That naivete soon wore off with a little life experience and a good dose of philosophy – but I can’t say I ever fully understood the distance between expression and material until I began to consider my wine drinking with more nuance than simply as a vehicle for hedonism and pleasure. It is common parlance in wine circles to talk of wine as the expression of a particular place, with its unique geology and topology. There is also talk of wine as the expression of history – how, for example, a group of simple monks over a thousand years ago sowed the seeds for what has become one of the wine world’s greatest enigmas and obsessions: Burgundy. And, not to be forgotten is the view of wine as the expression of personality – whether it be a consultant’s bravado or a humble family’s simple pleasures.

However, less thought is put into thinking of wine as choice, as a series of interactions through which human endeavor moulds and particularizes the expression of something enigmatic and unreachable. Some may be quick to pipe in that this enigmatic material from which wine leaps into the world is best understood as ‘terroir’. Over time, however, I’ve come to think of it as something far more.

The soul of wine is simply not comprehensible with reference to soil types, sun exposure, and topography. There is no doubt these things play an important influence in how a wine tastes – but that is quite a different question from the soul of a wine, what makes a wine live (or not) when you finally pour it into your glass.

Separation can be painful, it can produce longing, fear, anticipation. We struggle with separation all the time both in our personal lives, as a society (or societies) and as a species. But despite our endless attempts to control and predict, we can never escape the inevitable distances that ultimately form an important part of our life experiences. How can wine be any different?

The making of wine is in many ways a struggle against separation – that between the material that ends up in the bottle and the perceptions of the drinker; that between a natural world that often conspires to destroy crops and produce less than perfect ripeness or freshness and a product meant to evoke pleasure. The remoteness of so many vineyards and the solitary work of small vignerons is off set by the ever so important companionship that lets many of the world’s most unforgiving wine regions survive and even thrive.

But the great irony lies in that in spite of this struggle, the greatest wines (and I’m not talking high scores or prices here) are those that revel in distance, in being ungraspable. It is this unbridgeable gap that makes the best wines so compelling, that draws us closer even as it keeps us away. This special character is one that we will never pin down, never translate into language and one that will certainly never become a formula for success. There is no doubt in my mind that history, terroir, and personality are fundamentally important to and a part of wine and wine appreciation. But what keeps us up at night is the excited anxiety we feel when we, impossibly, experience the expression of something we cannot grasp. Like ghosts, these wines become sources of exhilaration as much as they haunt us, never letting go – everything else becoming far too solid in a world where the ethereal lies hidden before us in the everyday if only we can notice.

These days I approach things with a greater sense of humility, I pause more often, reflect, and accept that what I see and experience is but a glimpse not only of what is, but also of what is possible. I think the greatest compliment I can give to wine is that it’s helped me discover this side of myself in visceral experiences, which is an accomplishment that has alluded some of the greatest thinkers in the history of thought. In the end, it seems, we do need to experience and feel just as much as think. And so I gladly embrace the simple yet compelling creed: think less, feel more.

I recently attended an excellent tasting of so-called ‘natural wines’ hosted here in Vancouver. The attendees had various levels of experience with these wines but all were engaged in thinking about them and experiencing them. This openmindedness is precisely what natural wines are all about. But, as we spent the evening discussing and pontificating over – what are natural wines?

To begin, the most important task in understanding natural wine is to debunk the Socratic myth of natural perfection: an ideal form that underlies the possibility of all nature. Any winemaker with the pretense of finding this ideal form of nature through a bottle of wine is not a great representation of what makes the natural wine movement interesting. It is also such an approach that leads easily into dogma.

So, then, how do we broach the subject? One early distinction was that natural wine makers attempted to add nothing to a wine once it entered the cellar (a logical counterpart to movements like organic and biodynamic wine growing). No enzymes, no sulphur, no commercial yeasts, etc. etc. Some proponents have even gone so far to say that no new wood should be used as it imparts its own character that is not part of the ‘natural’ grape. Thus have some producers started using amphorae, which supposedly offer the most neutral fermentation vessel possible, and which allow native yeast colonies to form and live within the pores of the clay.

But to me this prompts a very big question: what is the underlying rationale that draws the line between humans and nature in such an idiosyncratic way? It is obvious that the very process of planting, picking and fermenting grapes is a human process, both conceived of in the human brain and meant to serve human needs and desires. We shape our environment when we plant and grow vines and make wine from their fruits. This process has, of course, become a vast continuum with industrial wine makers using this raw material as a mere base to make a heavily adulterated product that offers consistency at very high volumes. So, perhaps naturalists are those who, at first, eschew this sort of high volume wine making. Natural wines would not be possible at extremely high yields and on vast tracks of land with mammoth fermentation tanks. It is also questionable at what level a human can agriculturally understand a complex diverse natural environment over huge swathes of land – monoculture and a controlled environment become the necessary norms after a certain size.

