starts with this idea of being a…talented servant?..to what comes to their hands.

One of the most enduring conversations with a winemaker I have had was a short one with Byron Kosuge who works (or worked) in Paul and Kathryn Sloan’s facility at Small Vines. He expressed his philosophy to me basically this way. That, unlike the usual job in which somebody does the same task many times a day and thousands of times a year…in winemaking, if you’re lucky, you get about 50 chances to get it right. Each harvest becomes a precious thing in that way. I really found myself resonating with that thought process, a way of looking at it that I had never considered before.

For sure, you don’t need to bounce across to this thread, but I had a little of this thought process, maybe, when I posed this question

https://www.wineberserkers.com/forum/viewtopic.php?p=2959790#p2959790


Kwa Heri

Mike

Very well said(posted).

[Julian_Marshall]

Thanks William for such a thought-provoking essay. I can’t help finding it deliciously ironic that it should be published by TWA, whose former owner some would hold responsible for “bland, commercial conformity”!

Marcus’s skiing analogy is excellent - every winemaker anywhere is creating something according to their own choices. But the choices surely depend on place - the quality of the terroir and climate. Personally, I believe that wines should indeed be the expression of their terroir and I welcome the tendency towards greater purity.

But of course “natural” wines are just as much a choice as “patinated, personal wines”. Who knows, perhaps tomorrow’s consultants or “flying winemakers” will be today’s “natural” winemakers?

I don’t think that wines which aim to express more purity and “transparency” are inherently superior to those using new oak, because that would be as silly as the former one-size-fits-all approach which clearly believed that it held a universal truth. Each to their own. One person’s luxury oak is another person’s coffin.

Wine fashions come and go. The bottom line is that the stuff needs to be sold - as Marcus says:
“And for those who want to say doing nothing is the superior way to make wines…that’s a marketing opinion.”

I suppose the only problem is, in my opinion, that the market can sometimes dictate the fashion, hence all those Bordeaux which are not influenced by personal winemakers’ choices, but by a consultant.

There again, when you are the MD of a large château owned by a pension fund, you are not in the same position as a Jayer or a Coche. Your job is to ensure that your 150000 bottles correspond to the market, and that your product gets the EP score which will ensure it’s success, so you choose the necessary consultant. Fundamentally there is nothing wrong with that choice either.

But ultimately, the choice which really counts is our choice as consumers. We don’t have to buy a Jayer or a Rolland unless we want to. Whatever one feels about purity or patinated, S02 or new oak, what is great today is that we no longer have somebody telling us that they’re right about wine and that failing to agree with them means we are either numbskulls or philistines. A Lascombes or a Roches-Neuves are polar opposites, both the product of a winemaker’s choice, but neither is “right” nor “wrong”.

[Otto_Forsberg]

A great piece and something I can agree with fully. However, what struck me weird here was the use of the word “patina”. To my understanding, “patina” is used in French as it is in Finnish - an effect that is brought by the passage of time. That’s why the use of “patina” for winemaker’s influence struck rather odd to me. Especially “youthful patina” sounded very contradictory to my ears. Do the French really use the term this way?

I’ve understood “patina” in wine to mean basically the same thing as tertiary characteristics in an aged wine. That’s why I read “patinated wine” automatically as a wine with some age to it.

[Phil_T_r_o_t_t_e_r]

Especially “youthful patina” sounded very contradictory to my ears. Do the French really use the term this way?

You are right that “patine” often comes from the effect of time. But not necessarily. A good example comes from a shoemaker that will stress or otherwise treat a pair of leather shoes to give it a given patina. It could be debated that giving something patina is to replicate what would be the effects of time but that is not always the case. The Larousse defines it as both:
Patine: “Transformation de la surface d’un objet, d’une sculpture, se produisant avec le temps ou sous l’effet de certains traitements de surface.”

[Mike_Grammer]

I can only smile thinking of that word—my context is mom’s sterling silver set when it needed a burnishing or polishing

[Otto_Forsberg]

Especially “youthful patina” sounded very contradictory to my ears. Do the French really use the term this way?

