On Winning Louis Roederer Emerging Wine Writer of the Year 2012

Something rather remarkable happened to me on Monday. At about 11:30 PST — 8:30-ish London time — I received an email from David Honig, publisher of Palate Press, consisting of three words. “You won” in the subject line, and “congratulations” in the body. I hadn’t been able to fly to London where the Louis Roederer International Wine Writing Awards were being presented; the trip would have cost me about fifteen percent of the annual pittance I make as a graduate student, and that clearly wasn’t happening. David, who went on behalf of Palate Press’s nomination for wine website of the year, offered to accept for me should the necessity arise. I had planned on not winning, partly because I didn’t want to get my hopes up, but also partly because I don’t see what I do as being that award-winning. So, when David’s email arrived, I was truly surprised. It even occurred to me for a moment that it might be a mistake or a joke, but that’s not David’s style. I’ve been doing even more than my usually generous amount of smiling ever since.

I’m honored, naturally, and humbled, and astonished, and delighted. But I also feel as though my winning this award says something about the position of wine science writing in the the wine writing world. From my very first article for Palate Press, I’ve written almost exclusively about wine science: microbiology, flavor chemistry, article critiques, and the like. Doing so, I’ve always felt like a bit of an outsider in the wine writing world. I can’t relate to most other wine writers’ experiences about press trips to Portugal or interviewing a great sommelier or trying to tell the story of this beautiful South African Pinotage. Researching an article, for me, doesn’t involve tasting and talking; it involves hours of reading scientific journal articles. It’s nearly impossible for me to compare my writing to people more in the mainstream; we’re talking apples and oranges, in some ways.

Most importantly, it’s hard to judge whether what I’m doing is valuable. I can say that I’m one of the few people trying to talk about wine science to the lay-wine enthusiast. I can say that I think doing so is important. But I can’t say whether anyone else agrees with me.

The other finalists for Emerging Wine Writer of the Year are all splendid writers — including my Palate Press colleague Evan Dawson — but they all write something closer to the mainstream of wine writing. That I was chosen among them says something about wine science writing as much, and perhaps more, than it does about my own skill. It’s a validation, at least by this group of people, that the science of wine is potentially as interesting and important to the wine enthusiast as is the personal narrative of wine, or the economics or architecture or politics of wine, or tasting notes. It’s a statement that wine science writing has a place in the greater mission of wine writing. Even if I sometimes feel peripheral, I’m still sitting at the table. It’s a good place to be.

Let me have won the Roederer, then, not just for myself, but for the greater cause of wine writing. And, maybe, even for every writer who takes the risk of doing something different because it’s what she loves.

Because the air is very smoky here today

The sky is innocent enough but the dust, the dust is coming from some place I’ve never been and calling me to a place that is only a memory, and a collective one at that. I’m solidly focused on trying to place one foot in front of the other, calmly, resolutely, to make it look like this is easy, to make it look as though I’m not trying to ignore the horses cantering and the cattle grazing and the women in long skirts going about their business through my mind. But then a guitar comes from an open door, a guitar and a voice, and the only reason that I know the door is open is the music because I’m still staring resolutely at my feet, but “steeeel guitars from Memphis on the way to rock ‘n rollllllllll…” makes me look up, and back, briefly, and I see the figure in the worn jeans and sturdy belt and pale cowboy hat the color of a steer you might rope at the county rodeo and smoking what I’m certain must be Marlboroughs And I stop in my tracks for a moment, an instant, short enough that the kid behind me thinks that I’m still walking, because I hear the man in the jeans and the belt and the hat asking me the whereabouts of the young buck cowboy I lost years ago and who owns the horses he saw cantering and the cattle he saw grazing and whether I’m friends with the women in long skirts going about their business. But it’s a quarter to nine o’clock and I keep walking as though I don’t know the answers to his questions, no, sir, you’ve got the wrong girl.