So, a natural wine requires a smaller more understandable environment, which is in itself a good example of the fact that the best and most emblematic natural wine makers are those who are humble in the face of the land that they work. So, for me, first off natural wines are small scale wines that take the time to understand and respect every detail of what is going on both in the vineyard and in the cellar.

But that, surely, is not enough to explain what is going on here. During the tasting I noted that many had a fairly technical approach to understanding why natural wines were different – the litany of chemical processes that compensate or enhance wine should not be part of a natural wine. But is this entirely true?

Lapierre and Overnoy, two ‘natural wine’ producers in Beaujolais and the Jura respectively, have admitted to chaptilizing their wines on occasion. I’m not sure that vaults them out of the natural wine category. Clearly ‘natural’ is something more than merely technical.

A common refrain amongst naturalists is to do nothing to the grapes that they cannot do themselves. Do not compensate for bad vintages, for incomplete fermentations, for acid imbalance. Let the wines be what they are when they are. But why do nothing, or at least as little as possible? The underlying philosophy here is that doing nothing is (1) more respectful to the environment in which the grapes grow, (2) is a more authentic or complete expression of something that is the product of the earth rather than of human design, and (3) raises the ‘natural’ origins of the product above the hubris of the human ego. This underlying philosophy is a significant reason why natural wines have become more than simply a way of making wine taste good; rather, natural wines have become a rallying point for all those who infuse their wine drinking with at least a semblance of ethics.

To drink natural wine is, to many believers, to drink something that is more ethically pure than the majority of ‘adulterated’ wines on the market. This has been, understandably, a turn off for many who simply either do not want to think of the moral dimensions of what they are drinking or do not think of these dimensions on such stark terms. Recent debates surrounding natural wine in the United States and Europe have pushed this dogmatic and yet quite prevalent association to the side somewhat and have tried to move the debate forward to something more symbiotic. It is this sense of symbiosis that I find most compelling.

It is the most farcical parody of ego-critique to uncritically elevate a reverence for nature over human production. As the environmental movement that began in the 1960’s has shown us, such view points are not only a form of substituting an idealized environment for an overblown and self-righteous ego but are also entirely ineffective at resolving actual issues. The question of our relationship to the environments in which we live (which include social and political as well as natural environments as any good evolutionary theorist would admit) is not a question of ‘letting nature speak for itself’, a mere pipe-dream. Rather, if we really want to question how we relate to our environments, and if we want to bring ethical questions into this questioning, we have to understand the human-environment equation as inextricable even while the elements remain distinct. This is what the most exciting proponents of natural wine are finally figuring out.

There are good natural wines and bad natural wines. You can assess these wines analytically and personally just like any other. The best naturalists don’t just want to make ethical wines, they also want to make good wines. For the best naturalists, making a good wine also means making wine that distinctly expresses aspects of both the grapes and their environment that we otherwise cannot experience. Hence enters the idea of symbiosis – naturalists are trying to create a symbiotic relationship between themselves and the environment in which their grapes are grown and then fermented into wine. It is not a question of dominance – either of man over nature or of nature over man. Rather, it is a question of learning from that which elides our desires to categorize and to essentialize. To me, the best natural wines capture the elusive mystery of the natural world in a way that other wines don’t. They do this by dialing back all of the modern wine making techniques that have proliferated across the world and come to dominate agriculture and wine making and by, in a sense, starting from scratch.

If we do very little to the grapes, then we can see their potential more clearly. It is for this reason, I believe, that most of the best naturalists are actually incredibly empirical. They test and experiment and take risks in order to discover potentials in their grapes that no one else has discovered. It is for this reason I believe that naturalists could end up being the most important forward thinkers in wine: they believe in their subject and they want it to teach them rather than for them to dominate and control it. This is a radical shift away from current wine making practices. Are the results perfect? Not at all. But they are almost always interesting and the best are constantly progressing and learning with each vintage. This is why we can’t define natural wines: they have not yet defined themselves.

Some Natural Wines

Here are some brief notes on some of the wines that we drank over the evening. All these producers are making wines with very minimal intervention in the cellar, and all with indigenous yeasts.

Rkatsiteli Kakheti 2008: The only orange wine of the night (white wine with extended skin contact). It would have been nice to compare this with some other orange wines, but this at least was an example of the style. I found it overly aggressive and tannic with pretty much no fruit left and plenty of volatile acidity. This is not true of all orange wines, which can be quite finessed at times.

Movia Puro 2002: I brought this bottle of undisgorged sparkling from Slovenia’s Movia. A blend of Chardonnay, Pinot Noir and Ribolla Giala, this wine was remarkably fresh. I’m not quite sure technically why Movia wants this wine to sit on its yeast until drinking, but it was surprisingly less yeasty on the palate than I expected. I also thought the wine was outstanding.

