Better Winemaking Through Chemistry

There is an article in the New York Times Magazine about the wine consultant Leo McCloskey. He has developed a method of analyzing about 100 trace chemicals in wine and has correlated these with the rankings and scores given to these wines by wine makers and wine critics. He analyzes these trace chemicals in grapes before harvest and in the juice just after the crush and uses this to recommend when to harvest and how to process the wine.

To those who think winemaking is an art form, using chemistry to improve the quality may sound offensive, but I don’t see anything wrong with this. What has gotten some people all bent out of shape about this article (see this thread at Robert Parker’s web site for example) is that McCloskey claims he can predict the score that major wine critics will give a wine from measurements of these trace chemicals in the wine.

The style of wine McCloskey seem to be encouraging requires wineries to get the grapes fully ripe (overripe?) and then to limit the amount of skin contact during fermentation to reduce the tannins. McCloskey says critics and I guess consumers favor highly extracted wines with softer tannins that are more drinkable when they are young. The article does point out that this may not produce wines that age as well, but again I don’t see anything wrong with that. Most wine, even high priced cabernets are drunk fairly young. Very few people have wine cellars with 10-20 year old Bordeaux or California Cabernets. Wineries sell wine as a business, and that means they need to make a profit. Basic business 101 is to make your product more attractive to the consumer, and it only makes sense that a consumer that just paid $30-100 for a bottle of Cabernet would want to drink it sometime relatively soon, not put it in a cellar for 15 years before trying it.

The article does mention that Joel Peterson of Ravenswood, famous for their No Wimpy Wine slogan, tried McCloskey’s analysis but decided they didn’t like the results. Some people are worried that this kind of analysis is accelerating the trend towards homogenized wine making, where everyone tries to make wines that taste the same, but it is really the wine critics and the consumers that follow their recommendations that are responsible for this. Presumably, critics like Robert Parker are so influential because many consumers have found they like the wines that he likes.

The winery most prominently mentioned in this article as a McCloskey client is Chappellet. I have tasted a number of Chappellet wines in the last year. I liked some of them (here and here) and didn’t like one (here), so I have an open mind.