In Response to Mr. Gray on Wine Lists and Mr. Dawson on corkage

I somewhat belatedly read my fellow Palate Press columnist Evan Dawson’s article on corkage and then, also somewhat belatedly, The Gray Report post in which W. Blake Gray (also a fellow Palate Press columnist) responded to Dawson. When I realized that I had more to say about the topic than was going to fit tidily into a comment on either piece, I thought that I’d continue the chain by responding here. Please don’t think that I’m trying to steal either Evan or Blake’s thunder. Everything I’ve seen tells me that both Evan and Blake are great guys and even better writers, and I couldn’t steal their thunder even if I wanted to.

 

Blake asks the pertinent and (characteristically) punchy question: should a wine list educate or is the wine list just a price list? His question is prompted by realizing that he (an experienced wine writer, no less) doesn’t recognize most of the offerings on the wine list Jeremy Parzen has compiled at Sotto, which Dawson used as an example of a particularly thoughtful and interesting list. Since Blake can’t order based on familiarity and is given only the most general information about the wine – name, vintage, red or white, “bold” or light, and a very general idea of place (it’s an Italian restaurant; most of the wines are also Italian) – he has three options.

1. Ask the sommelier for advice. Blake dismisses this option as impractical because the somm isn’t always there and takes a long time to arrive table-side when he or she is. And while some servers are reliable sources of knowledge about the wine list, most are not.
2. Choose a wine based on price.
3. Bring his own bottle from home (which is the original connection with Evan’s article on corkage.)

The fourth option, which Blake didn’t mention, is to pull his smart phone out of his pocket and use his favorite wine app to look up tasting notes on the list’s mystery wines, but I’m going to give Blake the benefit of the doubt and guess that he’s too much the polite diner to unholster a cell phone at table.

 

Both Evan’s and Blake’s articles caused me to reflect on how narrow an audience they’re really addressing. We’re all addressing a narrow audience when we write about wine; most people don’t care enough about wine to read about it for fun, and that’s especially true of the geeky stuff I prefer. But Evan and Blake are writing to people who, additionally, live in sizable cities with significant fine dining restaurants AND who eat out at such establishments often enough to think about bringing their own bottles from home. I suspect that this does, in fact, describe most of the readership of Palate Press and The Gray Report, but it definitely doesn’t describe me. Blake lives in the San Francisco area. ‘Nuff said. Evan lives in Rochester, NY where I also once lived and so which I can attest is definitely not San Francisco, but it still has some reasonable restaurants. It unquestionably has restaurants whose wine lists surpass the boundaries of my wine knowledge.

 

I live in Pullman, Washington, a town the size of which is overstated by its 30,000-somethingish population estimate. Pullman is a small town on the Washington-Idaho border, smack-dab in the middle of wheat- and lentil-farming country, that just happens to have a sizeable university (Washington State) stuck in the middle of it.  It is, therefore, a peculiar blend of redneck farm community and partying college town. I love it. I love living in a town where I have a field ten minutes from my door and where I can’t go to the grocery store without seeing someone I know, but which has the critical mass necessary for cultural events. And a decent library. But what we don’t have are restaurants of the caliber that Evan and Blake assume are the norm. Pullman restaurants are largely designed to feed college students, which means neither fine dining nor notable wine lists. I’d qualify one restaurant in town (the lovely Black Cypress) as “fine dining” – two if I include the nearby Idaho town of Moscow – and its short but satisfactory wine list favors Washington and Oregon enough that I can reliably identify every glass and bottle. I’ll guess that at least some other readers can relate. We don’t all live in San Francisco or New York or even Rochester.

 

Back to Blake’s question about whether the wine list should educate or can be just a price list. As much as I enjoy the former, I’m honestly okay with the latter, which brings me to my second point about narrow audiences. On the rare occasions when I find myself within range of a good restaurant, I don’t have a lot of money to spend there. I know that more expensive bottles generally carry a proportionally lower markup and are therefore a better deal. I often know that some of the more expensive bottles are hard-to-find treasures, and sometimes I know that they’re really yummy. But none of that matters when you’re a grad student who’s functionally living below the poverty level.  I DO use the wine list as a price list. I don’t make a selection based on price alone – there are usually a few options around the lowest price point and I can rule out bottles that I know I don’t like or that are inappropriate for what I’m eating or that are horribly overpriced – but price still ranks as the most important factor in my decision. Hand me Jeremy Parzen’s beautiful wine list at Sotto and I’ll have no trouble making a decision even though I’m woefully incompetent at Italian wines. I want something red, and I want something bold – because I’m eating a braised oxtail dish, let’s say – so I go to that section of the list. The least expensive bottle is something called a syrache, which sounds a lot like syrah and I know that I’m hit-or-miss on liking syrahs, so I move to the second least expensive bottle. This one says “di Sardegna” which I’m pretty sure means “from Sardinia” and I’ve heard a lot of interesting things about Sardinian wine. Sold.

