Sonoma Wines in San Francisco

Last month, I was invited by my friend Stefano, President and Founder of 54 Hundred Restaurant Group, to attend “Sonoma in the City: San Francisco Trade & Media Grand Tasting at the Presidio.” Each region of Sonoma County was represented, and Stefano and I were particularly excited to try Pinot Noir and Zinfandel from the Russian River Valley. As Stefano and I were making our way through the Chardonnays and a few Sauvignon Blancs, even before we reached the reds, we were surprised by how similar all the winemaking styles were. Though all of the wines were of excellent quality (I didn’t notice any flaws in terms of flavor, nose or color), few of the wines we tried expressed the subtle nuances of terroir that I have come to appreciate from the best wines produced in the Santa Cruz Mountains and elsewhere.

The Sonoma wines felt like “new couch wines,” as Stefano and I came to describe the full-boded, in-your-face fruit-bombs, sweet with oaky vanillin, and slick like oil in the mouth from pushed malolactic fermentation. These Sonoma wines were not like our grandparents’ couches—worn pieces of furniture with individual character, that you often have to ease into—these “new couch wines” had all the accoutrements you could think of, and in many ways were a testament to modern winemaking techniques and technologies.  Too often, however, these advances take philosophical precedence during the winemaking process, and when vintners favor modern innovations over the unique expression of a vineyard, wine’s metaphoric value—and its individuality—can be lost. The ‘somewhereness’ that a wine might express is easiest to attain if minimal interference is made by the winemaker.

I do not want to suggest that modern winemaking techniques shouldn’t be employed when necessary. This is the view of one of my favorite Sonoma wineries, Limerick Lane Cellars, known for their cool-climate Zinfandels. Jake Bilbro, owner and viniculturalist for Limerick Lane, was pouring at the Sonoma in the City event, and he told me that while he and his brother, who makes the wines, try to be as hands-off as possible, they don’t hesitate to step in and solve problems when they arise. I think this is why Stefano and I found so many good yet identical wines at the tasting event, and also why I believe it is important for winemakers to strive for the expression of terroir in their wines. Modern viniviticultural practices have enabled quality wines to be produced every vintage; but this one-time dream of winemakers has eclipsed another desire just as old: to produce a wine that is unlike any other. 

New Poem: "Sami's Restaurant"

I'm pleased to announce that Alimentum: The Literature of Food has published my poem "Sami's Restaurant" as part of their Menupoems series, a celebration of National Poetry Month.

A Sense of Place: Wine, Terroir and Memory

This past summer I met my friend Stephen Kessler at Soif, a wine bar in downtown Santa Cruz. Stephen’s a writer and a lover of fine Riojas, and I told him about my wine blog. A couple of days later he sent me an essay he’d written years earlier, titled “Terroirisme, or Proust at the Wine Bar.” Marcel Proust was the first person to use the term “involuntary memory” to describe how sensations can pull past memories unexpectedly into the present. To borrow Proust’s term, a wine with terroir is one that induces an involuntary memory of its origin. Proust believed that involuntary memories contain the essence of the past, just as a wine’s terroir contains the essence of its own past—of the winemaker’s traditions, vineyard geography and the grape varietal. 

I find myself returning to that essay, thinking about how wine and memory are linked by our senses, and I want to discern how we recognize terroir in a wine. Much of a wine’s terroir is geological in nature, relating to soil and mineral composition, but any sense of place takes place in the brain. Jamie Good, author of The Science of Wine: From Vine to Glass, on his blog Wineanorak, writes, “Our conscious perception of flavour is formed in the brain. In the interaction between us and the wine we taste, the impression we form is a conscious experience that involves the fusion of inputs from at least four different senses, coupled with some sophisticated brain processing.” That process is memory.

This past December I spent a few days in New York, and while waiting for a friend to get off work and meet up for a glass at Terroir Wine Bar in the East Village, I decided to spend my free afternoon at the Natural History Museum. I was delighted when I arrived to discover that one of the special exhibits, which runs until August, was “Our Global Kitchen: Food, Nature, Culture.” One of the most fascinating displays was labeled “Food for Thought,” which included a map of the brain with different regions labeled according to their role in sensory perception. Next to the image was a short text: “Why do certain foods summon deep emotional memories? The outer layer of your brain, the cortex, has specialized areas for making sense of tastes and scents and merging them into flavors. But your smell system also has strong links to deeper brain regions that create emotions and memories—one reason foods can have such powerful emotional resonance.” Like Proust’s madeleine dipped in tea, a wine with terroir has the power to overwhelm our senses and transport us through our memories to another place and time.

