Dr Vino's wine blog

Many geologists object to two things: misusing “minerality” and being misquoted.

Site reader and distributor Damien Casten sent in an AP story (with no byline) yesterday entitled “Geologists debunk soil impact on wine at Ore. talk.” The Oregon event was a special session at the annual conference of the Geological Society of America.

At the meeting, Alex Maltman presented a paper with this to say about minerality: “The widely cited direct, literal connection between vineyard geology and wine taste seems scientifically impossible. Whatever “minerality” in wine is, it is not the taste of vineyard minerals.” He calls any perceived connection a “romantic myth.”

Fair enough, there may not be a transfer of minerals from substrate to the glass, but is terroir debunked? Not quite, argued Jonathan Swinchatt in a paper that cites the indirect influences of drainage, accessibility to water, microbiology, soil temperature, and trace element chemistry. He argued that unraveling these links is “devilishly” complex and thus “the connections between geology and wine will remain elusive for some time to come.”

Terroir: clear as mud!

After the jump, Greg Jones, a climatologist from Southern Oregon University (and son of the founder of Abacela Vineyards and Winery in Roseburg, OR) chimes in with his thoughts from the conference and the reporting of it. Read more…

We’re back with Part Deux of our interview with John Gilman, author of the newsletter A View from the Cellar (part one is here). John has offered a free issue from his backlist to any Dr. Vino reader so surf on over to his site and check it out. In this part of the Q&A, I had intended John to give a quick thumbs up or thumbs down on a number of hot-button issues in the wine world today as well as some things that I’ve heard him express unusual views about. In case you thought you were done gorging during the holidays, you can now feast on John’s 7,000+ words in this second part. So buckle up and get ready to hear his thoughts on what’s wrong with Riesling from Austria and Australia, screwcaps and their problems, the Loire, California cab then and now, indigenous yeasts, roto-fermenters, small oak barrels, wines over 14% alcohol and why he uses scores!

German Riesling
To my mind this is clearly the most singularly misunderstood and underappreciated region for great wines in the world. Read more…

The next time you hear a wine maker extolling the virtues and distinctiveness of the vineyard, a good follow up question might just be to ask about the yeasts used in fermentation.

Yeasts may be boring, invisible agents of the fermentation process but they have been getting more attention recently. Jancis Robinson is the latest to focus on them in her column from Saturday’s Financial Times, “Forget the grapes, it’s a cultural thing.” To the tape:

The overwhelming quantity of wine on sale today was fermented using commercially available strains of yeast, yeasts specially chosen for their particular and powerful attributes…One prominent New Zealand winemaker claims…that he can make any required style of Sauvignon Blanc from exactly the same grapes, provided he can choose the yeast. The following thoughts have been inspired by Chardonnays that taste like Sauvignon Blancs, a raft of indistinguishable New World Syrahs, and my sense that the flavour spectrum of wines today seems narrower than it has ever been.

She then describes some of the characteristics. Enoferm Assmannshausen®, for example, suggests that it be used “for making Pinot Noir and Zinfandel. It is considered a color friendly strain that enhances spicy (clove, nutmeg) and fruity flavours and aromas.” Lalvin CY3079® is designed “for barrel fermented Chardonnay and aging on lees. Gives rich, full mouthfeel and aromas” while Uvaferm SVG® is designed “to enhance typical Sauvignon character, diminished acidity and with good fermentation kinetics.”

While methods of grape growing and vineyard sites are certainly important, yeasts deserve to leaven the discussion of winemaking more than they do.

“[Winemaking] parameters are dictated by an international taste and by champions of this taste – including Robert Parker, The Wine Spectator and certain Spanish critics like José Peñin. They are then produced by taste bureaucrats like Michel Rolland and hundreds of indigenous enologists like Telmo Rodriguez,” says Mondovino-director Jonathan Nossiter in his new book, Le Goût et le Pouvoir (Taste and Power). Link

“I guess everyone is getting frazzled by higher and higher wine prices and WMDs(wines of massive deliciousness)…..but seriously… anyone with half a chimp’s brain can see through Nossiter’s transparency easier than a J.J.Prum riesling…it is Nossiter and his ilk(call them the scary wine gestapo)chanting the same stupid hymn that demand wines be produced in only one narrow style…..but bring on the suckers and fools….some one will certainly buy into his propaganda as they did that migraine-inducing disingenuous film……” eBob

Related: “Mondovino: shaky not stirring” [Dr. V]

Is that a whiff of raspberries and leather you get from that red wine–or a whiff of petroleum? With some premium wines consuming three times their weight in petroleum, don’t be surprised if it is the latter.

My previous postings on the carbon footprint of wine made me want to determine just how much carbon is involved in the making and transporting of our favorite beverage. So I collaborated with Pablo Paster, a sustainability metrics specialist, and we ran the numbers. Our findings have just been published as a working paper for the American Association of Wine Economists, available here as a pdf.

While I welcome your comments on the whole paper, I’ll post some of the key findings here:

* Organic farming has lower greenhouse gas (GHG) intensity than conventional farming but I was surprised that the difference wasn’t greater. Clearly there may be other differences in a local ecosystem but the GHG difference was surprisingly small. But on the whole, it was the transportation that played a more significant role from a GHG perspective.

* Regarding the “food miles” debate, we find that distance does matter.

* But not all miles that a bottle travels are the same. Efficiencies in transportation make container ships better than trucks, which in turn are better than planes.

* Shipping premium wine, bottled at the winery, around the world mostly involves shipping glass with some wine in it. In this regard, drinking wine from a magnum is the more carbon-friendly choice since the glass-to-wine ratio is less. Half-bottles, by contrast, worsen the ratio.

* Shipping wine in bulk from the source and bottling closer to the point of consumption lowers carbon intensity.