 

The worst thing that can now happen is that I don’t like the wine which, at a restaurant of Sotto’s caliber, is more likely to mean that I simply don’t care for it than that it’s poorly made. (If the bottle is clearly flawed I would send it back, but I’d also say that I’m more confident than the average consumer about my ability to identify wine faults.) Whether I like it or not I’ve probably learned something. It’s possible that the wine isn’t a good representative of it’s type and that I’ve therefore not learned anything that I can generalize beyond this specific wine, but that also seems unlikely in a restaurant like this with Jeremy Parzen running the wine show.

 

Actually, I’m much more likely to order a beer or stick with water regardless. Obscene markups on restaurant wine lists bother me so much that I rarely drink wine in restaurants even when I’m not the one paying. At less schmancy places with little or no wine on offer I feel fine bringing a modest but interesting bottle of my own. I won’t bring a bottle to someplace like Sotto unless the bottle ranks comfortably in price with their own list AND rocks, and since I have no such bottles in my cellar I won’t bring one. So I’ll drink water or, if the beverage manager has been thoughtful enough to put together an interesting beer list with a few curiosities, I’ll order one of those. Beer is usually an obviously better deal and, if I’m lucky, I’ll find keg- or cask-only offerings that I couldn’t try at home, all for less than the least expensive glass of wine on the menu, and almost universally more interesting.

 

I would be overjoyed to find a wine list full of things I’ve never seen before with clear, accurate, and interesting descriptions of its contents.  But, if I did find such a list, I would:

1. Be tempted to rudely bury my nose in the wine list rather than attending to my dining companion, should I have one;
2. Take 75 minutes to place my order because it took me that long to read the list and I forgot to look at the menu; and
3. Still order wine based primarily on price.

 

So, in the end, perhaps it’s better that the wine list act as a price list rather than an educational tool. When I go out to eat, I want to enjoy the meal and, hopefully, the pleasure of good company. I might not do either of those things very well should my attention be caught by an educational wine list. I can learn about wine at home, and that’s probably the best place for it.

 

I know that most people reading Evan’s and Blake’s articles aren’t like me but, if there are any who are, know that you’re not alone. To Evan and Blake, thanks for the thought-provoking reads. And I envy you getting to eat in those restaurants.

Approaching the Future with an Open, but not an Empty Mind

I just returned tonight from The Symposium for Professional Wine Writers hosted at the Meadowood Napa Valley in St. Helena. A beautiful, educational, astonishing, vibrant, vista-opening week in multiple different ways, and I suspect that I may feel compelled to share something more of the experience over the next few days. Tonight, I am reflecting on the possibility of possibilities. I love “wine science” (an awkward name to which I often resort in the face of the even more awkward list of sciences involved in wine growing, making, and appreciation) and I adore trying to find ways to share wine science with non-scientists, but…well, I like to write, too. From time to time I even like to write things that have no relationship to science whatsoever.

In one ten-minute writing exercise at the end of a session (given in part by Eric Asimov of the NY Times, no less), we were all challenged to write something in the “voice” of one of the masters (Kermit Lynch, Hemingway, and Hugh Johnson, among others.) I knew that I wasn’t going to write about harvesting indigenous yeast strains or genetically modified lactic acid bacteria, so I let the right side of my brain out to play. This is what happened (completely unedited from that ten minute exercise, I’ll warn you):

 

I drunk the wine like a late-19^th century romanticist. The brilliantly aged-carnelian liquor in my glass was brilliant, yes, but it was first and most importantly a vehicle for what I wanted it to be. I saw my companion – an older man with a younger heart – through the rose-colored glasses of that liquid. I saw the present moment through that liquid – an otherwise-ordinary Monday night with an utterly extra-ordinary bottle of 1964 Les Forts de Latour – and the liquid reflected back at me a life that was at once enchanting and purely ordinary in the most human way possible. I saw thousands of people living this experience before me, speaking different languages but expounding upon the same universal truths, feeling the same emotions in the same unique and powerful way, and all of these visions of my former selves only magnified the present moment, made the present moment more momentous.

