How About a Delicious Manufactured Wine Today? Or Not. (24 March 2017)

How About a Delicious Manufactured Wine Today? Or Not.

March 24, 2017

Last Sunday I read a piece in the New York Times Sunday Review written by Bianca Bosker ("Ignore the Snobs, Drink the Cheap, Delicious Wine"). Ms. Bosker claims she is a "trained sommelier" as a result of 18 months of preparation for her latest book, Cork Dork: : A Wine-Fueled Adventure Among the Obsessive Sommeliers, Big Bottle Hunters, and Rogue Scientists Who Taught Me to Live for Taste, from which her NY Times essay was excerpted.

Bosker describes her visit to the "sensory insights" lab of Treasury Wine Estates in California, where she learned about how Treasury, one of the world's biggest wine companies, uses modern technology, and chemistry, to manufacture wine to suit any taste. She points out that mass-market wineries may use as many as 60 different additives to shape flavor, without having to report or list any of those ingredients (except for sulfites). Sensory Insights Lab staff regularly blind taste samples to shape their various wines. Of course, the "taste" that is most important is the one shared by the largest percentage of amateur participants in Treasury's blind tasting panels. The final product on the day Boskar visited - the favorite of the 100 amateur tasters present for that session, she described as such: "I was reminded of root beer with a splash of Hershey's syrup and vodka. The wines were rich, syrupy and heavy." This is a fine description of soda pop, by far the most popular beverage in the United States. As a wine description, however, not for any wine I'm going to drink. 

Lei Mikawa, head of the lab, seems to have convinced Ms. Boskar that tailoring wine to the taste of folks who might prefer Coca Cola will help to create "future oenophiles." I think not. I do agree with Boskar, who writes: "Parallel trends exist in music, fashion, movies and art, where the lowbrow and highbrow coexist." In fact, such a parallel trend in wine is well established. Ms. Boskar's "newbie" wine drinkers do not routinely drink wine with food, while many older, more experienced wine drinkers couldn't imagine drinking wine without eating something at the same time. Most liquor stores carry loads of the latest laboratory-produced wines, hence billion dollar wine conglomerates such as Treasury Wine Estates. For more traditional, "highbrow" wine drinkers, a few wine merchants are committed to selling products that would probably flunk Treasury's amateur tasters panels. 

"Ignore the snobs," - good advice. Boskar is right to question the authority of so-called wine experts whose descriptions are so often way more complicated than the wines they are tasting. Trained sommeliers must study and taste critically to attain certification from the Court of Master Sommeliers, but the best of them also understand that their expertise is part of creating a special dining experience - they are part of a team, which also includes the chef and kitchen staff as well as the rest of the service staff. None of this means anything in the world of mass-market wine manufacturing, whose products are designed for folks who mostly want a stand-alone alcoholic beverage option for their daily beverage of choice: soda. Of course, wine and spirits retailers could offer other wine options, but that would mean having knowledge of what they're selling, which requires much more effort than buying the product made by conglomerates like Treasury Wine Estates. So, according to Boskar, "drink the cheap, delicious wine." Agreed, why not drink cheap, delicious wine? Real wine merchants have loads of cheap, delicious wine - none of it made by mass-market wine conglomerates.

When Boskar quotes Jancis Robinson - “It is one of the ironies of the wine market today,” the wine critic Jancis Robinson writes, “that just as the price differential between cheapest and most expensive bottles is greater than ever before, the difference in quality between these two extremes is probably narrower than it has ever been.” - she is taking Robinson's statement out of context. Jancis Robinson, truly a trained expert with decades of experience, is referring to the fact that technology such as temperature-controlled fermentation, more gentle grape destemmers and presses; as well as climate change, have resulted in a vast improvement in quality of cheap wine - without the need for up to 60 different additives.

I agree that there is more delicious and cheap wine than ever before - a lot of it made by farmers who grown their own grapes in vineyards farmed by their predecessors and handed down over generations. Many of these vineyards are cultivated alongside other crops, and in some cases alongside cows and goats whose milk is made into cheese in the same village. Sound romantic? Perhaps. Sound like a lot of work? Absolutely. In most places where wine has been made for millennia, it has been made side by side with the food with which it was consumed. Most of our ancestors, if they came from Europe and Central Asia, grew up not knowing a distinction between wine and food - they were cultivated together and consumed together.

Real wine merchants know where to get delicious cheap wines made by farmers whose products are delicious without the need for up to 60 different additives. They don't need wine writers and critics to point them in the direction of what to buy - the best wine merchants are the ones leading the way. Real wine merchants aren't led by focus groups - they listen to each customer, and try to find them a wine they might never have heard of before, which will not only satisfy them, but might even stretch their vision to include options they hadn't considered before. So, by all means, drink the delicious cheap wines - your local wine merchant is ready to help you find them.