What is your definition of a “delicious” wine? Are you looking for dense, opaque fruitiness, or do you seek vibrancy and nuance? Do you judge your wine’s pleasure quotient by its alcohol content, or are you looking for other kinds of sensory stimulation?The wine business would not exist if there were no room for differences of opinion. But in the past 30 years, the California “fruit bomb” model of wine has come to dominate the market, driven most notably by the taste preferences of influential critic Robert M. Parker Jr.
Mr. Parker was a young Baltimore attorney who drank mostly milk and cola until, at age 22, he tasted a big Rhone wine on a romantic trip to France with his girlfriend. Was it love? Was it the wine’s similarity to Pepsi that, in 1978, inspired Parker to begin publishing his newsletter ”The Wine Advocate”? The question is now moot as Mr. Parker’s 100-point scoring system and articulate quips found resounding success with would-be wine connoisseurs who wanted someone to tell them what to buy, and with stores who made money using his scores accordingly.
Ninety points from Mr. Parker could make a winery’s reputation. Soon, prices soared on his favorite Napa wines. Globetrotting enologists, such as Michel Rolland and Clark Smith, learned how to tailor wines to his taste. As bigger was perceived as better, vintners bought juice concentrators and let “hang time” inform harvest decisions.
It’s easy for California vintners to make “Parkerized” wines. With all that heat and sunshine, sugar and extract abound. In fact, due to the ripening profile of grapes under Napa’s alternating 50-degree fog and 100-degree sun within an average 24-hour period, it’s far more difficult for California winemakers to replicate the lower alcohol and nuanced aromas of “old world” or “cool climate” wines. To get this super-ripe fruit to ferment, they need to dilute it with water and then add acid. New oak barrels add dimension and hide the burn of alcohol.
Pure pleasure-inducing, or narcoleptic? It turns out that, ratings be damned, not every California winemaker wants to make big, robust wines. In his recent New York Times Magazine piece, “The Wrath of Grapes,” reporter Bruce Schoenfeld introduced “In Pursuit of Balance (IPOB),” a new “sectarian splinter group trying to challenge established orthodoxy,” a “guerrilla movement” of 33 California winemakers led by former sommelier/vintner Rajat Parr. IPOB’s members advocate wines with nuanced, natural, site-specific characteristics.
Giving short shrift to IPOB’s mission, which Mr. Schoenfeld dismisses as a “campaign rally,” he buys into the idea that “grapes brought to the brink of desiccation, to the peak of ripeness (or even a bit beyond)” yield the most “pleasure.” Apparently he was more snowed by attending Mr. Parker’s “Taste of Greatness Master Class” and $2,500 dinner on The Wine Advocate’s Grand World Tour than he was by IPOB’s symposium in New York.
After his article’s publication, Mr. Schoenfeld tweeted, “Hearing from both sides of my NYT ‘Wrath of Grapes’ story that I’m clearly biased against them. Now I know how umpires feel.”
Feeling pretty titchy myself about the topic, annoyed that Mr. Schoenfeld seemed to miss the point about the finer qualities of “balanced” wines, I asked Long Island’s vintners to respond to his piece. Are “balanced” wines a “profound and intellectually stimulating” ideal, while Parkerized wines are “merely delicious”?
The Lenz Winery’s Tom Morgan said, “Parker’s influence is a juggernaut in the wine world … [But] I’m of the conviction that wine’s proper role is to complement a dining experience, a vital catalyst to the enjoyment of good food and good company.”
At Raphael Vineyards, Anthony Nappa pointed out that the “natural” wines made in California may indeed show funky flavors from physiological unripeness that we don’t see here. He thinks that Mr. Schoenfeld mistakenly “lumps together” IPOB and the anti-interventionist “natural wine” movement. They aren’t the same.
“What we have naturally here is what IPOB is trying to do as a fringe movement in California,” he added.
Mr. Nappa sees Parker, IPOB and Natural Wines as marketing trends. For him, “The trick for us all in this business is to promote what we are doing without badmouthing others. New York wines are special, period, not because they are different from California, or France.”
Charles Massoud of Paumanok Vineyards agrees with Mr. Nappa. “Long Island naturally makes more balanced wines because ours is a cool climate growing region,” he said. “There is no right or wrong, but different personal preferences. In other words, ‘Vive la différence.’”
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