Matt Kramer on Austerity
Have a similar palate and I'll love you?
Yeah, I'm easy.
I felt like a big sore little toe in the world, out of synch, at odds with and like the wrong direction on the nap of corduroy.Today in particular I needed to see Kramer's piece in the Wine Spec entitled, The Fear of Austere.
He understands me. And today, I am grateful for that. It could be love.
Kramer starts his column by quoting a fellow at a Napa Valley blind tasting.
"The wine is austere," said the taster, "And that's not a good word in my book."
Kramer goes on to speculate, is that why so many of the wines today taste the way they do, because austere is considered undesirable?
Both Kramer and I seem to be on the what's the matter with austere camp. We like austere! It might mean that the wine is an approachable 13% alcohol, maybe it didn't have its tannins erased and just maybe it is interesting instead of NyQuil-esque.
A few years back at the Hospice de Rhone some guy said to Steve Edmunds about a syrah, "This ever going to open up?" Meanwhile I was writing a note to self: beautiful! Restrained beauty!
I also differ with many on zinfandel. I remember one in particular Summit Ridge. It was a little wine. Not important. Who knows. it could have been a big spoof wine, but I liked it. I have no idea if it still exists or if it does exist it does so in the same way, but it was austere! It had edge, it had angles it had rooms. I also remember when people tasted it they had no context for the angular wine.
Then there was Pierre Antoine Rovani at the IPNC. It was 2000 and the 98 red Burgundies were being discussed and slammed by the critic. I raised my hand amongst the masses and said, “I love the 98’s. They have edge and tannin and it’s a relief.” Or something like that.
He basically told me I was wrong. Love that. I was wrong. Like a palate can be wrong. It can be misguided but can it be wrong? (Like the guy at Hospices. Well, he was told austere was bad, you see. He was misguided.).
Shouldn’t I learn to keep my mouth shut? (yes) But so far, ten years down the line, every time I see 1998 I’ve been really happy. This June when I had the 98 Gevrey VV from Pansiot I found it just delicious, firm and structured. Last week, even though the sommelier at Alta, in the west village, warned me against the ’98 Matrot Blagny, (he actually said austere) it had lush aroma of just-evolved- burgundy, extremely floral and woodsy and a touch thrilling, especially at $52.
And what about stems, while I’m at it? I love stems but perhaps they were removed from the equation because of FEAR OF AUSTERE?
Austere is not a positive word. Austere has value written all over it, it has nun written all over it. But in today’s world I beg for come clerical austerity. And while others get this from stems, I get complexity. Stems in fermentation are endangered species in Burgundy.
Book preview: in chapter seven, The Lone Guinea Fowl of Burgundy, I take on the disappearance of stems from Burgundy. I mean, where would DRC, Ponsot, Chandon de Brialles, Geantet- Pansiot, Domaine Leroy and Pacalet, to name a few, be without them
P.S. Just got word that Mike Dashe has made a 2007 zinfandel, no added yeast, no overt oak influence. I can’t believe it. This is a Californian wine I am excited to taste. Might even be worth a trip to Sonoma to taste in barrel.
You don't have to go all the way to Sonoma to taste. Mike and Anne's winery is in Alameda.
The vineyard's in Mendocino County.
Didn't know about Almeda (I get there just as often as I get to Healdsburg) but I am confused. Aren't they in Dry Creek?
Is austere the opposite of overblown? I would have thought a better term was balanced. Austere has negative connotations (for me at least) in many contexts, only one of which is related to wine. No wonder it puts people off.
I had a sample of a riesling recently from the Alameda vintner and to my palate (maybe not yours or his) it tasted of marshmallow and lemon candy. Not my thing. Non-indigenous yeast, though I'm not smart enough to be able to say that was the cause. I wouldn't book a flight just yet.
Alice, Thank you for speaking the words unspoken. Those of us who prefer austerity, mystique, subtlety and intrigue are often left behind in the rush to drink the wines now favored by the likes of Messrs. Laube, Parker and Rolland. Here's to the road less travelled!
Steve,
Riesling's not his forté. Zinfandel is. Judge not in absence of the zins. I haven't had the riesling, but given that I'd be surprised if he embraced the proper parameters. He could -- he's smart enough -- but he lacks the experience as yet.
Dashe's winery is on 4th st in Oakland, not Alameda, Joe (you were just there!). I agree: the riesling is not nearly as well-balanced as the new Potter Valley zinfandel.
