These teachings are collectively known as GrapeCraft, a postmodern philosophy which envisions a future in which we can recapture what wine is purported to have delivered before the 20th Century changed literally everything about how wine is made and how winemakers think about it.
WineSmith wines intentionally explore traditions beyond the mainstream. They are not for everybody. Each offering contains a unique exploration of what wine can be, and we seek to be completely candid about the techniques employed and the rationale behind them.
When purchasing wines singly, we hope you will benefit from reading the technical sheets on our site, which themselves contain links to discussions of the techniques we employ, such as micro-oxygenation, alcohol adjustment, leaf pressure monitoring, ripeness measurement, lees batônage, and so forth.
Another way to learn about GrapeCraft is to look at groups of wines which illustrate a specific concept. We currently offer the following multi-packs:
Micro-Oxygenation Three-pack $149Minerality Three-Pack $69 Alcohol Adjustment Four-Pack $59
Micro-Oxygenation Three-pack
$149 at Our Web Store
In this assortment we present three very different wines, each of which shows itself to remarkable advantage through the refinement and harmonizing properties of a radical new technique which I believe also captures the essence of what wine used to be before scientists started fooling around with it.
The technique of micro-oxygenation was invented in the 1980’s by French winemaker Patrick Ducournau, who used it save the Madiran appellation’s traditional variety tannat from extinction. Modern winemaking practices including the use of stainless steel and inert gas had given this grape’s massive tannins a very dry, undrinkable aspect, like drinking cocoa powder. Ducournau realized that the wines were starved for oxygen, and over a decade perfected equipment and techniques to transform tannin structure. This is what the Aztecs taught the Belgians: how to use oxygen to transform cocoa into something rich, light, profound and pleasing.
Vern Singleton at the University of California at Davis had recently worked out how the harsh, bitter compounds in red wine (and also in tea, coffee and chocolate) could be glued together into chains, consuming oxygen in the process. Ducournau worked out that these oxidative polymers could be used to build a rich, light structure in the wine, similar to the way a chef whips air into egg whites to create a meringue. The secret was to feed the wine oxygen constantly at a low rate, just a little bit less than the tannins could react with. Any excess oxygen causes the wine to oxidize and spoil.
In experimenting with his new tool, Patrick made several shocking discoveries. The first was how much more oxygen his tannat could consume than he expected. A barrel delivers approximately a tablespoon of oxygen gas per day, or about one milliliter per liter of wine per month. He began by introducing four times the barrel rate, but eventually learned that his young wines could consume a hundred time the barrel rate!
The next surprise was how quickly this ability declined. The same wine which could safely receive 100 barrel units just after fermentation could only take one twelfth of that rate three months later. Temperature was just as critical – oxygen consumption is five times faster at 60oF than at 50oF. Strangely, wines that hadn’t seen oxygen in youth could only handle half that amount – the treatment actually made the wines stronger. So early oxygenation actually fights oxidation, stabilizes color, delays release, and increases longevity!
But the most surprising benefits to oxygenation were the transformations to wine texture and aromatic behavior. Tannins were transformed from harsh gritty granules in the front of the tongue all the way to the back palate. Most important, the creation of this tannin “soufflé” accomplishes the goal of a master saucier chef: to integrate the wine’s aromas. It became possible to harmonize the wine’s oak aromas, vegetal aspects, and even microbial characteristics into a united “single voice,” much in the way a well-made bearnaise sauce doesn’t exhibit distinct aromas of tarragon, onion and mint, but rather a harmonious, soulful mélange of these elements.
To micro-oxygenate a wine without oxidizing it requires expert training. Every wine has a different need which can only be assessed by frequent tasting and adjustment. Furthermore, the goals of treatment depend on the intended style and the nature of other blending components. Just as every chocolate maker decides every day whether to make dark chocolate, milk chocolate, or somewhere in between, so the winemaker employs oxygen together with batônage (yeast lees stirring), blending of press wine, time in barrel, adjustment of alcohol content, and wood tannin extraction to perfect and balance a proper structure.
None of this has any merit on its own. A beautifully structured wine can still be terribly dull. Structure only serves to facilitate the appreciation of native terroir expression. The three reds I have selected have very different characteristics to offer, and differ in expression more than they share in presentation technique.
