Wine's naturalistic fallacy

Just published a free-to-read Tuesday morning provocation on The Wine Advocate site. Would be interested to hear everyone’s thought!

The précis is that I argue that the notion that wines “make themselves”, and that any producer signature amounts to “makeup” is mistaken; every wine is the product of intention, as producers make choices in the face of almost infinite possibilities (even if these are, in practice, limited by logistics and conventions). The argument by which the essay stands or falls is this one: “To acknowledge that terroir is a text to be interpreted and not a law that demands adherence is also to accept that any winemaking style that seems to be more “transparent,” offering a less obviously mediated expression of grape and place, is in fact only a subtler and more deceptive form of artifice.”

An insightful take rather than a “natural wine” or “terroir” takedown, love it! I am always trying to impress upon people the million minute decisions that make great differences in the outcome of winemaking, covered very well here:

“Every choice, big or small, ramifies; and even negative choices ramify, so abdication is seldom an option.”

“In theory, the winemaker is faced with an almost infinite variety of combinatory choices; in practice, the constraints of logistics and the conventions of tradition limit options to a more manageable range.”

and I especially loved this:

“To acknowledge that terroir is a text to be interpreted and not a law that demands adherence is also to accept that any winemaking style that seems to be more “transparent,” offering a less obviously mediated expression of grape and place, is in fact only a subtler and more deceptive form of artifice.”

Oh, it’s a beautiful piece, William.

I think about this question most often when I’ve been at certain biodynamic places like Pearl Morissette in Ontario. Lots of attention to making some very unique wines, and yet (for me) their idiosyncrasies in flavors and mouthfeel are somewhat of a roller coaster for my own enjoyment . And is that because I grew up on Old World wines so devoutly? If I were new to wines in my 30s, and had a massive variety of wine making diversity in my first 500 bottles of wine tasted/consumed would my own palate flexibility have a much larger degree of variance? Would I embrace ‘quirky’ wine making techniques more readily?

I do indeed think about this often. Both on the personal, anecdotal levels as well as what they mean for the artisanal world at large.

Haven’t heard ramify used in a long time.

Decent article. Obviously, wine is made somehow. What you want to call it or do with it will be where the arguments lie.

All your article long , I was thinking about domaine Coche Dury . Today , the wines are more pure yes .
But where is the ( JF ) Coche nose ? Gone .
Now , it is much more difficult to recognise Coche wines made by son Rafaël blind . The wines are truly great but I preferred the old style . Some people called them overly oaked , even when no new oak was used … you liked it or you didn’t . They had a distinct style , I loved it .

This tendency is exactly that: a tendency. It is reaching the end of the pendulum swing as you let us understand through the first paragraph of your article:

how tenable is any philosophy for wine production that seeks to minimize the importance of production itself?

This was a necessary movement to get the consumer mass out of the

bland, commercial conformity on a beverage

and it will leave a more knowledgeable and informed generation of vignerons to pass these experiences and changes on to the next. This will also have served a purpose to educate the consumers to other styles of wines that were not following the “commercial conformity”.

So all in all, it was a good thing, it is a good thing but as almost everything else in life… let’s stay away from the extremes.

Good article and proper timing too as we feel that this shift to the extreme is reaching its end.

William,

This is an excellent piece and I have too many–seemingly ever expanding in digression after digression–thoughts on this to share in one post. I wanted to start by thanking you specifically for doing some work in posts on this forum, Instagram, and your writing to try and demystify to the best of your ability a lot of the discussion around wine making techniques and how that translates to what one smells or tastes in the glass. As far as I’m aware you seem to be just about the only person working in wine who is calling attention to the difficulty in always attributing an aspect of wine (or a group of wines) to just one decision in winemaking (including stems, use of new oak etc etc).