Alice:
I particularly enjoy reading Matt Kramer for the balance he offers against the ebob type of wines that seem to dominate the other columnists in the wine dictator. His column on austerity fits well with what you've been writing all along. Curious how people claim a palate/opinion/preference can be wrong.
It follows — saw where Jeremy got the boot from ebob, too.
Good things happen to good people.
Alice, you bring up an interesting point about quality. Is it completely arbitrary? From an absolute sense, we must say yes. However, from a pratical sense, it is useful to have some agreed upon criteria. Nothing new here but I would offer: balance, length, intensity, complexity.
Clos St Hűne is a wine that comes to mind when I think austere. It can be quite restrained in youth. Yet the intensity, length and concentration are there, promising something greater in the future. However, a charming but sharp wine with little fruit or concentration can also be called austere. There is a great difference between the two. The latter will generally only offer less in the future.
I would suggest that austere is not a qualitative term but simply a descriptor. It conveys style rather than assesses quality.
how in the world did 'austere' become a pejorative? i like austere, i like voluptuous, i like unyielding, i like supple, i like contumacious... all of these are descriptors, and none of them, in my book, are any 'better' than any of the others. why the tilt in the 'modern' wine press?
It seems inevitable, quite honestly, that size alone would become the single attribute by which wines are judged. Once you embark on the unusual exercise of giving numerical scores to multivariate sensory and aesthetic experiences like wine, you are forced to zero in on attributes that are amenable to the method.
What other sensory/aesthetic variable is amenable to the now usual exercise of lining up dozens of bottles, tasting them blind and giving them numerical grades? Or worse still, assigning numerical scores to wines still in barrel. (With these vinous fetuses, what on earth are we grading? Our wild guesses about where the wine is going ten years from now? How drinkable these wines not yet meant to be drunk are at the time of tasting, when drinkability straight out of barrel is quite likely cause for alarm more than anything else?).
To begin with, because of the limitations of our sensory apparatus, to get noticed in a positive way, a wine has little choice but to be "big," or to be odd. A "small" wine will be noticed in a big crowd only because it stands in stark contrast to its larger stablemates. Its nuances will be lost completely, only its size will show.
Furthermore, how would a numerical grading system work if you factored in multiple variables and gave them all different weight from wine to wine and from taster to taster?
"This is a 95 point wine because of its lacy delicacy and perfume." "No, this is a 70 point wine because it is lacy and delicate and I find such wines to be too feeble for my taste."
"This is a 90 point wine because it is HUGE and creamy." "This is a 60 point wine because it is HUGE and creamy and I detest such wines."
"This is a 97 point wine because it has lovely notes of damp earth, rose petals and fading fruit." "No, this is a 75 point wine because it has notes of damp earth, rose petals and fading fruit, and I do not think wine should have those attributes."
"This is a 90 point wine because it smells like silage and I happen to like silage." (Pretend you're Robert Parker and love, or simply have a blind spot for, the sweaty saddle aroma of brett on the march, ok?) "This is 60 point wine because it smells like silage and I happen to detest silage and I also know it signifies a serious flaw in the wine."
If the scale is going to be linear, you have to choose some easily identified and scalable attributes and use them to judge everything you taste, eliminating individual preferences and the individuality of the wines themselves. While there may be some subjective fudge factor involved for "extraneous" characteristics (like typicity), you need to zero in on something you can "grade."
Plus, all of us are essentially lazy creatures. As Jean-Marc Roulot says, we demand concentrated wines because we lack concentration when we taste wines that may be less concentrated but more nuanced. We want to be bowled over, we want "wow" rather than restraint. But, as Jean-Marc also says, concentration is the enemy of terroir. Are these global warming vintages of red Burgundy, which yield up wines with the fat and fruit of California, really "the greatest Burgundy vintages in history," as the 2005 has already been dubbed, or are they the end of Burgundy as we know it? I'm inclined to think the later, quite honestly. But try to tell that to the bozos who are frantically snapping up $1500 bottles of Rousseau Chambertin 2005 just so they can say they own "The Best" Chambertin from "The Best Vintage in History."
The same thing typically happens in virtually any competition that involves experiences that by their very nature should not be given "scores" or subjected to competition. Music competitions often reward flamboyance more than anything. "Beauty contests" reward the most obvious, stereotypical physical features. Job interviews go well for skilled flim flam artists and not so well for those who are thoughtful and candid.