Catherine and Andre Breton Les Perrieres 1997: 1997 and 2002 are both outstanding vintages for the Loire, and this Breton was holding up remarkably well. Unlike some of the other wines, this was varietally pure and classically Cabernet Franc from the Loire. Some vegetal elements here with some cooler berry fruits. You might not guess this is a ‘natural wine’ when drinking due to an absence of the faults you can often find in natural wines. The Bretons also use almost no sulpher, which makes the freshness of this 14 year old wine even more impressive.

Clos Rougeard 2002: This is pretty outstanding stuff and it lives up to the name. There is plenty of garden vegetables here and I found the wine to be a pretty much perfect expression of Cab Franc.

Gravner Rosso 1994: Gravner now ferments in amphora, and was, from what I can tell, the first modern european wine maker to use the amphora fermentation technique, which he discovered in Georgia. While this wine is from his pre-amphora days, I was extremely surprised at its expressivity, particularly given the age. Again, this was varietally correct and aromatically outstanding. Another beacon for natural wine making.

Frank Cornellisen Munjebel 6: This did not show as well as it did when I had it in New York a few months ago. I found the wine to be somewhat overly aggressive and I could not detect the varietal characteristics of the Nerello Mascalese grapes from which this was made. It was still a pleasure to drink and offered an amalgam of lightness and tannin that is pretty darn uncommon. Amphora fermented.

Dettori Tenores 2005: I had this the night before, and it showed better then. However, this is still really impressive wine. The 16% ABV does not show at all and I think the Grenache characteristics come through nicely in the wine. The wine at the tasting made me wonder about serious bottle variability, however, as the balsamic notes were a bit aggressive in the nose and overall the wine was less balanced and pretty than Friday’s bottle.

We also tasted some New World wines that I wouldn’t classify as natural, but are pushing towards it in some ways. We had a Pinot Blanc and a Riesling from Pyramid Valley Vineyards of New Zealand. The PB was a bit green, but the riesling showed nicely and is atypical for New Zealand, with some nice florality and a hint of residual sugar. The most interesting New World wine was the Cameron Clos Electrique white, which was made from cuttings from Corton. It tasted a hell of a lot like a good burgundy and was quite impressive – though again I wouldn’t put this winemaker in the naturalist camp.

It is easy to move from village to village and happen upon endless wine bars, restaurants and wine shops, each with a different vibe and selection. Me being who I am, I searched the city for stores and restaurants with a passionate and means-conscious approach to wine.

East Village: Of Amphora and Rustic Italian

My journey began in the East Village, surely one of Manhattan’s most exciting neighbourhoods, at Il Buco restaurant. Il Buco has a Wine Spectator award winning wine list – not something that would draw me in given a recent scandal exposing serious flaws in the awards process and given the Spectator’s monolithic palate. Il Buco, however, goes beyond all that nonsense. While the food is very good but not truly outstanding, the wine list offers many exciting finds.

My decision came quickly upon seeing an entire page of the wine list dedicated to Cornelissen, the Belgian wine maker who moved to Sicily to start making wines fermented in amphora, like the Romans used to do. I chose the Munjebel 6, a wine fermented in a clay pot buried in the ground. You might expect such a wine to be rustic and flawed, to say the least. My shock was at the profound precision and cleanliness of the wine, which possessed both lightness and very serious structure.

How a wine can be closer in colour to a Rose and yet possess tannins as hefty as a barbaresco is something I still do not understand. The wine, like many wines I’ve had with extended maceration, played chameleon to the food and worked with everything from burrata and pickled onions to gnocchi to slow roasted pork. Quite unlike any wine I’ve had thus far and one worth seeking out.

Unfortunately, I later found out the restaurant charged 2.5x the retail price of the wine, which in a city like New York is a travesty. The experience, however, was well worth the price and the atmosphere of the restaurant was more romantic and lovely than anything available in Vancouver.

East Village Part 2: Terroir

Those who regularly read the blog will know that I adore San Francisco’s Terroir Wine Bar and Merchant – a singular place that specializes in wines made with as few chemicals as possible.

Terroir in Manhattan’s East Village purports to follow the same concept, but is in fact not at all related to Terroir SF. This turns out to be an unfortunate reality as Terroir NYC does not rise to the same level.

Yes the wine bar pours some very good wines by the glass, but the atmosphere is cramped and filled with a bunch of wine-likers but not that many truly obsessive types. Of course, your tastes might dictate that you prefer a wine bar with a more straightforward atmosphere and some good wine by the glass, but this place tends to be cramped and somehow seems to disappoint in a city like New York. But all is not lost in a city with an unparalleled level of experimentation.

Financial District: North America’s First ‘Natural Wine’ Store

Manhattan has a mind boggling number of wine stores. It would be easy to walk into a dozen and never be impressed. At the same time, Manhattan’s diversity has given rise to a few of the best wine stores in the entire country.

