Archive for the ‘Winemaking’ Category
Monday, April 29th, 2013
by Jeff Miller of Artisan Family of Wines (Seven Artisans, Sly Dog Cellars, Red Côte)
 My post last week got a comment that deserves repeating:
“Always nice to see commentary on the blogosphere from another grower who can actually speak to a REAL day in the life of a vineyard owner. I’m having so much “fun” going after wineries for $33,062.50 still owed to me on the “stuff” from 2012 and 2009 harvests while nervously chewing my nails and running the numbers on my 2013 operations budget - and at the same time working towards retrieving the $7,560 owed to me by my “neighbor” for the pressurized 6 inch mainline they broke and replaced with a cotter coupling only to be asked by my attorney for a retainer to fight the 6 inches my three olive trees extend over my “neighbors” property line, never you mind the 6 feet of french drain they’ve illegally run across the very same property line and into my drain tile. And then there’s the paperwork involved with the insurance claim(s) on the Ag theft that occurred two months ago and the 65 vines I lost 1 year ago to a lunatic who launched his truck into my reservoir because he was “having a bad day”. I am having so much “fun” I can barely stand it. Happy Tax Day Mr. Parsons. Jeff, tip of the hat to you this 2013 growing season.”
This came from Thomson Vineyards, which per their website produces wine grapes in the Carneros. But the gist of it could have come from pretty much any real grower who has to deal with the day in day out problems of running a vineyard, which is similar to running all kinds of other businesses.
I can only add a note of sympathy. I’d like to say misery loves company. Only it doesn’t. But I guess there’s something to be said at least for knowing that you’re not the only one.
As we struggle to pay our bills, I can only second Thomson’s comment about having to go after wineries who haven’t’ paid their bills. We’d be so much better off right now if it weren’t for the tens of thousands of dollars we’ve had to write off from distributors that have gone belly up, or just not paid for reasons that are far from clear. The ones that go belly up I can understand. But the ones that are still actively in business that just never pay is harder to understand.
But what are you going to do about it? Hire a lawyer in some far off state to try to collect a $10,000 bill. Fat chance that’s going to end up being a cost effective move.
And then there’s the inevitability of the fact that when something goes not as planned, it’s always for the worse. The unanticipated truck careening through your vineyard never turns out to be a good thing.
Following up on a recent post, and apropos to the above, we got a response from the county for our winery/tasting room application. Three pages of “corrections”, most of them of the trivial variety, but I’m concerned about a few. That followed another letter requiring an environmental review of our septic system. Since our production is so small I know we comply, but that won’t save having to spend hundreds of dollars, and maybe more, to get a septic engineer to say that. Which wouldn’t be all that big a deal if we were collecting all the money owed to us…
No matter what, you have to try to keep your eye on the ball, to focus on the big things that will advance your business. But sometimes you get so consumed fighting rear guard actions that that becomes really hard to do.
So thanks to Thomson Vineyards for at least letting me know I’m not the only one.
Posted in Winemaking | No Comments »
Monday, March 18th, 2013
by Jeff Miller of Artisan Family of Wines (Seven Artisans, Sly Dog Cellars, Red Côte)
I have been a bitter critic of wineries, usually the biggest of the big, that routinely churn out mediocre wines stripped of all that makes wine interesting. Start with perfectly good grapes, and filter and fine and stabilize and centrifuge them and they lose most of what makes them potentially wonderful drinking experiences. True, not a few of these wines still manage to be pretty good, but it’s in spite of, not because of, these processes. It’s not good enough to say you made a good wine, when you really started out with something capable of being a whole lot better.
So I guess I got something of comeuppance last week. One of our distributors reported that one of our wines (our Petite Sirah to be precise) had been stacked at our warehouse upside down. Since this wine is unfiltered, and naturally subject to throwing off sediment anyway (it’s a fairly tannic wine), it has been accumulating sediment on the cork surface.
My immediate reaction: So what? When I get a wine with sediment, that’s a big plus for me. It shows it’s a real wine. It’s a tradeoff I’d gladly make: a little sediment for a real wine.
Our consumers reaction? Not nearly so positive. In fact, downright negative.
It’s a bummer, plain and simple. If you don’t go the “strip everything out of the wine that any person could possibly find offensive” route, you run the risk that those someones will find the wine wanting, or even flawed. That this is the furthest thing from the truth, is a big “so what?” if what counts is getting your wines sold.
I can remember tasting some years ago the same wine, one that had been cold stabilized, and one that hadn’t been. The unstabilized wine was subject to forming crystals when put in a fridge for a period of time. But my God it was so much better. Yet pretty much everyone cold-stabilizes their white wines, because, God forbid, a consumer might think there’s slivers of glass in his wine.
