Can the winemaking styles of the past compete with the instant gratification trends of the present? Seconds after the newest iPad releases, we troll the Web to learn when the next will follow. Email isn’t fast enough, so we Tweet, Facebook and text in a never-ending quest for fixes. We’re not content to wait for DVDs, we stream our content. Cable companies enable us, serving on-demand anything—anytime, on any device.
In a world where waiting is the Antichrist, where does that leave the wine industry, built on tradition and the long ball strategy? New wineries no longer plant their vintage and wait years for it to sprout its worth in the bottle. The storied romance of wine sinks into the background, making way for the “shop and pop” era, when wines are bought to be consumed now versus later. So will the Old World way fold in favor of the new—or will these two markets find a way to coexist?
While the shop-and-pop style of winemaking and consuming feels like a trend of today, others view it as a harkening from the past. There’s the French, who could be credited for feeding the first quick-fix thirsts in the 1970s, with Beaujolais Nouveau, fermented for just weeks.
Swanson Vineyards winemaker, Chris Phelps, also helming his own private label, Ad Vivum, shares, “There was already a trend toward wines that would be consumable sooner. It started a decade ago. Today, we’re seeing people trying to impress critics, along with a trend to sweeten the wines. We’re seeing wines that have a lot of tannins but are smoother with a lot of residual sugar being left in.”
It’s impossible to ignore the explosive rise in sweet wines like Moscato that are flying off shelves almost as fast as the Facebook texting Twitter brigade can flap its fingers. And it makes sense, given the evolution of tastes over time. College coeds chug sugar-laced sodas and Red Bull like water. Said coeds graduate, but their tastes stay stunted in Candyland, at least for a while. So they gravitate toward sweeter wines partly out of palate preference and, I’d argue, partly because they’ve been bred in a culture that doesn’t wait for anything—so why wait for wine?
Phelps sees it another way, “People want wines that are easy to drink, yes. But I don’t think they need to be sweet to get those parameters. It’s entirely possible, and it’s my personal winemaking philosophy, with Cabernet and Bordeaux blends, to make wines that are enjoyable out of the barrel just before they’re bottled. That’s what I trained to do when I was in Bordeaux 30 years ago, and then here. They may go through a little bottle shock and may not peak for a couple of years, but they’re enjoyable. There’s a recalibration among winemakers to go to dry wines, like my style—balanced but not overly tannic, ripe but not going to this sweet taste. There’s a lot going on through manipulation to make them more approachable.”
For Nicholas Bleecher of Jericho Canyon Vineyard, adaptions are becoming inevitable. “If someone really loves big Napa Cabernets, our wines are perfect at release. However, we’ve adapted some of our processing techniques knowing that our fruit, if left to its own devices, will require seven years of aging before most consumers will consider it ‘ready.’ We’ve started to extend macerations, sometimes up to three months. The point of this process is to maximize extraction from the skins in an effort to super-saturate the wine with the skin tannin. This speeds up the process of tannin-resolution and results in a wine that’s extremely concentrated, but softer and plusher than it would be otherwise.”
So let’s acknowledge that tastes turn, and people’s preferences ebb and flow, whether by the natural course of life or because of critical hype, further cementing the battle between ageability and ready-to-consume wines. “If a wine needs to score well, have a lush fruit core and a smooth, expansive mouthfeel at a young age, this requires several things, all of which compromise ageability,” says Thomas Guilliams, winemaker at de Tomas wines. “Many of the expensive wines in people’s cellars will be dead on arrival by 10 years of age. To say this isn’t a factor when grading the quality of a wine profoundly changes the rules of the game.”
It’s hard to gauge if we’re evolving, regressing or merely trying to “be it all” when it comes to our approach to winemaking. Or maybe it’s a simple matter of meeting the ever-evolving needs of today’s buyers. “At Venge, we want to be versatile. We make something for everyone. We have three variations of whites, a rosé and reds, from Pinot to structured and very age-worthy Cabernets and all in a variety of price points. The wine style matches the consumer preference, which is a large bandwidth these days,” says Kirk Venge, winemaker for Venge Vineyards. “I think California has an advantage in that respect. We’re not tied to one varietal or genre of wine like you see from Old World wine regions in Europe.”
Guilliams also sees the necessity of bending with the times, “The trend toward high-scoring, drinkable young wines is so dominant, I don’t think it makes sense for a winery to produce only wines that are structured for aging. As a winemaker, it makes more sense to produce different wines at different price points, with different goals in mind.”
While it’s hard to speculate on the longevity of our insatiable need for speed, what we can bank on is that, soon enough, the trends of today turn into the folklore of yesterday, history typically repeats and people’s personal preferences and tastes are bound to remain as diverse as the land we live on.