When we encounter a great wine, it pulls us into our sensory awareness, and at the same time connects us with others, past events and different places. By pulling us into ourselves, wine is capable of rejecting linear time in favor of singular moments, of free mental association rather than a temporal progression. Wine that does this revolts against the passing of time, and forces a release of ego in favor of sensory reflection. Such a wine connects us to others, to those tasters who have also recognized that particular wine’s terroir. Some novels, such as Ulysses by James Joyce, or Absalom, Absalom! by William Faulkner, are so stylized that the authorial presence is forced into the reader’s awareness. A fine vin de terroir force a recognition of the winemaker and the vineyard upon the drinker, inviting the drinker to join in the communication already underway between vintner and vine. 

Taste is subjective, determined by cultural evolution and subjective preference.  Terroir is an expression of a distinct relationship between the many elements of the vineyard, and those who have worked the land and made the wine. It is also a reflection of the cultural traditions that have evolved to refine winemaking in a particular region. When we recognize terroir in a wine, we recognize a place. But is it necessary that we have some sense of this place, even on a rudimentary level, to sense terroir? In “The Phenomenology of Terroir: A Meditation,” Randall Grahm, winemaker and owner of Bonny Doon Vineyards, writes: “The terroir intelligence does not entirely repose in the site itself, of course, but within the relationship that exists between the land and those who have farmed that land over generations. It is through experience, observation and countless iteration that some very clever person or persons determined that a very particular grape variety or individual genotype thereof on a particular rootstock on a particular soil type produced a wine that had a unique, special quality.” But what exactly is this “special quality,” and how do we recognize it? It seems to me that the greatest difference between professional sommeliers and novice tasters, is that sommeliers have tasted wine from all over the globe. In The Psychology of Wine: Truth and Beauty by the Glass, Evan Mitchell and Brian Mitchell write, “Experiments have suggested that it is not so much greater acuity of smell and taste that distinguishes experienced wine tasters from novices, but their greater range of experience and broader flavor vocabulary.” Expert tasters not only have an array of experiences to help codify a new wine, they also possess the proper language for describing what they’ve experienced. 

Our sensory memories affect not only how we perceive a wine, but also how we describe it. The Mitchells write that wine can be described in five dimensions: in terms of flavor, metaphor, geometry, gender, and anthropomorphizing. I would suggest that the last two dimensions are subsets of metaphor, which suggests that how we talk about wine is greatly influenced by how we sense it, and by our memory of past experiences. A wine with terroir has the ability to be recognized as region-specific, highlighting the microclimate of its origin, and this recognition is in turn reinforced by cultural and historical traditions that influence aesthetic taste. Recognition of terroir is tied to collective memory, for although terroir is recognized individually, a wine’s terroir must also be able to be sensed by anyone who is willing to look for it, who is passionate about wine, and who listens to what a wine has to say. 

Through description, we enter a dialogue where we use our senses—visual, olfactory, kinesthetic, gustatory—to relate to the components of a wine. We describe a wine’s scent from the olfactory sensations it provokes; flavors emerge because of our gustatory senses; our geometric descriptions relate to our kinesthetic approach to a wine’s texture or mouthfeel; and we describe a wine’s color based on our visual experiences.

In “Colors,” Radiolab Producer Tim Howard and linguist Guy Deutscher discuss the story of William Gladstone, the former British Prime Minister, who conducted an exhaustive study of every color reference in The Iliad and The Odyssey. Gladstone was shocked to find that blue was never used; nor does blue appear in the original Hebrew Torah. Deutscher explains that blue is extremely rare in nature, and that cultures do not create a word for a color until they can reliably make it; red is the easiest, and blue is the hardest color to create. Deutscher goes on to state that black and white are inherent to all languages, and that as languages develop words for new colors, red is always next, then usually green, then yellow; blue is always last. Deutscher explains that Homer came up with his “wine-dark sea” because the word ‘blue’ had not yet been invented. He goes on to explain that when we use color as a descriptive, we connect to a transcending reality. Having a word for ‘blue’ makes us notice blue objects more. It brings blue more fully into our awareness. 

