Ronga’s Rant

When you’re at a wine store, restaurant, or bar how do you decide which wine to get? You may ask a friend, the waiter or sommelier, or you may even do some research online. Either way, you are looking for a recommendation. As my friend Paul Mabray mentioned, recommendation is the number one influencer for purchasing decisions when it comes to wine. I’ll go out on a limb – don’t quote me here – and say wine isn’t unique to this phenomenon.

What’s fascinating is that there are only a FEW authoritative voices on wine. Whereas in restaurants, movies, books, products, music, etc. people have the luxury of listening to the voice of many. People turn to Yelp, Rotten Tomatoes, Amazon, Cnet, iTunes. Now you might argue, well, wine is a luxury good, where I want an expert opinion. Really? What about food or movies? You trust your palate or opinion enough to know what you like and what you don’t… you’ll listen to Yelp or Rotten Tomatoes, and your friends rec over Ebert & Roeper. You don’t go to the old school (or maybe you do, I realize I’m making a major gross assumption here) Zagat hard copy which was written at single point in time to look up a restaurant. If so…then here’s some food for thought. Restaurants have mad turnover in terms of employees, wine pros, chefs, etc. Zagat ranks a resto once per year. So… you go off of a Zagat rating 10 months ago, which by the way is one voice (or at least < 5). Instead you could hit the interwebs, go to good ole Yelp or the resto rating of your choice and see REAL TIME, what peeps are saying. You might get 20 reviews in the last month! This would quell any fears about employee turnover, especially with the cooking staff. Now, these peeps most likely are not foody connoisseurs. However, do you trust them to adequately judge service, ambiance, and quality of food? Maybe not. But at least you can read their reviews to ascertain how sophisticated their analyses may be. Decide for yourself.

In the wine world, people have been turning to a dying industry. Wine Spectator (don’t get me started). Wine Advocate. Wine Enthusiast…magazines! Now what? Robert Parker is an influential figure and, darn it, I respect him for what he done in the biz with scoring wines. Tremendous. But what he is doing is not scalable going forward. Espcially with people consuming info online and turning to consensus reviews. Parker rates wine at a point in time – for you finance nerds it’s like a balance sheet vs. an income statement.

Wine changes… it transforms in the bottle, in the glass, in the moment. Let people decide. Let them tell the story, based on their palates. Let the winemakers tell the story. 100 reviews is much more powerful than one man’s, in my opinion. I believe Cork’d is a sucker that can scale. People, more than ever are consuming information online… But I diverge. The point is, no matter how many influential human beings there are in the wine world, one voice doesn’t do it. It takes many. My palate is totally different than yours. I like smelly arm pit, just came out of the gym, sweat socks, barnyard, funkified, dirty, blue cheesy wine. I’m guessing you want to throw up right now.

So… make your voice heard. Not just in wine. But everywhere. Don’t be shy. You can’t be wrong when it comes to wine, music, food, art, travel. They are subjective and local to your DNA. It is your opinion after all. Embrace it and share it. Influence. Otherwise, how will others know what to buy?

I recently went to Boston Wine School and had a lively discussion on wine prices and the cause. Well…let’s not beat a dead horse here. There are many causes. Hype, quality, raw materials / additives, marketing, good ratings (can you say Robert Parker?), vintage / climate, or just pure nonsense. I guarantee I left some out. Regardless, many of these are directly related and I am going to focus on two that resulted in somewhat of a debate.

Additives and quality. Here was the argument by the winemaker – what does and what could potentially make wine prices so high are the “additives” winemakers use to enhance the wine. Without getting too technical on you (and myself for that matter), for winemakers to get the right chemical balance of acidity, sugar, sulfites, etc., they oftentimes have to add yeast, yeast food, enzymes, sugar, sulfites, tartaric acid, other vineyards’ juice, oak chips and other substances.

Some winemakers claim they don’t use “additives” but might use color-extracting “enzymes” or corrective measures to perfect a tannin imbalance. All of these adjustments/modifications allow the winemaker to do whatever he or she can to make the wine as saleable as possible. If winemakers don’t make adjustments (for example add the right type and amount of yeast pre-fermentation), they may have hundreds of gallons of rotten eggs instead of wine on their hands. So, adjustments are important and should not be viewed as negative, but rather the science aspect of making sure wine has the right levels before bottling.

Getting back to the winemaker’s argument, one can see that the more adjustments made, the more raw materials used in the wine making process. Economics tells us this makes prices go up. Right, got it. … wait a second…

So this is where I entered the debated. What if a harvest or wine is crap, for lack of a better term. So a winemaker keeps adjusting and modifying pre-fermentation to get the levels right to compensate for poor soil and other factors. Then maybe again post-fermentation through blending with other vineyards’ juice and by adding oak chips, etc. Again, who pays? Well, we do in the end. Personally, I don’t like this idea one bit. I would much rather pay a premium for a wine that comes from the ground (terroir), using the wild/natural yeast on the grape for fermentation… and STRAIGHT to the bottle. Now how often does that happen? I’m no expert, certainly no winemaker. I imagine very rarely. But, in my opinion I think the industry should charge MORE for less modified wines (assuming they have the Brix, pH, tartaric acid levels within range). If a wine isn’t naturally rich in color, I’d prefer winemakers not add a commercial enzyme to extract that color. Enzymes along with other additives mask and affect the smell and taste of what is truly going on in the vineyard. It’s almost impossible to know how “modified” a wine is – it certainly doesn’t say on the bottle, but you can start to smell and taste for it. For example, overly oaked wine might be masking a flaw in the wine…I personally look for wine that tastes like dirt. Like soil, like earth worms crawling in the ground. Yeah, I said it.

Terroir. Of course I love to see a deep, rich color in a red wine, but don’t judge a wine by its color…eh, unless of course it’s brown. You still want all the other good flavors and those depend on the varietal, region, etc. But I encourage and challenge you to see if you can taste some of the vineyard itself in the wine. Do a little homework or leave a comment of which vineyard you’re drinking from and I’ll help with the characteristics. Is it Alexander Valley? Mendoza? Oklahoma? Here’s to you, health and happiness…