Natural Wine

Remy Charest has a wonderful piece on Natural Wine over at Palate Press. A must read for some much needed balance on the issue of what is and is not “natural”.

My take: Making a wine without sulfur is crazy if you want consistency in your product. I’m not speaking of vintage to vintage consistency, I’m talking about bottle to bottle consistency from the same vintage. For those who make wine without sulfur and do it well, more power to them.

Where I have a problem is when reviewers and importers deign to instruct producers on how wine should be made. Just as there are no atheists in the foxhole, there are no real non-interventionest winemakers when you are staring down the barrel of a lost vintage. Happily this is a fact that Remy’s article makes perfectly clear.

My suggestion to those writers who feel that any wine not produced in a “natural” way is worthy only of a flush down the nearest latrine, is to take the time to verify that the wines you enjoy are actually as natural as the producers claim. That means testing them at a lab for, at the very least, free SO2. If you were a curious writer you could do more. It would be incredibly useful if natural wine advocates were able to properly ascertain where the nuances they enjoy emanate from.

Perhaps elevated amounts of volitile acidity are what you find enjoyable. Or, maybe, it’s the sometimes sweet and fruity aroma of ethyl acetate. Some folks might like a little red apple and sherry mixed in with their juice in the form of acetaldehyde. Perhaps it’s a mixture of all of the above and more; a wild cocktail of wine bug aromas.

A little independent testing would reveal what it is specifically about the natural wines they drink and recommend that they find so appealing. Because, and this is my real point, the only difference between a wine made with the addition of SO2 and one without is the elevated presence of various compounds that, in high enough concentrations, are considered wine faults.

Cowardly Wineries

Chateau Ste. Michelle in Washington has decided to “stay neutral” on the controversial free market wine proposition I-1100 up for a vote in 2 weeks in Oregon. They happen to be the largest member of the Washington Wine Insititue, which is against the initiative for incomprehensible reasons. Incomprehensible, that is, based on their statements. Here’s their basic position:

If all the laws are crossed out,” Leonard said, “that would allow retailers to force wineries to pay for the best shelf space and for advertising and promotional materials. That will tip the scales against small wineries.”

Wineries currently face these same pressures via proxy from wholesalers. Producers are simply one relationship removed from doing anything about it. And that’s if they can even land a spot in a wholesaler’s catalogue. And that’s assuming that the wholesaler does anything at all to try and sell their wine.

My take: The only reason a winery would come out against a free and open market for wine is if they are cowards afraid to compete based on the talent of their people or the strength of their brand. If you are large, your relative strengths are going no where. Conversely, if you are a small producer in WA and I-1100 passed, your ability to make a dent in the market through your own efforts is limited only by your marketing ingenuity and brand equity.

The folks afraid to play the incentive game with all the cards on the table are dross that should be swept aside so that room for real entrepreneurs will emerge. Protectionism breeds incompetence, laziness, and cowardice. Harsh, but true.

Sadly I-1100 is polling at less than 50%, so it appears the meek will live to cower another day.

Are wineries that sell direct ruthlessly competing with the clicks and mortar crowd?

That’s one of the questions David Williams poses in the latest issue of Wine and Spirit (UK). After taking the reader on an extensive survey of the past and present of online wine retailing, David asks whether the current buzz about wine/web 2.0 is fundamentally different from previous wine e-tailer failures.

Looking forward, David identifies direct-to-consumer as the third revolution in online wine sales. I think he’s absolutely right (I’d better, I’m betting our winery on it!). But he also thinks that direct-to-consumer sales will come at the expense of wine retailers and merchants, and Capozzi (that’s me) is held up as an example of a producer embracing the model and looking to cannibalize sales from clicks and mortar wine retailers.

Here’re some quotes for context:

…[A]ccording to Gormley, there is much more to come from the web.

“I think we’ve got an awfully long way to go,” he says. “What’s happened online so far has basically been improvements on the existing models of direct selling. But the real step change is still to come.”

