Wine, Like Baseball, Used to Be a Finesse Sport

With baseball season just getting rolling, I’ve been pondering the question: What do the national pastime and wine have in common? The answer is, of course, artificially pumped-up players, whose use of unnatural tactics to swell in size have forced us to look long and hard at what we value in the things we love. Wine, like baseball, used to be a finesse sport. Prized qualities were balance, elegance and clarity of fruit. Ted Williams, for instance, would have been a classic wine. Willie Mays. Derek Jeter. These days, wine, like baseball, is all about the home run. The artful styles are being lost to the cult of muscular, jammy, oaky, overly alcoholic monsters. While there’s a place for these types of wines, most of them strike out far more than they get on base. This was a hot topic at the fourth annual World of Pinot Noir conference last month in California’s San Luis Obispo County. Pinot Noir makes the world’s most classic finesse wine. A grape whose greatest expression exudes balance, nuance and an ethereal grace is being pumped up more and more to resemble a powerful Napa Cabernet or a Barossa Shiraz. A panel of top sommeliers concluded that these wines are poor fits with food, but that many a customer comes in requesting to be blown away by a weighty wine. “It’s a huge problem these days,” one sommelier told me. “The obsession with fruit and oak is driving out the more subtle wines. No one wants their wines to be overlooked, so they make them more and more massive.” And the question is not merely about style. It’s how this style is being reached, which is becoming more reliant upon “unnatural” winemaking. That is, the grapes are picked too ripe, which means the resultant wine is going to be highly alcoholic, which makes the wines flabby and hot (the industry term for high alcohol – the sensation is a burn in the nostrils when you smell the wine and a similar burn on the back of the throat after you’ve swallowed). To bring the wine back into balance, the wines are de-alcoholized with a centrifuge or reverse osmosis. They are watered down and acidified. In some cases, tannins are added back in. The point is that wine should be about working with what nature gives you and making the best wine possible under those conditions. If a place is too hot or the soil no good for growing grapes, wine should simply not be made there. If the wines have to be artificially manipulated to simulate classic and accepted norms of quality, the honestly made wines are besmirched and highly prized attributes such as expression of vintage and site are trampled. To appreciate the world’s great regions and their wines, we must believe that they are made with integrity. And, of course, the same is true in baseball. I cannot continue to enjoy a Barry Bonds home run if I suspect that he enjoys a competitive advantage. I can’t appreciate his place in the record books if it wasn’t achieved honestly. Certainly, not everyone is guilty of this, just as there are many ballplayers who earn their statistics naturally. But, as baseball is policing itself, it’s time to call on the wine industry to do the same, to decide which practices are acceptable and which are not. Europe’s wine regions are heavily regulated, while those in the New World are not (though we can be sure that there is plenty of back-alley manipulation going on many classic European regions as well). And though there is often no way to know if a wine was made naturally or not, we can often detect the most outrageous ones by taste. The primary quality for which we should all taste is balance. Difficult to define in words, balance is a quality that is obvious when encountered. A balanced wine shows acidity that carries the fruit through the mouth, rather than jangling the sides of the tongue. Its tannins are in line with the body, with bigger wines needing bigger tannins. The fruit is expressed fully from the front of the palate all the way through the finish. And the oak and alcohol are not obvious, with no one feature particularly dominating another. Any wine can be balanced, from a light Riesling that clocks in at 10.5 percent alcohol to a massive Zinfandel at 16 percent. Pinot Noir should be naturally in the middle, around 12 to 14 percent. Winemakers strive for balance, which should be achieved in the vineyard, not in the winery. Pay attention to this when tasting. If you taste something that seems out of whack, ask yourself what quality stands out. As much as I like a wine with great fruit, sometimes, indeed, it can be over-fruited and thus underwhelming. Too much fruit, oak and alcohol is a wine on steroids. And I cheer a home run as much as everyone else, but I want that thrill to be achieved naturally.