Tom also claimed that “we are living in the Golden Age of Wine Writing and the Golden Age of Wine Writing Talent.”

I read those words during the same period of time that I was making way through a review copy of long-time wine scribe Gerald Asher’s new collection of writings, A Vineyard In My Glass (not literally at the same exact time, of course, I’m not Thomas Jefferson, so I’m not reading eight books simultaneously while also dictating correspondences and cataloging in detail how many of my goats died from frost exposure last Winter while slaking my thirst with Scuppernong , or whatever), and I can tell you that just about every page of Asher’s collection screams out (in a polite, congenial British scream, of course) that Tom is way off base in his claim.  I say this with mad respect for Tom, of course, but…

Sorry, bro. We are not even close to being in a golden age of wine writing talent – unless you extend that Age’s starting point back far enough to include the writings of Asher and Hugh Johnson; because in terms of plying the craft of writing and applying the focused, dedicated talent of it to the world of wine, those two writers have NO modern equal.

If you’re reading this and you haven’t sampled the writings of those two stalwarts, then you need to do so with all speed. If you’re reading this and you fancy yourself a wine writer, I’m willing to bet a case of DRC that you couldn’t go toe-to-toe in terms of writing skills with either one of those gentlemen, even on your best day…

This is not meant to downplay your fave writers or their (or your) writing ability. And this is (emphatically!) not meant as a negative commentary on Alder’s new position at Team Jancis (just the opposite, in fact), nor should it be taken to mean that we aren’t in promising new age of wine coverage, with a veritable cornucopia of wine excellent and entertaining material available to us as never before (just the opposite, in fact).

But it is meant to say that we have very few people with true, unique, and finely-honed writing chops in any modern field, and particularly in wine, where much of the modern written coverage has become so banal and formulaic that it now effectively operates via an outsourced model – it’s well-passed the “jump the shark” stage at this point, folks.

This is not the Golden Age of Wine Writing – it is the Golden Age of Wine Coverage (and Tasting!) Democracy, and they are not nearly the same thing.  A short read through any of the articles in A Vineyard In My Glass will prove that to you, unequivocally.

Asher is a master storyteller, and he expects you (politely) to keep up with him, and helps you along my masterfully explaining difficult and often esoteric wine concepts in simple terms without ever including an ounce of condescension (which, incidentally, is exactly how he speaks to you in real life, if you ever have the pleasure of meeting him in person).  Asher’s primary goal seems to be to convey the humor, humanity and essence of a wine experience, educating you along the way where required (his take on Mt. Veeder Cab is particularly compelling in this way, I think).  We do not really have writers like this in wine anymore.

And it’s good in some ways that we don’t have writers like this in wine anymore.

Why? Because a lot of A Vineyard In My Glass is boring, and I mean boring in the way that your Grandfather telling you a story with a dozen tangents is boring. It’s boring in the way that Melville is boring when he goes off on those lengthy ‘this-is-how-worked’ descriptors about life at sea in Moby Dick. It’s boring because it’s masterful and beautiful and damn-near god-like in its lucidity, and we mere mortals simply lack the patience to deal with it.

We need to be entertained, and the future of wine coverage is clearly not in lengthy – or even necessarily well-written – prose.  It includes photos, and videos, and hopefully decently-written articles, and findings gems in that coverage like Asher (which are, by necessity, rare) should be treated as a bonus, and celebrated.  But while it might seem a slog at times, you’re unlikely to find anyone who will tell you, after they’ve gotten through them, that the regretted reading Moby Dick, or A Vineyard In My Glass.

Great writing will never die, but it wine it clearly needs to adapt in favor of great entertainment and education, and present itself in different and unique formats.  It’s not a Golden Age yet, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t strive for it, and it certainly doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t learn from the past masters.

Cheers!

Copyright © 2011. Originally at Are We In The Golden Age Of Wine Writing? (Hint: Not Even Close!) from 1WineDude.com - for personal, non-commercial use only. Cheers!

“That’s just… man, that’s just… NOT right!”

