If you are a wine drinker, you need to be concerned about global warming and its effect on wine growing regions around the world. Whether you are ignoring the facts of man's impact on global warming or you understand the fact that we are contributing signficantly to the natural warming factors already at work in our environment, as a wine lover, you need to be fearful of the future and what it means to your beloved beverage.
You have already seen some of the impact of the warming environment in areas like Germany, which has seen average temperatures jump to the point that they are having a hard time making the fresh, high acid, zippy kabinett rieslings we have all come to enjoy (at fair prices too). The grapes have been getting too ripe, above the kabinett level, and there is no way to make this type of wine with these riper grapes.
I have read projections that within 100 years, wine growing regions south of the latitude of Washington State will be too hot to grow quality wine. Areas like Washington will have riper conditions and will need to switch the type of grapes that they grow. Now you might think "no big deal, just move wine production to Canada and Greenland and Norway". The problem is these areas do not receive the correct amount nor the proper light exposure to produce quality wine. Further, finding the proper soil types and other climate factors (rain levels, timing of rain, etc.) is likely to be difficult if not impossible.
The prediction is that within 100 years it will be nearly impossible to grow high quality vinifera grapes in the US and maybe anywhere.
If that doesn's scare the stuffings out of you, you are just being ignorant. Maybe you won't live to see this but your children and/or grandchildren will. Don't you want them to have the opportunity to enjoy wine as you have.
So do your part, fight global warming, drive a Prius, recycle, support projects to reduce our impact on our environment and push the government to get in the game. Barack Obama has one of the most cogent plans for fighting Global Warming. There is no doubt that the earth will try to heal itself but we must do our part for our children, our grandchildren and to save the vines.
Tuesday, March 20, 2007
Wednesday, March 14, 2007
Why wine ratings are a joke (or...the joke is on us)
I admit it, I am a ratings whore. It seems like I am continually searching out the 94 rated Robert Parker Wine Advocate or the 96 Wine Spectator rated wine that "only" cost $95. Sometimes I get so mad at myself for chasing those whore wines with the knowledge that the three tier distribution system doubled the price of the wine the week before I bought it because they got an advance copy of the magazine with the "high" rating and knew they could get away with taking an obscene price increase because idiots like me will pay for the rating.
Intrinsically I knew there was something wrong with this but I could not put my finger on why. I knew it was not just that I was trusting another person's palate to determine what I thought was "good". It was deeper than that, soul deep. It finally hit me today and it all has to do with the science of the ratings. Screw the fact that people taste differently. The science of rating wines is no science at all.
As a researcher working in the food science area, I utilized statistical experimental design, demanding testing protocol that would yield statistically significant results. Without the proper test design, no statistically valid conclusions can be drawn about your test product. I knew that in developing a new product, I had to be sure to the 95% confidence level that the conclusions I was drawing were right. If I was trying to show that one product was better than the other or if I was trying to draw conclusions regarding the characteristics of my product (subjective (taste) or objective (pH)), I needed to have a statistically valid sampling program so that I tested enough samples to be truly confident of my conclusions.
Now back to wine ratings. There are absolutely NO STATISTICALLY VALID CONCLUSIONS that can be drawn from wine ratings. Parker, Wine Spectator, Tanzer, whomever, they all work off of one bottle, maybe two, provide from thousands, maybe tens of thousands, maybe even millions of bottles of the "same" wine available to us ratings whores. It is pure folly to believe that that one bottle in any way, shape or form represents the batch average of that wine. The chances of it representing the average are about the same as you hitting the PowerBall when the jackpot hits $300 million. Not very good odds, indeed.
What is the cause of the variation and why do you need more than one bottle to draw conclusions. First, the biggest tank you are likely to see in most wine production facilities is maybe a few thousand gallons. Most blending tanks are considerably smaller than this. Even a wine with as few as 100 cases (250 gallons) would like be blended in more than one batch since it was probably stored in 4 or 5 50-gallon oak barrels for aging. This means that most wines are blended in batches, tanks being refilled due to size limitations. At a minimum, to truly have a statistically significant sampling program, you would need to have multiple bottles from each of the blendings, certainly sampled throughout the tank. Add small barrel aging, which is inherently variable, and more bottles would need to be sampled to generate statistically valid results.