Want your wine to be clear as bell, without the slightly hint of haziness? Bentonite filter the hell out of the wine, and you’ll get that super clear look that everyone likes. But taste that super clear wine against the pre-filtered version, and you’ll find it has lost a lot of what the wine originally had.
So what do winemakers do? They routinely bentonite filter their whites.
So what starts out as a vibrant, even profound, wine, gets dumbed down into something innocuous but commercially acceptable.
I can rail about this til the cows come home. But I am but one lonely voice in the wilderness.
So what to do with our Petite Sirah? Well, you can have the warehouse spend its time (and our money) to turn all the cases upside down. Of course, this isn’t the best way to store wine, since you want the cork contacting the wine, not the air (hopefully neutral air) inside the bottle. Keeping the cork in contact with the wine keeps it from drying out. Dried out corks let air into the bottle, which will result in oxidation of the wine. It’s probably not that big a deal for our Petite Sirah, since we don’t have that much of the wine left, and it’s probably not going to go off on us before it gets sold.
Of course, whenever you do anything, it has unintended ramifications. When you turn the case upside down, all of sudden your label is upside down too. Solution: plaster new labels over the old ones.
So it really comes down to simple choice: do we stick to our guns, damn the ignorance of the wine consuming public, or do we do what we have to do keep our sales going? Well, that’s no brainer if there ever was one. I’m ordering the new labels tomorrow.
I still think those big megawineries are scoundrels guilty of compromising and adulterating their products. But maybe with a little less of the vehemence I felt a week ago.
Posted in Wine Sales and Pricing, Wine Tasting, Winemaking | 5 Comments »
Monday, March 11th, 2013
by Jeff Miller of Artisan Family of Wines (Seven Artisans, Sly Dog Cellars, Red Côte)
The Wine Curmudgeon posted a blog last week, “Five things the wine business can do to help consumers figure out wine” (which can be found at http://www.winecurmudgeon.com/my_weblog/2013/03/five-things-the-wine-business-can-do-to-help-consumers-figure-out-wine.html) that I found of interest, both for those points I agree with, and those I don’t.
The point of the post was to offer five suggestions on how the wine industry should deal with the consumer. The five are listed below, in italics. My comments follow each.
• Stop worrying about vintage. One of the few things that every wine drinker knows is that vintage matters, even though that’s becoming less and less true. Vintage – the year the grapes were harvested – matters for an increasingly small percentage of wine; most of the stuff we drink every day is made to taste the same regardless of the vintage. In fact, Barefoot, one of the most popular wine brands in the U.S., is non-vintage (its grapes come from different harvests). It’s actually possible to make better quality wine this way, mixing and matching the best quality grapes from various vintages. One example: the $10 Little James Basket Press wines.
I both agree and disagree with this one. Vintages do make a big difference, particularly in Northern Europe. They may matter less in California, but the last few vintages have definitely shown that they matter here as well. But the idea that wines can be made non-vintage (i.e. blending different vintages together) is one that has never really taken off, despite the fact that it is definitely the better way to make wine. The more material the winemaker has available to him, the better the chances are that he’ll produce something that’s really good. This is recognized pretty much throughout all winemaking in all kinds of different ways (different varieties, different clothes, etc.), Yet when it comes to vintages this idea receives short shrift. That may be crazy, but it’s so ingrained into the wine market that it’s not going to change, at least anytime soon. At least not for what are considered to be premium wines.
• Use less expensive bottles: It’s one thing to use a heavy, costly, imposing bottle for a $150 cult Napa cabernet sauvignon. But producers who don’t use the best made and least expensive bottle for a $10 wine are raising the price of the product without adding quality or value. For example, why do most wine bottles still have punts – the dimple on the bottom of the bottle – when it’s cheaper and just as effective to make a bottle without one?
Well, I can answer this question. The simple reason is that heavier bottles are perceived as being higher-end, and therefore people will pay more for them. Does that make any sense? Probably not. But then pretty much everything having to do with packaging of a wine, or any other product for that matter, doesn’t make any sense either. You can rail against the inequities of life and stupidities of the consumer, but that doesn’t get your wines sold. If you want to sell wine, you have to do this stuff.
• Stop obsessing over oak. High-end wines that need thousands and thousands of dollars worth of oak to pull their various parts into a coherent whole should spend time and effort describing the oak process and how it works. But the rest of the wine we drink – 90 percent? – either doesn’t need oak or uses a substitute, like staves or chips. And these wines are often perfectly fine. Sometimes, they even make the $10 Hall of Fame.