The above quote is from a friend of mine, in reaction to learning that some of his favorite wines – and, in fact, probably most wines – are made with grapes purchased from growers. As in, grapes that did not come from a patch of land directly behind a winery building on a farm somewhere, tended with care by the winemaker’s own hands.

Imagine how he would have felt if he’d seen the Alcohol and Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau’s list of “Materials authorized for the treatment of wine and juice.”  While it’s not quite as bad as the list of additives that are used to “enhance” our processed foodstuffs, it certainly feels a lot more “McDonald’s” than “Old MacDonald.”

As consumers, lacking evidence to the alternative we have a tendency to assume (naively) that what we consume is fundamentally natural, or that a “natural” product is somehow a superior one.  This premise – that the natural is always the better – serves as a driving force behind award-winning wine journalist Alice Feiring’s new book, Naked Wine: Letting Grapes Do What Comes Naturally ($10 eBook, or about $15 in print – I received an advanced review copy).

Feiring is a self-proclaimed polarizing figure in the wine world, and if her intention with Naked Wine was to solidify her controversial status, she could hardly have chosen a better cement than the topic of “natural wine”…

Dividing lines seem to have been drawn when it comes to natural wine: on one side, the Michel Bettanes of the world, who (perhaps because they award higher ratings to wines that are not in the natural wine camp?) decry natural winemaking as a fool’s errand; on the other, the Alice Feirings, who while not exactly screaming “Fast Food Nation”-style foul play, are at least insinuating that wine that is not made “naturally” is at best deceitful in how it’s marketed to the wine world, and at worst isn’t worth drinking at all.

One of the primary issue with natural wine is that it lacks anything close to standard definition.  Within the wine geek community, it’s usually meant to describe wines that have had little, if any, additions to initiate fermentation or prevent spoilage – at a minimum, no yeast inoculation, and little or no sulfur.  In turn, this drastically increases the probability of errant behavior during fermentation, adds difficulty in keeping the wine fresh during transport, and likely invites the spoilage yeasts such as brettanomyces (something I would consider a serious flaw in moderate-to-large doses, though Feiring seems to be on the opposite end of that spectrum: in Naked Wine, she waxes poetic over a wine she partly describes as having aromas of horse sweat).

I am of the strong opinion that natural winemaking is viable. I have tasted wines made with minimal sulfer that were decades old, from producers like Cahor’s Clos Seguier (whose 2006 Malbec made my “Top 10 Most Interesting Wines of the Year” list for 2010), that were insanely fresh and vibrant, and free of distracting amounts of funkiness. I’ve had others that I would not use to wash my car after accidentally running over a skunk for fear that they would make it smell even worse – it doesn’t always work, and takes a deft hand to pull off correctly.

Much of Naked Wine is spent chronicling Feiring’s European journeys in which she seeks out the producers who may be doing it right, tryingto  uncover how the world of natural winemaking operates – and why and how it came about in the first place.  The jaunt is kicked off by Feiring’s bold move to try her own hand at natural winemaking, working under the guidance of Kevin Hamel at Pellegrini Family Vineyards, trying to see small batch of Sagrantino from grape to glass with as little intervention as possible in between.  The poor Sagrantino becomes a minor player in the whole affair, bookending the European travels – which I found disappointing, because Feiring’s prose is at its most stellar when she recounts the emotional ups and downs of her vintner’s experience.

Maybe too much of Naked Wine is spent chronicling that Conrad-ian journey into the heart of natural winemaking darkness, actually.  All of the natural wine rivers traversed by Feiring lead to Jacques Néauport, who had a prolific career as consultant and is widely credited with creating the natural winemaking movement.  When Feiring finally finds her way to Néauport’s dinner table for an interview in which she hopes to take a nibble from the forbidden fruit of natural wine’s genesis, the result is a bit anti-climactic, if charming in its Zen simplicity: “There is no answer,” he tells her.  Néauport, it turns out, simply wanted to make wine without sulfur in order to reduce the impact of the hangovers he felt after copiously drinking wines that did have sulfur added.

