Jamie Goode: Does how a wine is made matter more than how it tastes?

Imagine you run a factory. Say you are making cars. There are two approaches to ensuring that your cars reach the market in a functional way, and with the sort of quality that you expect. [And, an aside, I was a child in the 1970s UK, and was quite obsessed by cars. Many of the famous brands were being made by a state-owned conglomerate called British Leyland, and the quality of these cars was regarded as terrible. British car manufacturers were really bad at that time, and when the Germans bought the Mini brand, they were astonished by how wide the tolerances were in UK car manufacturing.]

Process versus quality control

One approach is process based. Make sure that the process is so accurate and the attention to detail is spot on, and then the cars that roll off the production line should be fine. The other is to rely on quality control at the other end. You know that some of the cars won’t be great, so you test everything carefully post-manufacture, and stop the duds (the ‘Friday afternoon cars’) from reaching the market. Of course, most factories will use a mixture of the two approaches.

It’s a bit like this with making wine. Is your philosophy to be super-technical and in control of the whole production process, or are you going to be less interventionist, leave a bit to chance, and then hope to have some robust quality control at the end?

This is all about the issue of agency, and I think this is where we see a big philosophical divide in wine.

As a winemaker, are you making wine? Or is your role more of that of a custodian, where you choose your vineyard and your method of élevage to match, but where your philosophy is that you are allowing a wine to be formed and your role merely to guide it to the place where it ends up?

This leads us to the question that’s the title of this piece. Does the production philosophy matter more than the flavour? Outspoken biodynamic pioneer Nicolas Joly sums this up in his famous phrase, ‘Before being good, a wine should be true.’ For Joly, if a wine is not ‘true’, and we can debate what he means by this, it doesn’t matter how nice it tastes, it is illegitimate and so how it tastes is a moot point.

Truth versus taste

At one extreme, this position is a sound one. Say I make a wine, and you add things to it (such as sugar and flavourings) and then a group of tasters is presented the pair of wines and prefers the adulterated one. To them, this wine tastes better. But I don’t care about this, because it is an illegal, illegitimate, untrue wine. Legally, this wine is not true.

Someone like Joly might argue that if a wine is made from conventionally farmed grapes, where some herbicide and systemic fungicide have been used, then this wine is not true. They might have a list of winery operations (such as filtration or fining) that make a wine untrue. I wouldn’t go as far as this, but I understand the perspective.

For some people, production philosophy matters more than flavour. This is found in the natural wine movement, where some take a hardline zero-zero position, and won’t even contemplate adding sulfites at bottling. Some wines lose quality because of this approach, in the sense that to a normal taster, they don’t taste as good as they might have done had some sulfites had been added. There are some natural wines with above threshold levels of 4EP and 4EG (from Brettanomyces) or elevated volatile acidity levels, and there will be natural wine lovers who would rather encounter these characters in the wine than contemplate protective additions of sulfites. They are entirely within their rights in doing this, but it’s a situation where the production philosophy has come before flavour in decision making. I’ve even heard some argue that we should put up with a bit of mousiness and not hold natural winegrowers to the same standard we might hold other winemakers, because they are taking more risks.

On the other hand there are winemakers who hold to very tight production standards, because they want to make clean wines, and don’t want to risk any faults. Of course, if you are working for a large winery, your route to market might demand clean, consistent wines and there may be no tolerance for variation. Here we come back to the issue of taste. Whereas the consumers who go to natural wine bars have some tolerance for varying flavours, supermarket shoppers probably have less tolerance. I haven’t got firm data on this, but my impression from many years of going to press tastings suggest that crisp, focused, fruit-driven wines are valued in this market channel. And to reliably make wines like this at scale requires a process-based view where winemaking steps can ensure consistency and cleanliness even with some variation in the fruit that they receive. For supermarket customers taste is primary.

When it comes to low-intervention/natural wines, I’m not saying taste doesn’t matter. It’s just that production philosophy is primary. Hopefully, a natural production philosophy results in a wine that is true to place and which tastes better, but the most important thing is that the wine is an honest one. When I visit a wine bar specializing in interesting wine, whether or not it is a natural wine bar, I’m seeking authenticity. I come to learn. I want to taste a wine that comes from somewhere, and which is a product of a microbiological process. I want to like it, but sometimes I need to admire it first for what it is, and then learn to like it. I don’t need the immediate hedonic hit, and I won’t trade that for authenticity.

So, yes, production philosophy and ideology sometimes come first, and I think they should. Everyone has their line in the sand; for all of us there is a level of intervention, whether in the vineyard or the winery, which we are uncomfortable going beyond in our drinking. And sometimes the line in the sand moves according to drinking occasion and budget. I think this is entirely legitimate, even though I won’t join the zero-zero folks and their purity tests. There are some simple interventions that can stop a wine being irredeemably spoiled, and in this case, please do intervene rather than present me a wine with mouse or a VA of 1.7 g/litre!

• Jamie Goode is a London-based wine writer, lecturer, wine judge and book author. With a PhD in plant biology, he worked as a science editor, before starting wineanorak.com, one of the world’s most popular wine websites.