Very Snarky. :)
C,
J
http://hosemasterofwine.blogspot.com/
HoseMaster of Wine™
"[Humanity] has unquestionably one really effective weapon--laughter.
Power, money, persuasion, supplication, persecution--these can lift at a
colossal humbug--push it a little--weaken it a little, century by century;
but only laughter can blow it to rags and atoms at a blast. Against the
assault of laughter nothing can stand."--Mark Twain
Tuesday, June 2, 2015
EPHEMERA: "The Wrath of Grapes"--Not Just a Lousy Title
Most of the buzz in the biz the past week has centered on Bruce
Schoenfeld’s article in The New York Times Magazine, “The Wrath of Grapes.”
I think the title pissed me off to begin with, though I’m certain that
wasn’t Schoenfeld’s doing. Maybe “Parr for the Coarse” would have been more
accurate. Or “In Hirsute of Balance.” I thought I’d add to the discussion,
though I am also certain that what I say and think is relatively
unimportant.
When I was 42, Raj Parr’s current age, I thought I knew everything about
wine, too. I’ve never met Parr, but he’s certainly well-liked around the
wine world, which I’m happy to note, and not just by adherents of his
winemaking philosophy. At 42, many people reinvent themselves. Parr had
become a celebrity sommelier, the kind of oxymoron that makes me laugh,
like “natural wine.” And the best way to get into the pages of The New York
Times Magazine is to become a celebrity. Parr was smart, a sommelier who
knew to hitch his star to a wealthy patron, Charles Banks. (Does anyone
else find it ironic that Banks began his foray into the wine world with the
money he made as an investment banker (paragons of integrity) with Jonata
first, followed by the purchase of the very epitome of the wines Parr hates
and Robert Parker made valuable, Screaming Eagle?)
Parr’s being front and center in the sommelier world brings a very
distorted image of a sommelier to the public. He’s presented as the
anti-Parker in the piece, the angel on your shoulder, not that big, fat,
evil, 100-Point-Beelzebub whispering nasty remarks in your ear. At 42, I
was damned preachy about wine, too. I wasn’t smart enough to get one of my
wealthy customers to bankroll me through life, but I was certainly right
about wine just about all of the time. Though I never had any desire to own
a winery. And I never assumed it was my job to decide for customers what
wines they were supposed to like. I tried to list wines that were great
examples of their style and appellation, regardless of whether I found them
personally rewarding. I swear, I thought that was the job! Turns out, I was
a crappy sommelier.
Eventually, I learned that what I didn’t know about wine was infinite. This
is still true today. The NYT Magazine piece paints Parr as a visionary, a
kind and thoughtful revolutionary, a wine savant with unquestionable
knowledge, instead of as a man who has had a single idea and has run with
it. That’s not revolutionary, that’s narrowminded. Parr and Jasmine Hirsch
had a simple marketing idea, and it has worked much better than they could
have dreamed it would. Good for them. Now along comes Bruce Schoenfeld, who
pitches an idea to the New York Times, writes a marketing piece for In
Pursuit of Balance, and now Parr is the savior of wine. For another month
or so, anyway. The last winemaker anointed by the NYT Magazine was Abe
Schoener. Who talks about him anymore? Well, aside from Abe.
It seems to me there is a lot left out of the piece. That might be an
editorial decision, or it might have been the author. The piece quotes
Parker’s rant about Raj Parr, but fails to note that the rant was several
years old. That seems purposefully slanted editorializing. It fails to note
that Raj Parr doesn’t make Domaine de la Cote or Sandhi wines, which would
seem to me to be important, especially to the vast majority of the readers
of the piece who would certainly come away believing he does make the
wines. Does he make picking decisions? Does he just tell Sashi Moorman how
to make the wines so that they reflect their sites? Does he tell Sashi to
make wines without any style? “Hey, Sashi, I’m detecting some style in this
Pinot Noir. Knock that shit off.” And what about talking to some of the
producers Raj Parr and his tasting committee have turned down for inclusion
to IPOB? They might have something interesting to say.