I’m fully aware the background I’m about to bring in is not going to be popular on this board and I want to be clear I intend this in no way to be political or start a political argument but merely to make a point by way of background about human making. I have an extensive background in Marxist historiography and given Marx’s focus on the way in which human’s organize their production, and his brilliant thoughts on the subject I can’t help but be reminded of many of those observations when discussing this “non interventionist” approach. As you identify the reaction against commercial or “highly interventionist” wine-making becomes almost a caricature to the point that it claims a position that is on it’s face completely indefensible. No one drinks wine specifically because it is the product of nature; that’s literally an impossibility. Wine–probably even more so than most food or beverage-- only exists due to a human being (or group of human beings) intermixing their labor with nature; and in fact, whether you are fully conscious of it or not the particulars of this human creation process are what make wine so compelling and beguiling. Because there are nearly endless (though not infinite) sets of inputs and decisions (and limitations given by your particular climat, equipment, knowledge etc etc), and the fact that you get one shot at producing a wine each year (with essentially very little ability to actually control for any one particular set of input)-- the wine maker’s job seems utterly maddening. It also means, from my perspective anyway, while the natural setting is probably of significant importance, ultimately what you are buying when you buy a wine, is that producer’s particular set of sensibilities and skills mixed with his vineyard holdings. How you assign the % of what is most important I guess I’m not sure, though I personally through experience feel producer matters most because unlike what the common convention suggests you are basically buying, to put it as simply as possible, that producer’s palate. Essentially saying I like the wines that this person also seems to like. I remember attending a session with Jean Marc Roulot saying he produces wines he wants to drink and doesn’t really care about anything else and I’ve seen similar sentiments come from other winemaker’s I find compelling. It seems impossible to say “this expresses the natural soul of the vineyard or terroir” because without at least some human intervention there would be no vineyard, and therefore no “soul” to express. I actually find the idea that you are expressing “the soul” of the winemaker, much more compelling (though saying it is a mix of the two is probably ultimately most defensible)-- it is the blood, sweat, tears, and vision of the person interacting with his land, and his wine that is most visible or visceral in the glass and in the stories the winemaker’s tell about their wines (even when they try to emphasize their lack of intervention). If I only wanted to experience pure nature, I certainly would not buy wine.

Anyways, I’m maybe just restating what you wrote, but my point is what makes wine compelling and so interesting–to me anyway-- is the limits and possibilities set by the material realities of its production and how I get to experience what amounts to almost a material history (of “place”, of human making, of nature) through my sensuous enjoyment (or lack thereof) of the wine. To remove the human part of that is not only to literally deny reality but also strip the joy and humanity in sharing with one another in the results of our labor.

If I have William’s basic premise right, it is that the winemaker’s intervention, his stamp on the wine, is as important as the place it came from. Or, at least, that the winemaker’s stamp is a critical component in setting a wine apart from its peers, and that the most “interesting” wines have that stamp. I have mixed feelings about that conclusion. There are most definitely wines which have a “stamp” that makes them more interesting, more enticing, more cerebral perhaps. But there are an equal - perhaps much greater - number where that obvious stamp obliterates the wine, masking it’s intrinsic character with aspects not at all “native”.

Personally, I find myself drawn more to wines that have a less obvious winemaker’s “signature”, though there are important exceptions: Jamet’s Cote Rotie, for example, is clearly apart from its peers in style, which suggests something unique about the winemaking. Rougeard’s Saumur wines the same. When you find that unique combination of winemaking signature and terroir, it is truly magical. The problem, as I see it, is those successful combinations are few and far between.

Great article William

I continuously ponder over the producer vs. terroir debate you so eloquently wrote on.

To me it seems silly to claim there’s only one single way to express the TRUE terroir of a place. So much of it comes down to a producer’s preferences and decisions in the wine growing and making process that I always ponder how much of the wine’s uniqueness is due to location/terroir vs. producer.

In other word’s when one is drinking Jayer Echezeaux, one isn’t drinking the true expression of Echezeaux, bur rather Jayer’s expression of Echezeaux.