Bashing Robert Parker has been done so often that by now it has become a tiresome cliche. But yes, Mr. Parker properly gets blamed for this because it is indeed his aesthetic. From the moment you go down the road of the 100 point scale, you inevitably go down the road we're on. If you're gonna try to grade something as complex and ineffable as intelligence and ability and likelihood of success in a complex world, you end up with the SAT. True or false, multiple choice.
Plus Parker simply has a bizarre palate, there's no polite way to say it. It's as though you found a guy with no prior experience as a curator who had developed a taste for those dime store portraits of kids with huge googly eyes and made him the tastemaker for the Metropolitan Museum of Art. His tastes might mature somewhat with more time and experience, but not likely, since he was crowned king before he had really figured out which end of his body was his ass and which end was his head. Why question your abilities when everyone is already telling you you're a genius?
Here was a geeky sort of fellow who really knew very little about wine, as far as I am aware. Kind of a "I may not know much about wine but I know what I like" type, with the somewhat strange idea that you could 'rate' wine a la Consumers Union ratings of washers and dryers and thereby lead the revolution of the 'little guy' against the 'entrenched aristocracy' of Bordeaux. He went off on a few trips to Europe, tasted Bordeaux from the freakishly ripe 1982 vintage, was bowled over by its lush high horsepower sock it to me right now qualities, declared the vintage "the greatest in modern history," published his thoughts and thus changed everything somehow. And with "Parker scores" in hand, lots of American business men who had cowered under the steely eyes of snooty sommeliers and suffered pangs of inadequacy faced with incomprehensible wine lists could hold their heads high and just say "give me a bottle of this, Parker gave it a 96." And when the wine arrived, big and fat and as easy to understand as a bottle of Coke, there was nothing challenging to appreciate, no regret, no self doubt. Ah yes, democratic consumerism at its best!
From that point on, the freakish became a benchmark of sorts. Bigness rules.
When I think about the exaggerated wines that are au courant, it reminds me of the Goldie Hawn character in a chick flick of some years back. She played a woman in her late 40s or early 50s who had a thing for cosmetic surgery and in one or more scenes (which were intended to be hilarious) appeared with lips injected with collagen to the point of bursting, silicone breasts the size of watermelons, the skin on her face pulled so tightly her eyes were nearly on the side of her head, her proportions all out of whack after liposuction of various portions of her body below the belt line. She could barely see, walk or talk and looked absolutely ridiculous, but by God she had all the "desired" attributes screwed, glued and tattooed in place.
That's the story of quite a lot of wine nowadays -- whether from California or Italy or Australia or the Rhone or Bordeaux or Washington or even Spain. It happens less in Burgundy, the Loire, Germany/Austria/Alsace and Oregon, places that struggle for ripeness and that grow grapes that do not readily yield up The Inky Hedonistic Fruit Bomb -- and lo and behold, those more "austere" wines are a much tougher sell, except among the hard core group of terroiristes who love them and take the time and effort required to figure out what the heck is going on.
So where are we? We are in a world of wine criticism and wine appreciation that is akin to a world in which music is judged by amplitude. Pianissimo is a 70. Piano a 75. Mezzoforte is an 85. Forte is a 90. Fortissimo is 95 points and above.
And those shitty '98 burgundies? Well my dear, I am always so darned glad when the folks at the Wine Avocado and the Wine Expectorator declare a vintage like 1998 a total loss. While they were gushing over the flaccid and somewhat Californicated 1997s (most of which are now dead or dying), these wise folks condemned the entire 1998 harvest to the eternal fires of Hell.
And thus was a tremendous buying opportunity created. Virtually everything was sold at fire sale prices and was readily available. Thus even wines from the likes of Freddy Mugnier and the Rousseaus had to beg for a home -- and now that its quality has been recognized, Freddy's '98 Musigny sells for $500 plus a bottle. I recently popped the top on a bottle of 1998 Faiveley Latricieres Chambertin, of which it seems I bought a half doz for the princely sum of $180, yes indeedy, $30 a bottle. Need I tell you how good the wine is right about now, and how much better still it will be in five to ten years? By no means "lush," but incredibly centered, with a core of little red berry and Rainier cherry
fruit, a very attractive secondary note of cured meat (I kept thinking "prosciutto"), tannins just now becoming round (yes, this wine was "austere" when it was quite young) and the fresh juicy fruity acidity still lending the impression of a sappy young wine, even ten years from the vintage. It will be wonderful, I'm sure, when 2018 rolls around.