But it goes deeper than that. Winemakers know that they have variation, bottle to bottle, caused by the vagaries of blending and mechanically filling bottles as well as the closures used. Mechanical movement of the wine, oxygenation during filling, incomplete or inconsistent flow patterns from tanks and in lines are among the filling issues that contribute variation from bottle to bottle or at best, case to case. Add that to the batch issues described above and closure variation (cork problems and variability) and the number of bottles that need to be tested to have a statistically significant sample size increases dramatically, perhaps exponentially.
This does not even begin to address the statistical issues surrounding a human based measurment system. I admit that it is impossible to develop an objective machine-based system to measure human taste. Maybe in 30 or 50 years, but today, no. I am sure nerds somewhere are workingon it, but I have to believe it is years away. Unlike a machine, human tasters are not all the same and the same taster is not the same from tasting to tasting or even bottle to bottle within the same tasting session. Maybe Jim Laube has a cold or had garlic for dinner last night or has an owie on his tongue. His subjective taste would be changed due to these factors. Palate fatigue is also a common problem, even among highly trained tasters who have been in the business for years. I believe this is why big, huge, overoaked, overextracted wines have become the darlings of the tasting world. Sorry Jimmy Laube and Bobby Parker, but when you deign to taste 30, 40, 50 or more wines at a seating, you know that by the time you hit the 10th, your taste buds are more or less shot. The only wines that could possibly get your attention and score well after that are the ones that hit you over the head with fruit or oak. The germination of the "international style", I feel, was the vintners' response to palate fatigue and their commercial and financial need to have a highly scoring wine to get us ratings whores to buy their wine. The tasters (Parker, Tanzer, Wine Speculator, etc.) are at fault for tasting so many wines at once in a situation that is, at best, untenable, at worst, impossible. And for not demanding statistically significant sample sizes they can be wholly blamed. In their defense (slightly) I understand that huge wine corporation and small winemakers rely on those ratings to get us wine whores like me know what to buy. ARRGGGH How do you win as the consumer?
I have a BS in Chemical Engineering from UC Davis, probably the greatest wine training University in the world (sorry Bordeaux). I wonder what Maynard Amerine or the current faculty have said about the science (or lack thereof) surrounding wine ratings. I hope they have written about it. It is one thing to test a bottle and say that bottle is good. Or maybe tasting a few bottles out of a reasonably small sample, the number of bottles determined by the math, and concluding that based on the scores, that subset of the wine is good. But the more I consider what we accept as "proof" that a wine is good, the more my head hurts and I kick myself in the butt for chasing scores.
So what is a wine whore to do? Good question because it is not feasible to test every wine when you want to buy it unless you are independently wealthy (and few of us wine whores are). The independently wealthy among us buy the ratings anyway and could care less if they make any statistical sense. When you have unlimited resources what do you care what the statistics say? If you don't like it, f..k it, pour it down the drain and get another bottle of something else. So us wine whores have to stop buying ratings. Find producers or regions of the world or wine styles or whatever you like and stick with them.
A perfect example for me is Ridge and Turley. It used to be that any wine Ridge or Turley produced got a big score from the Wine Speculator. Recently that has not been the case. In fact, I think Ridge refused to submit their recent zins to the Speculator for rating because they knew they would get hammered by Jimmy Laube. It seemed to me (and famous vintner Randy Lewis even wrote a letter to the Spectator agreeing with my conclusion) that the Speculator, or Jimmy Laube, had decided that any extracted, high alcohol zin is bad and refused to give them decent ratings, even if they were perfectly balanced, zingy and tasty and deserved the ratings. I had been mad that the wines I was paying good money for were being rated for shit. Now I understand that the ratings mean next to nothing. My palate keeps saying that, by and large, these wines are still excellent and deserve a better fate, no matter what the Speculator says. So I keep buying them because I trust the producers and my taste buds say they are good. Now I have been critical of California Zin, even in this blog, in the recent vintages and I do believe it has been off the pace and variable at times in the 2000's. But there are still plenty of good zins that I have purchased and my taste buds are saying that the wines are improving with age in many cases.
We have to quit buying wines solely based on ratings. I cannot begin to count the hundreds of wines that never lived up to the ratings I purchased. In fact, I would say it is the rare wine that I rate as highly as the experts. This is especially important when you realize that often, the greedy distributors automatically raise the price of any wine that scores a 90, completely ripping off us wine buyers. Now I am not against capitalism, but these suckers are doing it based on a subjective score that we all know is flawed and they were happy to sell the wine at the lower price pre-score. Can you say price gouging? Sound like gasoline to you? Me too.