We don’t create words until we need them, and each newly formed word actualizes the object named. Our impression of a wine is influenced by our senses, but also by our experience, knowledge and expectations. In “The Phenomenology of Terroir: A Meditation,” Randall Grahm writes: “Matt Kramer once very poetically defined terroir as ‘somewhereness’, and this I think is the nub of the issue. I believe that ‘somewhereness’ is absolutely linked to beauty, that beauty reposes in the particulars; we love and admire individuals in a way that we can never love classes of people or things. Beauty must relate to some sort of internal harmony; the harmony of a great terroir derives, I believe, from the exchange of information between the vine-plant and its milieu over generations.”

Terroir is as much an expression of culture as it is a reflection of place. It is an expression of a collective taste for a particular style of wine born of tradition. Robert Haas, in his 2008 post “Terroir, Then and Now” on the Tablas Creek Vineyard blog, writes: “In the beginning, Egyptian, Greek and Roman wines were always identified by place of origin.” Lacking the traditions of European winemakers, New World vintners, instead of focusing on the “somewhereness” of a wine’s origin, have focused on the “somethingness” of the grape varietals. New World wines are named according to the grape, while Old World wines focus on the location. This focus on varietal rather than vineyard implies that the New World has terroir, but that it hasn’t yet been established as a cultural vernacular.

 Elaborating on the sense of place expressed by wine, Randall Grahm continues, “a great terroir wine will provoke a feeling that I can only describe as akin to homesickness, whether or not it is for home that may only exist in your imagination.” Homesickness is a translation of the word nostalgia, and in the late 1600s was considered a medical condition. Svetlana Boym, in her book The Future of Nostalgia, writes, “Nostalgia (from nostos—return home, and algia—longing) is a longing for a home that no longer exists or has never existed. Nostalgia is a sentiment of loss and displacement, but it is also a romance with one’s own fantasy.” Nostalgia can fill our heads with mirages, and create a sense of grandeur about both our past and our present. Boym informs us that “Nostalgia is not always about the past; it can be retrospective but also prospective. Fantasies of the past determined by needs of the present have a direct impact on realities of the future.” In our case, each vintage is a past fantasy of the vintner, determined by the needs of the consumer, which will impact the consumer’s perception of other wines in the future. With terroir, you sense the depth of a wine.

In his foreword to Terroir, by James E. Wilson, Hugh Johnson writes, “Terroir, of course, means more than what goes on below the surface. Properly understood, it means the whole ecology of a vineyard: every aspect of its surroundings, from bedrock to late frosts and autumn mists, not excluding the way the vineyard is tended, not even the soul of the vigneron.” Each vineyard that has been properly planted with the optimal varietal clone, grafted onto the right rootstock, pruned using the optimal techniques, and much more, has the potential to express itself in terroir. But there is also a second terroir, beyond the vineyard, one that starts in the glass and ends in our heads. 

Wine of the Mind: A Distillation of Culture in Ancient Chinese Poetry

Part I:

Poets were the earliest wine writers. In China, where there is a long and vibrant history of poetic and drinking culture, the influence of wine in poetry is hard to miss. Wine was a favorite subject of perhaps the most famous Chinese poet, Li Po, who is rumored to have drowned when he fell from a boat trying to embrace the moon’s reflection while drunk. In his book Chinese Wine, researcher Li Zhengping writes, “Chinese people traditionally viewed poetry as the wine distilled from the mind, and many of the great poems are indeed as aromatic, tempting and exquisite as wine.” Wine and poetry in ancient China were intrinsically related in a symbiotic relationship that extended beyond the mere corollary of pleasures we recognize today. Drinking wine and writing poetry was common, and even today, people retell the stories of Chinese writers who played drinking games, floating wine cups downstream and composing a formal poem where the cup landed, drunk on the language of the land.

