Cheers!

Cheers!

H. William (Bill) Harlan broaches wine as art in his foreword to Steve Heimoff's book New Classic Winemakers of California. "In California . . .a fortunate combination of terrain, climate, and geology endows the earth here with the capacity for great bounty. It provides the potential for great art, made from the fruit of the vine, coaxed by man - subject to nature".

Harlan comes closer to the truth about how wine could be described as art. The making of wine is about taking raw materials - earth, vine, sunlight - and creating an alchemy of sorts - gold from juice. Great wine is born when proportion, balance, scale, color, contrast, and a story to tell - all characteristics of art - come together once and only once to create a substance that can never be made the same again.

But wine is also mass-produced, like a chair or a vase. In that sense, should wine more properly be defined as craft?

Tim Crane, in his essay "Wine as an Aesthetic Object", makes some interesting points on the subject. "Things can be appreciated aesthetically without being works of art. A landscape can be appreciated as beautiful; so can a man or a woman. Wine certainly admits of aesthetic evaluation. Wines are praised as elegant, refined, balanced; they are criticized for being crude, brash or unbalanced. But wines are not works of art, and winemakers are not artists. The winemaker is doing something else: practicing a craft, engaging in high-end agriculture, making a beautiful drink - but not making a work of art."

Then Crane softens a bit: "It is not necessary to insist that wine is a work of art in order to claim many of the privileges of works of art. Wine is an aesthetic object rather than an art object. Art objects may matter to us partly because of their aesthetic qualities; but mere aesthetic objects can matter to us for exactly the same kinds of reasons, and wine might be like this."
Art itself is impossible to define beyond agreeing that it is made with deliberation and that it is meant to appeal to the senses or emotions. Wine's ephemeral nature does not exclude it from being viewed as an art form. Whether or not wine is seen as art, or as an aesthetic object, or craft, or simply a wonderful agricultural product, we can all agree that it can be a pretty astounding drink.

Cheers!

This October Sunday was harvest day. We left West County before dawn, driving through fog and drizzle to Healdsburg and Domaine St. George winery. Kenny Likitprakong and his wife Lynn Wheeler have chosen three rows of Cabernet Sauvignon from his family's vineyard for their Hobo Russian River Cabernet Sauvignon. Their daughter Ida now runs through the same vineyards Kenny played in when he was a child. We waited at the end of the road by the metal gate watching dawn arrive with slate blue light, the overcast sky slow to be revealed, the light not coming so much from the east as from a vague somewhere. Kenny drove up to the gate with his father, who as a young college graduate traveled from New York in 1973 to spend a summer assisting his uncle who purchased Domaine St. George that year. He never left, and is integral to the business still.

Only three rows but the terrain is steep, and we grab the sharp secateurs, ready to go. "Cut the whole clusters from the stem, away from the fruit so your blades won't get sticky from the juice. Leave the small grape clumps on the lateral stems for second crop". Smart enough not to trust us too much with the work, Kenny made sure that four of his best vineyard workers, led by Renaldo and Rachel, joined us. They chose small sickle-like knives as tools to harvest, and the fruit quickly drops in the small white bins, practically pouring off the vines. We move much slower, but soon fall into a steady rhythm. The air is cool with just a hint of mist. The grape leaves vary in color from green to gold to variegated red as we move up the hill. It is so quiet in the vineyard this morning, only a mix of English and Spanish spoken as we all get to know each other.

 Looking south, we see a wild landscape of manzanita and scrub oak just beyond the vineyard's reach - we look for signs of fox or deer. To the north stands the old metal bridge over the Russian River and Healdsburg beyond.