I don’t like the tone of the piece. But Schoenfeld is a talented writer
(even though he hates the HoseMaster, for which I am deeply grateful), so
the tone must be deliberate. Stuff like Parker being “hefty and bearded”
while Parr has a "teddy-bear physique.” He could have reversed those
descriptions and they’d be accurate, too. The tone shifts back and forth,
depending upon which side of the balance fence he’s writing about. Parr’s
parts are lullabies, sweetly rendered and cherubic. The other parts are
almost dismissive, and certainly skewed. And I know skewed. Steve
Matthiason is a dreamer, an ethical man who follows his wine beliefs at his
own expense. Doug Shafer lives among the grandiose architecture of Napa,
whereas Steve lives in a farmhouse. See that? Grandiose vs. Farmer Steve.
It’s propaganda, a NYT Magazine celebrity piece, plain and simple. And when
a PR piece is written by someone talented, it’s just that much more
effective, and that much more insidious. Yes, a piece should have a point
of view, and Schoenfeld is entitled to his. It’s just that his point of
view, illuminated by the hyperbolic subtitle, “A band of upstart winemakers
is trying to redefine what California wine should taste like — and enraging
America’s most famous oenophile in the process.” is so clearly sympathetic
to one side at the expense of the broader picture.
Try making one of Parr’s “virtually flavorless” wines and selling it in the
supermarket. Oh, that’s right, Santa Margherita did that twenty years ago.
Unlike Matthiason’s wines, it won’t make you think. It will make you drunk.
Try selling wines under 14% ABV in the supermarket. Oh, wait, just about
every wine mass-produced for supermarkets is under 14% ABV. Why? Because
you pay a lot more in taxes for a wine over 14% ABV, and that kills your
bottom line. Are those great wines? They are to the folks who buy them.
Maybe that Parr is on to something.
I’ve had a lot of fun at IPOB’s expense, and, to their credit, they’ve been
gracious targets. Jasmine Hirsch is a sweetheart, and has always been
generous to me. I’ve also insulted and satirized Robert Parker, and he has
been equally gracious. It’s weird to me how Schoenfeld’s article paints
Parker as responsible for what’s wrong with California wine, because, in
truth, there is nothing wrong with California wine. And if there were,
Parker would only be responsible for how it’s sold, not how it’s made. Are
there wines that were made tailored to Parker’s palate? Yes. They were
lousy and almost always scored lousy. Will there be more wines made
tailored to Parr’s palate? Not very many, I’d guess. And that is a blessing.
What Parr really represents is the culture’s awareness of wine as something
more than an inebriant. This is relatively new to Americans. Few people in
my generation thought about terroir, including winemakers. You were
basically unable to make “Parkerized” wines back then, so you didn’t.
Cabernet Sauvignons from Napa Valley in the ’60’s and ’70’s were all under
14% ABV, many were under 13%, just not by choice. Now people are thinking
about the differences between wine and Great Wine. All this is fantastic,
and it helps give meaning to wines like Sandhi. It also gives meaning to
wines like Carlisle and Bedrock and Spottswoode, too. There’s not just one
way to make Great Wine. Anyone, and I mean anyone, who tells you otherwise
is a fraud.
I’m just sorry that Raj Parr and company were anointed by the Newspaper of
Record. I’m glad for them, they’re all very nice people, and I’d love to
have a puff piece written about me in that magazine. But for the vast
majority of folks who read the NYT Magazine, that piece is very misleading
and misguided. It implies California has made stupid wines for decades
because of one critic, which is simply untrue. And it implies that Raj Parr
is some kind of visionary, while in truth he’s more Don Quixote tilting at
windmills.
Posted by Ron Washam, HMW at 7:00 AM
Labels: EPHEMERA, Wine Essays
48 comments:
Bill Ward said...
Spot on! Especially loved the part about there being no one way to make
great wine. Hope we have some great wine together soon.
June 2, 2015 at 8:26 AM
Clayton Lewis said...
Thanks for saving me time and energy today! I didn't want to search for the
NYT Magazine, read the article and then find no juicy,juicy gossip within
the piece. I may now go back to my regularly scheduled happy-go-lucky wine
world workday...
June 2, 2015 at 8:27 AM
Thomas said...
Right on, Ron.
I couldn't have--well maybe could have--said it better, but you did quite
ok!
By the way, the newspaper of record has been sliding off its pedestal for
quite some time, especially with the Sunday Magazine. It's saddening.
--
James Ellingson cell 651 645 0753
Great Lakes Brewing News, 5219 Elliot Ave, Mpls, MN 55417
James(a)BrewingNews.com BeerGovernor(a)gmail.com
>From the NYTimes (Better formatting and some pictures on the web site.)