My companion drunk the wine like a realist; the Henry James to my Hawthorne. He had lived this experience before, not just through the inherited memories of the men who preceded him, but last week in his tiny apartment behind his violin-making shop. And yet he had not lost hold of the sense of mystery in what he swirled, but he swirled his glass as a man runs his hand over the hood of an antique car or caresses a beloved canine. As the glass was for me my lens and mirror, so to him the glass was his flame. I could see him basking in its glow, his warm, round face soothing and shining in its garnet light.

And it was fun. I might even do it again sometime.

Wine Media, I’m Ashamed of You

It’s been in the news for the past week. Researchers from the Australian Wine Research Institute, led by Dr. Chris Curtin, have sequenced the genome of Brettanomyces bruxellensis (aka Dekkera bruxellensis) and are promising that a magic bullet solution to winery “brett” problems will be forthcoming. Decanter and Wine Spectator have both headlined the story.

If either of those publications has a microbiologist – or any biologist or biochemist, really – on staff, he or she should be ashamed of letting this one slip.

Sequencing any organism is unquestionably an accomplishment, though it requires more capital investment than scientific ingenuity in the present rapid-sequencing era. And I have great respect for the Australian Wine Research Institute (AWRI), a government-supported organization that has turned out insightful and important research especially over the past twenty years. But I have to wonder when I see the AWRI managing director Sakkie Pretorius quoted as saying “Sequencing the brett genome, which reveals its genetic blueprint, means the Australian wine industry can future-proof its strategy against brett and the risk of spoilage.”

The Brettanomyces genome gives researchers all sorts of useful information, but it by no means guarantees a solution to winery brett problems. For some context, consider that Pseudomonas aeruginosa, an opportunistic pathogen that causes the death of many people with cystic fibrosis, was sequenced in 2000. We still don’t know how to eradicate it, and it still kills people. Haemophilus influenzae was the first free-living organism to be sequenced (by Craig Venter’s group in 1995) – multiple sequences for different strains have been sequenced since then – and a lot of effort has been put into developing a vaccine for it, but we still haven’t figured out a way to prevent it from making itself comfortable in kids’ ears and causing ear infections. I’m not cherry-picking my examples. Knocking out a problematic infection based on sequencing the causative organism is by far and away the exception, not the rule.

So, as much as it’s thoroughly awesome that the AWRI folks have sequenced brett, it’s a very, very long stretch to conclude that “the Australian wine industry can future-proof its strategy against brett and the risk of spoilage.” With all due respect to everyone at the AWRI, I don’t think so.

One more nagging problem with all of this hubbub is that the research has been published in a magazine called the Wine and Viticulture Journal. Published by the company WineBiz, the Wine and Viticulture Journal is a non peer-reviewed trade publication. Under the ordinary protocols of science, a new genome sequence is introduced to the world via a scholarly article in a peer-reviewed scientific journal in addition. I obviously don’t know the motivations of Dr. Curtin and company – and those motivations might be perfectly reasonable – but publishing something like a genome in a trade magazine is highly unconventional and can’t help but raise the question: why wouldn’t you want the respectability of a peer-reviewed publication? According to the conventions of the scientific community, this research won’t truly be taken seriously until it has been vetted by the peer-review process. In short, the press is jumping the gun a bit.

And by the way, Wine Spectator, misspelling the organism’s name (Dekkara?) and improperly capitalizing the species name doesn’t win you any bonus points, either.

The Problem of Gluten in Wine

Over the past few years, I’ve had several people ask me about gluten in wine. Grapes don’t contain gluten, of course, but gluten-intolerant people do have reasonable reasons to be asking the question.

