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.com http://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.com http://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.com http://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.com http://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.com http://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.’ ” 
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