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/31/magazine/the-wrath-of-grapes.html?_r=1
The Wrath of Grapes
A band of upstart winemakers is trying to redefine what California wine
should taste like — and enraging America’s most famous oenophile in the
process.
By BRUCE SCHOENFELD MAY 28, 2015
In the steep hills of Central California near Lompoc, on a slope that runs
along Santa Rosa Road, two vineyards lie side by side. To all appearances,
the Sea Smoke and Wenzlau properties occupy one continuous parcel of land.
The vines are indistinguishable; they grow in the same soil and get the
same sunlight. Nevertheless, grapes planted only a few feet apart end up in
bottles of pinot noir that have little in common.
Sea Smoke’s top releases sell for more than $100, and its intensely
flavored wines receive all manner of critical acclaim. But the winemaker
who leases the Wenzlau vines next door — Rajat Parr, a former sommelier who
is a coowner of two wine labels, Sandhi and Domaine de la Côte — can’t
understand why anyone would drink them. He believes that the grapes are
picked far too late, when they’re far too ripe, and that the resulting wine
is devoid of both subtlety and freshness. Parr does things differently from
his neighbors at Sea Smoke, starting with when he harvests. “Our wines are
fermenting in barrels, we’ve gone home,” he says, “and they haven’t picked
a berry yet.”
Sugar content, which determines alcohol levels, rises as fruit ripens.
Parr’s wines are full of aromas and flavors that admirers compare to things
you would never think to connect to wine, like the leafstrewn ground in a
forest. To Parr, and a growing number of likeminded colleagues, such
nuance becomes impossible to achieve when the wines are too alcoholic; it’s
6/9/2015 The Wrath of Grapes - NYTimes.comhttp://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/31/magazine/the-wrath-of-grapes.html?_r=1
2/12 as if the lilting flutes and oboes of a symphony have been drowned out
by a slash of electric guitar. He prefers an alcohol concentration below 14
percent and often far lower, depending on the grape variety, as opposed to
the 15 percent and higher that is common in California. So Parr harvests
his fruit iconoclastically early. “If you pick a grape off the vine and it
tastes yummy,” he is fond of saying, “you’ve already missed it.”
Early one recent morning, Parr took me to La Côte vineyard, several miles
inland from the Pacific Ocean. The sun was shining when I left Santa
Barbara, where the temperature was headed for the 70s. I knew Parr
preferred sites that were far cooler than the surrounding area, but it
hadn’t occurred to me to bring a jacket. By the time we reached the
vineyard, rain was falling hard. The temperature was 49 degrees, and the
whipping wind made it feel colder. Grapes grew all around me, but it was
the least hospitable vineyard I’ve ever visited, more like a gathering spot
for Celtic druids than a setting suitable for the cultivation of fruit.
As we hiked past stickfigure vines, their leaves shivering in the gusts,
Parr explained that he wanted the specifics of the place — the shale in the
soil, that cutting Pacific wind — to be evident in the taste of the wine
itself. He hates the idea of blending topquality grapes from different
vineyards into the same bottle, which many producers do. Those wines might
taste good, he admitted, but they lack depth and intrigue. “I don’t believe
in the ‘best’ — that the best grapes from different areas come together and
create the ‘best’ wine,” he said. “I think there’s more to wine than that.”
Most California winemakers, it’s safe to say, are trying to produce
something more like Sea Smoke than Domaine de la Côte. Before Napa Valley’s
emergence in the 1980s, highly regarded wines were made in regions — mostly
various places in France — where cool, wet summers tended to undermine
agricultural efforts. The standout vintages were from the warmest years,
those infrequent occasions when grapes reached full maturity before being
picked. In California, where sunshine is abundant, ripeness is rarely an
issue. Fully ripe wines are possible not only once or twice a decade, but
just about every year.
If ripe wines are considered good, many California producers reasoned,
those made from grapes brought to the brink of desiccation, to the peak of
6/9/2015 The Wrath of Grapes - NYTimes.comhttp://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/31/magazine/the-wrath-of-grapes.html?_r=1
3/12 ripeness (or even a bit beyond), should taste even better. That
logical leap has created a new American vernacular for wine, a dense,
opaque fruitiness well suited to a nation of Pepsi drinkers. More sweet
fruit, more of the glycerol that makes wine feel thicker in the mouth, more
alcohol. And by extension, more pleasure.