Wheat paste – made from wheat flour, which does contain gluten – is used to seal the inside of some oak barrels. Some wine is aged in oak barrels, where it could potentially come into  contact with the wheat paste. Therefore, some barrel-aged wine could, potentially, contain gluten. Does this mean that people with severe gluten intolerance or gluten allergies need to avoid (barrel-aged) wine?

While I’ve seen plenty of gluten intolerance-related websites and forums pose and attempt answers to this question, I’ve had trouble taking them seriously. Logic and reason are useful tools, but sometimes scientific evidence turns even the best reasoning on its head. We can all speculate on what sounds reasonable, but some data would be nice.

An experimental report with something to say on the topic was published this year in the Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry. (It should be noted that a previous article commented on gluten sensitivity and wine, but the article was published in 2003 in a much less well-known publication – the International Journal of Tissue Reactions – to which I don’t have institutional access.)

Unfortunately, the article, “Immunological and Mass Spectrometry Detection of Residual Proteins in Gluten-Fined Wines,” doesn’t speak to the question of wines aged in wheat paste-sealed oak barrels, but to of residual gluten in wines that use gluten for fining – that is, clarified of yeast cells and other things that make wine cloudy – rather than. Fining agents, which also include such unpleasant-sounding if harmless substances as bentonite (a type of clay), egg white proteins, and isinglass (from fish bladders; yes, fish bladders), are added while the wine is still cloudy and help yeast cells and proteins and other things that make wine cloudy settle to the bottom of the container. The now-clearer wine can be “racked” off the top, leaving the cloudy bits in the bottom along with the fining agent, of which there should be none left in the wine. People with food allergies can sometimes be really sensitive to really tiny, trace amounts of allergens, though, so it makes sense to test whether any trace bits of gluten could be hanging around in wine waiting to make a super-sensitive someone sick.

Something really important to note here. This study looked only at wine clarified with wheat gluten, not wine aged in oak barrels sealed with wheat paste. Definitely different things. Still, even looking for gluten reactivity in wine is a start.

The study used anti-gliadin and anti-prolamin antibodies as well as pooled sera from people with wheat allergies to probe wine, then looked directly for gluten proteins in the wine using mass spectrometry. Anti-gliadin and anti-prolamin antibodies (gliadin is a wheat prolamin, and prolamins are proteins found in grains) are formed by people with celiac disease and gluten allergies and have a lot to do with the symptoms of these diseases. Sera (plural of serum, which is blood minus the blood cells) from people with wheat allergies should include these antibodies, too, but might include types that the researchers hadn’t thought to include among the purified antibody selections.

I’m inclined to take issue with the methods this study uses. After mixing together the wine and gluten, the experimenters centrifuged the wine to remove the gluten. This is obviously not what usually happens in a winery (though a few wineries do use gigantic centrifuges for this purpose.) The strength of this study, though, is its use of both antibodies – a relatively direct measure of immune system reactivity – and mass spectrometry, which simply measures whether gluten proteins are present or absent.

The bottom line? These researchers DID find gluten proteins in wine that had been fined with wheat gluten. There is at least the possibility that people with celiac disease or severe gluten allergy will react to wine that has been exposed to gluten during processing. What we still don’t know, it seems, is how likely that possibility is.

*For the record, previous studies over the past ten-ish years have looked for gluten proteins in wine fined with gluten, but this was the first published report using both antibodies and the more sensitive mass spectrometry method.

**Using gluten to clarify wine is an interesting proposition in itself. Presently, both egg proteins and isinglass – a substance derived from fish bladders (yes, I said fish bladders, and I meant it) – are used for the same purpose. Both pose an issue for vegan wine drinkers, who won’t consume anything containing or made with animal-derived substances. The latter is a problem for vegetarians, too, and either might be problematic for people with severe allergies either to eggs or fish. Gluten, then, seems like a great alternative…save that it might cause problems for the gluten-intolerant even as it solves problems for vegans.

