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| La Salada “Roig Boig” Penedès/Spain 2023 Jutta Ambrositch “Rakete” Roter Gemischter Satz Vienna/Austria 2023 Leo Steen “Red Table Wine” Redwood Valley/CA 2022 Planet Mouraz “Bolinha” Curtimenta Dão/Portugal 2021 Arribas Saroto Tinto Trás-os-Montes/Portugal 2022 |
| The psychologist William James observed that human cognition is only possible when our minds filter and attenuate the “blooming, buzzing confusion” of our empirical sensorium. Without throttling the buzzing confusion, we’d be unable to attend to much of anything, “look at that…look at that, and that!” Neuroplasticity is downright hilarious with a child, but not something you want whilst driving your car on the 405 during rush hour. Monovarietal wines are the viticultural practice of shutting down the blooming, buzzing confusion of grape varieties, making it easier for growers to communicate what they’re up to, and for us wine drinkers to choose something we want to put in our mouths. So, cabernet sauvignon becomes a Euclidean point, eternal and never changing, like Coca-Cola; sauvignon blanc, Sprite. Many producers of cabernet sauvignon and sauvignon blanc employ the full armamentarium of modern, technical winemaking to make standardized, predictable commodities, eternal and never-changing, just like soda pop.
Curiously, some folks seem to feel that mono-varietal wines are somehow purer, more genuine, and less confected than wines made from blends of different varieties. When someone complains about wine as something impossibly, terribly complex, my response is that we’ve only been making wine for about ten thousand years, long before we made raised bread, when we ate grain primarily as a gruel, so we’ve had a lot of time to obsess over and elaborate on it. Certainly, a world in which monovarietal wines rule the roost is a less confusing world, but I’m not here to make wine less confusing. Well, I am, but not in that way. Historically, we made all of our wine from a mix of different grape varieties. Even in a vineyard nominally planted to one variety—before the era of nurseries and propagation through cutting/grafting—the genetic identity of the vines was quite varied. In a Burgundian massale selection vineyard of pinot noir, for example, there might be any number of different biotypes of pinot, and one clos would have a different mix than the next, not to mention degenerative plants of pinot gris and pinot blanc. And you see the vestiges of this in certain regions, such as Chateauneuf de Pape, Vienna’s gemischter satz wines, and countries like Portugal, which continue the historical practice of using many different grape varieties in their wines. Tonight, we’re tasting five different co-fermentations, some consisting of just a handful of varieties, others with many, some known, others unknown. |