Pleasure is a matter of opinion, of course. But for three decades, the
tastes of mainstream American wine drinkers have been shaped by the
personal preferences of one man, Robert M. Parker Jr. A 2013 inductee of
the California Vintners Hall of Fame — as a reviewer — Parker has been
anointed by The Atlantic Monthly as “the most influential critic in the
world,” all genres included. As it happens, he has made a career out of
championing exactly the style of wine that Parr and his colleagues disdain.
In my conversations with them, no phrase elicited more derision than
“Parker wines.” It was shorthand, fair or not, for wines they deem
generically obvious and overblown.
Until a few years ago, if you wanted to drink a wine with a European sense
of proportion, you bought a European wine. In 2011, in reaction to an
American marketplace that they perceived to be dismissive of California
wines made in anything but the superripe style, Parr and Jasmine Hirsch of
Hirsch Vineyards in Sonoma County began soliciting members for a loose
confederation of pinotnoir producers called In Pursuit of Balance. The
group, which charges a $900 annual fee, conducts what amounts to a
political campaign on behalf of viticultural restraint. Most of its 33
members — located from Anderson Valley, about 100 miles north of San
Francisco, to Santa Barbara — make modest amounts of wine, somewhere
between 40,000 and 60,000 bottles a year. That’s too small, typically, to
have much of a marketing budget. But by joining the group, which stages
tastings around the country (and sometimes abroad), they’re able to reach
the consumers who are most likely to appreciate their wines.
In recent months, many of these have started appearing in shops and on wine
lists. At some restaurants in Brooklyn and certain San Francisco
neighborhoods, for example, theirs are the only domestic wines available.
The success of this nonconformist group, a sort of guerrilla movement
against the California mainstream, has prompted invectivefilled exchanges
6/9/2015 The Wrath of Grapes - NYTimes.comhttp://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/31/magazine/the-wrath-of-grapes.html?_r=1
4/12 on Internet bulletin boards, blogs and Twitter feeds. Partisans fight
over alcohol levels, the proper role of critics and whether restaurants
should be trying to influence their customers’ tastes by carrying only
certain styles of wine.
At its core, though, the debate is about the philosophical purpose of fine
wine. Should oenologists try to make beverages that are merely delicious?
Or should the ideal be something more profound and intellectually
stimulating? Are the best wines the equivalent of Hollywood blockbusters or
arthouse films? And who gets to decide? Standing at the rear of a
glassenclosed atrium in TriBeCa one morning in February, Parr looked out
over more than a thousand wineglasses, each partly filled with pinot noir.
This was the fifth annual In Pursuit of Balance tasting in New York, held
for the benefit of perhaps a hundred retailers, journalists and sommeliers
and a few winegeek consumers who paid $125 each to hear dialogues about
sugar levels, crop thinning and the Burgundian mindset. Onstage, panel
after panel of winemakers extolled the benefits of modest alcohol levels.
(These included, in addition to enhanced aromatics and more subtlety and
elegance, the capacity for a drinker to consume more wine before getting
drunk.) The speakers were in such ideological alignment that I might have
been watching a campaign rally. “That’s when a light bulb went off in my
head,” one panelist, Bradley Brown of Big Basin Wines, said of his epiphany
after drinking a particular bottle of Burgundy. “It has to be possible to
make more perfumed — more aromatically driven — wines in California.”
