People love the phrase In vino veritas I imagine because it rolls off the tounge so well, but additionally because of its witty reference to that muscle’s loosening when much vino is imbibed. In wine, or with wine, there is truth. But I wonder sometimes whether In vino scientia holds as well. Is there any true knowledge with wine? What follows are some observations I have made after 5 years in the industry spending time as a graduate student at UC Davis in addition to working in Fiddlehead Cellars, Sacred Hill, the vineyards of Germany, and HdV Wines. Most of this comes from a seminar I delivered as part of an interview for an Extension Faculty position that I ultimately turned down. Because extension positions naturally focus on distilling knowledge from both academia and the industry into forms that are usable my focus are some principles of science, enology, and in particular, how I think they may relate to aiding advancement of an industry.
I believe the goal of obtaining more knowledge of - and about - grapegrowing and winemaking is to use all our understanding to optimize our viticulture and enology to ensure we are making the best wine possible each vintage. Some may argue the real goal is to make money (certainly the owner’s goal if they are not also the winemaker). Why should these two goals be incompatible? They are not, but it takes scientific understanding, industry commitment, marketing, and cooperation to make it all happen.
But does anything stand in the way of this goal? As with most subjects, nothing is clear cut and nothing is blameless. I’d like to present the good, the bad, and ugly of Science and the Industry in terms of each’s ability to help us gain knowledge. Let’s start with science. How does science help us gain viticultural and enological knowledge and understanding?
The Good: Extremely valuable and responsible for much beneficial and useful technical knowledge regarding winemaking.
The Bad: Difficult to integrate all true possibilities that affect a certain outcome…often the scientific problem is posed as one specific condition or treatment, but initial conditions of juice, or the condition of finished wine rarely have only one element that may cause a problem…i.e. errors on being too focused or esoteric, requires patience
The ugly: Much more unknown than known. Requiring more research, money, etc.
The point: we can use more understanding and science can help us.
So how does the industry help us gain knowledge and understanding about winemaking?
I must be careful here because, well, I am speaking to the industry. But also because I think it is easy to misunderstand my point. Certainly there are practices we employ that science has not shown an effect for yet, but may indubitably have an effect. The fact is we don’t always know why we do things because they simply haven’t figured everything out, but the bottom line is decisions must be made. So the risk of course is that people tend to begin to think that their practices are impacting the wine and therefore their beliefs about winemaking begin to cloud their knowledge of winemaking and their ability to learn. Let me try again: we begin to think we do always know why we do something, or we think we have real knowledge. Do we? Here’s some good and some not so good with the Industry:
The good: Loads of experience, empirical data and intuition, and the cogs of wine production.
The bad: Explanations of success usually tied more to one’s general practices and their beliefs about winemaking than reproducible information (or scientia, knowledge). For better or for worse…but as far really knowing something this is “for worse.”
The ugly: Distilling what is really true, what really worked, from an anecdote associated with success. “I tried this and it worked!” Did it? “That was true for you, but not in my vineyard or cellar.” Oh.
The point: we can use more understanding and the industry can help us.
The Goal: develop and utilize our understanding of enology (via science and the industry) to make great wine.
So what to do? First let me say that there is a great cooperative spirit in the wine industry and a large degree of learning from one another. But I still observe skepticism due to context and dubious sources of knowledge being used. I beg your patience as I look a little further into how the good, the bad, and the ugly appear to manifest itself in the science/industry interface and their attempt to gain and use knowledge. Simply put, you might be able to say that epsitemologically we have become contextualist, or relativist. I don’t think this is isolated to the wine industry but probably largely cultural. It might seem odd to delve into the history of western thought in the middle of a wine blog post, but I believe it is critical to understand our presuppositions - in particular with knowledge - in order come up with an approach to improving what we know about wine. So, a quick review.