You are right that “patine” often comes from the effect of time. But not necessarily. A good example comes from a shoemaker that will stress or otherwise treat a pair of leather shoes to give it a given patina. It could be debated that giving something patina is to replicate what would be the effects of time but that is not always the case. The Larousse defines it as both:
Patine: “Transformation de la surface d’un objet, d’une sculpture, se produisant avec le temps ou sous l’effet de certains traitements de surface.”

In that context it makes some sense. However, even in that definition I’m understanding it that the transformation in question means something that appears aged, not just any transformation. Even in French Wikipedia article (https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patine_(aspect)) all the definitions on artificial patina seemed to describe processes in which make a new object appear aged and/or weathered.

[Otto_Forsberg]

I can only smile thinking of that word—my context is mom’s sterling silver set when it needed a burnishing or polishing

That’s natural patina and by far the most common use of the term.

[Julian_Marshall]

A great piece and something I can agree with fully. However, what struck me weird here was the use of the word “patina”. To my understanding, “patina” is used in French as it is in Finnish - an effect that is brought by the passage of time. That’s why the use of “patina” for winemaker’s influence struck rather odd to me. Especially “youthful patina” sounded very contradictory to my ears. Do the French really use the term this way?

I’ve understood “patina” in wine to mean basically the same thing as tertiary characteristics in an aged wine. That’s why I read “patinated wine” automatically as a wine with some age to it.

In the context, I understood it to mean that the wine is fashioned by the winemaker’s intervention, so that its personality is the result of a deliberate action. But you’re right that the normal meaning in French is the effect that time gives to something - for example an old staircase would be patinated by the passage of time (and shoes!). If you “patinate” a piece of furniture in French, you are either protecting it with a product of some kind, or more often making it look old by rubbing some of the paint or polish off, or else painting it with something that gives that effect - which I’m sure William didn’t mean!

[William_Kelley]

William, first, I greatly enjoyed your essay, and find it an argument that shouldn’t get much disagreement, in a general sense. I’m only following the discussion into some nooks and crannies. Your first paragraph describes more what we’ve come to agree is the “standard” for certain regions; if Chablis and Burgundy switched their winemaking approaches long ago, maybe we would have come to accept that as the standard. I will most definitely agree with the last sentence of your first paragraph, all wines that I like quite a lot, though I have a preference for Gibourg and Mugnier over Chevillon. That’s actually a really interesting example, since (to my tastes) Chevillon always has a distinct flavor profile different from those other two, pretty much across the portfolio. Perhaps it’s something about how they farm, or the native yeast in their winery, or fermentation temperatures, or something else entirely. But it’s there as a winemaker’s stamp.

As for examples? I would give the wines of Bernard Moreau of 10-15 years ago, and of Mongeard-Mugneret in the same vein even today, as wines where the oak treatment too often masks the underlying terroir, especially when young. Or, in a different sense (again, for my tastes, and no doubt an unpopular opinion given their desirability), Fourrier, whose wines I find overly ripe, to the point that they tend to mask their terroir.

Don’t worry, that’s the spirit in which I took your comments, and I’m very happy to exchange!

It’s interesting how close changes like that evoked above actually came to happening (of course, radical changes have actually happened, too). René Lafon in an interview once said that, back in the day (I guess in the 1960s) he had to convince tonnellerie Damy in Meursault to start making 228-liter barrels again, so many people had gone over to using tanks or foudres!

Picking those three producers was slightly tricky of me, because to my mind the Mugneret sisters make Vosne-styled Nuits and Mugnier makes Chambolle-styled Nuits, whereas Chevillon, which you identify as your least favorite of the three, makes the most obviously “Nuits” Nuits (after all, they are based there and even buy their barrels from Sirugue, a cooper actually based in Nuits). Mugnier’s Marechale is, to me, a great example, because it is both obviously different from his Chambolle wines and still very obviously a Mugnier wine. And to me, the Mugneret-Gibourg style is just as pronounced as Chevillon’s: after all, the new oak can be quite prominent young (that creamy, spicy overlay from Tonneleries Rousseau and François Frères), though it integrates beautifully over time (M-G is my largest red Burgundy holding, so don’t interpret this as a criticism). But, and this gets back to the real point of the article, one taster’s transparency is often another’s makeup, and it is ultimately more useful to talk about more or less subjectively compelling aesthetics when one is dealing with producers operating at this level.