Ducournau called our WineSmith 2004 “Crucible”Napa Valley ($100) single vineyard pure cabernet sauvignon “Madiran style!” This is "real wine" with incredibly dense, melted tannins. Its two-ton harvest was the entire focus of our winemaking consulting team for the '99 harvest. Picked on November 1, it is nevertheless no overripe “extended hangtime” wine, but retains core aromas of fresh blueberry and blackberry typical of Tulucay Vineyard above the east edge of Napa town. These small berries yielded very low volumes of intensely tannic juice packed with tannin. The wine took 100 barrel units of oxygen for six weeks, completed malolactic, and then was run at eight mls/month for six months, finishing while still absorbing five. It was then barrel aged for additional months, finally bottled in December of 2002. During the first year of barrel age, its lees were stirred twice per month until they were entirely absorbed into the wine. The result is a miracle of aromatic integration: the nose literally drags you into the glass. We used a proprietary name because the wine has more finesse than most conventionally made pure Napa Cabernet Sauvignons. More…
Our WineSmith 2006 Cabernet Sauvignon ($20) is an extraordinary bargain for those who enjoy densely packed cabs with amazing color, rich plush structure with clean, pure lines and heaps of fruit. Made entirely from Cabernet Sauvignon, the blend is comprised of 91% Peterson Vineyard, perhaps the best cab vineyard in Lodi. Just for laughs, we submitted the 2003 version to the New World Wine Competition in the OVER $50 category, where it received a unanimous Gold Medal from all four judges. Peterson Cab has very rich color, fine tannin and a distinctive olive / capsicum terroir characteristic. The wine responds wonderfully to micro-ox, transforming into an extremely round, full, generous wine with very fine tannin which fills the mouth. To be a complete blend, however, it needs more structure and framing, for which blended in 9% of Crucible from Tulucay Vineyard. The resulting blend is quite magical. This is the perfect wine for Friday evening after work when you need a generous dose of “reward hedonism.” More…
2005 WineSmith Roman Syrah In his classic "Gods, Men and Wine", William Younger proves that although the Romans had access to sulfites ("blue smoke"), for some reason they didn't use them in wine. We wondered why. To try an experiment, we had to draw on all the elements of GrapeCraft. To prevent oxidation, we need a wine with strong reductive energy, so we chose a high altitude Syrah from Renaissance Vineyard high in the Sierras so we have massive color and tannin. Besides reductive energy, we needed a refined structure to integrate the flavors from a whole microbial ecology, so micro-oxygenation treatment helped us in both respects. The result is quite unexpected – a soulful personality and ethereal depth emerges from this wine unlike what you’re used to. The sulfited version in 2002 is an exceptionally good Syrah, but pales in comparison. More…
Minerality Three-Pack
$69 at Our Web Store
Few aspects ring more passionately for lovers of WineSmith wines than their obvious minerality. The source is pretty clear -- living soil. Beyond that, the science of what’s going on is a bit mysterious. So we decided to pick out a selection of our most minerally wines in a special discounted package.
I’ve been pursuing the mysteries of minerality for ten years now, most recently with an open-minded group of CSU Fresno investigators. It’s a tricky problem. Atomic absorption data of the elemental content of organic vs conventional wines hasn’t so far yielded simple linear answers as to what minerality is.
On the other hand, the sensory data is pretty clean. Just taste an organic tomato and compare with the waxy, flavorless hydroponic type! In other words, minerality quite obviously exists, but we don’t presently know how to measure it except with our senses.
Here’s what I’m pretty sure of. There is a characteristic minerally finish to wines which is strongly associated with living soil practices (earthworms, cover crops, abandoning pesticides or herbicides). It has been described as mineral energy, mineral electricity (as it resembles electric current in the throat), and also the "flavor" one has in the back of the throat after eating half shell oysters or when driving home from the beach. It’s similar to saltiness, but more complex and persistent. We don’t see this characteristic in wines from grapes grown using the methods of petroleum agriculture – bare soil, pesticide use, no earthworms present in the soil. These wines end in the mid-palate, and have a short, blank finish. They also don’t age well.
We Grapecrafters have a healthy respect for minerality for several reasons. Mosel rieslings, strong in this sensory characteristic, can age 30 years, whereas Californian and Australian rieslings die like dogs within five years. Second, when we micro-oxygenate (a process which involves continuous sensory and analytical testing for the wine’s ability to take up the oxygen without signs of overwhelm, such as a rise in dissolved oxygen, aldehyde creation or open fruit expression), wines with minerality tend to take up much more oxygen than their dead-soil counterparts. Third, minerality imparts a liveliness on the palate and a lengthy flavor persistence that sets living soil vineyards apart from other New World wines. Our trials at Fresno State are at least inquiring into the nature of this obvious yet elusive phenomenon.
Our 2003 WineSmith Faux Chablis is the third vintage of an experiment in using no-till covercrop practices as depicted in our Dirty Pictures Gallery at http://www.winesmithwines.com/winesmithwines/vineyards.html. In Chablis itself, the native limestone seems to impart this characteristic naturally. Being made from seawater, it’s not surprising that a rich collection minerals is there. Soil expert Claude Bourguignon (http://www.abcdpresse.fr/pdf/Bio-Claude-Bourguignon.pdf) believes that the grapevine’s ability to neutralize the highly basic pH of raw limestone creates a perfect environment for a complex soil ecology which supports the growth of the mycorrhizal fungi which (in symbiosis with the grape rootlets) actually perform the uptake of trace mineral complexes. We were able to achieve a very similar taste effect on our sandy loams at the Napa College Student Vineyard by encouraging a healthy soil ecology.
