The great wine pretenders

It struck me recently while I was tromping around Santa Barbara County`s Sanford and Benedict Vineyard, one of California`s finest and most beautiful wine properties: The longer I taste wine, the less I really understand what separates the great ones from the dog`s water. I don`t mean in the bottle - it`s surprisingly easy for even the least experienced wine drinker to appreciate a great wine when he swallows it. What I mean is that no matter how much wine lovers yack about barrel aging, farming techniques and "natural" winemaking, there is ultimately a seemingly invisible leap that takes some wines out of the also-ran bracket and into the category of head-shaking wonder. So what makes the difference? I asked Richard Sanford, the tall, thoughtful, William Hurt-ish winery owner who planted Sanford and Benedict back in 1970, and puts its intensely flavored grapes into his top Sanford Winery chardonnays and pinot noirs. He knew that I knew the usual spiel: the care taken in the vineyards, the care taken in the winery. In fact, as I told him, that was what confused me the most - so many wineries make all the right noises about their farming and winemaking, but only a fraction of them actually put great wine into the bottle. It surely isn`t about facility size or equipment. The day I saw Sanford, I had recently come from visiting Cronin, a tiny winery literally crammed into the basement under Duane and Nancy Cronin`s modest home in Silicon Valley, where Duane hand crafts delicious, distinctive wines a Burgundian would be proud to claim. Then there`s Napa Valley`s Beringer, a lavishly equipped giant, which regularly turns out some of the state`s greatest luxury-priced cabernets and merlots. After some discussion, Sanford - whose own winery makes some wonderful wine - settled on two answers to the quality mystery: one technical, one mystical, both probably right. He recalled a study by the longtime University of California at Davis professor Harold Olmo. In the study, Olmo concluded that about 2,000 decisions went into making a wine, from the ground to the bottle. "So sometimes," said Sanford, "a winery might focus on the big decisions and get them right, but all it takes is to mess up 14 or 15 of the little ones. That doesn`t seem like much out of 2,000, does it?" In fact, it`s easy to imagine that 2,000 decisions may be low-balling it. Just planting a vineyard involves dozens of choices about everything from how to prepare the ground, to what rootstocks to choose, to how closely to plant the vines - and in which direction - and how to trellis them. It`s astonishing how much each of these early inputs can figure in the final result. Wine grapes are very sensitive little fruits, nurtured and guided like thoroughbreds for centuries to respond to their vineyard sites. Here is a composite portrait of a vineyard and winemaking operation as often presented these days by a quality-ambitious modern winemaker: It`s planted on well-drained, poor soil that causes the vine to struggle and to produce fewer, more intense grapes. This effect is intensified by grafting the grapevine wood onto a low vigor rootstock, and further enhanced by going through the vineyard just before the grapes turn color and cutting off some clusters, to further concentrate the plant`s energy. And, just in case the poor vineyard wasn`t struggling mightily enough already, the vines will be planted at close spacings to increase competition, and decrease crop-load per vine. The location of the vineyard will provide a long growing season, preferably with hot days to ripen the fruit, and cool nights to keep them from respiring acid. Otherwise, depending on the regulations at hand, the winemaker may have to add sugar to the fermenter to mimic the alcoholic robustness of ripe fruit, and/or acidity to keep the wine from seeming flabby. The grapes will (of course!) be harvested at the precisely perfect moment for the particular vintage, with dedicated pickers making several passes through the vineyard, and other workers at sorting tables weeding out the bad berries. Various vineyard blocks and lots will be fermented and barreled separately to enable the winemaker to fine-tune the ultimate blend. After aging languidly in shockingly expensive, painstakingly selected small oak barrels, the wine will be bottled with little or no fining or filtration. And presto! You have a great, luxury-priced French/Italian/ American/Australian wine. Except that often times, even with all or most of these steps implemented, you can have a pretty average-tasting wine at best, at a thumping great price. There`s always the possibility, of course, that they aren`t doing all the things they tell wine writers and wine tourists they`re doing. But I believe most of them are honest about it. It may just be that the other 1,500 or so decisions are getting muddled up; or it may be that Richard Sanford`s other explanation of wine quality - delivered really as an aside - means more than many wineries want to acknowledge: There is a feel, a touch that some people have, usually gained through hard experience. "Sometimes," he said, "when you have the experience, you just KNOW when things in a vineyard feel right. And sometimes you just have to have the patience to know when a wine should be left alone. It`s not really what most people in our instant-gratification culture want to hear." But winemaking is inconvenient that way - it`s an ancient craft that will yield only so much to modern or technological blandishments. Sanford literally lived surrounded by the Sanford and Benedict vineyard for a decade back in the 1970s, and you feel, walking around it with him 30 years later, that he could practically tell you a story about every vine. But then, that would take time, and we`ve got to be bustling on.

Richard Nalley`s wine articles appear in Men`s Journal, Food & Wine and Departures. He is the winner of the 1997 James Beard Foundation Award for Magazine Wine Writing. Please send your wine questions to Wine Talk, c/o Copley News Service, P.O. Box 120190, San Diego, CA 92112-0190. Questions regarding individual bottles or collection appraisals cannot be answered. (c) Copley News Service

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Author: Richard Nalley