I believe that the responsibility of the winemaker is to take that fruit and get it into the bottle as the most natural and purest expression of that vineyard, of the grape varietal or blend, and of the vintage.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
Winemakers have to adapt to what they're given by nature: the vines, the fruit, the soil and the weather.
I'm actually surprised how technical a lot of commercial wine production is. Things are done very much from an industrial chemistry point of view at certain price points, but that's not the impression you get with wine.
Fairly early in my career, I had a passion for wine just as a consumer, and I started to learn about the whole process, starting with a piece of raw ground, and ending up with a work of art in a bottle.
The reality is that I'm making better wine than I thought I would. The whole process is simple but beautiful.
Slow food, free-range, no steroids, eat local, and natural winemaking are all part of a general yearning for simpler times. But the fact is that most winemakers these days, big and small, have drastically lessened the use of chemicals in the vineyard, embracing such concepts as organically grown, biodynamic, and sustainable.
Wine is connected to abundance.
What is wine? It is the grape present in another form; its essence is there, though the fruit which produced it grew thousands of miles away, and perished years ago. So the object of many a tender thought may be spiritually present, in defiance of space - and fond recollections cherished in defiance of time.
To work a vineyard, you need a lot of guts to do that. To go out there and work all year, you almost feel that these people talk to the grapes. Wine is a lifestyle, and you can talk about it for ages. It's a passion, but it's not something I can do on a daily basis.
Essentially, wines are fermented grape juice, so I'm trying to make the point that the wine world is about scores and marketing and kind of creating a scarce resource where they don't really exist.
Wine lovers have known for centuries that decanting wine before serving it often improves its flavor. Whatever the dominant process, the traditional decanter is a rather pathetic tool to accomplish it. A few years ago, I found I could get much better results by using an ordinary kitchen blender.