It’s like those panting classes with everyone painting the same subject. At the end of the day when you step back, all of the paintings are of the same subject, but they are expressed differently. Some may show the subject better or worse than others, but even then, there’s bound going to be a handful of paintings that portray the subject equally well, but are expressed in different fashions. It seems to me like no coincidence that we also note things like shape, structure, colour, clarity when we talk about wine as well.

How woefully tedious it would be if every Pinot Noir from Echezeaux or Richebourg tasted the same, all wines completely fungible.

I reckon we drink wine less for the connection to place, and more for the connection to people. Even if we are far removed and distant from those who produce the wine we consume, we are ultimately drawn to the fingerprint of those people who produced the wine, or patina as you’d call it.

I reckon liking a region, vineyard or cru can be seen akin to liking a genre in a book, or film, or whatever other media one may consume. Insofar as that within that genre that are various ways in which that work may manifest. One may have a noted preference for say historical fiction novels, but not all historical fiction novels may move or compel one to read them. It is those from authors with their own set of unique characteristics, quirks and idiosyncrasies (whatever those may be) that compel you to read those books.

I imagine wine being much the same. It’s not so much one’s fondness for say Echezeaux or Montrachet that compels and intrigues, but for rather one’s fondness for Jayer’s or DRC’s Echezeaux, or Ramonet’s or Leflaive’s Montrachet. Each of them imbued with the producer’s unique characteristics, or patina to use William’s word. Even if we are ultimately abstracted and removed from those who produce the wines we consume, I think the uniqueness we often associate with a given terroir is not solely due to the geography of where those grapes were grown, but equally important, if not more so, we are drawn to and compelled by the fingerprints, or patinas, these producers leave behind in their wines

Thank you! I have gone through the same process of reflection, especially in the course of getting to know, and coming to love, Selosse’s very idiosyncratic Champagnes.

I think one’s point of entry into a region (or, let’s say, a genre, to borrow from Rodrigo’s post) is immensely important. Each wine we taste in a sense alters our palate, by expanding our frame of reference, but those formative encounters can be the most defining. If, to continue with the Champagne example, one starts out with tank fermented, reductive, quite high-dosage Champagne, the shock of coming to Selosse is going to be so huge as to be, for some, insurmountable. Whereas if one comes to Selosse via old Champagne from the 1950s, serious white Burgundy, or the wines of Jerez and even the Jura, they are going to be a lot more, in a sense, accessible. One of the things that makes Selosse so interesting is the way he has transcended categories and gotten away with it, but it is remarkable the extent to which our wine culture considers some practices to be appropriate in some regions and not others. I have friends who love classical Rioja but criticize Ridge Monte Bello for the American oak signature, for example. But what would they have said in late 19th-/early 20th-century Haro when Rioja was being invented?

Thank you! And I very much agree that its humane dimension is one of the things that makes wine so compelling. Indeed, it’s an irony of contemporary wine marketing that it’s the producers’ stories that sell; yet it’s de rigeur to imply that those producers just watch as the wines make themselves. By pivoting to focus more on the concept of terroir vs the reality of production, you’ve also anticipated “part two”, which will look at the cultural history of that concept and how “gout de terroir” went from meaning “tastes of dirt” to “tastes of the dirt”. I probably should have addressed that better in this essay, but I didn’t want to bite off more than I could chew during a Texas power outage. Anyway, thanks again for the kind words, and interesting reflections.

If your aim was to provoke, than I fear you have failed completely, because everyone here seems to agree with you completely, which is not surprising since your piece makes so much sense.

My premise is more that all wines are, unavoidably, the result of how producers answer the myriad questions posed by wine production; so all wines bear a stamp. So, as I put it in the essay, any winemaking style that seems to be more “transparent,” offering a less obviously mediated expression of grape and place, is in fact only a subtler and more deceptive form of artifice. The concept of “transparency to terroir”, in other words, doesn’t do justice to the complexity of what is actually going on.

