Winemakers weigh in on the industry’s technological advances.
When one thinks about Northern California wine, they likely imagine gorgeous Highway 29, winding through St. Helena past acres of bright green vineyards; clean-lined tasting rooms; oak barrels and cool warehouses, where the vintages quietly gestate before producing another fruit-on-the-palate delight. But while popular culture has led us to believe in what The Ominvore’s Dilemma author Michael Pollan might call a “pastoral fiction,” where grapes are hand picked, crushed and bottled, the reality of wine production is looking increasingly scientific. Words like “bouquet” and “reserve,” those staples of wine-related discourse, are now sharing vocabulary space with “micro-filtration” and “reverse osmosis.” And, where once oenophiles might have indulged in agrarian fantasies of barefoot grape crushers as they sampled their Pinot, they might soon be more inclined to imagine soil probes. Or satellites.
“Winemakers Need Space to Make Good Wines” trumpeted a September 8 Wine Spectator article—the headline a pun referencing the way some vintners (including Napa’s Robert Mondavi Winery, which explored the idea during the 1990s) have turned to satellite technology to better predict weather and control the conditions that make good wine. Viewing one’s vineyard from space or filtering agricultural data through a computer to predict optimum harvest time seems a far cry from the bucolic image consumers tend to associate with wine culture. But as time passes, such high-tech methods are becoming more and more the norm within the industry.
Water levels
“Today, almost every serious grower has at least a weather station and a frost alert system,” says Jacob Christfort, founder and president of Ranch Systems, a Novato-based company specializing in vineyard montioring, control equipment and software. Once vice president in charge of wireless software development with Oracle Corporation in Silicon Valley, Christfort moved to Mendocino in 2001 to pursue a program of sustainable agriuculture on his family’s ranch. He says the technology he now produces already existed back then, but it usually had to be bought piecemeal from several different vendors. Ranch Systems now bundles four separate systems under a lower single price—a bargain for growers that’s given Christfort’s company a market advantage as winemaking gets increasingly technological.
Along with weather stations, which read and record vineyard climate conditions, and frost alert sensors, which are designed to prevent the ruination of crops due to extreme cold spells, the Ranch Systems package also includes irrigation controllers and soil moisture tracking probes that read and record data. Once collected, all data is filtered through a base station then relayed back to a secure website for customer review. Whether purchased individually or as a single package, Christfort’s systems provide growers and winemakers with an impressive amount of information, which gives them more control over the finished agricultural product. Christfort says he’s convinced these technologies give vintners who use them an advantage over those who don’t. He also says they’ve become the “bread and butter” of the wine industry.
In Healdsburg, Chris Donatiello confirms Christfort’s statement. His C. Donatiello is an organic, boutique winery on Westside Road specializing in Pinot Noir and Chardonnay. In its organic “aroma gardens,” herbs like lemon verbena and pineapple sage are used to enhance customers’ understanding of wines’ natural bouquets.
“We try to keep our processes as simple as possible,” says Donatiello, describing how his grapes are still hand-sorted. Still, he does have a weather station—a feature, some might argue, that constitutes a departure from traditional winemaking.
Alcohol content
Far more controversial technologies exist. In the last two years, publications from Wine Spectator to blogs like Tom Wark’s Fermentation and North Bay newspapers like the St. Helena Star have covered a lively debate over the use of reverse osmosis (RO)—a process which, when combined with distillation, extracts alcohol from wine (it’s also known as “sweet spotting,” “de-alcing” or “alcohol adjustment”).
California’s warm climates often lead to grapes with high sugar content and, therefore, a higher wine alcohol level. And though fruitier, “chewier” wines are currently the rage among consumers of Napa Valley vintages, some critics complain of the “high octane” taste, and many wine producers shy away from a federally imposed $0.50 tax for wines with an alcohol content of more than 14 percent. Grapegrower Andy Beckstoffer of Beckstoffer Vineyards has even hosted a series of seminars about the consequences (such as lower crop yields) of letting grapes get too ripe. To cool these “hot” wines, many producers have turned to alcohol adjustment via RO/distillation and “spinning cone” (SC) technology, a process that uses centrifugal force and steam to separate out a wine’s alcohol content, leaving it with a lower alcohol level.
Companies that specialize in RO serve more wineries than, perhaps, the industry would like to admit, because even though the procedure has become common, not many wineries willingly confess to manipulating their product for fear that consumers might be disappointed to discover their favorite wine, far from being a true product du terroir, was trucked out of town, dumped into a tank and manipulated via a series of chambers, filters and tubes. And though there’s no scientific proof either way, some critics of RO claim the procedure diminishes the taste of the wine as well as the alcohol level.
An industry evolution
Domingo Rodriguez, vice president and co-owner of Wine Secrets, a North American “filtration service provider,” says incorporating new filtration technologies is just the next step in the evolution of the industry. It needn’t be damaging to either the pastoral image of winemaking—or to the proverbial pasture itself.
“Most people have this romantic notion that the grape goes from the vine to the barrel to the bottle,” he says, “and this is still the case for boutique wineries all the way through to some of the largest producers.”