Naked Wine – and Feiring herself – ultimately remain controversial because they take on an attitude and air about the topic of natural wine that could justifiable be called dogmatic. In treating natural wines as a sort of pinnacle, the implication is that wines not made in the same way are inferior.  Which is a bit like saying that McDonald’s shouldn’t be in business at all precisely because it’s not Old MacDonald.

The trouble with such an approach is that it ignores the legitimacy of the vast majority of wines on the market today, many of which are arguably more manufactured than grown, but whose consumers don’t really care so long as they taste good, are reasonably priced and aren’t full of medically-unsafe amounts of additional ingredients – and for $7 / bottle, is the argument against them really worth making at all?

Fine wine, however, is a different story; while certainly there must be some expensive, high-scoring fine wines that undergo terroir-masking manipulations that consumers might find questionable (if not detestable), the odds are probably stacked against most fine wines being made that way.

Naked Wine might confuse transparency in fine winemaking techniques with outright deception, or lack of viability, and it may ring the dogma bell a bit to often – and too loudly – for some, but it will almost certainly make you think differently about how wine is made, and that alone makes it worth the price of admission.

Cheers!

Copyright © 2011. Originally at Art Vs. Artifice In The Search For Natural Wine from 1WineDude.com - for personal, non-commercial use only. Cheers!

Mentioned in this Episode:

• Ramos Pinto 20 Year Tawny Port (yummy – about $60)
• The Finest Wines of California: A Regional Guide to the Best Producers and Their Wines (excellent, about $25)
• The Finest Wines of Bordeaux: A Regional Guide to the Best Châteaux and Their Wines (made my top 3 picks for the most recent Georges Duboeuf Wine Book of the Year Awards judging, about $25)
• Real: Stories by Shelley Malcolm Photographs by Terilee Dawn Ouimette (very cool, but not really wine-related – about $36)
• Olivier Leflaive Burgundy selections (awesome, but expensive – see past 1WD coverage of Olivier Leflaive for more info).

Cheers!

Copyright © 2011. Originally at 1WineDude TV Episode 36: Not Quite Dead (Why Most Wine Books Don’t Match With eReaders… Yet!) from 1WineDude.com - for personal, non-commercial use only. Cheers!

First off, wine books tend to be weighty – as in, literally weighty, heavy, and requiring a lot of storage space. In the case of my current stock of wine book samples, they are taking up an increasingly alarming percentage of my office floor space, as they sit in grim admonition of my incapability to keep up even a modest a review schedule… MOCKING ME WITH THEIR SILENCE!!!

Anyway… I’ve been making a (half-hearted but) concerted effort to chip away at the wine book sample library that has now grown out of my floor space, and so picked up the nearest to my desk chair, which happened to be Bettane and Desseauve’s Guide to the Wines of France By Michel Bettane and Thierry Desseauve (about $25 at Amazon.com).

Michel Bettane, France’s most recognizable wine critic, is (I’d argue, anyway) prone to pontification (something I noted when hearing him speak last year in Cahors). He lives up to that  reputation in this new guide – which in-and-of-itself is a capable, handy abd well-researched reference on a wide swath of French wine.  It’s in the guide’s Frequently Asked Questions section that the pontification is on display, when the authors directly address the question, “Can a wine critic’s opinion really be trusted?”

In this case, Bettane and Desseauve’s Guide to the Wines of France is not just weighty in heft, but also in tone; and the answer it offers to that potentially deep query is alternatively defensive, poignant, and downright… odd…

Bettane and Desseauve (though I suspect mostly Bettane) begin by going on the defensive, acknowledging that the role of the critic has come under attack in recent years (all emphasis is mine):

“…They see us as members of an old-boy network, incapable of delivering fair and impartial advice. Some even question our professional competence and the very criteria that form the basis of our opinions… We are not handsomely paid for what we do, not in France at least…”

Hard to argue with them; I don’t know any wine critics who are raking in the cash in any currency, and there’s been no shortage of barbs thrown the way of critics in an age when the voice of the amateur can be heard louder (and carries much, much farther) than in any other time in history.  Typically, when a professional is faced with explaining the value one brings at a professional level, said pro starts talking about said professionalism, in terms of distancing his/her role from that of an amateur on the basis of experience – which is precisely what Bettane and Desseauve go on to do:

“As for our views about wine, we are surely better placed to give advice than consumers themselves in wine chat rooms. To begin with, we have the advantage that comes from seeing thousands of different wines develop over a huge number of vintages. In particular, we have a much clearer idea of how wines are made, varying in style from one winemaker to another, according to local traditions and available technology.”

