Creative tension

Published: (01-06-2008)
Author: Wine & Spirit News Desk
Are all wines increasingly tasting the same? This was just one of the questions at the inaugural Winecreator conference in Ronda last month. Stuart Walton reports
The question of whether wine diversity is being sacrificed on the altar of commercial homogenisation increasingly feels like the only game in town. Books are pouring forth, earnest debates are being joined, international colloquies convened. Nor is the tone always entirely comradely. In some quarters, tempers are fraying.
On the whole, we can only welcome this. The conversation the wine world is having with itself is the one that matters most of all. When I raised these issues in a book of 2001, nobody much wanted to do anything other than celebrate the glorious efflorescence that was contemporary wine. Now, it seems, everybody is concerned about the standardisation of consumer taste that appears to be driven by the markets, by the major players in the retail trade, and by certain wine commentators.
The inaugural conference of a n international symposium, Winecreator, was held in the Andalusian town of Ronda. Hemingway once stopped here for the bullfighting, and something of the toreador spirit prevailed as an impressive assemblage of winemakers and critics met for a day and a half to ponder the pertinent issues.
Presiding over the opening proceedings, Jancis Robinson MW appealed to participants to leave their platitudes at the door and address the topics with intellectual rigour and honesty. The opening session duly plunged straight into the question of whether terroir, the fabled sense of place, should matter more in wine than commercial appeal. French critic Michel Bettane argued, unexpectedly perhaps, that all wine was about manipulation. A wine could express its geography, but it could also express the way the winemaker has chosen to interpret that geography.
Portugal's Dirk van der Niepoort made many of the more thoughtful contributions. He found it disturbing that viticultural training still over-emphasises fruit maturation, as though nothing were more important than ultra-ripeness, the result of which has been a generation of wines that show evidence of surmaturité. Overripeness was consistently condemned. It has been caused in many areas, French oenologist Denis Dubourdieu noted, by the preference for red varieties with longer vegetative cycles, because these are less likely to produce hard tannins but are also helping to drive alcohol levels up.
Irrigation reared its controversial head, with Bettane suggesting some loss of character is the price for ensuring quality in dry vineyards . Niepoort retorted that vineyards shouldn't be planted in regions that were too dry .
What is often perplexing about the debate is that the very homogenisation we are regretting is as much about quality as it is about style. Conference organiser José Peñín argued that wine is gradually becoming more boring as it gets better. Comparative tastings result in ever higher average ratings for wines, not least because hefty yields are capable of being turned into better wine than would have been possible 20 years ago.
Dubourdieu concurred. In some cases, lowering yields only magnifies problems, such as the extrusion of green tannin. He also reminded us that the single common factor of all wines perceived as great in the past was that they were transformed by ageing. Modern consumer pressure is changing that, meaning winemakers must decide whether wines with firm phenolic structure are still preferable to wines for drinking young.
Wine commentators naturally came in for some stick. Peter Sisseck, a grower in Ribera del Duero, resented the accusation levelled by some that winemakers have no interest in outside opinion. US critic, David Schildknecht insist ed a bullish market for fine wine leads to too much wine being made and an oversensitivity to criticism among those striving for their share of the action. At the bottom end, meanwhile, there is incessant downward pressure on price, especially during an economic slowdown. But instead of the press helping to incubate talent among winemakers there is obsessive concentration on a handful of super-premium wines, which only accentuates the quality dichotomy.
As the spectre of Robert Parker hovered over the conference's closing stages, the importance of a critical dialogue that might influence winemaking for the better was stressed. Joshua Greene, editor and publisher of Wine & Spirits in the States, ventured that the notion of the monolithic American market was a myth. There was no single consumer taste, let alone a "Parkerised" one. Robinson said that, as beings who were parasitic on the whole business of winemaking, critics often had too great a sense of their own importance.