More from Morgan Twain-Peterson in Bordeaux. Only from Morgan will you find lines like “Trickery, the blind virgin and the goatskin bag has been part of winemaking as long as rules were around for it.” Enjoy.

Bordeaux has not had a truly bad vintage since 1992. And I am having a very difficult time tasting for vintage, particularly for those vintages since 1995—like things are all jumbled up. Some wines taste concentrated and show no browning to coordinate with their labels stated age, and once I consign myself to the fact that Bordeaux is making claret in a stronger style than I previously remembered, I taste a thin little Haut-Medoc wine from a great year that is already keeling over on itself like a dried-out tomato vine. I am actually feeling quite confounded, guessing 1998 as a 1995 at Beychevelle the other day and a 2001 as a mighty 2000. Though there clearly exists the possibility that my taste-memory has been Trojan-horsed, I am confidant that other forces are at work as well. Unlike my grandmother and grandfather, who both had superb palates for claret, I can not quite identify wines so well–there is another variable being thrown into the mix these days—technology.

Bordeaux is big business. The amount of money that can be made by selling en primeur based on early ratings of a wine is stupendously high. It is in any chateau’s best interest to make wines that are rich and earlier satisfying than in years past. This lushness and immediate accessibility is achieved through a number of winemaking mechanisms—some traditional and some more modern. Some have potentially great consequences, and some practices account, I believe, for the reason that I am having trouble telling vintage variation while tasting blind.

The first technique for making wines of greater suavity and plushness is a factor of blending. Chateaux are gradually inching up the percentage of Merlot in their wines—Beychevelle and Lagrange are up to 50% in some years. Merlot, in the Medoc, is of redder and slightly less intense color than Cabernet, but it has immediately forward fruit and much plusher, lighter tannin. The color, in this year of much rain, and even in better years, and tannin percentages can be amped up by a number of techniques that I will discuss next. Obviously, the transition of using more Merlot is a gradual phase, since vines typically 25 years or older make it into a chateau’s first wine. This suits many properties just fine however, as the business for second wines, Les Fiefs de Lagrange, Haut-Bages Averous, Les Forts de Latou, Alter-Ego de Palmer, etc. is booming. Merlot, particularly young vine Merlot, provides immediately accessible fruit to these wines, though they may lack in finesse. This though, is not always the case, as at Beychevelle they are declassifying more and more Cabernet into the second wine in order to increase the percentage of Merlot in their first wine. As a result, Beychevelle’s second wine is a bit more rustically tannic than others. This increase in Merlot will certainly have some effects on the ageability of these wines—the monster wines from monster vintages from the big-boys, Latour, Lafite, Cos etc, will continue to age gracefully for decades, but there are a bevy of other wines that may reach their ideal consuming age a little sooner. But only time will tell.

Almost all juice in a year with as much rain as 2006 is seeing some form of concentration—and particularly Merlot, with its slightly larger berries and tendency to be planted in water retaining clay soils. The classic technique for concentration is saignee. A few days after fermentation is started, when a pretty even blend of aqueous and alcoholic extraction is taking place and the juice is pretty well-colored up, a percentage, usually up to 15%, of the must is run off into a separate tank and allowed to finish fermentation separately. This concentrates the remaining juice by increasing the overall percentage of skins and seeds (where color, flavor, and tannin come from) in the remaining wine. This method has been used for generations—rose was originally derived from this practice, albeit, when undertaken after a wine had seen much more limited time on the skins. In Bordeaux, the dark but not highly extracted juice is typically blended into a chateau’s second wine—again, more fruit forward and less tannic.

The other method of concentration is understandably a bit more controversial. In Bordeaux, in virtually every major chateau I have visited, resides, in a little unassuming room, a concentrator and a reverse osmosis machine. For juices, for concentration takes place just prior to alcoholic fermentation (the mess of CO2 and inability to properly read sugar levels while fermentation is going on would make the process difficult), the machine essentially boils off a percentage of condensate (it is clear, smells like kirsh and tastes like slightly sulfured water). The boiling of water is undertaken in a vacuum, so the water will boil off at around 24 degree centigrade, a temperature that is not dangerous for the must (most ferments here are actually kept around 29 degrees centigrade). Philosophies vary regarding both its actual functioning and its proper place in the winemaking process.

