Winemaking 101

A multicourse tasting lunch at Antica Terra.

Credit...Frank Ockenfels for The New York Times

My knowledge of wine is less than 0 as my wife knows far more about this arcane craft than I though I like dry reds better than dry whites, which compromises my depth of understanding of a discipline that's been around for thousands of years.

The reason for this blurb is the fact Alex Halberstadt knows how to write. Fluid, direct and passionate, yours truly came away impressed with his take on a fanatical wine making genius by the name of Maggie Harrison in his NYTimes piece titled Maggie Harrison's War on Wine. 

We were there to sample Harrison’s wine, but to our surprise she began the tasting by pouring for us some of the finest wines from France, which is to say some of the best wines in the world, including one I’d always wanted to try, the Gevrey-Chambertin Vielle Vigne from Jean-Marie Fourrier, a pinot noir from a talented producer in Burgundy. (It was glorious.)

“I’m having you taste these wines,” Harrison explained finally, “to create a context in which to taste my wines.”

To grasp the audacity of this statement, you have to remember that Oregon’s wine culture is, relatively speaking, in its infancy. As far as we know, the state’s first pinot noir vines were planted in 1961, whereas the first vineyards in Burgundy date to at least the first century A.D. Harrison’s declaration was akin to my kicking off a reading in a local bookstore by reading passages from Flaubert, then announcing that I’d been creating a context in which to hear my work. Was this woman kidding?

Harrison’s most distinctive wine is a pinot noir called Antikythera (named for an ancient Greek astronomical calculator that is often described as the world’s first computer). 

You gotta love the name of her pinot noir, my favorite wine to drink without question. :)

Harrison considers wine, like art, to be “cultural, not natural.”

Credit...Frank Ockenfels for The New York Times

One reason as to why she's so good at what she does ...

She attributes her ability to map so many flavors in her mind at the same time to her synesthesia. The causes of the condition remain poorly understood, but at least one study suggests that synesthetes may have an enhanced capacity for creativity, possibly because of increased connectivity among regions of the cerebral cortex, and are more likely to enter creative professions. Nikola Tesla, David Hockney, Duke Ellington and Frank Ocean have reported having it. In “Speak, Memory,” Nabokov describes learning as a child that he shared the condition with his mother while playing with alphabet blocks: “We discovered that some of her letters had the same tint as mine.”

Like Nabokov, Harrison has grapheme-color synesthesia, a form in which numerals and letters become associated with colors, and this turns out to be especially useful in her work. As she tastes her way around the bottled samples, her brain turns every number into a distinct, vibrant color, until the wines in front of her become a palette of umbers, oranges and Prussian blues that she combines into a final composition that aspires to what she describes as “emotional transparency” and a “perfect tension between intensity and levity.” Her synesthesia allows her to hold this overwhelming amount of sensory data in her mind as a palette of color, “keeping it in the sensory realm,” she told me, “without having to translate it into language.”

Read Halberstadt's article in it's entirety to learn why wine and Harrison matters. :)