            Much more than an intoxicant, wine in ancient China was believed to have medicinal properties, and was a central part of religious life. Drinking wine was not only an accepted form of socializing, it was an important tool to keep one’s body and mind in balance, as long as frugality and moderation were practiced. In his book Ancient Wine, Patrick McGovern contends, “The history of civilization, in many ways, is the history of wine. Economically, religiously, socially, medically, and politically, the domesticated grapevine has intertwined itself with human culture from at least the Neolithic period and probably long before that.” The same, of course, can be said about poetry, though that is a vine of another varietal. Each time we pick up a poem from centuries earlier, or drink a wine grown from a plant that’s been cloned and transplanted for hundreds of years, we recapitulate that history, pulling past values into the present.

McGovern goes on to claim that wine is possibly the greatest legacy left by ancient humans; the psychotropic effects and medicinal value of alcohol explain its central role in society, religion, and the economy; fermented wine was more nutritious than fresh grapes; and finally, wine’s preeminence in history is largely due to the chemical compounds that delight our senses. “Widespread use of wine by a population, however, was a two-edged sword. Persons who indulged in wine were likely to carry genes that predisposed their descendants to alcoholism” (McGovern). This duality contained within wine—the nourishing and destructive qualities of alcohol—are evident in the works of poets such as Li Po.

In his book The Art of Chinese Poetry, James Liu examines some common concepts and ways of thinking and feeling found in Chinese poetry: Nature, Time, History, Leisure, Nostalgia, Love, and Rapture with Wine are all discussed. In the last section on wine, he writes, “Again, as every reader of Chinese poetry must be aware, there are constant references in it to drinking and becoming tsuei, which is usually translated as ‘drunk’, though actually it caries rather different implications and associations.” Liu goes on to cite the Shuo Wen, a philosophical cornerstone of Chinese etymology from circa 100 AD, which explains the composite character as a whole means “everyone reaching the limit of his capacity without offending propriety.” Liu explains that because tsuei does not mean the same as “drunk” or “inebriated” in English, he prefers to translate tsuei as “rapt with wine” because it focuses less on the notion of intoxication and more on the notion of “being mentally carried away from one’s normal preoccupations.”

Part II:

According to the scholar and translator Burton Watson, “Nearly all Chinese poets celebrate the joys of wine, but none do so as tirelessly and with such a note of genuine conviction as Li Po. Though he wrote in a poetic tradition that condoned, even demanded, the frank expression of sorrow, and he himself often gave voice to such feelings, one imagines that he could never have been entirely desolate so long as he had his wine” (Chinese Lyricism). Sorrow and wine seem linked in a dialectic union in his poetry. Life’s brevity breeds sorrow, yet Li Po seems to suggest that wine enables him to see beyond his own sorrow and appreciate a larger sense of existence. We can find a subtle expression of this idea in Li Po’s poem “Something Said, Waking Drunk on a Spring Day,” where he writes:

                        Overcome, verging on sorrow and lament,

                        I pour another drink. Soon, awaiting

                        this bright moon, I’m chanting a song.

                        And now it’s over, I’ve forgotten why.

Here we can see how wine sooths the mind, stripping it of the sorrows and laments that usually rattle in our skulls like death chants. After another drink, when the song has ended, Li Po has forgotten the sorrow that caused him to sing. Wine not only relaxes us physically, it eases us into new perspectives, and it helps release us from worry and desire. There is cruelty and hatred everywhere, Li Po seems to suggest, but wine can dispel these evils of the heart. This sentiment is perhaps best exhibited in Li Po’s poem “Drinking Alone,” which ends with the lines, “Out beyond this jar of wine, its all longing, longing—no heart of mine.”

An ardent Taoist, Li Po’s poems reveal that he studied Buddhism early in his career before converting to Taoism. An excellent example of Li Po’s Taoist disposition with a Buddhist bent can be seen in the third of his poems titled “Drinking Alone Beneath the Moon.” The poem begins with a description of April blossoms, and opens in a somber tone typical of Li Po. He writes, “Who can bear spring’s lonely sorrows, who / face it without wine? It’s the only way.” This is a concession by Li Po that wine prevents desolation. He goes on to say that no matter who we become, our life is fated from birth:

But a single cup evens out life and death,

our ten thousand concerns unfathomed,

and once I’m drunk, all heaven and earth

vanish, leaving me suddenly alone in bed,

forgetting that person even exists.

Of all our joys, this must be the deepest.