Chambers Street Wine is pretty much the first wine store in North America to champion so-called ‘natural wines’. This means more that the store is fanatical about knowing everything there is to know about the producers it carries, building personal relationships with them and with importers in the U.S. and ensuring perfect provenance for all their wines.

West coast aficionados will find an incredible array of Italian wine at this shop that extends far beyond what you find in California or the rest of the Pacific North West. I was personally greeted by a wonderful sales person who talked my ear off about all her passions and thoughts about the wines in the store. Completely unpretentiously, I was directed both to rare treats like the $150 Cornelissen Magma and to an inexpensive small producer Aglianico for a mere $20.

The store also boasts an amazing selection of old German Rieslings, Italian Barolos and Loire Valley Cab Franc. I walked away with a 1997 Breton single vineyard Bourgueil for less than you would pay for a current vintage in Vancouver.

I could wax poetic for a long time about this store and its staff, but the best example I can give is that after an hour long conversation I was directed to a favourite China Town stop for lunch and sent off with a 1995 Barolo for a mere $25.

China Town: Duck and Barolo

In New York one can easily spend a fortune dining at highly regarded and Michelin starred restaurants. This is the easy path towards a memorable experience. But I imagine that such lavish moments pale in comparison to something as simple as a tucked away Peking Duck restaurant in the heart of Manhattan’s China Town and a $0 corkage for a 15 year old Barolo.

Clearly Peking Duck House mastered the art of Peking Duck decades ago. A perfect spice rub, immaculate carving of superb quality duck and home made hoisin sauce provided the best Chinese Food I’ve had in ages. That I paired it with a 1995 Rocca La Pira Barolo? That the pairing was one of the best I’ve had? Well that was perfection.

Greenwich Village: Corporate Batali Shows the Goods

There is something particularly irritating about super chefs who franchise their brand across the country. Batali is one such chef that brings the ire to my eyes. However, a quick stop off at Otto after an inspiring modern jazz concert at Cornelia Café convinced me that at least this man understands quality and value.

Huge artisanal pizzas accompanied by 1/3 bottles of small producer wines from Piedmont, Campania and Tuscany for $12-$16? Yes, that works. The food and wine were both outstanding and, much like Greenwich Village itself, Otto shows that even the upscale and slightly vanilla experiences in New York can yield great results.

Lower East Side: Manhattan’s Best Wine Bar

Despite the many fine experiences I had in Manhattan, my last night in town at The Ten Bells at Orchard and Broome (recommended, once again, by the amazing staff at Chambers Street Wines) was pure New York. Perhaps it was the dingy surroundings, or the fact that I had just seen the mind-blowing 7 hour play Gatz (a word for word rendition of The Great Gatsby), or possibly the superb list of wines from the likes of Movia, Breton, etc. (including an amazing sparkling Gamay from the Loire), or the expertly crafted small plates and carefully selected cheeses – whatever the reason, The Ten Bells stood out to me as the best wine bar in Manhattan and the NYC rival to SF’s Terroir.

Both places are passionate beyond the realm of normalcy, both located in slightly off the cuff areas, and both are – to a fault – true to the place they inhabit. Terroir’s rustic wood interior and retro vinyl collection are matched by The Ten Bells’ inspired avant-garde interior, perfectly executed small plates, and passionate, thoughtful clientele and staff.

It strikes me that the particularity of wine does not only need to arise from the glass itself, but can also find expression in the setting. The greatest testament to both Terroir SF and The Ten Bells NYC is that each is authentically grounded in its milieu, much like the wines they pour. I can think of no higher praise for a wine bar.

Conclusion

This article has offered but a mere sampling of the great wines and wine experiences available in Manhattan. It is also easy to forget the bevy of crappy wine available in the city and the reams of faceless and soulless wine bars. However, Manhattan is near immune to such things. With its endless variation and diversity, there is no need to stick around somewhere that sucks. This is something that Vancouver (and, honestly, most other cities) completely lacks. But perhaps it is such juxtapositions that give us pause and make us realize why experimentation, entrepreneurship and passion are far more effective drivers for an industry than nanny-state government regulation.

Post-Mortem

I would be remiss to not mention that the ultimate purpose of my trip was to attend one of my closest friend’s wedding, which was a beautiful event in rural Maryland with clear skies and dappled foliage. That my friend is a beer geek? Well that led to the consumption of a few special mid-west and east coast brews, my favourite of which were probably the Founder’s Harvest Ale and the Shlafly 2007 Reserve Barley Wine. Oh, and why don’t more people make stouts brewed with honey and aged in Whisky barrels:

Many wine consumers are too intimidated to ask a sommelier or lack enough immediate knowledge to inform a sommelier what they feel like. With a device like the iPad a consumer has access to reams of information without having to fear sounding stupid. And, once that consumer has gained confidence they can dialogue with the sommelier more effectively.