But just as the invention of electricity changed the face of the wine industry 100 years ago by mechanizing many production techniques, Rodriguez continues, the age of computers has again rewritten traditional images of wine production. “When you go into a big production facility now,” he says, “you’ll see stainless steel, and you’ll see all the temperature-controlled tanks. The wine industry and manufacturers of winery equipment have kept up with the times, modernizing and upgrading equipment, just as every other competitive industry has.”
These types of computer-operated technology, he says, have become increasingly important, especially to bigger companies, whose large production volume rules out some of the more traditional winemaking methods.
Rodriguez describes himself as “a traditionalist with a high-tech background.” Thus, while Wine Secrets uses modern filtering technology to influence wine characteristics (like pH levels) and remove smoke-taint from grapes (a phenomenon that, after the rash of recent wildfires, will surely affect some of this year’s crops), the company is also committed to a sustainable, green future. “Any filtration will alter the character of a wine,” he says, “be it through traditional or new methods. These ‘new technologies’ often replace old ones that consume more water and energy, and that can have more of an impact on the wine.”
The company has partnered with PG&E, the California Energy Commission and a number of other waste-conscious technology providers around the world in an effort to provide more sustainable winemaking technology, and its Selective Tartrate Removal System (or STARS), a “membrane-based technology” tartrate stabilization system that removes wine crystals from wine using electrodialysis, won a 2005 California Energy Commission Flex Your Power Award.
By replacing the energy-spewing bulk refrigeration methods more commonly used for tartrate stabilization, STARS upholds these green ideals. For a fee, the technology can be transported to a winery and contracted out on a daily to yearly basis. So wineries can avoid the high cost of purchasing the equipment outright.
According to Rodriguez, business is good—and not only because of energy-related concerns. He alludes to competition between vintners and wineries as another reason winemakers use technologies like RO to achieve that perfect vintage.
The traditionalists’ approach
Meanwhile, winemakers like Chris Donatiello and Cathy Corison of Napa’s Corison Wines maintain that it doesn’t take cutting-edge technology to create a good product.
“I can’t stress enough how location factors into the process,” Donatiello says. It’s a sentiment echoed by Corison, who’s been making wine in Napa for 33 years and says, “Grapes grown in the right place and in the right way make good wine.” Like Donatiello, she favors an organic approach.
“My winemaking is very old-fashioned,” she says. Asked what technology she employs, Corison mentions plows, hoes and a traditional cover crop of peas, vetch and oats—the sorts of things winemakers have been using for centuries to draw nitrogen from the air and convert it into fertilizer for the grapes. She also uses no pesticides and tends each vine by hand. For weather information, she says, she uses the National Weather Service.
“I grow my grapes organically, because I want my soils to be alive,” she explains. “The organisms in the soil will make everything the grapevine needs available to the plant.”
Neither Corison nor Donatiello uses manipulation technology. Corison says she takes pride in the fact that she obtains a balanced, elegant product without resorting to the “bells and whistles” of RO or micro-oxygenation (a process that adds oxygen back into the wine in small degrees to “soften” more abrasive tasting vintages). While she’s a fan of low alcohol levels and believes they “grace the table” better than riper, more alcoholic fare, she produces such vintages the old fashioned way: by picking her grapes earlier in the growing process.
“I consider it a failure if I let the grapes get too sweet,” she says, noting that balance is the most important aspect of wine and, hence, in her vineyard. “The whole goal is to have the flavor come together at the right time,” she says. “Good wine can be made by committee, but great wine needs a person. At some point, the hand of the person who makes the wine comes through.”
Domingo Rodriguez has surprisingly similar thoughts. He mentions the new WinePod (www.winepod.net), a $4,499 winemaking device dreamed up by Provina, Inc., that uses a computer software program called WineCoach to “guide you, step-by-step, through the winemaking process.” Available for home shipping, WinePod (the device itself looks like a man-sized metal wineglass) can churn out four cases of wine in one fell swoop.
“It’s no substitute for a person,” Rodriguez says, dismissing the item as a “$4,000 toy.” Asked if he thinks robots might eventually take over the wine industry, he laughs, maintaining that, whether wielding an arsenal of cutting-edge technology or sowing nitrogen-harvesting cover crops, “all winemakers are still, at heart, true winemakers. They have to have good fruit, and no technology is going to prevent you from making a mistake. You still have to go through the same steps people went through 100 years ago.”
Is there any difference, then, between high-tech and low-tech wine? Are there benefits to a natural versus a technological approach?
A recent “Wired Science” taste test of Napa Valley wines—a Pinot Noir from Clos de la Tech (where a high-tech winepress cuts the traditional all-day pressing time down to half an hour), a micro-oxygenation Bourriquot from Havens Wine Cellars and a naturally produced Zinfandel from Sharp Cellars—concluded that untreated wines “stacked up well” against the tech-aided competition. (You can view the video at www.pbs.org/kcet/wiredscience/story/1000-the_grapes_of_math.html.) In the wine industry, however the debate goes on. Natural wines, some say, taste too “green” or “earthy” due to an earlier harvesting that may result in unripe grapes getting into the press. Others criticize manipulated wines as tasting “too uniform.”
Cathy Corison says she can’t speak for anyone else, but that, for her at least, “The benefit of naturally produced wine is that it has a soul. That’s not something you can really put your finger on.”