Also tough to argue with that logic. Ever read Outliers? Bottom line: nothing makes you an expert at something like experience, and the pro in almost every case will have an edge on the amateur in that regard if only by virtue of volume of exposure.  Now, you might take umbrage at their inclusion of wine chat rooms (and by extension just about any on-line forum, blogs, etc.), but while it can be argued that there are some experienced non-pros in those forums, it can be also argued with equal merit that the majority of people in those forums don’t have the time (or funds) to taste the volume of wines that the pros do.

So far, so good; but things take a decidedly odd turn after that:

“Most of all, we are more even-handed when it comes to assessing wines: in the course of our work, it would be unthinkable to judge the work of so many producers and not become friends with a few of them. This is precisely why we are less likely to show favoritism than all those wine enthusiasts who pride themselves on their particular choice of supplier.”

Uhm… excuse me… WTF?!???

Let me get this straight: consumers/amateurs pride themselves on buying the wine from a few brands/outlets, and this makes them less objective in their analysis of wine? And befriending wine producers makes pros more impartial?  None of that makes any sense whatsoever.

Speaking for myself, and I suppose I sit somewhere between the amateur and professional here, my friendships with wine producers causes me a sh*tload of agita, because it makes me worry that I’ll be prone less impartiality when evaluating their wines, not more.

As for consumers priding themselves on limiting their wine purchases to a few select suppliers or brands, Bettane and Desseauve must not have seen any of the data from the last few years on the fickle Millennial generation’s wine purchasing habits – they don’t really build limited brand loyalty, they try just about anything and everything. And I’m pretty sure that stance wouldn’t qualify them as biased zealots incapable of objectively discerning the merits of wines from multiple producers.

The big question from passionate wine consumers back to the authors, I think, ought to be Why even go there? We’re talking about two guys here who don’t really need to defend their position as critics in the first place, and if they feel so compelled to answer a charge against their utility, why not leave it at “we taste a sh*tload of wine and have garnered the experience.” Why take pot-shots at the wine geek consumers of the world? Those are your core customers, guys!

I’d be remiss in all of this cavil-mongering, however, if I ignored the more poignant part of the authors’ answer:

“The fact that we are impartial, however – and the evidence does seem compelling – certainly doesn’t mean that we are infallible. Let me say it loud and clear then: even wine critics can get it wrong! This is why we taste wines throughout their lives, from the cask right through to old age; why we scour the vineyards and wineries; and why we ply producers with questions.”

Wine critics do, indeed, get it wrong.  Sometimes, they even get it wrong a few sentences before telling us that they can get it wrong.  Why the fact that wine critics are fallible should be surprising news is beyond me, but they deserve props for mentioning it.  Bettane and Desseauve also deserve credit for reminding us (in multiple places in Guide to the Wines of France) that the subject matter of wine is not a destination, it’s a journey; and wine expertise is not a finish line that remains stagnant, it’s an ever-moving target.   That fact might sometimes generate Sisyphus-ian levels of frustration for wine geeks, but it’s also responsible for much of what makes wine artful and soulful – if not for an eternally-moving mark, we’d have a much less exciting wine world about which to pontificate.

Cheers!

Copyright © 2011. Originally at Can A Wine Critic’s Opinion Really Be Trusted? (Dissecting the Pontifications of Bettane & Desseauve’s Guide to the Wines of France) from 1WineDude.com - for personal, non-commercial use only. Cheers!

This week, we’re going to look at the three that did make that cut, with my explanations as to why I chose them, exactly as I reported them to the folks running the GD awards this year.  They’re listed after the jump in descending order, ending with my personal #1 pick for the award.  The official winner will be announced next week at Duboeuf’s annual Beaujolais Crus preview in New York on May 24.