Gormley reckons the seeds of revolution lie in the ability of consumers to make direct contact with their favoured producers, and to buy their wines directly from them – a kind of virtual farm gate, leaving retailers to act as “sourcing partners who basically just do the logistics”.

A virtual farm gate. I love that image. Rusty, creaky gate hinges and all. It conjures up the kind of one-to-one opportunities that direct interaction with wine lovers provides. Drop on by, have a chat. Maybe buy some wine. Lovely. Serene. Downright agrarian. Which is why the following juxtaposition is a bit jarring:

It’s a model that appeals to forward-looking producers such as Josh Hermsmeyer in California’s Russian River Valley. Hermsmeyer is well-known in cyberspace as the man behind the thoughtful pinotblogger site, which tells the story of his attempts to build his Capozzi family winery from scratch. And he is convinced that, for boutique fine wine producers if not bigger brands, the possibilities afforded by the internet could make fine wine retailers a thing of the past.

So, just for the record, I never said that I think fine wine retailers would be a thing of the past. It’s an interesting idea, but one that I completely disagree with, as you’ll see below.

I simply think that distributors and unnecessary middlemen that add no value will become a thing of the past. And even then, as David notes, I was only talking about small wineries. Big producers will always need distributors to move the volume of wine that they produce. For them, the distributors add value.

So Jill and all the rest of the awesome fine wine retailers out there, you can put down your knives.

More quotes:

“It seems to me that the change really will be at the high-end,” Hermsmeyer says. “Using social media, wine lovers who want low volume, artisanal wines will be able to go straight to the source and easily interact with the principals behind their favourite winery.

“Since the time and effort it takes to cultivate real, meaningful relationships with people doesn’t scale, I think this is where the small guys have a pretty sizable advantage over the big ones. Our customer bases are much smaller, so more personal attention can be paid to the folks who are truly passionate about our brands.”

Not everybody believes this is the future of wine retailing. As you might expect, Bennett thinks otherwise, and says: “There will always be a role for people like us who can give their authority on what we consider to be the best wines around. It’s very hard to buy direct in Burgundy, for example, unless you know your stuff.”

Bennett is absolutely correct. There will always be a role for people who have built up authority and trust with consumers to use their influence to recommend good wines. The wine world is way too cluttered and complex to navigate without some guidance. That guidance could come from a friend, a sommelier, a professional reviewer, a wine blogger, or a retailer. All of these folks add tremendous value. So, as long as the wine world stays complex and cluttered, they won’t ever go away.

More than that though wineries that rely on direct to consumer sales to make their business work would be foolish to view fine wine retailers as anything other than partners. Third party recommendations are crucial in the wine industry, and having a brand advocate that also happens to sell your wine is a powerful thing. Their passion and knowledge of wine will attract consumers and will help you grow your brand.

And as far as the internet goes, online tools are making it ever easier to create profitable relationships with such partners.

Retailers and Wine Bloggers as Partners

As just one example, imagine if every wine blogger suddenly became a tiny equity partner in your wine brand. If someone likes your wine enough to write about it, shouldn’t they be able to monetize their influence and get a cut of any sales that resulted from their recommendation? Isn’t this precisely what wine retailers do offline right now?

This isn’t a new idea, and it isn’t hard to implement. In fact I wrote about how to do it almost two years ago. People do it all the time with goods on Amazon. It’s called an affiliate program, and the web makes setting up such a system shockingly easy.

What’s holding back such a system from taking root doesn’t have anything to do with technology or the internet. It has to do with many wine bloggers viewing themselves as independent wine reviewers instead of independent wine retailers. The dominant wine blogging model is to be a small scale Robert Parker instead of becoming a small scale Kermit Lynch.

No Mini Kermit Lynches? Why?

Both Parker and Lynch have an unquestionable passion for fine wine. Both have acknowledged expertise. Both are well respected. So why aren’t there more mini Kermit Lynches out there?

No one who has spent the time to build up credibility with their audience is going to squander it by recommending a crap wine just to make a few short-term bucks. And if they do, they’ll quickly lose their influence and readership anyway. The blogoshpere is self-correcting.