Mechanically, most chateaux saignee off a percentage of a tank—between 10 and 50% percent and place it in a separate smaller tank. That wine is then put through the concentrator and concentrated up to a high level and then the concentrated juice is added back to the original tank. Thus, if one wanted a total of 10% concentration, one would run off half the juice in a tank, concentrate it by 20%, and then add it back to the original tank to make a 10% total concentration. The process is not the most gentle one (a machine that makes as much noise as it does cannot be that gentle!), so some winemakers find it ideal to concentrate a small amount of wine highly—a process that takes time because it becomes more difficult to concentrate as the juice becomes denser, while others use the more time efficient method of concentrating a higher percentage of juice for a shorter period of time. I find it ridiculous that chateaux still feel that they will be punished for this practice, and are afraid of openly talking about it, for fear of retribution from critics (I have had a couple of winemakers say to me that they would expect a 3-5 point hit if Parker found out they were using a concentrator, an irony if I have ever seen it). Nonetheless, I will not use the names of chateaux or their winemakers who have been kind enough to give me access to this information.

As to when the concentrators are used, that is a most difficult question to answer, because I am here in a rainy year that is making for low must weights and high water content. Right now, everyone I know is concentrating, typically about 5-15% based on the parcel and tank. French law, passed last year, stipulates that concentration can only increase the potential alcohol by 1 degree (according to one chateau director). Most wineries are doing this, if not a bit more (there is always a way of fudging the paper-work I suppose). Several directors have told me that in a perfect year they would never have to concentrate—2005 for instance saw no concentration at many of the chateaux. That said, it is a potent tool, and I am sure that some chateau are using it even in good years. I do not feel bad about saying that it is used at Pichon-Baron and Lynch-Bages because Jean-Michel Cazes himself has openly stated that he bought the machines in 1991. I have a feeling that this might be a reason for the serious difference in concentration between Pichon-Lalande (where a more delicate style is strived for anyways) and Pichon-Baron, even in the best of years.

It is important to remember that concentrators are only effective as long as the juice is good, for it concentrates everything. If a wine is green, or the tannins are quite course, those elements will be concentrated along with the sugar density. Terroir is still the most important element even when concentration is used—in fact, it is perhaps even more important. This is, of course, the argument of chateaux directors. For instance, many who do not use micro-ox argue that concentration is not nearly an envasive process as bubbling—since bubbling is something that can fundamentally alter the taste and chemical composition of the wine. Of course, those on the right bank who use micro-ox say the same thing about using concentrators. And I think they are both right and wrong, but that they are both wrong about framing the argument in such a manner. Being dogmatically against one technology while using a similarly invasive one reeks more of hypocrisy than anything else. I am sorry that director of chateaux and oenologists feel that they have to split hairs in such a manner, rather than acknowledge that either technologies use is not going away until people demand that they do. And as long as people pay over $300 a bottle for Latour or Valandraud, they will not go away.

And then there is reverse osmosis. I have not seen it in use yet, for it is not that time of year, but I know that most chateaux also have an RO machine, and I am sure that all of its uses are utilized from time to time— to rid a wine of VA, to de-alc a wine, or to concentrate it (the membranes of the RO machine are so fine, and expensive, that running juice through the machine would be a impossible and expensive proposal).
This technology is making it so that a more normalized wine can be produced year over year. No longer can one say, “this is clearly the 1998 because all those rains didn’Â’t get the Merlot sweet enough and there is a corresponding lack of glycerin, concentration, and alcohol here”. As a MW candidate, this bothers me because it makes my life much more difficult. As a wine drinker though, this means that the amount of quality wine available from more marginal years is higher— which is better for the consumer, in some ways.
I think what jibes me in a wrong way most about the technology though is that it is being used in the wrong place. It is the rich chateaux with the most privileged terroirs that can afford this technology. A concentrator and RO machine will each cost somewhere between 50,000 and 150,000 dollars. These are the playthings of the super-wealthy. A bit unjustly, those chateaux who perhaps need the technology the most are —those who are losing the battles of sales and taste for the under 15 dollar wine to the warmer, fruit rich wines of Australia, California, Chile, Argentina, and Spain. Though the recent agreement allowing the use of cost-effective oak-chips will help some of the smaller wines compete a bit more effectively in the current arena of global wine taste, it still may not be enough.

