Name that wine flaw

If wine flaws are identified strictly on the basis of the personal and individual determination of each and every wine consumer (or each and every winemaker, for that matter), what is the point of having any winemaking standards?
Just harvest, ferment, and let it rip--someone is bound to like it

That's an interesting philosophical question Thomas. I think that such a non-system might just be workable!

Look at food preparation. We don't have absolute standards for preparing, say, a Caesar salad, or the perfect omelette, chefs take their shot (which can of course vary each time just as the raw materials and the process varies a bit with winemaking) and there is an end result.

Stop right there.

Try serving a Caeser salad with rancid oil or brown and wilted lettuce, or try serving an omelet using powdered eggs or cooked in chicken fat.

Now I'm sure there are some who won't mind either of the above, but there certainly are standards in the kitchen.

More important, wine is more like packaged food than it is like food prepared from a kitchen. The standards in packaged food are myriad.

I fear you are making the same argument of many consumers: that there seems to be no technical reason or possibility for technical standards in winemaking. Again, then why have any standards at all?

Stop right there.

Try serving a Caeser salad with rancid oil or brown and wilted lettuce, or try serving an omelet using powdered eggs or cooked in chicken fat.

Now I'm sure there are some who won't mind either of the above, but there certainly are standards in the kitchen.

More important, wine is more like packaged food than it is like food prepared from a kitchen. The standards in packaged food are myriad.

I fear you are making the same argument of many consumers: that there seems to be no technical reason or possibility for technical standards in winemaking. Again, then why have any standards at all?

Well I guess my point is that you can't (easily) have hard and fast standards. You can't say that acidity over X g/l is a flaw, or VA above a certain concentration is a flaw but below that it is just an allowable 'seasoning', any more than you can say with absolute rectitude that this sauce used 3 g. too much lemon juice or that they should have used corn oil instead of olive oil.

I don't see that there can be any absolute standards set for this sort of thing, just spectra where anything in the dead centre is obviously (by consensus, perhaps) OK and anything that is further out toward the edges is getting more and more dubious.

Now I do understand that there will be SOME things that can be absolutes - presumably some chemical compounds whose presence in any detectable concentration is a no-no, but I'd think there were far more that were in the situation of having a wide acceptable range - residual sugar, tannin, total acidity......

You could point to a particular wine and say "I don't like this as much as I would if it had just a tad more acidity" but that wouldn't make it a flawed wine, would it? Maybe the winemaker was hoping that there would be a bit more acidity, but he works in a region where added acidity is not allowed, or his personal philosophy requires him to make a 'naturally' possible wine without additives. I don't see how the fact that it didn't turn out exactly the way he'd have liked can merit labelling it as 'flawed'.

Heck, all my winemaker friends working with cabernet would LIKE to be turning out Latour, and may be greatly disappointed that things don't quite work out that way (particularly here in BC), but that failure of intention doesn't indicate a 'flawed' wine.

Stop right there.

Try serving a Caeser salad with rancid oil or brown and wilted lettuce, or try serving an omelet using powdered eggs or cooked in chicken fat.

Now I'm sure there are some who won't mind either of the above, but there certainly are standards in the kitchen.

More important, wine is more like packaged food than it is like food prepared from a kitchen. The standards in packaged food are myriad.

I fear you are making the same argument of many consumers: that there seems to be no technical reason or possibility for technical standards in winemaking. Again, then why have any standards at all?

Well I guess my point is that you can't (easily) have hard and fast standards. You can't say that acidity over X g/l is a flaw, or VA above a certain concentration is a flaw but below that it is just an allowable 'seasoning', any more than you can say with absolute rectitude that this sauce used 3 g. too much lemon juice or that they should have used corn oil instead of olive oil.

I don't see that there can be any absolute standards set for this sort of thing, just spectra where anything in the dead centre is obviously (by consensus, perhaps) OK and anything that is further out toward the edges is getting more and more dubious.