The truth is that wine ratings can give you a general impression of a wine. But they should never be used for any more than that. We have to realize that wine is a highly variable, highly changeable, highly subjective art form and the best you can hope is that when you get around to drinking it, it meets the taste profile you had hope for when you purchased it. Wine whores of the world, wake up and smell the coffee. Quit chasing that high score because it is likely that the score is flawed or that you won't agree with it anyway. Be your own man (or woman). Your enjoyment of the wine will probably go up and no doubt your pocketbook will thank you.
Intrinsically I knew there was something wrong with this but I could not put my finger on why. I knew it was not just that I was trusting another person's palate to determine what I thought was "good". It was deeper than that, soul deep. It finally hit me today and it all has to do with the science of the ratings. Screw the fact that people taste differently. The science of rating wines is no science at all.
As a researcher working in the food science area, I utilized statistical experimental design, demanding testing protocol that would yield statistically significant results. Without the proper test design, no statistically valid conclusions can be drawn about your test product. I knew that in developing a new product, I had to be sure to the 95% confidence level that the conclusions I was drawing were right. If I was trying to show that one product was better than the other or if I was trying to draw conclusions regarding the characteristics of my product (subjective (taste) or objective (pH)), I needed to have a statistically valid sampling program so that I tested enough samples to be truly confident of my conclusions.
Now back to wine ratings. There are absolutely NO STATISTICALLY VALID CONCLUSIONS that can be drawn from wine ratings. Parker, Wine Spectator, Tanzer, whomever, they all work off of one bottle, maybe two, provide from thousands, maybe tens of thousands, maybe even millions of bottles of the "same" wine available to us ratings whores. It is pure folly to believe that that one bottle in any way, shape or form represents the batch average of that wine. The chances of it representing the average are about the same as you hitting the PowerBall when the jackpot hits $300 million. Not very good odds, indeed.
What is the cause of the variation and why do you need more than one bottle to draw conclusions. First, the biggest tank you are likely to see in most wine production facilities is maybe a few thousand gallons. Most blending tanks are considerably smaller than this. Even a wine with as few as 100 cases (250 gallons) would like be blended in more than one batch since it was probably stored in 4 or 5 50-gallon oak barrels for aging. This means that most wines are blended in batches, tanks being refilled due to size limitations. At a minimum, to truly have a statistically significant sampling program, you would need to have multiple bottles from each of the blendings, certainly sampled throughout the tank. Add small barrel aging, which is inherently variable, and more bottles would need to be sampled to generate statistically valid results.
But it goes deeper than that. Winemakers know that they have variation, bottle to bottle, caused by the vagaries of blending and mechanically filling bottles as well as the closures used. Mechanical movement of the wine, oxygenation during filling, incomplete or inconsistent flow patterns from tanks and in lines are among the filling issues that contribute variation from bottle to bottle or at best, case to case. Add that to the batch issues described above and closure variation (cork problems and variability) and the number of bottles that need to be tested to have a statistically significant sample size increases dramatically, perhaps exponentially.
This does not even begin to address the statistical issues surrounding a human based measurment system. I admit that it is impossible to develop an objective machine-based system to measure human taste. Maybe in 30 or 50 years, but today, no. I am sure nerds somewhere are workingon it, but I have to believe it is years away. Unlike a machine, human tasters are not all the same and the same taster is not the same from tasting to tasting or even bottle to bottle within the same tasting session. Maybe Jim Laube has a cold or had garlic for dinner last night or has an owie on his tongue. His subjective taste would be changed due to these factors. Palate fatigue is also a common problem, even among highly trained tasters who have been in the business for years. I believe this is why big, huge, overoaked, overextracted wines have become the darlings of the tasting world. Sorry Jimmy Laube and Bobby Parker, but when you deign to taste 30, 40, 50 or more wines at a seating, you know that by the time you hit the 10th, your taste buds are more or less shot. The only wines that could possibly get your attention and score well after that are the ones that hit you over the head with fruit or oak. The germination of the "international style", I feel, was the vintners' response to palate fatigue and their commercial and financial need to have a highly scoring wine to get us ratings whores to buy their wine. The tasters (Parker, Tanzer, Wine Speculator, etc.) are at fault for tasting so many wines at once in a situation that is, at best, untenable, at worst, impossible. And for not demanding statistically significant sample sizes they can be wholly blamed. In their defense (slightly) I understand that huge wine corporation and small winemakers rely on those ratings to get us wine whores like me know what to buy. ARRGGGH How do you win as the consumer?