While some sommeliers worry that the iPad would take away personalization, in my mind, if a wine program was developed effectively in its electronic mode, it would rather increase and augment personal connection and make the experience much more enjoyable. Bone has certainly seen the benefits with 11% more wine sales and customers generally spending more money on wine than usual.

The downside, of course, is that with ready access to big publications and Parker points, etc. consumers could lose the experience of wine and food that a sommelier spends so much time creating and instead feast upon the easy understandability of the 100 point scale. Of course, a good restaurant could simply design a personalized electronic wine program for its customers that would avoid all of that nonsense. On the other hand, if customers got used to seeing Parker points for every wine on a wine list, they might start demanding access to these points of other establishments.

However, this is but a possible problem attached to the many other benefits that iPad wine lists could bring. Let’s see if anyone picks this up in Vancouver.

The full article is here.

1. Arg, the Olympics is coming, how will I get to work?

2. Well I guess a lot of people will be celebrating B.C. during the Olympics – that’s good.

3. Wait, why are all Olympic venues dominated by large multi-national corporations?

4. No one will be celebrating what is truly B.C. during the Olympics!!

5. What can I do?

6. Well, I don’t usually enjoy or drink that many B.C. wines, but perhaps it’s time to do a profile on B.C. wineries during the Olympics.

7. But, I can’t really afford to pay for wines that I wouldn’t normally drink. I have a limited budget and like to spend it on things I’m excited about.

8. Hm, well since I’m going to put a ton of effort into researching, reviewing and writing about these wines, maybe the wineries will just send me samples. It seems fair and reasonable.

9. Ok, I’ll do it – at least to give the small guys a voice during the Olympics.

During this process I’ve been reading a lot of opinions and criticism about wine writing in both the traditional media and blogging. Complaints about bias and lack of integrity abound in the world of wine lovers and industry types. What are some of these concerns?

• Wineries and wine associations pay for free trips of wine writers and those connected in the industry. How can these individuals offer fair and unbiased opinions?

• Corporate interests are dominating the public’s access to and appreciation of wine. There are no real venues in B.C. to market and share small artisanal and family producers that are kicking the SH*!()$* out of the big guys in terms of quality.

• Some wine bloggers never write negative reviews, and simply lap up samples of low quality wine and shill them on the public in puff pieces.

• Some wine publications do exactly the same thing.

No one likes to be unpopular. It’s tough to be truly and fairly critical – to strike the balance between accuracy, fairness, and honest opinion. It’s also tough, as an amateur and in a media environment where advertising dollars are flushing down the drain, to afford to taste and drink the 1000’s of wine it is necessary to drink to educate your palate. The more I think of it, the more I realize that it is costly and risky to have integrity as a writer and journalist – but it is just these sorts of people that we need to support.

My philosophy is simple – one should be independent (fiercely so) and one should not be writing about wine if one’s career depends on connections within the industry and if one can advance their career by being sycophantic. These are just principles of journalistic integrity, much of which is depleting as it is more and more difficult for news agencies to be independent from corporate interests.

There is also the sheer ridiculousness of writing about wine based on tasting through 100’s of wines at tastings and press events. Now, I appreciate these events for what they are for providing a means to educate my palate – but to be honest, I never really understand or appreciate wine unless I’m sitting down drinking it with a meal or just sipping it during good conversation. You know, like most people do when they actually drink the wine we write about.

Now, this leads me, somewhat as a digression I suppose, into the Ideology of Quality. When I received these samples for the B.C. wine tasting, I also received marketing materials. Here is a common theme in the marketing materials:

• This winery was founded on passion and love for the vine.
• We believe in putting the best efforts into our vines and wines.
• We believe these are some of the best wines of the type in the world!
• Look at all the awards we’ve won!

In addition to these common themes, some more specific brands of the Ideology of Quality are:

• We believe in minimal intervention.
• We let the fruit speak for itself.
• We use extremely low yields.
• We want the land to speak through in our wines.
• We use the most advanced techniques possible to produce authentic high quality wines.
• Look at all the awards we’ve won!

Here are a few things I know. “Minimal intervention” is a near meaningless phrase in itself. What is minimal? Wine making IS intervention in nature. Minimal is meaningless. What matters are the particular choices you make when you grow, harvest, and vinify grapes. It’s not a question of no interference and much interference, it is a question of your philosophy of production – of your approach to creation and the process of human interaction with nature. Ya, so that’s meaningless and yet it’s used on consumers all the time.

“We let the fruit speak for itself”. Wha? Ok, but you also crush it, and stick it in vats and use yeast to ferment the crushed grapes into an alcoholic beverage, and you probably add sulphur and oak, etc. And yet, these words are commonly spoken to the average wine buyer or winery visitor. Again, it doesn’t really mean anything.

Passion for the vine. Ok, that’s great. But, this phrase is now a cliché, which means it is devoid of particular meaning. If you want to use the word passion and wine together, you better tell me what you mean by passion.