So what gives? It’s a rhetorical question obviously, because I really don’t know the answer.

All I do know is that direct-to-consumer will be much more profitable for wineries if they can build their own Long Tail network of micro-retailers and blog partners.

And that means partnering with wine retailers of all shapes and sizes, both online and off, not trying to kill them.

That’s my take at least. What do you all think? All comments welcome.

This past Thursday I headed up I-80 to Davis to attend RAVE 2008. There were a number of cool presentations, but the final talk of the day by Dr. Mark Matthews was by far the most provocative.

Matthews covered a lot of ground in his talk, which was an overview of the research he had conducted on the factors relating to wine quality over the past 25 or so years.

The main theme was that a lot of the dogmas long held by researchers, enologists and viticulturists in the wine industry might be based on a poor analysis of the data.

Dogma #1: Vine Balance

For instance, winegrowers talk a lot about vine balance. Part of Matthews’ talk was designed to show that vine balance appears to be a nebulous concept of little real value since the way we measure it (comparing grape yield to the amount of dead plant matter trimmed off each vine at the end of the year) is flawed.

The acknowledged range for the ratio for crop weight to pruning weights is between 5 and 10. There have been many studies that back this up and wine literature is rife with nods toward the idea.

The problem is that when you graph pruning weight ratios along with wine sensory evaluation data, you don’t find a correlation. Instead what you find is that nearly all wine, both good and not so good, falls within the 5-10 ratio.

In other words, if as a grower you were hoping that by keeping your vine in balance you would give yourself a better chance to make good wine, you’d be wrong. Bad wine is as likely to be made as good wine.

So obviously there are other, more important factors in play. The most we could say is that a 5-10 ratio might be necessary, but not sufficient for high quality wine. There’s more to the story than just vine balance.

Dogmas #2 and #3: Berry size and Low yield

What else is thought to contribute to wine quality besides vine balance?

Lots of folks (myself included) feel berry size is another key indicator. The smaller the berry, the better.

Low yield (sometimes a byproduct of vine balance, sometimes not) is also accepted to be a driver of quality. I’m a big believer in low yields as well.

But here again it seems that the whole process is much more complicated than simply “grow small berries and limit your crop.” Here’s a cut and paste from Matthew’s lab website:

That small berries are superior to big berries, and that high yield translates into low quality, are two prevalently held dogmas within the wine industry. Data suggest that it is the journey rather than the destination that determines wine grape composition and wine sensory attributes.

We have found that the composition of the berry is more dependent on how it got to a size than on the size itself, and that what may matter more to fruit composition and wine sensory attributes than just yield per se, within a wide range of yields, are the conditions under which the fruit arrived at said yield. See the research summary figure below:

Click to enlarge

“It’s not the destination, but the journey that matters.” Interesting stuff.

Could Global Warming Be Dogma #4?

And then today I stumbled across this, from an ABC Radio interview with an Australian biologist named Jennifer Marohasy:

Duffy (the interviewer): “Is the Earth still warming?”

Marohasy (the biologist): “No, actually, there has been cooling, if you take 1998 as your point of reference. If you take 2002 as your point of reference, then temperatures have plateaued. This is certainly not what you’d expect if carbon dioxide is driving temperature because carbon dioxide levels have been increasing but temperatures have actually been coming down over the last 10 years.”

Duffy: “Is this a matter of any controversy?”

Marohasy: “Actually, no. The head of the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) has actually acknowledged it. He talks about the apparent plateau in temperatures so far this century. So he recognises that in this century, over the past eight years, temperatures have plateaued … This is not what you’d expect, as I said, because if carbon dioxide is driving temperature then you’d expect that, given carbon dioxide levels have been continuing to increase, temperatures should be going up … So (it’s) very unexpected, not something that’s being discussed. It should be being discussed, though, because it’s very significant.”

Last March I wrote about a presentation to the Napa Valley Winegrowers I attended that suggested that global warming might actually be good for Napa winegrowers. I was very surprised at the time, and I still am.