This week, we’re giving away a copy of one of those ‘top three’ books – Mark Oldman’s Brave New World of Wine: Pleasure, Value, and Adventure Beyond Wine’s Usual Suspects!

Same drill as last week, people: you comment, and in one week I’ll randomly select a winner from the list of commenters!

You can see exactly where Mark’s latest release fell in my top three after the jump (for more on Mark, check out the interview I did with him back in October) – to make a long story short, his latest book kicks all kinds of wine learning ass. The main reason I picked Brave New World of Wine as one of my three finalists, however, was because Mark’s book reminds us of something that I think we spend too much tome forgetting – inherently, wine is supposed to make us happy; it’s supposed to bring joy, delight and (at the high end) some artistic measure to our days.

Do we miss the trick too much, and too often forget about the joy that wine is supposed to bring to us? Shout it out in the comments for a chance to win!

Enjoy – and good luck!…

3) The Finest Wines of Bordeaux: A Regional Guide to the Best Châteaux and Their Wines (Fine Wine Editions) By James Lawther MW (about $25)

Another book about Bordeaux?  Really? Do we really need this?  Turns out the answer is “Yes.”  Lawther’s book is a great addition to the Finest Wines… series, all of which are visually stunning books and thankfully avoid the massive weight and size of the coffee-table-style that seems to be de rigueur in wine publication.  The book works because it also doesn’t fall prey to one of the other trappings of the wine media world, which is to laud storied Chateaux without ever touching on more controversial topics, or ever saying that their wine quality suffered, or ever talking about the human beings behind those expensive releases.

This book matters because it deftly includes those elements that other takes on Bordeaux miss, and at its heart is a humanist take on what, after all, is a very human endeavor: creating wines that are meant to stand the test of time and set the bar for the world’s best reds. Lawther has the knowledge to turn a small space on each producer – a few paragraphs, usually – into a knowledgeable mini-treatise on the people, the places and wines that come from them.  It’s certainly one of the best takes on Bordeaux ever produced.

2) Oldman’s Brave New World of Wine: Pleasure, Value, and Adventure Beyond Wine’s Usual Suspects By Mark Oldman (about $15)

With this new release, Mark Oldman has matched the level of achievement of his first book, which I consider to be one of the best entry-level wine books ever produced.  That in and of itself is impressive.  In the pages of Brave New World of Wine, he offers up wine recommendations slightly off the beaten path, meant to expand wine knowledge beyond the basics and focusing on a topic often totally disregarded in the context of learning wine appreciation: delight.  And he does it in a casual, accessible writing style, and a somewhat-less-accessible but easily-learned system of icons/badges to help navigate his wine recommendations – and they’re recommendations that don’t requiring expending your bank account.

In the process Oldman – somehow, almost impossibly – makes the strange, esoteric, and nigh-unpronounceable of the wine world seem fun, interesting and cool. The book comes off as bit devil-may-care, but that clearly belies an intense amount of research and knowledge on Oldman’s part and the result is a reference that will prove indispensible to intermediate wine lovers, particularly in the U.S. market.

1) Reading between the Wines By Terry Theise (about $15)

Terry Theise’s opinionated treatise on why wine is important as an art might be the most important wine book written since the turn of the century, and I am actually stating that without trying to add any hyperbole.  This is not a book for the casual wine fan – it’s a love-letter to anyone who cares deeply about wine, to anyone who’s ever really found themselves transfixed by a fine wine, to anyone who’s ever spent the time to really listen to what a true wine of place was trying to whisper to them.

The presentation of the book is sparse, and it works because the words are what are really important here.  Theise has managed to create a work just as subtle, well-crafted, opinionated, unique and characterful as the style of wines that he champions in his “day job.”  If there’s a better written work that stands as a convincing argument as to why we should treat wine as an art form – with all of the implications of how we appreciate it sensually as well as mentally – I’ve yet to read it.

Cheers!

(images: amazon.com)

Copyright © 2011. Originally at Georges Duboeuf Wine Book Of The Year Awards, Concluded (“Best Of The Best” Giveaway!) from 1WineDude.com - for personal, non-commercial use only. Cheers!