I can’t even go on with this list because it is so frustrating. What happened to quiet confidence. Since when have marketers and marketing lingo infected the wine world to such an extent that everyone is afraid to be distinct from each other? We might stand out!? But, what if no one likes us? I just had a flash back of my first high school dance.

So, this ideology of quality seems to promote the ideal that “minimal intervention”, “passion”, “low-yields”, etc. are markers of quality. But there is very little discussion of philosophical and human motivations beyond “passion”. I begin to suspect the sincerity of these sorts of proclamations when I learn that recently no wineries in B.C. expressed an interest in learning from an expert on biodynamics from France who was willing to come into the province and share his knowledge – not a single winery.

I’m suspect of a winery that can’t express itself any more effectively than “we just try to make the best wine possible.” Since, in the end, what is possible and what is to be hoped for are intricately entwined – and the last time I checked hope is a fairly multivalent concept and one that, in any effective way, cannot arise from hubris. It is integrity and humility that produce the most effective hope, and the most diverse possibilities.

So how do all these ideas link together? One simple phrase: the Ideology of Quality. Whether via a wine writer, marketer, or winery itself, the wine world seems afraid to deviate from a standard vocabulary and semantics for expressing wine quality (points-based rating systems are another culprit here). Instead, true expression is captured by other interests, by biases, by marketing, by the desire to fit in and sell wine. Of course, underlying all this is a most fundamental human instinct: survival.

So much of the wine world seems to be caught up in its own survival. Unsuccessful writers dine on Kraft Dinner each night while the successful ones try to protect their interests (and massive cellars of free wine) and avoid that dilemma by folding their personality and expertise into a pre-formed model. Once you’ve breached that inner circle, it’s like a pack instinct to keep out all pretenders to the throne.

Wineries? Well, they’re scared shitless that they’ll never make back their initial investments. Others are doing very well and are simply trying to diversify and spread their brand. But, they seem afraid that if they go off-message they might jeopardize the basis for their success. I am no stranger to these feelings – that is what it is like to have a career and try to survive in the business world.

But, what gets lost in this giant race is distinct and particular expression: real thoughts about wine, effective criticism, small producers who either don’t understand the game or simply don’t want to join it. There must be a better environment within which one of the world’s most profound agricultural products can be explored, loved, and discovered. We are all far too concerned with our own survival and the ideology of quality to actually and humbly discover how to best entwine ourselves with the ‘natural’ world through wine. We are part of that ‘natural’ process – but we are vacating this meaning from ourselves with each puff piece, marketing blurb, and cliché.

So, while I plan on continuing writing profiles on B.C. wineries for the sake of the industry and the small guy, I have to come out and say that I still have tremendous difficulty saying that B.C. wine is at the same level as the great wines of the world, of all types from weekday meal wines to wines for 50th wedding anniversaries. B.C., with the exception of a very few producers, is still too caught up in the Ideology of Quality to actualize its potential. Right now it is just trying to “make the best wine possible” – but it has homogenized the hope that gives meaning to possibility. Until wineries take that next step and are bold enough both to have their own voice and beliefs, but also humble enough to listen and learn from others, we will languish where so much of the world’s wine languishes – in mediocrity.

A common analogy to describe the creation and adoption of new technologies is known as the “hype cycle”, developed by the Garner Group. It looks something like this:

One of the big critiques of this model is that it hypothesizes a static cause-effect relationship between the creation of technology and its adoption. There are many examples, such as fuel cells, of technology that has never been adopted into the mainstream. Jim Bullock at the 2003 Aye Conference hypothesized that technology adoption actually derives from the confluence of two vectors: 1. the social process, and 2. the delivery process. The social process is about people and their expectations whereas the delivery process is about the availability of the technology itself. Most technologies rely on other technologies to be successful, just as, for instance, social media relies not just on computing, but also on portable computing and, increasingly, smart phones.

The dilemma I want to talk about in this article relates to the first vector of technology adoption hypothesized by Mr. Bullock: the social process. This relies on a few presuppositions.

Firstly, these days it is cheap to get content to people. The costs of entry are minimal with electronic publishing, whether in a blog, via twitter, facebook or other social media services, being mostly free. Second, there are two basic kinds of social networks: open networks and closed networks. Open networks do not limit access by filtering individuals based on specific interests or commonalities. Twitter is the de facto example of an open network. Closed networks limit access by focusing on commonalities or interest. Facebook is the most important example of this, but also consider social media sites that focus on wine, like Cork’d, which are explicitly designed to facilitate dialogue amongst a select group of people.

Here’s my thesis: the differentiation between content delivery in open and closed networks is about the social process. Closed networks provide a clear set of tools that guide user’s expectations, and provide them with an easily digestible means to connect and share content. No one is confused about the purpose of Facebook: upon signing up the website asks you to enter your email address to find your friends.