Personally, I would not only stop obsessing over oak, I would stop using it, either altogether or at least in the high quantities that it’s used throughout much of the wine world. For some wines, I wouldn’t argue that some oak is helpful. But I would like to feel like I’m drinking a grape product not a tree product. With lots of wine, it’s hard to tell. I like pepper with my salad, but a few turns of the peppermill is enough. I certainly wouldn’t want to dump the whole container of pepper on the salad. But that’s what many winemakers do with oak.
• Appellation isn’t the be all and end all. Appellation – where the grapes were grown – matters almost not at all for most of the wine we drink, and consumers (especially younger ones) are paying less and less attention to it. They want malbec or moscato, and they don’t really care where it’s from. And, truthfully, given modern winemaking techniques, the goal is (as with vintage) to make the malbec taste like malbec, not like it came from California or Argentina. This is another opportunity to make less expensive, quality wine by mixing grapes from different appellations, and not worrying whether the bottle says California or Argentina.
This one I could hardly agree with more. If anyone could, with consistency, identify which appellation a wine came from tasting them blind against other similar wines, I might feel differently. But to a large extent this is just a marketing ruse. As far as the idea of blending wines from different appellations is concerned, see my comments above concerning blending of different vintages (great idea, will never happen).
• Write back labels in English: One wine that costs around $10 promises things that are all but impossible for a wine at that price: “chocolate and hints of licorice.” Or, to go to the other extreme, the wine drinker who buys another wine “prizes the simple things in life: spending good times with close friends.” Both do the consumer a disservice. They’ll assume they’re wine idiots because they couldn’t taste chocolate and licorice, and be totally confused by what the second wine is supposed to be. One solution, as advocated by W. Blake Gray: simple terms that we all understand, like rich, robust and fruit.
I have always been a big believer that there are only a few things that people can agree on with any consistency when it comes to a wine. Flavor is not one of them. Acidity, tannin, sweetness, oak level, maybe, even probably. Yet most wine is described primarily by its flavor profile. So what that nobody can agree on it. A simple description like “rich, robust, and fruit” beats the usual drivel that we see on the back of a wine label, even if it’s generality means it really doesn’t say that much about the wine. Perhaps this situation would be a little better if there were a little bit more honesty in the comments on wine back-labels. But I don’t think we’re going to see a description such as “lean, fruit challenged” any time soon. I think it’s fair to say that back label prose is going to continue to be one of the worst examples of writing in the English language.
Posted in Viticulture, Wine Marketing, Wine Tasting, Winemaking | No Comments »
Monday, December 24th, 2012
by Jeff Miller of Artisan Family of Wines (Seven Artisans, Sly Dog Cellars, Red Côte)
I don’t like “natural” wine. I don’t like anything about it.
My disgust with the whole thing came to the fore as I was reading a post by Jamie Goode, someone whose writings I generally respect. You can find the post at:
Natural wine, a primer
jamie goode’s wine blog
http://www.wineanorak.com/wineblog/natural-wine/natural-wine-a-primer
So where do I begin? First, I want to take exception to the premise, somewhat unstated, that “natural” winemakers make better wine because they make it “naturally”. Let’s put aside the issue of what “naturally” means and assume, for the moment, that it means something.
I would even grant, for the sake of argument, that those making “natural” wine make better wine than their “commercial” brethren.
But to assume that, granting all of the above, “natural” winemakers make better wine than others is a far cry from saying that they make better wines because they employ “natural” winemaking. There’s that old Latin phrase, “Post hoc, propter hoc”, or “after this, therefore because of this”. It’s points out the fallacy that simply because one thing comes after something else doesn’t mean that it was caused by it. Or put another way, a correlation doesn’t mean causation.
I would be pretty sure that as a whole (with many exceptions) those that self-define themselves as “natural” also do a whole lot of things that translate into making good wine that you can do without being “natural”. Things like sourcing good grapes (whether grown “naturally” or not), taking care to not screw up the winemaking, etc. etc. Just showing up in the sense of not screwing up goes an awfully long way towards achieving a good wine.
“Natural” winemakers again, as a group, are going to eschew some of the more manipulative winemaking processes that megawineries employ routinely. But does avoiding excessive fining or filtration mean your wines are more “natural”? Many would say yes, but you can certainly employ those techniques without being in the “natural” camp.
But I guess my biggest problem with “natural” winemaking is that it’s more of a marketing concept than anything else. There’s no regulation saying what “natural” means, and it can really mean almost anything. And I guess it’s a pretty good marketing slant. After all, who wants to advocate “unnatural” wine. Haven’t seen any Gallo ads lately making that pitch.