We cannot escape our fate, but wine has the power to help us shed the concerns that bind our minds and make us servants to our own desires. Alcohol, Li Po suggests, leaves us raptured, released from the bounds of heaven and earth, released even from one’s own sense of individual existence. This feeling, this rapture with the world that wine induces, which hinges on the release of the ego, of one’s sense of singularity, this, claims Li Po, is life’s deepest joy. From the poem above, we can see how this enjoyment and inspiration were inseparably linked, and that the greatest joy Li Po gets from drinking wine is a lucid understanding of existence and a heightened spiritual perspective.

Part III:

A good wine, like a good poem, makes us focus on its qualities. When we read a beautiful poem, or drink a special bottle of wine, we cannot help but be made aware of our experience, of the balance, intensity, complexity and distinctive personality captured on a page or in a glass. In The Philosophy of Wine: A Case of Truth, Beauty and Intoxication, Cain Todd claims that by drinking fine wine, “We learn more about our multifarious interest and pleasures, the nature of appreciation, and the meaningfulness and emotional expressivity that objects in the world can attain for us. And we become aware of our own powerful and subtle capacities for discriminating and evaluating.” Just as when we experience a great wine, brilliant poems force us to exercise and expand our perceptual and imaginative capacities. By trying to understand and appreciate wine we come to a deeper appreciation and understanding of our own existence. I think this is what Li Po meant in his second poem titled “Drinking Alone Beneath the Moon” when he ends with these lines:

Three cups and I’ve plumbed the great Way,

a jarful and I’ve merged the occurrence

appearing of itself. Wine’s view is lived:

you can’t preach doctrine to the sober.

What We Talk About When We Talk About Wine

In The Wine Bible, Karen MacNeil writes that a great wine must possess five qualities: a clear and distinct expression of flavors and aromas; a distinct expression of its varietal character; a harmonious integration of its many components; complexity; and connectedness—which she describes as “the embodiment of a single piece of earth. […] the bond between a wine and the plot of land it was born in.” MacNeil claims that connectedness is the most elusive of these five qualities, and her description suggests that what she means by connectedness is the ineffable characteristic of terroir, and how the best wines contain not only the first four qualities, but locates those qualities within a specific setting. While connectedness in wine may be the most elusive quality to ascertain, I find the notion of complexity equally confounding and compelling.

MacNeil writes, “Complexity is not a thing but a phenomenon. […] Complexity is more like a force that pulls you into a wine and impels you to repeatedly return for another smell and sip because each time you do, you find something new.” Much more than the layering of different flavors, complexity is the push and pull of novelty and pattern, of surprise and gratification. As a phenomenon, complexity is not so much an expression of a wine’s natural qualities as it is the perception of our own qualities in a wine. It is our consciousness that allows us to perceive wine as complex; and while certain desirable mutations may have been selected over centuries of grape growing, those qualities were produced for us by the grapes. Each mutation in a grapevine has been an appeal to our desires to ensure we continue its propagation.

At the beginning of the summer, I opened a 1998 magnum bottle of Zinfandel to celebrate the new condo my family friends Brad and Deb had bought in Santa Cruz (it seemed fitting to welcome these East-coasters with a wine made from a grape that is decidedly Californian). I told Brad, a neuropsychologist, that the grapes were grown in volcanic soil near Clear Lake. We entered into a discussion about differences in cultivars, how the soil and climate preference of grapes mimics our own preference for certain flavors and aromas, and as the conversation meandered from varietal to varietal, I sensed that our own evolution is not unlike that of the grapevine. Brad explained the neural dynamic of vines, the genetic crossbreeding and cloning that occurred long before any varietal names were prescribed. Mastery of the inner workings of wine is a prodigious feat, and when we drink, we sense its complexity. 

The Evolution of Terroir

Taste is a learned response. It is a product of society, and changes according to time, place and cultural traditions. Thus our perception of terroir when we drink wine is also tied to traditions that continue to evolve. There is a culture behind terroir that follows the winemaker into the field when he ties his vines to staves; it is there when he decides his fruit is ready for harvest; and most pronounced when he enters the winery—his studio, his church, his laboratory, his home. Perhaps the most direct role the vintner plays in making wine is deciding how to store it and for how long. Oak barrels came into prominence during the Roman Empire, and today they are the most common vessels in which wine is aged.