Ever try Santa Cruz Mountain Vineyards' wines? They make killer PN and Durif, as well as pretty decent cab. Yes, they're austere. And delicious. Next time you're in the bay area, rent a car, head south towards Santa Cruz, see some redwoods, and visit SCMV.
Then, of course there are Joseph Swan PN's and zins, which, given your palate you probably know pretty well.
Cheers for Alice and Matt! We want less! Riot for Austerity!
I could imagine the same heads would start bobbing in blissful agreement if the alpha taster said that the wine was hedonistic "a good thing in my book". Please! It’s so boring how so many wine people claim to be hedonists and drink hedonistic wines. I’m so very hedonistic. You too are so very hedonistic. We are surely hedonists. This hedonistic wine has a really amazing complexity. SILENCE! Everyone should just stop this nonsense - with the possible exception of Jay McInerney- especially since the trail of hedonism is paved with gout and Chlamydia.
I live in Burgundy. It was inevitable, really.
My grandmother back in Pennsylvania had an Amish aphorism stenciled on the transom above her kitchen sink. It said, 'kissin' don't last; cookin' do'. The water glasses on her shelves smelled funny. Dusty; as dusty, I'd now say, as a Chablis Cote de Lechet. Severe... austere.
My first Burgundies (in Burgundy)--that was 25 years ago--were simple wines. I really wanted to stay here, so the budget was limited. I remember Maranges and Santenay. And, man, talk about austere. Tannins before tannins got soft.
At the same time,my wine friends back in the US went from kiddie wine to Bordeaux to ego-CA stuff to flabby-whatever. You know the progression. Jammy, extracted, over-powering wines with an exaggerated use of oak. From a distance, it was another culture.
Me, I lived in Burgundy. And it was inevitable that I was going to meet people who would take me in another direction. I learned about yield and maturity and extraction--all in another direction. Today, I would use the term 'austere' in its normal everyday sense. An extreme.
When you guys say 'austere', you're counter culture. You mean a million things, and it's hard to extrapolate. But I think I get it. New world wine is and has always been experimental. And experimentation means 'who, what, when, where, why and how'. And how!
To me, your 'austere' is the new 'reasonable'. And, don't get me wrong... that's a thing of beauty, and you know it. Not just because it's beautiful, but because we move closer and closer to culture without the big C.
Well, I was sufficiently dissatisfied with the vague recollection in my blog comment that I undertook a bout of unpacking, and came up
victorious! Here's Matt Kramer on Chalk Hill (actually, the Chalk Hill AVA):
"In its application to become a separate AVA, a distinction of soil
was noted: a whitish soil, which, the Chalk Hill name notwithstanding, actually is volcanic ash. ... One cannot find any apparent distinction in the wines, which are mostly Chardonnays. So
far, the Chalk Hill AVA can be found only on a map."
Interesting that you followed up the next day with "Matt Kramer on Austerity," and that you mentioned Chandon de Brialles in the same
posting. As it happens, I opened the 99 Ile des Vergelesses the other night, after an English dance, with Liz, who found it a little
unapproachable. It is young, and rather austere, I'd say. (Kramer describes Pernands as "unbending, like an old Maine farmer"). It
opened up as we drank it but I think it will improve. Actually the
97 is drinking beautifully right now - the 2nd excellent 97 I've had recently (the other being a Geantet-Pansiot). There's more of all 3
of these if you're ever around, but I drank up my 98 Matrot.
Alice, thank you for your post “FEAR OF AUSTERE”. I have also noticed that a vocal segment of American wine drinkers have decided that austere is a bad thing. It is also true that this trend is starting to greatly affect the kind of wines that are being produced around the world. I know folks who are quick to say that this is the result wine makers chasing wine reviews, but I think the answer is a little more complicated.
Some American wine drinkers see the food they eat and the wine they drink as separate and distinct categories of things. Frequently, these folks are looking for what I call a “cocktail” wine. A cocktail wine is one that offers a consistent taste profile year after year. Typically cocktail wines are big wines. They almost have to be, because they are going to stand alone. On the other hand, austere wines are more complex and subtle. Understanding and appreciating an austere wine requires time, reflection and understanding. Cocktail wines do not ask the wine drinker to make this commitment, because they are easily understood. Given America’s love of sound bites, bullet lists, and fast food, I think America’s love of cocktail wines is here to stay.
Hi Neil, The point of American's and cocktail wine? Well put. However, if they could warm up to some muscadet instead.. --Alice
Neil, the same trend is alive and well in Old Europe too, certainly in Italy. I think they've watched too many episodes of Sex and the City.
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