I like wine that’s Italian and red.
“I shall have a Barolo,” I said.
But I had to think twice
When they told me the price.
Now I favor Barbera instead.
The cute verse is from the site OEDILF.com where an editorial team and a host of contributors were busy compiling a complete English dictionary, each word defined by means of a limerick. Hundreds, possibly thousands of words were treated there before the site disappeared.
Limericks are a bit like their low-rent siblings, the knock, knock jokes. The scheme is perfectly predictable, the rhythm infectious. Once we hear the tuh tuh TUMP-itty TUMP-itty TUMP we know what’s coming. The expectation that the five lines of verse, once underway, will tumpitty-tump their way to an amusing or at least clever conclusion is part of the pleasure the form provides. Alter the familiar meter, add or subtract a line, fail to adhere to the rhyme scheme and you risk losing your audience. ”Hey,” someone will say, “that’s no limerick.”
I suppose if you were making an analogy to poetic forms, a wine made from Barbera (a popular red grape variety) would be more like a limerick — a kind of people’s choice wine that doesn’t often rise to heights of grandeur — while Barolo (from prestige vineyard sites in northern Italy) would be more like an epic poem, a serious theme expressed in a challenging form, like Longfellow’s hypnotic dactylic hexameter (“This is the forest primeval”; or Shakespeare’s march cadence blank verse (“Yond Cassius hath a lean and hungry look”). But the idea is that each has a time-honored tumpitty-tump of its own to guide us along.
In the world of viticulture we have something called appellations, a collection of forms into which wine can be poured, you might say. Appellation law, wherever it exists, earns its living providing a set of familiar, approved patterns to which winemakers can conform their output and corresponding naming protocols to help identify them.
The idea is that when a consumer hears Côtes du Rhone, for example, it’s like hearing someone say “knock, knock.” What’s comes next is entirely predictable. Should a winemaker disregard the traditional harvest dates, add an unauthorized grape variety, or employ fruit from outside the designated area (all elements of the prescribed pattern), his audience may react with surprise or indignation. ”Hey,” someone will say, “that’s no Côtes du Rhone.”
The appellation system works smoothly for winemakers and wine drinkers alike until someone comes along for whom the accepted forms feel like more of a hindrance than a help. The impulse to jump the fence and explore fresh territory is more likely to come from the vintner side of the equation than from consumers, although consumers become willing co-conspirators when they grow a bit weary of the same old thing.
From the start, the FK Wine Corner has harbored a healthy respect for outstanding examples of approved-model winemaking — let’s call it wine that rhymes — but also a delight in the kind of fence-jumping and form bending that results in bottles that either refuse to rhyme or, if they do, bump along at some idiosyncratic tump-itty tump we don’t yet recognize. There are any number ways for winemakers to go rogue in this way. Let’s quickly look at five.
Natural wines, for example, seem to have a rhyme scheme all their own, which is to say that, among other things, we see less consistency from one property to another even if they happen to be in the same appellation. Sometimes, wines made this way don’t show enough typicity (conformation to approved standards of taste) to be passed by appellation authority tasting panels, and thus may be denied the designation they would otherwise qualify for.
Low to no sulfur wines. Without additions of sulfur dioxide at various stages of winemaking made with a view to maintaining bright fruit flavors, aromas, and colors and suppressing unwanted bacterial activity, wine tends to take on a divergent character. You may call what results faulty or just alt-y, depending on whether you tend to avoid or seek them out. See natural wines, above.
White wines made like reds. In conventional white wine-making fresh grapes are pressed and the juice fermented apart from any solid matter. Red wines are made by crushing grapes so that fermentation takes place in the presence of all the solid matter (skins, pulp, seeds, sometimes stems). The tannins and pigments this latter process extracts are what make red wine what it is. Give white grapes the red grape treatment and what you get is a white wine with flashes of the color, texture, and grip of a red. Tasting what are often called orange wines (for the amber hue they assume) can be a real paradigm shifter.
Wines in non-standard packaging. At this point, there’s nothing terribly new about bag-in-box, TetraPaks and cans, except this: We’re at the point where what we would call real wine appear in these formats. The disconnect for the consumer comes when long-established ideas about glass bottles and cork closures being the one true and unfailing guarantee of quality meets this new reality.
Unchaptalized wines. It’s not legal everywhere, but in many parts of the wine world it’s accepted procedure to add sugar to fermenting musts in years when nature doesn’t provide the ripeness required to raise alcohols to what are thought to legal levels. The technique doesn’t add anything BUT alcohol to the finished wine, however, and for this reason some winemakers voluntarily forswear the practice. The truth is that lower alcohol wine (let’s say below 12 percent) can be wholly charming and delightfully drinkable. The current popularity of feather-weight, chillable reds proves our point.
Wines that don’t rhyme can be a little demanding, generally requiring more time and patience to sell, and calling on consumers to reset some expectations. While not every wine shop or consumer is willing to make the effort, we do, because, in the end, we’re convinced that wine, like poetry or any other human effort, has the obligation to progress — even if that only means replacing one tumpitty-tump with another.
Reach me at stephenmeuse@icloud.com