From time to time, winemakers will drop by our cellar to present and talk up their wines We love having an in-person opportunity to ask all kinds of questions about how and why they do things as they do. Of particular interest to us is how a particular wine gets to be the way it is, and not one of the myriad other ways it might be. In pursuit of this, we’ll often pose some version of the following: What are you aiming at in a finished wine, and how do you go about approaching the target?
The most interesting response I’ve ever received to these queries came from new wavey California winemaker Abe Schoener, who told me that he goes into the vineyard, picks a grape, chews it, tries to sense what kind of wine the grape wants to become, then sets to work realizing its dream.
While it seems clear that a chat with a wine grape can only ever be a conversation with oneself, his comment is meaningful in one key respect. It acknowledges the reality that winemakers do, must, cannot help but, impose a style on the wine they make, simply by virtue of the hundreds of decisions required to bring a sound, drinkable wine into existence.
This holds true whether the style in question is the outcome of a personal vision, along the lines of an Abe Schoener, or one that conforms to a more community-based, consensus template. Mary Taylor, whose line of affordable European appellation-designated wines are longtime Wine Corner favorites, is in this second category. Her aim for this segment of her portfolio is to offer wines that represent solid, affordable, faithful iterations of wine made according to the legal standards existing for each defined category — think Côtes du Rhone or Bordeaux Blanc.
And while it’s true that sites, soils and atmospheric conditions play important roles in the character of the raw materials winemakers have to work with, choices about where and what varieties to plant, vine pruning techniques, harvest dates and many other factors crucial to the character of finished wine are entirely matters of human agency. This may take a form that is steeped in traditional craft practice, sophisticated technology or a kind of crude primitivism — nonetheless, in each case the outcome will be not just wine, but a particular possibility of wine.
Under the circumstances, it makes sense to occasionally remind ourselves that what wine may be, could be, and should be isn’t fixed by nature, but is the subject of a constant renegotiation between winemakers and wine drinkers.
At least that’s how I style it.