Now I do understand that there will be SOME things that can be absolutes - presumably some chemical compounds whose presence in any detectable concentration is a no-no, but I'd think there were far more that were in the situation of having a wide acceptable range - residual sugar, tannin, total acidity......

You could point to a particular wine and say "I don't like this as much as I would if it had just a tad more acidity" but that wouldn't make it a flawed wine, would it? Maybe the winemaker was hoping that there would be a bit more acidity, but he works in a region where added acidity is not allowed, or his personal philosophy requires him to make a 'naturally' possible wine without additives. I don't see how the fact that it didn't turn out exactly the way he'd have liked can merit labelling it as 'flawed'.

Heck, all my winemaker friends working with cabernet would LIKE to be turning out Latour, and may be greatly disappointed that things don't quite work out that way (particularly here in BC), but that failure of intention doesn't indicate a 'flawed' wine.

OK, Bill, I'll do one last post and then pull out, because I am having deja vu all over again

You can set v.a. parameters; in fact, the TTB has set a limit for wine; go over the limit and it's to the vinegar factory with that lot, and I have sniffed some bottled wines that must have slipped through the cracks in the system.

You can set pH standards; go over a certain pH and you won't have much of a wine to drink, unless you like mediocre, flabby products that will spoil within a few months while in the bottle, and I have tasted a few of those, too.

You can set reduction standards, you can set SO2 addition standards, you can set acid/sugar standards, as they do with Riesling (although, I don't know why it isn't done with some other varieties), you can set alcohol standards for table wine, you can set standards as to what goes into producing wine, if you want to set them, i.e., is adding oak chips winemaking or packaged food production? You can do a host of standard setting from a chemical and scientific standpoint and, in fact, that is exactly what is done in wine production.

Your last paragraph mixes preference with objective standards. What I am talking about when I say that a flaw is an unintended result is when the result leads to excessive v.a., reduction, unwanted ML, unwanted Brett infestation, and even too much asparagus in SB because the winemaker may not have made strong demands on the grapegrower.

I have met hundreds of winemakers in my career, maybe three of them want excessive v.a. in their wines.

Mostly, winemakers don't want reduced wines, don't want wines that go "off" because of some yeast that they didn't know they had in their cellar, and so on.

OK, Bill, I'll do one last post and then pull out, because I am having deja vu all over again

Fair enough, we've had fun playing with whether or not you can set meaningful standards.

Let's take a moment to talk about whether or not setting such standards is a good thing, leaving aside the issue of how easily you can set them.

We had a government that decided that setting standards for winemaking in BC would be a good thing. They dictated a set of winemaking standards and said to the wineries - "If you adhere to these guidelines, you can join the Vintner's Quality Alliance, and you can put the VQA symbol on your bottles as a marketing inducement guaranteeing the consumer that you have used good winemaking practices.

They way things worked out, the adherence to the basic winemaking rules did NOT ensure quality wines, and indeed many producers succeeded in making absolute crap, albeit not flawed in the way that ignoring the rules might have produced.

The very best wines made in BC are not VQA because the talented winemakers see no point in spending the money on joining, and perhaps they also wish, on occasion, to diverge from the practices that the rules would require because they believe that they can make a better wine by working outside the rules.

To be charitable, the VQA experiment could at best be labelled a conditional success if one argues that it may have excluded some truly abominable wines but in fact it has had luttle effect in elevating the general level of winemaking in the province and the very best attainments have been quite independent of government intervention.

I saw the same thing when I was visiting winemakers in Bergerac this Spring. God knows the French are mad keen about setting rules, and forcing people to strictly follow to them - they are worse than a bunch of retirees on a condominium council (and those, let me tell you, are some of the most stifling mini-bureaucracies I know).

