The Wine Savant: A Guide to the New Wine Culture (10 page)

But when you move beyond these general guidelines, the natural-wine idea devolves into a conceptual free-for-all. Take, for instance, the issue of sulfur dioxide. Some naturalistas insist that sulfur should never be added, vinegar be damned; others say it is permissible but only in small amounts (some cap it at 10 milligrams per liter total SO2, others say up to 20, but many refuse to put a number on it). Then there is chaptalization, the process of adding sugar before or during fermentation in order to boost a wine's alcohol content. Hardliners consider it verboten, but others, no doubt mindful of the long tradition of chaptalization in natural-wine strongholds like France's Beaujolais region, are more flexible.

There even appears to be wiggle room on the all-important yeast question. Strict constructionists assert that manufactured yeasts aren't allowed under any circumstances; use them and you forfeit the right to call yours a natural wine. But other people say that you can employ them if it's the only way to finish fermenting a wine. Some natural-wine evangelists contend that beyond certain inviolable principles—not using poisons in the vineyard, for instance—intent matters as much as actions; if a vintner is making a good-faith effort to be natural, that's good enough.

I'd be more inclined to take this movement seriously if the wines were unequivocally superior, but that's not the case. Some of them are great. The late Marcel Lapierre's Morgon, a
cru
Beaujolais that was widely regarded as a beacon of naturalness, was consistently ethereal—in fact, I can't think of a wine that made me happier. The wines imported by New York–based Louis/Dressner are likewise considered paragons of minimalism and are usually delicious. However, plenty of mediocre wines are also parading under the natural banner, and a lot of hideously bad ones are, too—oxidized, microbial messes that only a vintner's mother, or an ideologue who values means over ends, could possibly love.

And here's a related point: nonintervention can often be more detrimental to
terroir
expression and authenticity than intervention. If, for instance, a vintner chooses not to add sulfur to his wine and the wine oxidizes or is otherwise flawed, he has actually throttled the voice of the vineyard. Oxidation is not an expression of
terroir
; it is inimical to the expression of it (a point that Paul Draper, arguably America's finest winemaker and a longtime practitioner of minimal intervention, has made). If the goal of “natural” wines is to produce wines that taste true to their origins, then eschewing the use of sulfur makes no sense; if the result is an oxidized wine, it is a wine that reflects the cellar practices of the winemaker more than the particular attributes of the vineyard from which it came.

Given the growing influence of science and technology over wine, a backlash was inevitable, and for now the backlash has taken the form of the natural-wine movement. Natural advocates are driven in part by a romanticized view of the past: that if only we could go back to the way that wines used to be made, our palates would be so much better off. But this is mythologizing on an epic scale. Forget ancient wines and just focus on the more recent past. Fifty years ago, a lot of wines were quite literally dirty—they were made in filthy cellars and were often riddled with flaws. Why did new oak barrels became fashionable in Bordeaux in the 1960s and '70s? Because the great consulting oenologist Émile Peynaud pointed out that the use of dirty old barrels teeming with bacteria had fatally compromised many wines, and he managed to persuade winemakers to start using cleaner wood and otherwise to improve the hygiene in their cellars. Sure, the new oak thing has gone too far, but the use of sanitary wood vessels for aging wines helped raise the quality not only in Bordeaux but throughout the wine world. These days clean, stable wines are the norm, and that is a significant and wholly salutary change from fifty or a hundred years ago.

That said, I'm all in favor of experimentation, and if the natural-wine movement encourages people to give more thought to how they vinify their grapes, that's a good thing. I can also say that I share the same general outlook as natural-wine proponents. I don't want wines doctored up by machines and chemical additives in order to invest them with qualities they would otherwise lack, even if those artificial influences aren't necessarily obvious to my palate. But for the same reason that I prefer clean sports stars to those who are bulked up on steroids, I want wines that come by their attributes as naturally as possible. I'll take Hank Aaron wines over Barry Bonds wines any day.

But I think “natural” advocates ought to ditch the “natural” label, which is hopelessly tendentious and polarizing, and instead put the focus where it really belongs, on individual wines and winemakers. Call them good wines, call them distinctive, soulful, or funky wines—just don't call them natural wines.

5

Food and Wine,
or Is It Food versus Wine?

H
ERE IS ONE
of the great wine ironies of our time: never have sommeliers been more prominent than they are today, and never have food and wine pairings mattered less. In case you haven't noticed, sommeliers have become the cool kids of the wine world; they are widely seen as the guys (and gals) with the best jobs in wine and the most glamorous lives. They are being celebrated in both print and film, are often as big an attraction at restaurants as the chefs (or bigger ones), and have become genuine tastemakers, too. If sommeliers get behind a particular grape or style of wine, it inevitably becomes the new “it” wine among avant-garde oenophiles. And yet all this sommelier worship comes at a time when the most basic function of sommeliers—to help diners find the right wine to match with the food they've ordered—is not nearly as important as it used to be. In part that's because of the kinds of foods we are eating these days and how those dishes are being served. It also speaks to the very self-confident wine culture that has taken root in the United States. Many people have no trouble navigating wine lists and thus have little need for advice from sommeliers.

Given the way celebrity has infected American food culture, turning chefs into television stars and cultural icons, it was probably inevitable that something similar would happen in wine. But it is curious that the spotlight has fallen on sommeliers. Without in any way intending to slight sommeliers—some of my best friends in the wine business are sommeliers—their job is not, on its face, particularly glamorous; they are wine waiters. And yet the fickle gaze of celebrity has now fallen on them, a point underscored rather dramatically by a recent documentary entitled
Somm
, which follows several sommeliers as they take the notoriously challenging Master Sommelier exam. Not only did
Somm
get screened at the 2013 Santa Barbara International Film Festival; immediately thereafter, Samuel Goldwyn Films acquired North American rights to it. And with that, the celebrity sommelier phenomenon reached the ultimate destination, Hollywood.

