From time to time, winemakers in town to present and talk up their wines will drop by our cellar. We love this, because it gives us an opportunity to get acquainted with the people whose wines line our shelves, and also because we get to ask all kinds of questions about how and why they do things as they do. A primary object of our curiosity is how a particular wine gets to be the way it is, and not one of myriad other ways it might be.
In pursuit of this, we’ll often pose some version of the following question: What are you aiming at in a finished wine, and how do you go about approaching the target? The most interesting response I’ve ever received to such a question came from new wavey California winemaker Abe Schoener, who told me that he goes into the vineyard, picks a grape, chews it, tries to sense what kind of wine the grape wants to become, then sets to work facilitating its self-realization.
While it seems clear that a chat with a wine grape can only ever be a conversation with oneself, his comment is meaningful in one important respect: It acknowledges the reality that winemakers do, must, cannot help but, impose a style on the wine they make, simply by virtue of the hundreds of decisions required to bring a sound, drinkable wine into existence. This holds true whether the style in question is the outcome of a personal vision, as with Abe, or one that conforms to a more community-based, consensus template.
Mary Taylor, whose line of affordable European appellation-designated wines have been favorites among Wine Corner clientèle, is in this second category. Her aim for this segment of her portfolio is to offer wines that represent solid, affordable, faithful iterations of wine made according to the legal standards existing for each defined category — think Côtes du Rhone or Bordeaux Blanc.
And while it’s true that sites, soils and atmospheric conditions play important roles in the character of the raw materials winemakers have to work with, choices about where and what varieties to plant, vine pruning techniques, harvest dates and countless other factors crucial to the character of finished wine are entirely matters of human agency. This agency may take a form that is steeped in traditional craft practice, or is beholden to sophisticated technology or opts for a kind of crude primitivism — nonetheless, in each case the outcome will be not just wine, but a particular possibility of wine.
Under the circumstances, it makes sense to occasionally remind ourselves that what wine may be, could be, and should be isn’t fixed by nature, but is the subject of a constant re-negotiation between winemakers and wine drinkers.
At least that’s how I style it.