These winemakers told me that they cannot make a wine in certain areas that is as good as it can be and still toe the line on one of the stipulated parameters, alcohol content - their best wines are always slightly above the government guidelines (these rules can be very specific about how the grapes must be cultivated and the wine made). What the good winemakers do is to submit their wines to the authority, get the answer that the wines are not suitable for labelling under the AOC (in the case in point, this was Saussignac), and that they must label it as generic Bergerac. The winemakers slap their foreheads and say a Gallic 'woe is me' and then go ahead and label it as Bergerac as all their customers know their reputation and the quality of their wines, and it won't sell one whit more slowly for the lack of designation.

French bureaucracy is not technically circumvented but the winemakers have in effect been able to flout the rules as they please and get away with it (I won't mention any names as you never know who might be reading!)

So there are two examples of how setting rules has failed to result in better wine reaching the consumer. Which makes me wonder why they should even try. I wonder what the situation would be if a libertarian approach were taken and anyone could do anything to the grapes as long as they were grown within the specified region. The good winemakers that produced a pleasing product would prosper and those that didn't would rightfully languish, all without reference to any arbitrary rules.....

OK, Bill, I'll do one last post and then pull out, because I am having deja vu all over again

Fair enough, we've had fun playing with whether or not you can set meaningful standards.

Let's take a moment to talk about whether or not setting such standards is a good thing, leaving aside the issue of how easily you can set them.

We had a government that decided that setting standards for winemaking in BC would be a good thing. They dictated a set of winemaking standards and said to the wineries - "If you adhere to these guidelines, you can join the Vintner's Quality Alliance, and you can put the VQA symbol on your bottles as a marketing inducement guaranteeing the consumer that you have used good winemaking practices.

They way things worked out, the adherence to the basic winemaking rules did NOT ensure quality wines, and indeed many producers succeeded in making absolute crap, albeit not flawed in the way that ignoring the rules might have produced.

The very best wines made in BC are not VQA because the talented winemakers see no point in spending the money on joining, and perhaps they also wish, on occasion, to diverge from the practices that the rules would require because they believe that they can make a better wine by working outside the rules.

To be charitable, the VQA experiment could at best be labelled a conditional success if one argues that it may have excluded some truly abominable wines but in fact it has had luttle effect in elevating the general level of winemaking in the province and the very best attainments have been quite independent of government intervention.

I saw the same thing when I was visiting winemakers in Bergerac this Spring. God knows the French are mad keen about setting rules, and forcing people to strictly follow to them - they are worse than a bunch of retirees on a condominium council (and those, let me tell you, are some of the most stifling mini-bureaucracies I know).

These winemakers told me that they cannot make a wine in certain areas that is as good as it can be and still toe the line on one of the stipulated parameters, alcohol content - their best wines are always slightly above the government guidelines (these rules can be very specific about how the grapes must be cultivated and the wine made). What the good winemakers do is to submit their wines to the authority, get the answer that the wines are not suitable for labelling under the AOC (in the case in point, this was Saussignac), and that they must label it as generic Bergerac. The winemakers slap their foreheads and say a Gallic 'woe is me' and then go ahead and label it as Bergerac as all their customers know their reputation and the quality of their wines, and it won't sell one whit more slowly for the lack of designation.

French bureaucracy is not technically circumvented but the winemakers have in effect been able to flout the rules as they please and get away with it (I won't mention any names as you never know who might be reading!)

So there are two examples of how setting rules has failed to result in better wine reaching the consumer. Which makes me wonder why they should even try. I wonder what the situation would be if a libertarian approach were taken and anyone could do anything to the grapes as long as they were grown within the specified region. The good winemakers that produced a pleasing product would prosper and those that didn't would rightfully languish, all without reference to any arbitrary rules.....

One more time, and then I swear, I'm out.

You are talking about something totally different from setting scientific, measurable standards to ensure that wine is not spoiled, infested, bad for your health, and something other than wine, like vinegar. These standards should be and sometimes are set. When the wine fails to meet the standards, it is flawed. Not marketing, which is what most of that other stuff is all about, but about making wine.