Jim Clarke

Hi,

Welcome to my somewhat-abortive blog. Blogging seemed like a good move at the time, but I guess I’m fortunate in that traditional media still has an interest in publishing (and paying for, frankly) my work, so after a summer of attention, the blog has fallen into neglect. I will continue to update it with information regarding newly published articles and the like; a list, with links, can be found on my “About” page. Feel free to browse the archives as well, of course.

Along with the writing I am doing more and more presentations/panels/lectures on wine and beer; please contact me at jimclarke.newyork@gmail.com if you are interested in having me speak at your event, public or private.

Thanks for stopping by.

There’s always been a lot of arguments and disputes as to the value and purpose of wine competitions: Does winning mean anything? What is the best format for a wine competition? Can we make them more transparent, so those bronzes, silvers, and golds can have a clear meaning to wine consumers?

I thought it was time to look at how other fields of human achievement are evaluated in open competition. Are we really stuck with the format we’re all familiar with? Well, they say you can’t teach an old dog new tricks, but here’s one alternative:

Manifesto: A new format for wine competitions (click to play)

If Steve Heimoff and Matt Kramer are to be believed, winemaking has gotten “meta.” How we talk about wine has changed wine itself. Mr. Kramer credits “authenticity” whereas Mr. Heimoff credits the 100-point scoring system. While both factors surely have their influence, neither amount to human beings acting directly to change the taste of wine.

First, some context: Kramer’s initial column regarding authenticity was focused on the changes in wine styles since the 1970s. He describes this as standards set by wine producers themselves, as winemakers and winegrowers in a particular region defined their wines and in some cases asked their respective governments to set those definitions as law – exactingly so, in much of Europe, and much more broadly in most of the New World. This is questionable; to cite one change during the period in question, does allowing Merlot or Cabernet in a Chianti make it more authentic, when those grapes have no real history there? Or does it make those wines more commercially viable in the international market?

For the producers, authenticity is a concern in as much as it allows a region to make itself stand out in the market. If Gevrey-Chambertin permitted grapes other than Pinot Noir and wines made fom those grapes were sold as Gevrey-Chambertin, it would confuse the meaning of that name in the market, and be bad for consumer confidence – even if the wines were good, there wouldn’t be a stylistic consistency to them. Authenticity, to producers, is in many ways simply a matter of protecting the brand. There’s nothing new or startling in that which would account for a “giant transformation” since the 1970s.

In fact, while writers and some winemakers do seem to be taking a renewed interest in authenticity in the past few years (alongside the interest in natural wines, which many feel are more authentic) that’s a recent change. Many of the Super-Tuscans that appeared in the 70s and have done quite well then certainly had no claim to authenticity, but were (are?) hugely popular (I’m thinking in particular of the non-Sangiovese wines); they were in many cases brazen attempts to grow wines that tasted Californian, but came from Tuscany. What’s authentic about that?

And the point system certainly does influence sales, which motivates producers; after all, you have to sell your wines if you want to stay in business. In some cases that means “Parkerization.” Mr. Heimoff sums up the move as one toward “richer and riper” wines. There may be something to that, but the 100-point system didn’t enable, or even create, that demand. Wines from a good (i.e. ripe) vintage were always more in demand than wines from lesser years. The fact is, no winegrower ever wants a thin vintage, and there’s nothing new about that. A bad year is economically tough on the farmer and winemaker. For a long time, though, winegrowers and winemakers were limited in how much they could do to improve a lesser year.

The biggest change in wine in the past forty years has been having the science and technology to protect against bad vintages to a greater degree than ever before. And I mean that without getting into micro-oxygenation, vacuums, spinning cones and the rest of the winemaker’s tricks for manipulating their wine.

The cliché says that good wine starts in the vineyard, and so do these techniques. Things like new trellising systems that help limit rot and promote ripeness. Canopy management revolutionized New Zealand and made Marlborough Sauvignon Blanc a household name worldwide when before it was totally unknown. Learning how to protect vinifera vines from the cold has turned the Finger Lakes from a Manischewitz factory into the home of America’s best Rieslings. A better understanding of clonal selection has done wonders for a number of regions, Chianti included. These are all viticultural advances that allow producers to sell fine wine more consistently than in the past; given a bad year, they have more tools at hand to salvage it.

Vinification has advanced as well. A lot of it’s just better hygiene: brettanomyces used to be thought an aspect of terroir; now it’s known to be a (generally undesirable) yeast, and we’ve learned how to banish it from the winery (more-or-less). Rias Baixas was a vinous backwater; EU investment introduced stainless steel tanks and temperature-controlled fermentations, and now their leading grape, Albariño, is being sought out and grown in California and New Zealand. Similar transformations are happening in Greece.

South Africa is an interesting example. Cut-off from many of these advances by boycotts until the end of apartheid in 1994, many of the wines they first began to export failed to demonstrate the Cape’s potential. Exposure to the advances made elsewhere have kick-started many dynamic changes and improvements in the country’s wines. They were chasing sales, and good scores may aid that, but it’s access to the tools that makes it possible. To my palate – and I taste a lot of South African wine – the country has by-and-large retained its signature, so this isn’t a case of squandered authenticity, either.