Beside me, Parr nodded vigorously. Now 42, with a teddybear physique, Parr
spent nearly two decades serving wine and putting together wine lists for
some of America’s most highly esteemed restaurants. Born Rajat Parashar in
Kolkata, India, he Anglicized his surname to Parr and later became an
American citizen. But he never embraced American wine. In the early 2000s,
he recalls, he drank a syrah from the Rhone Valley in France with another
sommelier. Like other Rhone wines, it impressed him less with its fruit
flavor than with its hints at things that couldn’t possibly be in the wine:
roasted meat, freshly turned soil. He liked how the wine felt in his mouth,
crisp rather than 6/9/2015 The Wrath of Grapes - NYTimes.comhttp://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/31/magazine/the-wrath-of-grapes.html?_r=1
5/12 weighty, and how the wine evolved as he drank it, one sip after the
next. These, he knew, were hallmarks of bottlings from the finest regions
of Europe. When he wondered aloud why similar wines weren’t made in
California, the other sommelier said it simply wasn’t possible. “That stuck
in my head,” Parr says. “California is a big place. How was it not
possible?” In Pursuit of Balance is controversial in wine circles. The name
itself is polemical. It seems to imply that those outside its ranks don’t
mind if a single attribute of their wines (sweet fruit, perhaps, or
alcohol, or the flavors that result from prolonged aging in oak barrels)
dominates the rest. Aware that being on the intellectual side of a debate
against pure pleasure tends to make his group look severe — the
“antiflavor elite,” as Parker likes to call them — Parr took the stage in
TriBeCa to spread good feelings. “It’s not a movement,” he said. “It’s just
a discussion among friends.” Moments later, the moderator of a following
panel, Ray Isle of Food & Wine Magazine, pushed back. “I had understood you
were actually creating an IPOB church,” he said. In fact, group members do
tend to proselytize, which befits a sectarian splinter group trying to
challenge established orthodoxy. They point out that Parker’s influence has
been so strong over the past quartercentury that he has actively altered
winemaking techniques — not only in Napa but also in regions from Europe to
Australia. To sell expensive bottles, producers needed access to the
American market. And to get that, they needed Parker. In 1978, while
working as a lawyer for a Baltimore bank, Parker started a newsletter
called The Wine Advocate. The name played off his occupation as an
attorney, but it meant more than that. Convinced that many highly regarded
producers were passing off thin, unappealing wines as fashionable, he
created a 100point scoring system and then wielded it like a truncheon. He
awarded high numbers to wines that tasted the way he believed good wines
ought to taste. He punished others with scores in the 70s and 80s and
biting insults to match. Today, The Wine Advocate, which has some 50,000
subscribers, provides detailed descriptions of wines it rates to help
readers gauge if their 6/9/2015 The Wrath of Grapes - NYTimes.comhttp://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/31/magazine/the-wrath-of-grapes.html?_r=1
6/12 preferences are similar. Nevertheless, by attaching a precise and
easily understood score to the commentary, Parker gives the impression —
purposeful or not — that he isn’t merely communicating his personal
reaction to each wine but quantifying its intrinsic value. For American
consumers, the idea that the quality of various wines can be compared as
easily as batting averages or stock quotes has proved irresistible. “People
would walk into wine shops with the name of a wine and Parker’s rating, and
not one word about the style or character of the wine,” says Michael
Mondavi, whose father, Robert, is largely responsible for spreading the
fame of Napa Valley wines across America. “Just because of the two digits
he’d assigned to it, they’d buy it.” Parker’s taste has always been broader
than his detractors like to admit. “It’s simplistic to say that Bob just
wants fruit bombs,” says Jeb Dunnuck, who writes reviews for The Wine
Advocate. But the wines that receive Parker’s highest scores — those 98s,
99s and 100s that have turned previously unknown producers into cult
favorites — are typically the most intensely flavored and come from places,
like Napa, where the grapes are most consistently ripe. For wine regions in
some of the warmer areas around the world, the lure of Parker’s endorsement
was overwhelming. “Spain went through a time when a lot of wines were being
made a certain way in order to get a score,” Ashley Santoro, the wine
director of the Standard East Village restaurant in New York, told me
during a break between sessions at the Balance tasting. When local
distributors came calling at her former restaurant, they were so certain
that Santoro would want their wines, they often assumed she didn’t need to
taste them. Parker liked them — what else mattered? “They’d walk in,”
Santoro said, “hand me a sheet of paper with a list of scores and say,
‘This got 98.’ ”
--
James Ellingson cell 651 645 0753
Great Lakes Brewing News, 5219 Elliot Ave, Mpls, MN 55417
James(a)BrewingNews.com BeerGovernor(a)gmail.com
Greetings,
Our friends Mark and Gloria are part of a fund raiser this Sunday at the MN
Fair Grounds.
SAPAS is the St. Anthony Park Area Seniors. Event includes BBQ from Giggles
Campfire
Grill and beers and ciders from ten plus area craft breweries including
Insight, Urban Growler, and Summit.
Live Music from three bands and a silent auction.
Hours are 3 to 6 p.m.
Address is Cooper St and Lee Ave in Falcon Heights (Fairgrounds)
Cost is $35 in advance and $40 at the gate.
Parking is free.
Great food, great beer, good fun and all for a great cause.
Cheers!
[image: Inline image 1]
--
James Ellingson cell 651 645 0753
Great Lakes Brewing News, 5219 Elliot Ave, Mpls, MN 55417
James(a)BrewingNews.com BeerGovernor(a)gmail.com