I’m all in favor of many of the things that the “natural” clique favor—I believe in more or less sustainable farming, and less rather than more intervention in the winemaking process. I think a lot of “commercial” winemakers feel the same way, even if the really big wine companies generally (though not invariably) favor a more sanitized, standardized product.
But if you take the things that probably most people loosely associate with “natural” wines, I think they are not the reasons why wine is good. In many respects, they are things to overcome.
Let’s take just a couple of examples. “Natural” fermentation. This means that the fermentation is allowed to take off without the introduction of commercial yeasts. Like everything in the wine business, this issue is not as simple as it might first appear. In many cases, the winery is inhabited by a yeast (or yeasts) that jump into the fermentation vat and start the fermentation. But did those yeasts really come in initially from the vineyard, or are they the descendents of commercial yeasts used in times past? Hard to say. Even assuming they are from the vineyard, do they make for a better wine? It’s really a crapshoot. There are yeasts that really don’t do very good things for the ultimate product. Others may impart some level of complexity (though probably not). Using a commercial yeast certainly gives one a level of assurance that nothing really bad is gong to happen. One thing I know for sure—wines made with commercial yeasts can be awfully good.
A second point is so2. This chemical is almost universally used in winemaking. It inhibits microbial taint and oxidation. I keep being told that you can make good wine without so2. But I just have a hard time buying that, since the so2-free wines I’ve had just don’t pass muster. That’s not to say it can’t be done. But it’s a battle. For what purpuse? Are so2-free wines “better” in any sense? I don’t think so.
Conscientiousness in winemaking goes a very long way towards making a good wine. If “natural” winemakers make good wines, I suspect it’s primarily because they are conscientious, not because they are “natural”. And conscientiousness is a trait that’s not limited to “natural” winemakers.
Posted in Viticulture, Wine Marketing, Winemaking | No Comments »
Monday, December 3rd, 2012
by Jeff Miller of Artisan Family of Wines (Seven Artisans, Sly Dog Cellars, Red Côte)
Do bigger wineries make better wines than smaller ones? In a post on Fermentation, “With Wine, Bigger May Be Better—Or Preferable” (http://fermentationwineblog.com/2012/11/with-wine-bigger-may-be-better-or-preferable/), the CEO of one of the largest wine companies makes the case that they do.
Certainly, there’s a case there to be made. Bigger wineries can invest in more equipment, have access to more grapes, etc. etc. They can spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on one piece of equipment, more than a small winery’s entire equipment budget.
And I certainly wouldn’t claim that big wineries can’t make good wine, as many certainly do. J. Lohr and Beringer jump to mind.
But despite all that, my overall impression is that smaller wineries do make better wine, on average, despite the more limited resources they have available to them.
Why that is is difficult to pin down, but I do have some thoughts (maybe just speculations?) on the subject.
First and foremost, I think it’s important to recognize what makes a wine brand successful. Lots of things go into the equation, and the quality of what’s in the bottle is just one of them. Marketing and packaging count at least as much, and probably more. Muscle in the distribution network certainly counts for a huge amount of what makes a winery successful, and big wineries have that, and small wineries don’t. When Gallo releases a new product, they don’t have to beg for shelf space–they simply demand and get it.
So if you’re a big winery, it may be, as a simply business proposition, that your efforts are more profitably directed at aspects of your brand other than the quality of what’s in the bottle.
No doubt, small wineries want to make money (or at least break even). But I do think that small wineries have a real commitment to trying to turn out a really good product. They don’t always succeed, but by and large they try. And, as they saying, “showing up” is a big part of what counts.
Another factor that I think gives smaller wineries an advantage is that its really hard to maintain a high level of quality when you’re churning out really large quantities of wine. A small winery can pick and choose where it sources its grapes. A large winery can’t cherry pick to the same extent.
I also think that the consumer has a lot to do with it. There’s a lot of wine out there that’s really kind of a commodity product—relatively nondescript, very price sensitive. This is a part of the market that the big winery is going to go after—in fact, it’s its bread and butter. For this market, a consistent, inoffensive wine is critical. A wine that’s crystal clear, consistent, and without anything anyone could possible be put off by, is the key to success. Mediocrity, in short, is more important than complex and exciting.
Certainly, the factors that, at a small winery, can cause the quality to be higher, are not by definition absent at a large winery. A larger winery can aspire to the same things as a smaller winery can. And, if it does, it certainly has the resources to do the job well, even in light of the limitations that size imposes.
But if, as a large winery, you’re successful at the bottom line, your motivation may be to do more of the same old same old, rather than aspire to doing something special. I do believe that most large wineries just don’t see investing in making a more interesting, complex product as being a good economic decision. And they might be right.
Posted in Winemaking | 1 Comment »
|
