The Wine Making Revolution
Often it is that whimsical and hopeful part of us that likes to believe we live in new, exciting and changing times. But, while our version of new, exciting and changing may certainly be manifested in a different way than the version our grand parents and great-grand parents experienced, it is nevertheless the nature of human invention and creativity to constantly live in new, exciting and changing times. This is not so with Wine Making. For largely the last thousand years, wine making used the same methods and acted upon the same biases. Now – today – that is all changing before our eyes. We really are living in new, exciting and changing times in the world of wine.
While the last thirty years have been but a blip on the radar screen in the long history of wine production, they will surely be marked as the time when everything changed. What does this mean? It means that while grape growing has been taking place in different parts of the world for quite some time, this is the time when relatively new wineries like those in the United States, Australia, New Zealand, South America and even South Africa are bringing something new to the table. For the first time history, there is the actual study of wine making and wine growing emerging as a scientific field in its own right, thanks to the efforts of places like U.C. Davis in California. Similarly, new technological innovations are making it possible to produce white wines that are as demanding, complex and elegant as their red wine brethren who have dominated the scene since the very first grape fermentations.
The crux of the revolution is the meeting of ideas. It is the old world of wine making meeting the new world of wine making. Old world wine growers like those in France, Italy and Spain founded a tradition based on the notion of terrior - that a wine's character and complexity comes from the land in which the grapes are grown; that everything heavenly about wine comes from a single plot of land that is different in ways too vast and subtle to fully understand; that the vineyard is a sacred work of subtlety.
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