Open networks, on the other hand, provide a limited set of tools to guide the user. Twitter does not build in expectations into its functionality, but instead relies on the user to figure out how to use it and how to interact with others. Twitter requires a more sustained effort to understand than a service like Facebook, which is why so many businesses fail to utilize twitter effectively.

Now, when considering the differing social expectations created by Facebook and Twitter one can notice the fundamental impact these expectations have on the nature of content delivery in these two networks. Facebook, while setting expectations firmly and clearly, limits the diversity of its content delivery to what people expect to read and hear from their friends. Hence, advertising on Facebook is of the traditional non-interactive sort. Intrusive advertising, no matter how well targeted it is, is a necessary consequence of Facebook’s closed nature. People put up with this advertising because the Facebook network has reached such a critical mass that, to put it in economic terms, the costs of not participating are far higher for most people than the costs of viewing intrusive advertising.

Twitter does not operate this way. Because expectations are diffuse and unclear, twitter effectively has no rules for managing content delivery. Even if, over time, we begin to see Twitter using intrusive advertising, this is not the real future of content delivery on open networks. Instead, open networks such as Twitter’s true power is in allowing more diffuse and less intrusive content delivery for businesses. Twitter’s weakness is in scoping and channeling content into easily understandable chunks and in providing guidance for its users.

Thus, if we return to the “hype curve” above, it is only possible to understand social media’s place on this curve if we divide it into social process and delivery process. Right now, the delivery process is peaking, and, may in fact actually be maturing. As newspapers die, content becomes easier and easier to produce to such an extent that almost everyone knows how to and does produce content online, thus making the delivery process nearly ubiquitous.

On the other hand, the social process has yet to mature as fully as the delivery process. Social and personal expectations about social media are not cohesive. Additionally, the delivery processes have fragmented the social processes to such an extent that many Facebook users simply don’t understand or don’t find a use for services such as Twitter and many Twitter junkies are tired and bored of Facebook and its limitations.

If the “hype curve” is at all accurate in relation to social media, then it is only accurate if we increase the number of data points and the number of axes on which to plot the development of the technology. Thus, social media is not just about visibility and maturity; it is also about social expectations, the lost third axis. By plotting along these three axes we can get a better image of the future of social media.

My first thesis that the differentiation between content delivery in open and closed networks is about the social process leads me to the prediction that the future of social media will merge the guidance element of closed networks with the diffusion element of open networks. I believe that Foursquare is an early attempt to achieve this combination of factors, but that its interactive capabilities need to be enhanced.

Thus, the content delivery dilemma in social media is not about the cost of delivery any more. Rather, the dilemma is about the method of delivery. Content is so easy and cheap to produce that users need interfaces that guide them through the sheer volume of material and provide them with guideposts on not just how to manage content, but, more importantly, how to produce it.

A mature understanding of the social process that underlies the development of social media will allow a visionary firm to go beyond traditional monetization and intrusive advertising. In the future, the most successful networks will figure out how to leverage word of mouth marketing within a model of content guidance and signposting within an open network. This will allow for word of mouth marketing to become more important and more targeted than traditional marketing. It will also converge the benefits of visibility with the benefits of social expectations. It is only then that social media will reach the first stages of its maturity.

As reported by the Associated Press:

The geologists say wines may vary in levels of dissolved minerals, but those variations aren’t related to the levels in vineyard soil.

And they say the concentration of minerals in wine is below the threshold of human taste and smell.

(you can read the full article here).

Cherries and Clay, another Vancouver wine and food blog, suggested that “there must be some connection there [between soil minerals and flavour] which isn’t fully understood.” And, while commenting on that post I realized that I had a fair amount to say about this topic.

Generally, I trust the scientists when it comes to answering scientific questions. However, what is more interesting to me is how we use metaphor to think about sensual experiences. As much as wine is a pleasure-based commodity, it also seems to have a unique ability to conjure up in many the desire to be metaphorical and to experience the aesthetic beyond just deciding what is ‘good’.

Thinking about the relation of the taste of minerals to the content of the soil to me is more about how we use wine as a vessel through which to explore our relation to the objects around us. This can be based on many philosophies. For example, the biodynamic philosophy has a very particular sense of a human’s relationship to external objects, and tends to prioritize a certain concept of the ‘natural’ above others. This, to me, is one approach that gives rise to the desire to express the nature of the soil and its mineral content in one’s thoughts about a wine.

We all know the hedonist philosophy that drives many of the big publications. This approach cares less about idolizing a certain concept of nature and more about a certain notion of pleasure. The metaphors such people use to describe wine thus move more towards the opulent and towards excessive use of flavour descriptors and superlatives.

Some others (including, I’m sure, many scientists) may see wine as an enigmatic expression of natural processes. Such a philosophy might see the ‘minerality’ question somewhat like a fascinating puzzle about how complex natural processes are.