Winemaking signature has always struck me as similar to cooking great ingredients - do you like your freshly caught lobster steamed and served with lemon wedges or poached in butter? Both are still going to taste like lobster, but they are very different styles. Is one any more legitimate than the other? Nope.

Your comments here make me think of the observation of a friend of mine, John Atkinson, who suggested that the domaine-bottling movement represented “a reterritorialization from vineyard to domaine”. That’s to say, the era of the négociants’ dominance tended to subordinate producer styles to vineyard styles (with wines blended and even adulterated to make e.g. a Pommard “taste more like Pommard”), whereas the grower-bottling movement brought production-derived differences out of the shadows and into the forefront. As you intimate, today, the appellation cannot really be meaningfully be given without the producer as a qualifier: Jayer’s Echezeaux, Ramonet’s Montrachet—and, maybe even more emphatically, Dureuil’s Rully, Guffens’ Mâcon. Whereas 100+ years ago the producer and even the bottler was frequently omitted from the label: one sees old 19th-century bottles that are just labelled “Chambertin”!

My signature on the Cellartracker discussion forum is, “Terroir is not a flavor.” It seems germane here.

There is something to be said for varietal, or site-specific, “typicity”; but it’s not the end-all be-all. And that’s said without even touching the third rail of “defining “typicity”.”

The pedant in me wants to note that the “naturlistic fallacy,” is the fallacy of believing that nature has human feeling, that when it rains, nature weeps, etc. By extention it has also referred to criticism that justifies an artwork for reproducing what it describes. Thus an artwork about boredom should be boring and an artwork about incoherence should be incoherent. What you are describing really doesn’t have much to do with that. Though I suppose, with sufficient interpretive energy one could justify the analogy, I don’t know that I would be persuaded.

With regard to your argument as a whole, whereas as a matter of abstract philosophy, I agree with you, there is a family resemblance among the wines that the term natural designates, and an even more specific set of resemblances to the wines that get condemned for interventionist winemaking, so the terms, like points for those who can read them, do serve a communicative end, I think. I know that authors create their characters and that authors who say that their characters decide what they will do and not their authors’ desires for them are somewhat deluded. Nevertheless, those authors usually create more compelling characters. Likewise, a winemaker who declares that he or she does only what his vineyard tells him or her to do is either speaking metaphorically or is similarly deluded. And, likewise, those winemakers generally make wines I prefer. One more thing. I do absolutely agree that the best winemakers all have their own style. And that concept is abstractly at war with thinking that non-interventionism is all one seeks. But not all styles are to all tastes. Christian Delorme definitely make wine according to his own lights and is to be admired for that. But his lights weren’t mine and I never cared for the wines.

What do you mean that French doesn’t have a word for winemaker? What is “vigneron?” The fact that it doesn’t have the French word for “make” in it doesn’t mean that that isn’t what the word means?

I love the article!

As a person that drinks a lot of “natural wine”, but hates the term, this article perfectly describes some of my thoughts. It is as people sometimes don’t understand that almost every part of winemaking is a choice. And as long as that is not accepted the discussions becomes too focused on certain things.

The best example for me is the discussion of adding sulfites. In the genre of “natural wine” i have never understood why this is seen as such a special no-go for many, when it comes to the perception of showing true terrior. It is not like other choices had not effect…
And what annoys me the most about it, is that it removes focus from what is important to me, farming the land we use for a luxury product, with care, while producing thrilling wines!

It depends which definition you take e.g. Merriam-Webster:
Winemaker: a person who makes wine, specifically : one who supervises the wine-making process at a winery
It doesn’t relate to growing or tending the vines. But the web also provides the following definition: A producer of wine; a winegrower.

Whereas vigneron always included the work at the vineyard e.g. Larousse:
Vigneron: Personne qui cultive la vigne, fait du vin.

So it depends who you ask .