Before the use of oak casks, wine was typically stored in clay amphorae sealed with pine resin. In his book Uncorking the Past: The Quest for Wine, Beer, and Other Alcoholic Beverages, Patrick McGovern writes, “Tree resins have a long and noble history of use by humans, extending back into Paleolithic times. […] Early humans appear to have recognized that a tree helps to heal itself by oozing resin after its bark has been cut, thus preventing infection. They made the mental leap to apply resins to human wounds. By the same reasoning, drinking a wine laced with a tree resin should help to treat internal maladies.” For Paleolithic winemakers, adding tree resin to wine was a way to absorb the power of the trees, and, as it happened, helped to preserve the wine. The technique of adding resin to wine is analogous to ageing wine in oak barrels. The porous nature of the wood allows the wine to oxidize, smoothing tannins and concentrating the wine’s flavor and aroma. The resin in the wood also imparts its own flavors onto the wine.

At the 2012 Cabrillo Music Festival event Music in the Mountains, I was fortunate enough to speak with Randall Grahm, the winemaker for Bonny Doon Vineyards. I asked him about the effects of barrels on wine, and in particular that I was interested in gaining a better understanding of the difference between French and American oak. Randall explained that there are several hundred phenolic compounds in wine, and that some, such as tannins and vanillin, are also found in oak barrels. Newer oak barrels impart a stronger imprint on the wine, with American oak tending to lend stronger sweet and vanilla overtones than French barrels, which tend to oxidize slower, and that supply notes of spice and toasted almonds to the wine.

The choice between French or American oak barrels raises a philosophical question about the nature of terroir. The milder French casks are said to promote the characteristics the soil imparts to the grapes, though the flavors of American oak can become nuanced after barrels are used for a few years. French oak is traditionally used for wine making, but there are no French oaks trees in America, and terroir is supposed to express a specific place. For American vintners, the decision whether or not to use native wood is as perplexing as deciding how much of terroir is geological and how much is cultural. Some critics have claimed that the New World has no terroir, but this view overlooks the many American winemakers who are inspired by the traditions of the Old World. The concept of terroir, like that of taste, has evolved, and will continue to change.

Any writer will tell you there is always something lost when a work is translated, but there is also the potential for something to be gained, for a sentiment or belief or tradition to be revived or reinvented in a new fashion. Culture changes as we construct new traditions. Inspired by a novel understanding of vini/viticulture, geology and soil sience, winemakers all over the world have the opportunity to express their own terroir, to bring out in their wines the flavor of the land and the traditions that govern it. Of all the wines I tasted at the Music in the Mountains event, my favorite was a Pinot Noir from Windy Oaks, which offered up strong notes of strawberry, the wonderful Pinot-funk characteristic of barnyard and damp earth, which I find is a strong expression of the terroir of the Santa Cruz Mountains.

This was not the first time I had tried that Pinot. A month earlier at a wine tasting event sponsored by the Monterey Bay Wine Co, I was able to taste the wine and talk with Jim Shultze, the winemaker for Windy Oaks. When I asked him what he thought about terroir he told me he felt it was “an expression of extreme mineral intervention”—found in wine that has has high malolactic acid levels for a wonderfully textured, round mouth feel. Jim told me he might have the longest growing season in California; his harvest ends as late as November 1. He uses all neutral French oak, but added that he’s experimenting with barrel stave thickness, grain tightness, and large volume neutral cement barrels.

From the clay amaphorae of Egypt and Greece to modern stainless steel and cement tanks, the traditions of winemaking continue to change, and so too does the wine. But while the winemaker imparts his cultural prejudices on the wine through his choice of container, Jim reminded me that the grape belongs to a longer tradition. The grape vine, vitis vinifera, was domesticated around 6,000 years ago, and we can trace its ancestry back to ampelopsis, a climbing vine of the vitaceae family, which originated 500 thousand years ago. Nature has its own customs. Jim told me that last year he picked his fruit at 22.5-23 brix, a measurement of the sugar levels in the grapes, but that he picks his fruit based on flavors, not brix. He wants to harvest flavors, not alcohol, he explained. “Let the wine decide when it should be pressed.” The grapes know when they are ready to ferment. Their tradition is to ripen on the vine and lead us, eagerly, into the fields for harvest.