Others might care more about the human capacity for technology, for augmenting natural processes and creating products that derive from that interaction. Such people may care more about ‘minerality’ as an end-point in a process of augmentation and manipulation.

The question of ‘minerality’ is really a smaller version of larger questions about expressing the experience of wine drinking. Wine drinkers aren’t drawn to wine for scientific reasons, and scientific explanations of flavour (which in wine drinking has become almost entirely metaphorical) are an insufficient means for understanding the basis of so many people’s interest in fermented grapes. Rather, the whole ‘minerality’ debate hinges more on philosophy and aesthetics than on science because they better reflect the basic starting point for most people’s wine experiences. Keeping this in mind will help to focus the discussion on how people are actually talking about and therefore experiencing wine.

To get into the establishment one merely had to walk down a few steps and seat oneself at a picnic bench style table. When I went there with my friend I had just finished a full day of walking the city and needed sustenance badly. For anyone who has been to Paris, getting real sustenance at a reasonable price can be quite difficult. This place was cheap, so it fit the bill. Three things went wrong:

1. I didn’t realize how disgusting it is to get all your calories for a day of walking from melted cheese and stale bread cubes.

2. About 5 minutes after my friend and I sat down, a group of about 20 insanely raucus Italian tourists walked in. I am not stuck up about people having fun nor do I like silent restaurants. But these people were screaming at the top of their lungs, so much so that the restaurant owner had to ask them to be quite at least 5 times.

3. The wine came served in baby bottles.

I don’t know about you, but drinking wine from a rubber teat was not my idea of a healthy way to consume liquids. Although Freud may have been proud to see a literalization of regression, I couldn’t help thinking about how many other mouths had sucked on that particular teat.

Now, seven years later, I found out that someone thought this was such a good idea that they should bring it to New York City. I know that NYC has a reputation for new and strange experiments, but unless the proprietors also offer diapers and bonnets at the door, I’m not quite sure how this makes any sense. I also just found out there was a reason for this strange French practice: namely that the French only tax wine served in glasses, so serving it in baby bottles avoids the tax and adds a nice touch of French irony. In America the only irony in “La Cave des Fondus” is that its ‘hommage’ to a Paris institution is an un-ironic restaurant where Americans can act like babies. And, that, my friends is how irony becomes parody.

Percentage of Wines Rated Excellent or Higher

May – 08

$20 and under: 0%
$20-$30: 20%
$30-$40: 40%
$40-$60: 45%
$60+: 85%

UPDATE – SEPT 08

$20 and under: 0%
$20-$30: 12%
$30-$40: 33%
$40-$60: 49%
$60+: 73%

So it seems that, at least for me and based on my subjective ratings (which includes my general knowledge of the wine’s price), price doesn’t guarantee quality, but it suggests it. I think this is only true with careful selection as I think the decrease in quality at the $60+ price point over the two periods was due to exploration. As soon as you explore, the risk you won’t like a wine increases. But, then again, if you don’t explore, you can’t find out what you like! Also interesting is that the biggest jumps in quality of the bottle seemed to occur when moving from the $20-$30 category to the $30-$40 category, with 20% or over jumps in the number of Excellent ratings over both periods, and from the $40-$60 category to the $60+ category, with between a 24% and 40% jump in the number of Excellent ratings. What does this say? Maybe it’s worth it to push up slighty over the $30 level if you want something a bit more special. But there is less difference when the price goes above $40 until you reach the stratospheric $60+ level.

The rules (please pass on) are:List seven songs you are into right now. No matter what the genre, whether they have words, or even if they’re not any good, but they must be songs you’re really enjoying now, shaping your spring. Post these instructions in your blog along with your 7 songs. Then tag 7 other people to see what they’re listening to.

Seems like fun, plus I can’t buck a trend, so here it goes:

Song #1: Dizzy Gillespie and Arturo Sandoval – Wheatleigh Hall. A great piece from a lesser known album called To a Finland Station. In my opinion, this song, and the cd it is on marks one of the greatest trumpet duet moments of all time!

Song #2: McCoy Tyner – Enlightenment Suite – Crazy crazy jazz that awakens the soul. Pretty phenomenal stuff.

Song #3: Uri Cane Ensemble – Goldberg Variations – If you think that Bach is cool, you MUST check out this great collection of variations from one of NYC’s greatest avant garde musicians.

Song #4: Vampire Weekend – Oxford Comma – pretty simple, but catchy poppy goodness.

Song #5: MGMT – Kids – I like the retro-80′s synth sound with a modern edge.

Song #6: Rachmaninov – Elegy – a little known piece, but stunningly beautiful. One my all-time favourites.

Song #7: Martha Argerich playing the Bourree from Bach’s English Suite no. 2 on her Live from the Concergebouw cd – no one plays Bach like this.