Less than two hours and we have almost a ton of fruit - ripe, sweet Cabernet, a dusty, dark blueberry color, small berries for such a noble grape. An excellent crop and Kenny is pleased. "That's 55 cases of wine right there". We pause and reflect on our efforts over coffee and pastries. But more grapes are waiting to be picked in Mendocino County in the afternoon and Kenny is already on the cell phone making arrangements - the task made more difficult when Ida wants to play hide and seek among the wine barrels. Some of the fruit to be picked includes not so common varietals such as Valdigue. Asked why the interest in that fruit, Lynn says "We want to keep winemaking fun."

Kenny and Lynn generously hand out bottles of Hobo Cabernet from the 2006 and 2007 vintages - from these very vines! - as thank you for our help. We couldn't keep from decanting and drinking the 2006 vintage with dinner and enjoyed its cassis and blueberry fruit with a wonderful pepper accent. We loved the wine found in the bottle, but getting our boots dusty and hands juice-sticky, living for just a very short time the life of a winemaker and vineyard worker, makes us appreciate wine and the joy it brings even more.

Cheers!

manipulation.  You’d be astounded by the amount of junk people throw into their wines, buckets and buckets of rubbish.  They beat the crap out of their wine – for example by pumping the wine and forcing it through filters”.

Atascadero Creek wines tend to be Burgundian in nature, nicely balanced with spicy and earthy notes.  Plenty of fruit but not fruit bombs.  “I have inoculated with yeast for years, just de-stem and place into the fermentors.  I don’t filter or fine my red wines, and the wines are carefully racked, corked and labeled by hand.  We asked about style.  “The great thing about being an independent winemaker is that I can make my own palate”.  Appleby’s wines don’t need to taste the same year after year, so Bob can respond creatively to each year’s vineyard expression.   We recommend trying a couple of Bob’s offerings – they are featured in a good many West County restaurants by the glass and bottle.

Wine can be maddening in its elusiveness to description.  Wine notes are awash with similes as reviewers try to nail down in words the ephemeral yet many layered nature of how a wine tastes.  Edward Hopper said “If I could say it in words there would be no reason to paint.”  We wonder how many winemakers feel the same about their art when they see the critics distill their wine to words.

Cheers!

We recently came to wine from professional careers in architecture and interior design. Although the design field requires its share of science and technology - after all, buildings need to stay put and function as intended - the central kernel or core of design is the creative impulse. We know that winemaking is also governed to a great degree by science and technology. But we have met so many winemakers with amazing talent in music, art, food and athletics we have to wonder if those with innate creative abilities make better, more interesting wine. For it could be argued that as the winemaker's work moves nearer science, it moves further from humanity. From time to time in this column we will introduce you to these creative people and hear their take on wine and design.

An ongoing debate throughout the history of design is simplicity versus complexity. Curnonsky, the famous French gastronome, said that "in cooking, like all other arts, simplicity and sincerity are the two principle elements of perfection". We like to substitute wine for cooking in this quote, for winemaking is also an art. This column in the future will explore whether simplicity in winemaking is critical or dare we say essential to great wine, or whether complexity wins the day.

Like many of you, we are not wine experts, but have always enjoyed drinking it and learning

about it. We will undoubtedly ask some naive  questions of the wine gurus and expect to receive some interesting answers back. We will pass these on hoping to amuse as well as educate.

Speaking about education - we should have asked more questions about trellising for our vines in front of the shop. We winged it a bit instead, and it isn't pretty - too complex as a matter of fact. Fortunately there's always next year to improve.

While reading an essay on art appreciation in The Book of Tea by Kakuzo, we found a quote (substituting the word wine for art here) that made us stop and think - "In my young days I praised the winemaker whose wines I liked, but as my judgment matured I praised myself for liking what the winemaker had chosen to have me like". Let's give ourselves credit for trusting our taste and not relying on someone else's taste.

The accepted method of scoring wine is the number rating system. If a wine magazine rates a wine 90 or higher, it sends people flocking to buy. So math governs purchase. However, one wise customer this week told us their unique way of rating wine - the happiness scale; not so happy up to very, very happy. Maybe not mathematic or scientific, but more human don't you think?

Cheers!