At the scientific revolution around the Renaissance, a reliance on scientific observation as the primary source of all knowledge was born. Richard Tarnas has written a wonderful history of western thought entitled The Passion of the Western Mind. In it he characterizes the optimism of the age following the birth of modern science as “directly tied to confidence in science and in its powers to improve indefinitely the state of human knowledge, health, and general welfare.” This was true up to the early 20th century when the foundations of math and physics were shaken by, amongst other things, the theory of relativity. When this occurred the rebellion that had been brewing in other disciplines (such as philosophy) due to the emphasis on the individual began to sprout as science’s hold on base knowledge loosened. Suddenly it seemed scientific knowledge was confined to “abstractions,” “symbols,” and “shadows” not actual knowledge of the world itself. This ultimately led to our current Post-Modern intellectual situation.
But let’s not throw the baby out with the bath water just yet. While recognizing both “an essential autonomy in the human being and a radical plasticity in the nature of reality” we find ourselves in a “challenging intellectual position that…begins with the assertion that reality itself tends to unfold in response to [a] particular…set of assumptions that are employed by each individual and each society.” Based on these observations of western thought one would predict that a contextual interpretation of data will be seen more and more. Is this not what we do in the winemaking industry? First, there seems to be great skepticism regarding scientific knowledge and recommendations based on such data. Second, one might say, “Well you may have observed that with your site, or your yeast strain, but what I see is…x, y, z…or different.” Third, scientist operating under their set of assumptions tend to discount or even entirely disregard empirical data coming from the industry, doubting it’s validity. Therefore as I said before the risk of course is that people tend to begin to think that their practices (in their context) are impacting the wine and therefore their beliefs about winemaking begin to cloud their knowledge of winemaking and their ability to learn. This can lead us to “a chaos of valuable but seemingly incompatible interpretations…with no resolution in sight.” Yikes!
However it does not mean there is nothing real or true about our surroundings, or in this case about viticulture and enology. Again Tarnas: “since evidence can be adduced and interpreted to corroborate a virtually limitless array of world views, the human challenge is to engage that world view or set of perspectives which brings forth the most valuable, life [or wine]-enhancing consequences.” Because the fact is we do know quite a bit and we know it certainly, not contextually. We know that the berry accumulates sugar after veraison. We know that anthocyanins make grapes purple. We know that yeast (in grape juice) - independent of context (wood vs. steel vessel) - ferment sugar to produce alcohol. I know this seems silly and simple, but reminding ourselves of these basic answers places what we do not know in…well, context. Will certain things remain mysterious? I hope so, the intuition required when dealing with such mystery is one thing that makes winemaking artisanal and great. However I believe we must allow what we observe in our context to loudly communicate with (not against!) more objective forms of gaining knowledge so that together advancement may be made and quality improved across the board. What I’d like to see is “thoughtful individuals engage the task of evolving a flexible [where necessary, e.g. knowledge of terroir] set of premises and perspectives that would not reduce or suppress the complexity and multiplicity of human [or cellar, vineyard] realities, yet could also serve to mediate, integrate, and clarify.” Additionally, I think I simply need to accept the fact that sometimes you just have to do things because you believe it is true, not because you know certainly. It makes for more lively discussion anyway.
30 years ago Amerine and Joslyn wrote “it is clear that we should soon have a complete picture of the chemical components of wines which influence their color, taste, odor, and quality. It is not yet clear how we can correlate this vast amount of information with the actual color, taste, and other characteristics of wines as perceived by the consumer. This is surely one goal of enologists for the last third of the 20th century (M.A. Amerine and M.A. Joslyn, Table Wines).” We do not have a complete picture yet, but it is less murky than it was 30 years ago. However mystery will remain for a long time regarding correlating that “vast amount of information” with ACTUAL components of quality AS PERCEIVED by the consumer. This creates risk for continued conextualization of wine knowledge, but hopefully all can work together to find a framework that continues to improve quality and production of wine.
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Epilogue.
I should note that the consumer (with the exception of the final paragraph) was entirely left out of the discussion. The reason is mainly a space/time question. I think the consumer is largely informed by marketing and by individuals in the industry who -as I already noted - are prone to communicate beliefs about winemaking more than knowledge of winemaking (unintentionally confusing the two). We’ll leave the consumer for another post.