Now I hear that temps have leveled off globally or even dropped? The mind reels.

But there’s even more. From the interview:

Duffy: “Can you tell us about NASA’s Aqua satellite, because I understand some of the data we’re now getting is quite important in our understanding of how climate works?”

Marohasy: “That’s right. The satellite was only launched in 2002 and it enabled the collection of data, not just on temperature but also on cloud formation and water vapour. What all the climate models suggest is that, when you’ve got warming from additional carbon dioxide, this will result in increased water vapour, so you’re going to get a positive feedback. That’s what the models have been indicating. What this great data from the NASA Aqua satellite … (is) actually showing is just the opposite, that with a little bit of warming, weather processes are compensating, so they’re actually limiting the greenhouse effect and you’re getting a negative rather than a positive feedback.”

Duffy: “The climate is actually, in one way anyway, more robust than was assumed in the climate models?”

Marohasy: “That’s right … These findings actually aren’t being disputed by the meteorological community. They’re having trouble digesting the findings, they’re acknowledging the findings, they’re acknowledging that the data from NASA’s Aqua satellite is not how the models predict, and I think they’re about to recognise that the models really do need to be overhauled and that when they are overhauled they will probably show greatly reduced future warming projected as a consequence of carbon dioxide.”

The point of this huge spew is, I suppose, that there are huge gaps in our knowledge.

When we taste grapes in the vineyard and decide to pick, do we really know how the flavors we taste then will translate to finished wine? Or are we just guessing? Do we really know which of our vineyard practices are actually contributing to higher wine quality? Or are we just following tradition and accepted wisdom? Is the earth really on fire? Or, in our human hubris, are we underestimating the planet’s ability to adapt and survive?

On this most holy of weekends, these are some of the questions that keep me up at night.

Last Friday the American Society of Enology and Viticulture published an article by Science Editor (and my former Prof.) Linda Bisson and Managing Editor Judith McKibben that tackles the issue of Open Access to publicly funded research. You can read the article here. If you have any interest in free access to public research, be sure to give it a read.

The following is the letter I sent in response.

Dear ASEV,

Regarding the debate over open access, which I believe to be an extremely important one, my advice for the ASEV is to focus on adding value to the research you publish.

Currently the ASEV’s value proposition is to “provide services that include an impartial, rigorous review process; manuscript editing of text, tables, and figures; design and layout; and both print and online distribution.”

I would argue that the single most valuable function that the ASEV currently serves is as an aggregator and a distributor. Folks looking for the latest research don’t have to cast about, they simply turn to the AJEV. It’s probably true that if you continue to be mainly an aggregator and distributor of research, that free access would make people less likely to pay for your service.

But you can do so much more.

Look at the typical “workflow” of one of the journal’s readers. In my experience, most people who value their time adhere to a system pretty similar to the following: They open up the journal, scan the Table of Contents, turn to an article that piques their interest, scan the abstract, turn to and read the conclusion, and only then, if they feel they need more detail or the research has a particular applicability to their field or work, do they read the entire article.

Why not add value and save your readers some time by writing Research Summaries that synthesize and give context to the research? Bibiana Guerra and Kay Bogart do a stellar job of this over at the Trellis Alliance. Here’s just one excellent example – their latest.

The ASEV has to read and vet the articles anyway, it shouldn’t take too much more effort to condense and contextualize the research findings into a few hundred words. If the workload gets onerous, farm it out to your indentured servants grad students.

I would pay more than what I currently do for such a service. Much more. It would add tremendous value to the journal. Moreover it would delight your members.

The alternative is bleak unfortunately. Like it or not, the AJEV is a middle man for information that wants (and in many cases deserves) to be free. By adding value through your expertise and proven communication skills, you can do more than keep the ASEV solvent. You’ll preserve its heritage as an invaluable resource worthy of our dollars, while at the same time allowing public research to be viewed freely by the taxpayers who ultimately paid for it.

Warm regards,

Josh Hermsmeyer

Viva Open Access!