The Aquitaine region, like the remainder of the south of France, is drowning in a sea of unsellable wine. Pictures adorn newspapers and magazines of angry cooperative farmers taking pick-axes to tanks filled with New World wine. Wine is being shipped to distilleries and made into industrial grade alcohol. New World wines not only get the benefit of greater warmth and more sun, but also greater acceptance of the technology used to produce it. If one ever wonders why Yellowtail always seems to taste the same despite vintage change it is because it is essentially a wine made exclusively via the function of chips, concentrators, reverse osmosis, and spinning cone—there are probably even certain flavor elements added. It is formulaic. And though I personally find Yellowtail rather awful, it is a winner in the marketplace. Personally, I would like to see a bit of this technology made more readily available to those farmers who are currently being paid by the EU to rip out their vines ad grow different crops—to allow them to make wines that might compete a bit more with Australia. Though a bad grape is a bad grape, and whether it is concentrated or not will taste bad, there are always ways of improving a more marginal grape, and resulting wine’s, flavor using technology. Remember that the big chateaux that I visit make up only 7% of all the wine produced in Bordeaux, and remember that Bordeaux is one of the largest continuous growing regions in the world. Technology may be the best way to preserve Bordeaux, to keep it an economically viable region in the world of wine, but right now it seems that the rich chateaux are the only ones who use and can afford to use it effectively.

Technology is understandably something people view apprehensively. Wine, for many, represents nourishment, represents vines and little piece of earth someplace, it represent a magical process by which grape-juice is transformed into something wondrous before it volatilizes and becomes vinegar. I was thinking about this magic because I have been re-reading my favorite book, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, and a paragraph struck me as particularly apt for what is going on in the wine industry.

“A surprising fact about the magician Bernard Kornblum, Joe remembered, was that he believed in magic. Not in the so-called magic of candles, pentagrams, and bat wings. Not in the kitchen enchantments of Slavic grandmothers with their herbiaries and parings from the little toe of a blind virgin tied up in a goatskin bag. Not in astrology, theosophy, chiromancy, dowsing rods, séances, weeping statues, werewolves, wonders, or miracles. All these Kornblum had regarded as fakery far different—far more destructive—than the brand of illusion he practiced, whose success, after all, increased in direct proportion to his audiences’ constant, keen awareness that, in spite of all the vigilance they could bring to bear, they were being deceived. What bewitched Bernard Kornblum, on the contrary, was the impersonal magic of life, when he read in a magazine about a fish that could disguise itself as any one of seven different varieties of sea bottom, or when he learned from a newsreel that scientists had discovered a dying star that emitted radiation on a wavelength whose value in megacycles approximated pie. In the realm of human affairs, this type of enchantment was often, though not always, a sadder business—sometimes beautiful, sometimes cruel. Here its stock-in-trade was ironies, coincidences, and the only true portents: those that revealed themselves unmistakeable and impossible to ignore, in retrospect.”

Trickery, the blind virgin and the goatskin bag, has been part of winemaking as long as rules were around for it. The Burgundians are famous for it, we almost expect it from them. It is the illusion of technology not being used that provides the reason why winemakers hide the equipment and speak of traditional winemaking out of one corner of their mouth while the other side is saying “alright, 10% here.” The handwaving and speech of traditionalism is there to take the consumers eye away from what is going on. But I wonder if this trickery is not, perhaps, a little bit, for the consumers benefit. For some, the magic of wine is ruined when they start to hear about barrels used, long-chained phenolic compounds, and things that sounds like fraternity-hazing rituals such as pigeage and remontage– all of it is a reminder that wine is just a product of evolving science, just like many other things we consume from day to day. But, I am one who still longs to be deceived, to believe in the magic, yet be a magician myself. So for now, I will shut up and remind myself that wine is part magic—that something miraculous and complex turns simple grape juice into a product than can evoke powerful memories of love, loss, vistas painted in blue and red, and even the ground beneath ones feet. But I will also sagely attempt to remember that the magic of nature must be combined with the magicianÂ’s of human-kind, who silently turn the tricks so silently demanded by the audience.