How exactly did you lose your mind? What ever possessed you to explore your expensive and arcane obsession with wine? The caption of an old New Yorker cartoon read, “They used to be relatively nice men. I wonder what turned them into oenophiles?”
I think I can tell you. At least for me, but quite likely for you as well. It’s that mysterious, haunting, bottle bouquet you always find in great wines after some time in the cellar.
Let me tell you a story. In 1999, I was working with my French mentors at OenoDev, experimenting with micro-oxygenation. California winemakers were intrigued by the technique but expressed concern that minute amounts of oxygen would stimulate Brett growth.
So, we set up an elaborate experiment to test whether that was true.
We took some 12-inch stainless steel pipe and welded up a dozen little tanks, filled them all with Merlot, and inoculated half of them with Brettanomyces, the other six serving as uninoculated controls. The plan was to run six different regimens of micro-ox, with and without Brett inoculation. We pasteurized all the wine ahead of time to prevent interference from other microbes that might be present.
Instead, disaster ensued. We had to abandon the experiment.
Winemakers start to freak out when there’s more than 500 cells per ml of Brett in a wine. We got 100,000,000 CFUs in all six inoculations! That is when I realized that if you kill off everything in the wine, the Brett goes insane.
It’s in times like this that you learn something. Thought is born of failure.
I learned that Brett is really like a hospital disease, an opportunistic pathogen if you like, and draconian cellar procedures that kill off everything else actually cause the disease. We now know that Brett is controlled by fostering the health of all the other organisms that grow in wine and compete for micronutrients. This diverse collection of benign organisms in their millions, collectively known as the cellar’s microbiome, are also the source of that seductive bottle bouquet so treasured by wine geeks.
Every human being depends on a highly diverse personal microbiome that lives inside and outside her body and is responsible for good health. Just as each person’s microbiome is unique, so it is for every winery, thus a source of distinctiveness in wines that are fermented and aged there.
In 2019, I was in a group including Rob Davis from Jordan and we were tasting the 1976 Cabernet, the first Cab that he made, under the tutelage of Andre Tchelistcheff. The wine was in remarkably good shape for being so old, but it hadn’t really developed very much.
I was working in retail when the wine came out, and having sold hundreds of cases of it, I remembered it very well. So I said, “Rob, this tastes exactly like it did 46 years ago.” He replied “I know. All my wines are like that. Tom Jordan had always insisted that they sterile filter the wine to prevent microbial spoilage in the bottle.”
And then he pulled out a magnum and he said, “Well, Andre and I decided we wanted to do some commemorative magnums. Since we couldn’t fit the bottles onto the bottling line, we weren’t able to sterile filter the wine. So Andre said, ‘Oh what the heck, let’s just take a siphon hose and we’ll bottle right out of the barrel.’ so that’s what we did.”
And this wine to me was vastly superior. While there was nothing wrong with the sterile-filtered version, this wine was just stunning -- really the equal of a great Bordeaux. That’s when I learned that a lot of the development that we expect in a bottle is really microbiological.
That was a real eye opener to me.
Tom Jordan’s control issues with microbiology are quite typical of California winemakers, who are generally interested in squeaky-clean wines at the expense of the very complexity that got them hooked in the first place.
Since sterile filtration is a 20th Century invention, French winemakers have been for hundreds of years making great wines that are unsterilized, so why should they start now?
What’s peculiar about Jordan is their commitment to the Bordeaux style: balanced wines with graceful tannins and moderate alcohol, yet never destined for the greatness they might achieve with a bit more faith in their microbiome.
The simplicity of Jordan Cabernets is a minor example of the Peltzman Effect, which catalogues the unintended consequences that inevitably occur in response to an intervention, often offsetting or even negating the intervention. Seatbelts and helmet laws have resulted in riskier driving behaviors. Extreme sanitation in Odwalla juice plants resulted in the breeding of superbugs that could thrive at previously unheard-of pHs.
Grape Leaf Skeletonizer moths were never seen in California vineyards until the 1940s, just about the time growers began spraying petrochemicals. By 1970, they were wiping out vineyards. The subsequent implementation of Integrated Pest Management techniques has brought the pest completely under control while simultaneously decreasing pesticide use.
In my previous article, Turning Out the Enlightenment at the End of the Tunnel, I talk about the 19th Century image of the rationalist hero, ingeniously uncovering Nature’s secrets and exercising dominion over her.
Nature loathes an abusive husband. Enologists and other scientists may be clever at invention, but we truly suck at anticipating how the world may fight back. When I developed the reverse osmosis technology for uncoupling the harvest decision from brix, I never imagined it would result in wildly overripe, clownish Napa Cabernets that only the wealthy unwashed could love. Oops, my bad.
Doctors are learning that when they swear the Hippocratic Oath, “First, do no harm,” it often means “Do less.” Work with the fundamentally mysterious powers of Nature and don’t seize control unless you truly know what you’re doing. Let the body heal itself.
Miracles happen every day. That’s just another way of expressing wonder at good fortune afforded us despite our ignorance. My role as a winemaker is mostly to get out of the way and let the miracles happen. Sure, I use techniques to prepare a young wine’s structural integrity for its journey in barrel. But what happens then, I haven’t a clue. But whatever it is, it’s why I got into the game.