I have a BS in Chemical Engineering from UC Davis, probably the greatest wine training University in the world (sorry Bordeaux). I wonder what Maynard Amerine or the current faculty have said about the science (or lack thereof) surrounding wine ratings. I hope they have written about it. It is one thing to test a bottle and say that bottle is good. Or maybe tasting a few bottles out of a reasonably small sample, the number of bottles determined by the math, and concluding that based on the scores, that subset of the wine is good. But the more I consider what we accept as "proof" that a wine is good, the more my head hurts and I kick myself in the butt for chasing scores.
So what is a wine whore to do? Good question because it is not feasible to test every wine when you want to buy it unless you are independently wealthy (and few of us wine whores are). The independently wealthy among us buy the ratings anyway and could care less if they make any statistical sense. When you have unlimited resources what do you care what the statistics say? If you don't like it, f..k it, pour it down the drain and get another bottle of something else. So us wine whores have to stop buying ratings. Find producers or regions of the world or wine styles or whatever you like and stick with them.
A perfect example for me is Ridge and Turley. It used to be that any wine Ridge or Turley produced got a big score from the Wine Speculator. Recently that has not been the case. In fact, I think Ridge refused to submit their recent zins to the Speculator for rating because they knew they would get hammered by Jimmy Laube. It seemed to me (and famous vintner Randy Lewis even wrote a letter to the Spectator agreeing with my conclusion) that the Speculator, or Jimmy Laube, had decided that any extracted, high alcohol zin is bad and refused to give them decent ratings, even if they were perfectly balanced, zingy and tasty and deserved the ratings. I had been mad that the wines I was paying good money for were being rated for shit. Now I understand that the ratings mean next to nothing. My palate keeps saying that, by and large, these wines are still excellent and deserve a better fate, no matter what the Speculator says. So I keep buying them because I trust the producers and my taste buds say they are good. Now I have been critical of California Zin, even in this blog, in the recent vintages and I do believe it has been off the pace and variable at times in the 2000's. But there are still plenty of good zins that I have purchased and my taste buds are saying that the wines are improving with age in many cases.
We have to quit buying wines solely based on ratings. I cannot begin to count the hundreds of wines that never lived up to the ratings I purchased. In fact, I would say it is the rare wine that I rate as highly as the experts. This is especially important when you realize that often, the greedy distributors automatically raise the price of any wine that scores a 90, completely ripping off us wine buyers. Now I am not against capitalism, but these suckers are doing it based on a subjective score that we all know is flawed and they were happy to sell the wine at the lower price pre-score. Can you say price gouging? Sound like gasoline to you? Me too.
The truth is that wine ratings can give you a general impression of a wine. But they should never be used for any more than that. We have to realize that wine is a highly variable, highly changeable, highly subjective art form and the best you can hope is that when you get around to drinking it, it meets the taste profile you had hope for when you purchased it. Wine whores of the world, wake up and smell the coffee. Quit chasing that high score because it is likely that the score is flawed or that you won't agree with it anyway. Be your own man (or woman). Your enjoyment of the wine will probably go up and no doubt your pocketbook will thank you.
Sunday, March 04, 2007
Why Riesling is the greatest white wine grape
After a long hiatus due to the blessed birth of our first child (a son), I'm back to rant and rave.
So, with all due respect to the Burgundians, certain California products (Ramey, Marcassin) and the top Aussies, it must be certainly true that riesling is the greatest white wine grape. Why, you ask? I can think of maybe 8-10 reasons in support of this declaration which I will detail below. Now I am hardly revolutionary in this assertion. I have read several articles written by professionals who share my assessment. But let me detail why I believe this to be so.
So, with all due respect to the Burgundians, certain California products (Ramey, Marcassin) and the top Aussies, it must be certainly true that riesling is the greatest white wine grape. Why, you ask? I can think of maybe 8-10 reasons in support of this declaration which I will detail below. Now I am hardly revolutionary in this assertion. I have read several articles written by professionals who share my assessment. But let me detail why I believe this to be so.
- Good riesling grows just about anydamnwhere. There is a reason why they are not growing chardonnay in the upper regions of the Nahe or Mosel in Germany. That vine will not grow there, at least not survive and produce world-class wines of any distinction. Yet in this area where hard winters would devastate a chardonnay vineyard, riesling grows, nay, thrives. Riesling also appears to ripen fully in these short growing season, cold areas. Now I am not an enologist and I cannot tell you to what extent vines are harmed by hard winters but it must be that the vine works well in these conditions or it would never have been grown for hundreds of years in these cold areas.