* Light packaging material such as Tetra-Pak or bag-in-a-box has much less carbon intensity.

* Using oak chips is a more carbon friendly alternative than oak barrels, particularly those that are shipped assembled and empty around the world

* There’s a “green line” that runs down the middle of Ohio. For points to the West of that line, it is more carbon efficient to consume wine trucked from California. To the East of that line, it’s more efficient to consume the same sized bottle of wine from Bordeaux, which has had benefited from the efficiencies of container shipping, followed by a shorter truck trip. In the event that a carbon tax were ever imposed, it would thus have a decidedly un-nationalistic impact.

What does this mean for the green wine consumer? Drinking a wine made without agrichemicals, from larger format bottles, or wine that has traveled fewer miles is the more “green” option. Beyond these points (or in addition to them), you could perform your own carbon offsets, for example, by giving up one bottle for another and saying no to bottled water.

“Red, White and “Green”: The Cost of Carbon In the Global Wine Trade,” By Tyler Colman and Pablo Paster

UODATE: This paper was been published in the March 2009 issue of the Journal of Wine Research
image 1: istockphoto.com

Tom Lubbe, a biodynamic vigneron in Roussillon who hails originally from South Africa, writes in responding to the statement, “We’ll see who are the real biodynamic producers this year. If they’re really biodynamic, this year they won’t have any wine.” I tasted Tom’s excellent old-vine Grenache called Matassa earlier this year. To his email:

This is the kind of lunatic (no positive connection to lunar cycles) assertion that the Bordelais, or those who spend too much time in the environs, are prone to making. A difficult vintage should have no bearing on the basis of your cultural method in the vineyard. The assumption that no “truly” biodyamic (and organic?) vigneron could make wine in 2007 shows a paucity of comprehension for what biodynamics (and organics?) actually entails and the multiple benefits that issue from a more holistic, natural approach to viticulture. A naturally farmed vineyard’s ability to resist pathogens is dependent on the condition of the soil. If the soil is alive with a rich diversity of microbial activity (and the oft forgotten earthworm) the vineyard’s resistance to disease is naturally stronger , much like the bacteria we need in our gut . In fact, the real grape when fighting off pathogens such as oidium or downy mildew without the interference of systemic chemicals produces increased levels of polyphenols, which as we now know affect not just taste but our health and nutrition as well. In real wine I like to think these three elements (taste, nutrition and health) are as intimately linked as they are in real food.

Indeed, if a vigneron labours through the years to regenerate a living soil and still cannot take in a reasonable harvest this would be a sure sign that they are working a mediocre terroir for grapes and they should either relocate their viticultural efforts or plant rice. That Bordeaux was originally a swamp developed by the English and Dutch, two essentially mercantile/military nations with insatiable thirsts for cheap booze, does come to mind when regarding the nature and frequency of bad vintages in Bordeaux. (Does M. Rolland do sake?) Kampai, Tom

Related: “Green wine: the zen forest of Matassa, Roussillon”
“2007 vintage verbatim: Nicolas Joly on biodynamics“

How will vintage 2007 turn out in France where it rained much of the summer? A few weeks ago, I posted a comment that someone in the trade in France told me: “We’ll see who are the real biodynamic producers this year. If they’re really biodynamic, this year they won’t have any wine.”

With a rebuttal today, via email from the Coulée de Serrant in Savennieres in Loire, we have Nicolas Joly. He is a leading practitioner of biodynamics and wrote the book “From Sky to Earth” to help vignerons around the world in their conversion to biodynamics. I say vignerons and not “winemakers” because his business card reads “Nicolas Joly, Gérant de la Société, Nature assistant and not a winemaker.” To his email:

All serious biodynamists had no problems with disease! I lost maybe 1% of the crop. There were as many people caught on the conventional side as on the organic/biodynamic side. Any serious person will confirm this. Those who were caught were those who have not much experience with mildew-rare though they are. Mildew’s development is a very fast–one or two days as opposed to a month for oidium–so you need to react very fast reaction. It’s simple: treat after the rain with very small doses of copper each time. We used around 5.5 to 6 kg of cooper per hectare this year, about 50% more than last years. We had the strongest pressure for 20 years.The 501 BD treatment was also very efficient. The negative statements come from people who either have no understanding of BD or who want to justified the fact that they did not move toward a better farming.

I have a new book coming in the US soon for consumers (it just came out in French ) and will be available in Italian, Portuguese and Spanish soon.

On February 9th and 11th part of the group “Return to Terroir” will be in Montreal and Toronto [for a tasting of biodynamic wines].

(image, with permission)

Is the world running out of Champagne? Such is what a panicked headline in the Guardian implied recently.

Indeed, Champagne is the most effervescent region in France, a winemaking country where practically every other region is affected by la crise viticole. Peter Liem, Senior Correspondent for Wine & Spirits magazine, is so interested in Champagne that he left New York earlier this year to move there. I caught up with him via email about what’s happening on the ground. He talks in detail about the effects of the phenomenal demand for Champagne and offers his picks for reasonably priced bubbly here in the States–as well as ones only available in France. Read more…

Darrell Corti has banned the sale of high alcohol wines in his food and wine emporium in Sacramento, CA according to a story on AppellationAmerica.com. Corti says:

At our store, after a tasting on the 29th of March, I put on top of the Zinfandel section, “This is the last tasting Corti Brothers will do for over 14.5 percent Zinfandels. These wines will no longer be sold at Corti Brothers. There will be no exceptions…They (high alcohol wines) make you very tired. My idea of a really good bottle of wine is that two people finish the bottle and wish there was just a little bit more. Some of these wines with high levels of alcohol — you can’t finish the bottle. You don’t want to finish the bottle.”

What do you say? Is Corti a hero or a villain?