While it is easy to be snarky about all this sommelier worship, the rise of the American sommelier is actually a very interesting story. Although the role of wine waiter did not originate in France—it apparently dates back to the Greeks and Romans—the job took its modern form there, which was good in some respects, not so good in others. On the plus side, the French invested the otherwise ho-hum business of opening and pouring wine with ceremony and élan. On the down side, they brought a pronounced hauteur to the task. Many French sommeliers came to the job not by choice but by conscription, and the position has usually been a life sentence. In France, the sommelier was often someone who entered the restaurant trade as a barely pubescent teen with dreams of becoming a chef (and no prospect of attending university). Then, deemed unworthy of a place at the stove, our man—and it was always a man—got shunted off to the wine cellar, where he was condemned to spend the rest of his working days in the shadow of the egomaniacal prick who beat him out in the kitchen. This was not a recipe for service with a smile.

By contrast, professional wine service in the United States is a relatively recent phenomenon—it only really started in the 1980s—and took root in very different fashion. The pioneering figures here—Kevin Zraly (Windows on the World), Daniel Johnnes (Montrachet), Larry Stone (Charlie Trotter's, Rubicon)—were all college-educated and came to wine out of passion, not because they were frog-marched into the bottle room. They saw their role as mainly pedagogical, an outlook perfectly tailored to a time when Americans were developing an interest in wine. They made wine service educational, and they made it fun. They also brought an entrepreneurial spirit to the work. Rather than let the role of sommelier define them, they defined it, turning a dead-end, white-men-only métier into an exemplar of upward mobility and diversity.

Consider, for instance, Johnnes, now (along with Stone) the dean of American sommeliers. In 1985, Drew Nieporent put him in charge of the wine service at Montrachet, a restaurant he was opening in New York. Johnnes, taking his inspiration from the restaurant's name—Montrachet is the grandest of
grand cru
white Burgundies—assembled a spectacular cellar, and he and the wine list became the restaurant's star attractions (not that the food wasn't also good). In the late '80s, Johnnes began bringing in some of the unknown wines that he had discovered on trips to France. Today he has a thriving import business with a roster full of impressive names, oversees wine operations for chef Daniel Boulud's restaurant group, and has even done some winemaking himself: a few years ago, he produced a small amount of red Burgundy with the help of Frédéric Mugnier, one of the region's most esteemed
vignerons
, and made an Oregon Pinot Noir with the assistance of the talented Eric Hamacher. In addition to all this, Johnnes organizes what has become in the eyes of many people the world's greatest wine event, La Paulée de New York, a bacchanal modeled after the annual postharvest festival in Meursault. (It is actually a bicoastal event now, alternating each year between New York and San Francisco.)

Younger sommeliers are following the same trajectory. Indian-born Rajat Parr originally made a name for himself on the San Francisco wine scene. These days he oversees wine service for all chef Michael Mina's restaurants. He is also producing highly acclaimed Pinot Noirs and Chardonnays from California's Central Coast—his label is known as Sandhi—and has become a de facto leader in the movement to bring greater restraint and finesse to California wines. He was one of the founders of an organization called In Pursuit of Balance, which promotes this new paradigm through seminars and tastings. Parr has also written a book; a few years ago he coauthored with wine writer Jordan Mackay a book called
Secrets of the Sommeliers
, which combined practical advice for consumers with an inside look at the fabulous life of sommeliers. And no sommelier leads a more fabulous existence than Parr. His Twitter feed, under the handle RN74 (RN74 is a wine-focused restaurant in San Francisco that's part of the Michael Mina empire and which takes its name from the main north-south route in Burgundy; there's a Seattle branch now, too), ought to be titled “Travels with Raj.” Every week seems to find Parr in a different city or wine region; one week it's New York, the next it is Piedmont, the week after that it is Paris, Tokyo, or points in between, and invariably with pictures of the amazing wines he's consumed. Yes, Raj has quite the life.

What many sommeliers will tell you is that all this entrepreneurship and diversification is motivated in part by necessity. Wine service is a young person's game; working the dining room floor night after night takes its toll after ten or fifteen years, especially if you have a family, and so sommeliers need to find different ways of putting their skills and knowledge to use. In this sense, they are like veteran chefs who open multiple restaurants, establish product lines, and so forth. Obviously, part of the motivation for these chefs is a determination to cash in on the renown that they've achieved, but it is also prompted by a desire to step away from the stove after years of toiling in kitchens.

But while sommeliers are more visible than ever, how much value do they really add to the dining experience? For one thing, sommeliers are generally found at high-end restaurants, and a lot of high-end cooking has become so eclectic that it is almost pointless to try to create appropriate wine pairings. Some of today's most influential chefs—Ferran Adrià of the recently closed El Bulli in Spain, Heston Blumenthal of the Fat Duck outside London, and Grant Achatz of Alinea in Chicago, to name three of the most celebrated among them—have a wildly inventive streak that, whatever its virtues, can fall a little short when it comes to wine compatibility. What exactly do you pair with, say, coconut ravioli in soy sauce, or a Parmesan cheese ice cream sandwich, two of Adrià's dishes? Or how about sea urchin with frozen banana, puffed rice, and parsnip milk, an Achatz dish?