- Riesling makes great wines in all types of styles. There is no grape, white or red, in which the skilled vintner can make world class in steely bone dry, round dry, off-dry, moderately sweet, sweet and sticky botritised styles. I suppose the grape that comes closest in terms of this schizophrenic behavior is chenin blanc, which also swings across many styles. But chenin blanc still has limitations, which riesling does not seem to have.
- Riesling makes world-class wines around the world. Okay, here is a partial list of great riesling producing wines around the world...Germany, Austria, Australia, California, Washington state, New York state France and I even believe South Africa is getting into the act. I would be surprised if New Zealand, Argentina, Chile and other areas do not get into the act if they have not already. Now it is certainly true that many of these areas have had success with chardonnay. But cold areas like Germany and Austria cannot grow good chardonnay...period. It just will not ripen in those climes nor will the vines survive the harsh winters.
- Great Riesling is cheap when compared to top chardonnay. Come one, this is not even a contest. Absolutely awesome German spatleesen and ausleesen wines made in fabulous years often go for under $30. Try finding any well-heeled or highly rated white Burgundy or Napa Chardonnay for under $100. White burgundy is most acute in this, ripping off the consumer on a daily basis. But it is truly true that riesling is nearly free when compared with similar quality chardonnay. Further, at low price points, chardonnay can be flabby, flat and uninteresting. On the other hand, great riesling can be had for under $10.
- Riesling don't need no damn oak to make it taste good. Vintners would argue that the reason their chardonnay is so expensive is due to their ubiquitous use of "new French oak" to improve the wine. I say if it needs new French oak to taste good, why don't you just give me an oak chip to suck on. Great wines, while improved with aging and vinification techniques, should also be able to stand alone as a great wine. Riesling, which is generally aged in stainless or large neutral wood tanks, does this while chardonnay often needs additional "help" to reach the top. Sure, the oak is nice, but all serious wine drinkers have encountered the well-rated chardonnay where the after harvest treatment gives more of the flavor profile then the grape itself. For purity of the grape in the glass, riesling has it all over chardonnay.
- Dessert rieslings are amongst the longest lived wines...period. Along with great Sauternes, Port and arguably certain red Bordeaux, top rieslings age for 100 or more years and actually improve during this period. While the best chardonnay can stand some bottle age, most will not take longer than 10 years in the bottle before they lose their zip.
- Great dry and off dry rieslings compliment food better than top notch chardonnays (with the exception of Chablis, perhaps). Riesling loves food, especially cuisine that is thought to ruin most wines (especially chardonnay) such as Thai, Chinese and even Mexican. A well-educated, smart consumer can select a style of riesling to compliment just about any dish with possible exception of a big old steak. And only an old lady or a jerkoff drinks chardonnay with a big old steak. It is a rule, you must drink a big red with your bloody steak unless you have an allergy to red wine. For that, save the riesling for dessert.
- Great riesling reflects terrior at least as well if not better than chardonnay. Let's face it, chardonnay is amongst the most manipulated grapes there is. Using techiques such as heavy oak application, malolactic fermentation, cold stabilization, acidification and de-alcing, vitners around the world manipulate chardonnay seeking a uniform, international style preferred by wine writers and perhaps some consumers, especially those who buy labels. I am aware of no such machinations taken seeking the "internationalization" of riesling. It is true that riesling is often chapitilized (sugar added) legally in areas such as Alsace and Germany because short and cold growing seasons often prevent full maturation of the grape. But that hardly affects the flavors positively, more likely, it represents a wine that the vintner has declassified and is just trying to make into a simple table wine, hence not really part of this discussion. And while certainly any well made wine will require vinification techniques to improve flavors or stabilize the wine, compared to chardonnay, riesling almost makes itself. I would argue that riesling is a truer expression of terrior than most chardonnays.
- Riesling is more interesting than chardonnay. While truly great chardonnay unfolds in many layers, it's flavor profile is still rather narrowly defined, no matter where in the world you grow it. I will allow that some areas have added new flavor components to the stock buttery, slate, caramel, oaky, smokey flavor profile that typically describes chardonnay. Australia, which gets a citrus flavor in its chardonnay, comes to mind as an example of this. But riesling really has a much greater defined flavor profile than this. Perfume, slate, floral, citrus, botritis, unctous - these are just a few of terms describing riesling. This is especially true when you consider the different flavors that emerge across the sweetness spectrum of riesling.
So for my money, I believe that the noble Riesling is truly the greatest white wine grape. Let me know if you agree.
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