Questions For NealRosenthal/RandallGrahm...

At SanteFe Wine&Chile Fiesta this Thurs, there will be a seminar on natural/terroir-driven wines. The panel will be moderated by Alice, but will include NealRosenthal & RandallGrahm. As always, I'll be timing Randall on his first use of "counterintuitive" in his speil. The record is 1 min 13 sec.
Below are some questions I've posed to the panelists. Any other questions that come to mind and any answers from this august group of experts?
Tom
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Questions For Neal:
1. You can have wines that display a strong sense of terroir (sense of place),
like (many of) those from Chablis or the Arbois. Wines that are very terroir-
driven.
You can have wines that are very strong in varietal character, in which the
terroir is sublimated to varietal character, like Oz Shiraz or Central Coast
Viognier. That is not to say these wines don't display terroir, they can, but
the varietal character is the dominant component.
You can have wines that are very strong in a winemaker's style, in which the
winemaker's style transcends both varietal character and terroir. Ridge Vnyds
is one example. Dehlinger Syrah and PinotNoir speak (weakly) of varietal
character, but both are very distinctive Dehlinger. Or you can have wines that are
more representative of the fermentation yeast (so they say) than anything,
as done with NZ SauvBlancs.
What, in your mind, makes terroir character more important than varietal
character or winemaking style?? Why do terroirists elevate terrior onto this
pedestal?
2. How do you identify terroir in a wine? What characteristics do you look for?
If you plant Teroldego in the BennettVlly, how do you know what it's "supposed"
to taste like?? If that one & only Teroldego shows terroir?
3. Back in the mid-late '70's, there was a lot of planting of Cabernet in the
SalinasVlly/MontereyCnty. The wines universally displayed a distinct herbaceous/
canned green beans & aspargas character. They were universally reviled. Was that
not a valid display of terroir?? If these wines showed such a strong terroir
character, why were they rejected by the marketplace? Since terroir is now much
more appreciated now (to my observations), would these wines be accepted in the
marketplace now?
Since those early days, they've (at DougMeador's guidance) greatly changed
their farming techniques for Cabernet in the Salinas and now are producing Cabs
that are much more accepted in the marketplace. The wines show a bit of
herbaceousness, but a ripe/chocolatey character and seldom do you encounter the
"Monterey veggies" in their Cabs.
So which Monterey Cab dispalyed an authentic terroir? Is terroir in a wine
not a universal constant but something you can manipulate in the vnyd by your
farming technique?? Seems contrary to what the terroirists would have us believe,
that terroir is a universal truth and cannot be manipulated.
4. We can plant Chard in Chablis and the RussianRvrVlly and, based on the examples
we've tasted over the yrs/decades, have a good idea if our Chard displays
terroir. What if we're planting Chard in the MesillaVlly of NM. How do we know
if the wine displays terroir or not? How do we know what farming practices and
what winemaking techniques to adopt to insure our wine displays terroir?? Or
does that take yrs of monkeying around w/ the wine to identify that terroir?
Are there areas in the world that, no matter how hard you try, are unable to
display terroir??



Questions for Randall:
1. Everyone "knows" that wines are made in the vineyard; that spoofalated and highly
manipulated wines are evil. That "natural" (whatever the heck that is) wines that
display terroir are "good".
So...you take these poor vines and whack off their little footsies and force
them to grow on these ugly/American/crude rootstocks. You plant them in these
military/DonaldRumsfeld-precise rows going up-hill and down-dale across the vnyd.
You take these poor little vines and cruelly crucify them by tying their spindly/
protesting little arms onto these cold/evil metallic/wire trellises. You go thru
the vnyd in the heat of summer and whack off a bunch of their poor/baby brothers
(green harvesting), leaving them to wreath in pain & agony on the ground for the
next several hours, whimpering and crying until they die a slow/painful death.
When the poor vines are out there in the vnyd at the end of summer, dying of
thirst; you cruelly cut off their supply of water in order to get them to bloat
up their sugar level like the Pillsbury DoughBoy.
Now...how the heck can you possibly call a wine made from these highly-
manipulated vines a "natural" wine I ask you!!! It seems very counter-intuitive
to me. Why are some manipulations regarded as "good" and others as "evil"?
How can you tell one from the other? Are the practices of MasanobuFukuoka of any
relevance to your growing philosophy?? There are some who believe his practices do
much better at displaying the "terroir" than other systems.

2. On some of your Ca d'Solo labels, you use the petri-dish crystallography pics.
I've visited w/ PeterWork (Ampelos) on the subject and didn't get much solid
information from him.
How do you go about generating those crystal patterns? What, exactly, do they
tell you? Can you distinguish between a wine that comes from a biodynamic vnyd
from one that's not?? Or one that's been RO'd vs. one that's not?? Can you use the
technique to distinguish between various varietals?? Why copper chloride?
WineCrystals... all seems a bit too woo-woo for us scientific types!! Looking
at those patterns seems a bit like a Doc reading a mammogram or an MRI scan...
requires a lot of intuitive background to extract any information from it.

I wish that I could be there to see the exchange, Tom (not least of which because I like the event). One other question I have for Randall is whether those crystallization patterns are reproducible: if he makes 3 patterns from the same wine, do they show the same features?

Thanks for fighting the good fight!
Mark Lipton

Great questions Tom. No questions for the moderator?

Salute

Great questions Tom. No questions for the moderator?
Salute

No questions for Alice. I could formulate some very pointed/embarrasing/ego-deflating questions but I've promised myself that I'll be, at the very least, civil to her. I found her book to be a very self-indulgent, bitchy, whiney read and a total waste of time. She has a message worth telling, but Neal does it soooo much better in his book. I'd rather use the question time to get responses that I'll learn something from the panel. Alice is not that person to educate me.
Tom

Finally found time to read your questions and I think they are great. These are things that I have thought a lot about ever since I started planting a test vineyard on my little piece of Southern Maryland. All of these things that get kicked around as good or evil (cultured yeast, acid adjustments, irrigation, etc.) are too often a single variable taken out of context of the bigger system that is growing grapes and making wine. The relative merits of the single variable are judged on the basis of the final product often without any way to understand how changing that variable would impact the product. In your questions, you essentially wrapped up a thought I have had a lot lately which is; can anyone really understand wine. The complexities associated with the interactions of all the variables and the inability to control many of those variables such as one would do in a lab type setting leaves most (if not all) of us with less than complete knowledge.

Seems to me that most peoople want to put lables on things and make general value judgements based upon the labels they have applied. While if I understand your line of questioning, you are questioning the labels themselves, the logic behind the lables and hence the merit of those lables. I would love to know how any of your questions get answered.