We wouldn’t be interested in many of the world’s wine regions if they hadn’t gained from some of these advances. To go back to Rias Baixas, an “authentic” albariño in the ‘70s would have been – at best – a nice thing to drink for “local color” while visiting Galicia, and certainly wouldn’t have been something you’d bother to export. Winemaking and winegrowing advances have made authenticity a luxury we can afford to think about.

To digress a bit, what about the over-ripe, high-alcohol wines? Well, many of these techniques, especially those of the vineyard, cannot be turned on and off each year, so while a bad year might, with the kind of advances I’ve been talking about, now yield acceptable wine, a good year ends up being even riper than normal, perhaps even riper than desired. The emphasis for a long time has been on ensuring adequate ripeness, but now these techniques (and application of these techniques in places where cool vintages rarely apply) mean that we’re getting wines that err on the overripe side, a pretty much unheard-of problem several decades ago. Add in global warming and all that richness and ripeness seems unavoidable.

It has taken some time for producers and winedrinkers to realize the nature of the problem, and fixing it is a gradual process – you can’t change a vineyard in an instant. Other technologies – those aforementioned spinning cones, for example – are attempts at redressing this imbalance; in many ways, and so are at least some aspects in the interest in so-called natural winemaking. And there’s no point in fixing the over-ripe, high-alcohol problem only to find ourselves back where we started with occasional vintages of thin, weedy, vegetal wines. Much as we praise vintage variation as part of the nature of wine, it’s not that big a window to work with. And if a region has an off vintage these days, winedrinkers have a lot more alternatives than they once did.

Could other fashions have sent winemaking in a different direction over the past four decades? Possibly, to a small degree. But lack of ripening has long been the bane of most farmers, whether they grow tomatoes, corn, or winegrapes. Science in various forms has brought huge advances in the fight against under-ripeness – perhaps we’ve even over-shot the mark – and that’s the big transformation in the world of wine. Without the development of new tools and skills, you can talk points or authenticity all you want, but not much is going to change.

So disappointing to get no response on last week’s tasting note; fellow Gen-Xers, where are you?

“I drank what?” is from 1985′s Real Genius:

Chris Knight (played by Val Kilmer): I was thinking of the immortal words of Socrates, who said, “… I drank what?”

If you haven’t seen it, I recommend adding it to your queue; it’s no great shakes, but there’s a lot of good lines; think of Kilmer channeling Groucho Marx in a science-y context. I also recently realized that I regularly a line from the movie without knowing it:

Kent (Robert Prescott): You, huh? Well you won’t get away with this. Doctor Hathaway’s gonna hear all about this. You’ll rue the day!

Chris Knight: “Rue the day?” Who talks like that?

I find many opportunities to say, “Who talks like that?”, but upon consideration, “Rue the day” may be in for a come-back.  Anyway, for this week, we have something else entirely:

“We tasted it and said it was swell. It was pretty bad.”

Who said it? What drink were they talking about? It’s pretty vague, I admit, but there’s a hint in the writing style (no, not Hemingway).

No, not the god-awful rock ballad by Extreme, in which singer Gary Cherone begs some woman to have sex with him to prove her love; more wine comics! This week a new comic was published in France that pretty vigorously attacks Robert Parker along with several other wine industry names that he has often been associated with such as Michel Rolland and Jean-Luc Thunevin. Parker claims to be “delighted” with the whole thing; sommeliers who disagree with his palate were the target of a recent rant, but when it comes in the form of a cartoon, no problem. Time to reconsider the organization and presentation of the winelist, perhaps? Actually, Paul Grieco’s Terroir list is a big leap in that direction. Bringing wine down to earth and deflating its pretensions with humor?

Maybe. Not all comic books are humorous these days; Kami no Shizuku, the Japanese manga that started it all, is more of a soap opera as far as I can tell. And for that matter, not all comics are for children, though another recent French publication was indeed an illustrated book about wine for kids.

It also reminds me of the badges that wine bloggers are promoting as an alternative to the 100-point rating system. They, like comics, are largely visual, but with a couple of words to make sure they’re making their point. The WineDude’s have the most interesting visual side that I’ve come across; however, most of the reviews on his site are summaries of his Twitter reviews, where he uses a “school grade” system. The idea is that a certain badge is a guarantee of quality and a stylistic definition of sorts – Crowd-Pleaser, Old-School Classic, etc. – without sticking a number on it. What makes me think about them in this context is the idea of replacing textual information with visual information as a way of talking about wine.

Of course, the comics tend to focus on a narrative story about the world of wine rather than on describing or critiquing individual wines. An exception, albeit from beer side of things, would be Pints and Panels, a beer-review comic; quite frankly, I like the genre and the information, but I’m not sure the visual content adds much here. In any case, comics allow text as part of the medium; describing a wine with pure dance would be much more difficult, I imagine. The closest thing, perhaps: watch Gary V. with the sound muted. Sometimes it’s oddly informative; sometimes it’s more…surreal. I suppose at the very least it does show that we aren’t stuck with words alone when we want to communicate about wine.