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Attempting to drink Norton in Virginia

Norton is not a hybrid. Maybe you knew that, but it’s easy to forget/not realize/assume that it is. Very understandable: Norton obviously isn’t among the top European vinifera varietals – and its name makes it an unlikely candidate for one of those little-known and newly-discovered vinifera esotericals – so that means it must be a hybrid, right? Well, wrong. Norton is a Vitis aestivalis or “summer grape” (aestivalis refers to summertime) and a totally different species from V. vinifera and V. labrusca. In the United States, we usually refer to European varietals as “viniferas, V. labrusca grapes like Concord and Catawba as “natives” for being indigenous to this continent, and intentional “man-made” crosses between European vinifera and American native varietals as “hybrids.” Vitis aestivalis, then, is none of the above.

Or at least that’s the best consensus at this point. Some folks seem to think that Norton might be a very old hybrid between a labrusca called (of all things) Bland and the vinifera Pinot Meunier. I’ve not read genetic data on the subject, but every paper in American Society of Enology and Viticulture as well as the several Norton-related papers indexed on PubMed agreed in identifying Norton as V. aestivalis. Like native labruscas, Vitis aestivalis is also native to eastern North America. state of Missouri markets Norton as “America’s True Grape.”

So, Norton is not a hybrid and, therefore, I was interested in tasting a few over my weekend at the 2011 North American Wine Bloggers Conference in Charlottesville, Virginia. Hybrids and I don’t get along well for one really quite simple reason: anthranilates. Methyl and ethyl anthranilates are the chemical compounds responsible for the distinctive “foxy” aroma that characterize wines made from hybrid grapes (or pure-bred V. labrusca.) V. aestivalis, however, isn’t known for having a high level of these compounds or the associated “foxy” flavors.

I learned today that Norton is associated with Missouri – Norton is Missouri’s state grape – but I had heard more about Virginia’s iterations of the varietal. Norton is popular in these areas in large part because of its strong mildew resistance, a real boon in often-humid climates. With 100°-ish temperatures and humidity over 50% all weekend, even I was beginning to mildew by the end of my three-day stay in Virginia.  

I somehow managed to miss the several Nortons at the Virginia-only tasting over and around the Friday-evening dinner at Monticello, but there were plenty Missouri versions at the post-prandial “The Other 46 Tasting” (referring to the states other than CA, WA, OR, and NY.) Scientific evidence aside, I’m now more willing to accept the son-of-Bland hypothesis. I wouldn’t exactly call these wines bland, but flavorful they were not. Keeping in-mind that this wasn’t an event designed for in-depth tasting, here are my very brief notes on three Missouri Nortons from that evening:

“Lots of burnt-out fruit up front, nothing to back it up, a bit sour. YUCK.”

“Skunky, smoky, and sweet. Double YUCK.”

“Richer, jammier, a little sweetness, but no tannins, short finish, flat mouthfeel, just not much going on.”

I don’t want to dismiss an entire varietal/region/style based on a handful of examples, so I’ll make an effort to try more Norton wines in the future. HOWEVER, reading a little more about the basic characteristics of the Norton grape makes it sound unlikely as a great winemaking grape. From a 2011 paper in BMC plant biology by a group of viticulturists in Missouri:

-          Norton retains high malic acid at time of ripening → high acidity for a red and, after malolactic fermentation, potentially lots of buttery flavors. I’m just not sure if butter complements the basic Norton flavor.

-          Norton retains high phenols at time of ripening → phenols are such a tremendously large and varied group of compounds that it’s hard to say more about the impact of “high phenols” on the finished wine without more information on the specific phenols involved.

-          The skin of Norton grapes has a higher anthocyanin content than that of Cabernet Sauvignon → deep pigmentation. Usually a good thing, but a bit misleading in this case because it doesn’t match up with intensity of flavor.

 

Interestingly, several of the articles I found that were theoretically in support of Norton angled heavily towards negative comments about Norton’s flavor profile (this profile at Appellation America is a good example.) Ergo, un-foxyness may be the best thing that can be said about Norton. Still, I’ll do my best to keep an open mind. If anyone has anything to contribute about growing V. aestivalis and/or making or drinking wine derived thereof, I’d welcome the education.