Feiring - The battle for wine and love: or how I saved the world from parkerization

Copyright 2008 by Alice Feiring

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The Library of Congress has cataloged the print edition as follows:
Feiring, Alice.
The battle for wine and love: or how I saved the world
from parkerization/Alice Feiring.
p. cm.
Includes index.
1. Wine and wine making. 2. Wine tasting. I. Title.
TP548.F366 2008
641.2'2dc22 2007034414
ISBN 978-0-15-101286-2

e ISBN 978-0-15-603476-0
v2.0117

For my grandfather, Samuel Avrech,
one of the greatest loves of my life
and the very first winemaker I ever knew

When it comes to wine and love, I get attached. So when I realized that certain wines I had relied on and lusted after were disappearing from the universe, I lost sleep. I angsted. I sulked. The loss was far more serious than the discontinuation of my favorite color of brick-red lipstick. Much more serious. In fact, the loss felt more like heartbreak. I could always find a different shade of lipstick, but there is no substitute for real wine or profound love.

I woke to this truth in 2001. The wine outlook was turning intensely bleak. Unless I navigated my choices very carefully, almost any wine would explode into a jammy fruit bomb, all vanilla-almond crunched up, often tampered with, and styled by technology and chemistry. This was not the kind of wine that first beguiled me. The revelation cattle-prodded my inner whistle blower. But the real eye-opener was a call from a California friend who told me, You wont believe this, but theres a consultant out here who helps wineries beef up their wines so theyll score 90-plus Parker points (referring to the worlds most famous wine critic, Robert M. Parker, Jr.). He told me the name of the gentleman and company, Enologix, but said in true deep-throat style, You didnt hear it from me.

I hadnt realized that the world of wine had become so cynical. A business was actually thriving by helping wineries shape and coerce a wine into a fat, oaky, thick, dense wine that Parker would give big points to? No wonder the Zinfandel I used to drink had lost its character and acquired as much alcohol as port. No wonder I could no longer find a California wine to suit me.

With all due apologies for painting Mr. Parker as the hit man in this book, he and his tastes have become bigger than himself. The term Parkerized has been added to the colloquial lexicon, and there is even a Wikipedia entry: Wine Parkerization, the widespread stylization of wines to please the taste of influential wine critic Robert M. Parker, Jr.

If Parker likes a wine, the wine sells. Prices rise. People make more money. Most everyone who equates high Parker points with increased income wants to please his palate.

One of the many disturbing outcomes of the rush to create a standardized wine is that it no longer matters where or on what you grow the grapes. Many Old World winemakers, with generations of winemaking in their history, believe that the grape is a vehicle for the lands expression. So the wine made in the Istrian Peninsula in Croatia will taste very different from the wine made in Lodi, California, even if the same grape is used. This qualityalluring and seductivedrew me to wine in the first place and probably puts me firmly in a camp with others that Parker vilifies as terroir jihadists on his Web site, erobertparker.com. And those of us in that camp are mystified that the quest to attract Parkers attention has created wines with such concentrated power that delicacy and minerality are overpowered. And too often these wines rely on technology and additives to rack up Parker points.

So I dreamed: Wouldnt it be terrific if I could be the heroine who stems the tide, slows the overwhelming production of hormonally overblown or sanitized winesthe ones that the worlds most famous wine critic is credited with championing? If only I could stop the proliferation of four-square wines with utterly no sense of place or minerality that reflect nothing about where they come from. At first I thought, Write the screenplay: Girl sleuth suspects a dangerous sameness in wine, discovers a link between the globalists gobbling up small wineries, technologies that change the nature of wine, and an influential critic. While investigating, she flies to a safe zone, the Loire, and tastes wines so brilliant they bring tears to her eyes. She falls in love with a partisan vigneron, and together they create a network of like-minded individuals throughout the world, topple the critics wine-rating system, put the conglomerates out of business, and return the vineyards of the world to those who know how to work them. In the end, our girl learns perfect French and lives happily ever after in love and in wine.

But at heart Im a self-serving realist who sees how difficult it has become to grab a good glass at any price. With barbarians breaking down the door to the wine cellar, I had to shelve my fantasy and find the real story.

This is my journey into the wine worlds version of David and Goliath. At stake is the soul of wine. This is giant corporation vs. independent winemaker. This is international and homogenous vs. local and varied. This is manipulated and technical wine vs. natural and artisanal. This is the world that courts Parker vs. those who heed their own calling. If the new technology made a better wine, Id say great. But for the most part, wine is being reduced to the common denominator, and this is sacrilegious.

Throughout the journey, I visit producers who make wines that inspire love and devotion. I show how these wines are made. I unmask the modern waythe reverse osmosis, the tannin addition, the yeasts, the enzymes, the cold soaks, the sawdust, oak chips, the barriques, the micro- and macro-oxygenation, the rotor fermenters, and the cherry drops. There will be scientists and consultants, who help create cookie-cutter wines for the mass palate. I will deal with those who say terroir (the magic that brings soil, climate, vintage, and winemaker together in a bottle of wine) and natural wine making are simply excuses for bad wine.

Im sure I wont change (nor do I wish to) the viewpoint of those perfectly happy to buy the wines that are easiest to find, but I am hoping to intrigue those who want wines that truly have a story to tell. Once people experience these wines and winemakers, once they know that wine truly does have soul and character, it will be difficult for them to cozy up to wines made by the numbers and not from the heart. I am not Cassandra predicting the fall of Troy, I am not Jonah warning Nineveh about impending destruction. Im not even Samuel Becketts Vladimir, wringing my hands in despair on the stage. There is hope. Though no jihadist, I am here to report that we are on the brink of a wine revolution, a renaissance. The best and most vibrant real wines are about to be born.

So, one day, I woke up to find that many wines I loved were disappearing. I went on a journey to find out why this was happeningwho is behind this and what the hell does love have to do with it all.

When my world was still innocent, I was drinking Manischewitz mixed with seltzer, but by the time my father ran off after a neighbors wife, I was drinking the partially fizzy Mateus.

I had a multitude of reasons for disliking the object of Dads affections, and all of them seemed to find expression in my developing a violent allergy to her Siamese cats and an aversion to her vulgar perfume. Obviously this Madame Chauchat of a woman had a profound effect on my sinuses. Nevertheless, I remain indebted to her. Years after my familys little scandal cooled down, Madame Chauchat and my father were cohabitating. I had run away to graduate school in the Boston area and was starting to cultivate an interest in wine. When I was visiting my father on a school break, his Madame Chauchat invited me to raid her ex-husbands wine cellar. Still terribly shy at twenty-three, I was hesitant to appear greedy and so I took only three bottles out of the hundreds there. One was an Italian wine from Piedmont, a 1968 Barolo made by someone named Giovanni Scanavino. I packed the bottles carefully, took a nineteen-dollar Peoples Express flight back to Boston, and shared the wine with two friends and my boyfriend, a rather sweet but straightlaced guy who barely drank and who knew I didnt like that he barely drank. The drinking became an even bigger issue when he saw me take my first smell of the Barolo. As far as Mr. Straight Laced was concerned, it was as though I had just fallen in love with another man.