The high altitude living granite soils of Renaissance Vineryard and Winery in Yuba County, well up into the Sierras, have been where scientists go to obtain samples of unaltered type strains of organisms such as Botrytis cinerea because this devout religious community has never used pesticides and herbicides since planting the vineyard in 1975. The 2005 WineSmith Syrah allows the attentive palate to easily discern the minerally finish in an otherwise conventional wine of very high quality and perfect structure. More…
In the 2006 WineSmith Cabernet Franc is evidence that this variety pull minerality from the soil more strongly than any other red grape. The is not a big muscle wine like our 2005 Cabernet Sauvignon; instead there are many floors on the elevator. So much depth and seductive hollowness is present that one literally experiences a feeling of falling into the glass. Although not a strongly tannic wine, this energetic blend actually requires more time in the cellar to open up. Fortunately it forms itself into a wonderfully integrative complex in which the varietal spice and the spice of old French oak intertwine indiscernibly and the pure line of its core is uninterrupted by any trace if the graininess and vegetality which is so often off-putting in examples of this variety. More…
Alcohol Adjustment Four-Pack
$59 at Our Web Store
In 1810, Napolean Bonaparte instituted the suggestion of his physician Dr. Chaptal to adjust the alcohol content of the great Burgundies and Bordeaux wines by the addition of beet sugar. This permitted the vignerons to hang the grapes into the rainy season to obtain true flavor maturity without concern for the alcohol imbalance which dilution by rainwater would cause.
New World wines have long been faced with the opposite problem – sufficient hangtime for flavor maturity results in our dry climes in high sugar musts and wines of too much alcohol – hot, bitter and unavailable to the palate. In 1992 I solved this problem by proposing a use of the new water purification filters the U,S, Navy had recently developed to create drinking water from seawater. When wine is pumped across these filters, no flavor or color goes through – only water and alcohol. The alcohol can then be distilled without harming the wine and the water returned to the wine.
Vinovation now provides this service for over 1,000 wineries in California and many more overseas, and together with our competitor, The Spinning Cone, we adjust just under half of the premium wine produced in the State.
This invention opened up the possibility to make new styles of wine, such as fully ripe Zinfandels with the restrained alcohol of a Super-Tuscan. They also allowed me to experiment with the making of traditional European styles as alternatives to the standard high-impact blockbusters for which California is principally known.
An unexpected discovery around alcohol adjustment is the phenomenon of “sweet spots.” We had initially expected that consumer preference for alcohol balance would follow a bell curve: dislike for both the high and low alcohol wines, and a feeling of balance throughout the middle range, with a peak somewhere in the 13%’s. This never happens. We always find “radio stations,” points of harmonious balance just adjacent to very bad, dissonant, unbalanced wines! One lesson – never rinse your glass with water between wines. Always use the wine itself. More…
In order to obtain a Chablis-like lemon blossom characteristic for the WineSmith 2003 Faux Chablis, it was necessary to get the grapes ripe to the point of color change from green to gold for the entire berry. The resulting 25.4 Brix gave us an alcohol of 14.8%. This lemon aroma was not perceptible in the resulting wine. Try mixing 1/8th teaspoon of 100 proof vodka (pure alcohol) into two ounces of the wine to recreate this effect. You’ll see the aromatic characteristics of the wine disappear as it solubilizes with the alcohol and is taken away from the headspace aroma. This simple experiment reveals the sad fact that California whites have always been capable of the ripe, delicious aromas of Chablis and Sancerre, but our alcohols made the flavors invisible. Alcohol trials revealed three possibilities of balanced wines – a California Montrachet style at 14.2%, a medium-bodied Meursault style at 13.5%, and this wine, a convincing Chablis knockoff at 12.9%. More…
To increase the tannin concentration of our Cab Sauv /Merlot Miser Meritage blend, we use the French method of “bleeding” 15% of the juice away from the skins immediately after crushing to produce our Skinflint Rosé. Fermentation to dryness resulted in a wine which, like all dry rosés, did not carry its 14.9% alcohol well. By lowering the alcohol to 12.5%, we found a “sweet spot” which displays its natural fruitiness so well that it appears to possess nearly 1% residual sugar. The result is a wonderfully versatile wine which goes with everything. Popular TV chef Rachael Ray even designed a Cubano Pork Chop recipe [link] just to show off this lovely wine..YUMMO!
The flippant upside of Skinflint pink is our red Miser Meritage bottled under the CheapSkate label. The massive tannins resulting from the “bleeding” process were harmonized by micro-oxygenation. The 14.3% alcohol was just TOO hot! We found the perfect Bordeaux-style sweet spot at 13.4% alcohol, resulting in a wine which shows minerally elements in a tight, ageworthy package well fleshed out by Mangels Vineyards chocolatey Cabernet Sauvignon plush tannins. You'd have to look far out to find a better value in Bordeaux-styled Meritage.
It is a great challenge to obtain the spicy lemongrass aromas of Spain’s Galician Coast Rías Baixas wines in California’s less maritime climate. As a result, some producers arrest fermentation and allow them to finish sweet. But to me, the strength of this fascinating grape is its central hollowness, which makes a place for rich foods like lobster and avocado. The 2005 WineSmith Albariño came in at an original 23.4 Brix resulting in an unpleasant 14.1% alcohol. We found a beautifully balanced dry wine at 12.8%. More…
~ Our Medal Winners ~