I spoke recently over the phone with Alice Feiring about her last book and her thoughts about what is going on in the wine world. As you know, Alice Feiring is a wine writer for several major publications including the New York Times and she is running In Vino Veritas, her blog. She has been a cheerful advocate for natural wines in her country and she fights regularly against what she considers is an homogenization of wines caused by the scores system instituted by wine critics and particularly by Robert Parker.
This telephone interview is a good opportunity to post several of the pictures that I shot earlier in the year at her official signature day in Paris for the French edition of The Batttle for Wine and Love. The French version is traducted by Arnaud Pouillot and published by Jean-Paul Rocher Editeur, a publishing company that published several books from-or-about Jules Chauvet.
The signature event was as exciting as a wine tasting event : imagine, there were three excellent vignerons pouring their wines for Alice that evening, Catherine Roussel (Clos Roche Blanche), Philippe Pacalet and Champagne Larmandier. This took place at Le Lieu Commun in the 3rd arrondissement.
When I called Alice the other day, she said spring came early this year and she was considering going foraging to to pick up ramps, wild leeks in the woods. She usually does that the last week of april but the season seemed to come earlier this year.
I told here first that I liked the way she wrote her book, this searching for what made her lovely wines at the early stage of her wine education vanish, her nearly investigative approach in this battle for wine and love. I even found something akin to these Japanese wine mangas, you know, these Drops of God sommeliers looking for the secrets behind iconic wines that they tasted or smelled in their youth and travelling through the world to unveil the graal...
__ Alice : Hopefully it has already started to happen, at least in the United States. Since she came back from Spain, she realized that oddly, wine critics are so powerful over there in Spain, not Parker in the matter but Jay Miller for this case. In this US, there is a growing number of people who don't look for major critics for their guidance. It started with individual people first and it was passed on some stores then. People realized that certain styles of wines got the good scores and there began to be made only this type of wines, the wineries doing all they could to make their wines fit the frame. The easily identifiable style of wine that Robert Parker promoted through his high scores made it tempting for the wineries and the enologists to produce wines that would get high scores too. So, now it is changing and people begin to look for a wine that they like instead of a wine "by a number", it begins with the big cities first, places like New York, Boston, Washington, the West Coast cities too, even Portland, Oregon, and this trend will eventually reach the rest of the country. In the other countries like Japan, Spain, even france, the scores are still very important for wine buyers.
__ Alice : She says that there has been a great tasting even recently in the US, the La Paulée, based on La Paulée de Meursault, a Burgundy wines tasting, and Claude Nollet from Chandon de Briailles, and she said that she was impressed by how many people were knowledeable at this tasting. Alice says that when you don't have a wine culture, you study more to get it.
That's when I ask Alice if she isn't maybe to hurried about the way the American consumers choose their wines : back in, say, 1950, the wine culture was almost nowhere to be found in the public, and today, not only a growing proportion of wine consumers are demanding and knowledgeable about wine, but the country produces excellent wine. Isn't just more time what could relativize the importance of wine critics like Parker ? Wine consumers are said to already begin to snub woody Chardonnays.
__ Alice : It's soooo slow, she says, laughing. She says that she has a narrower palate than Robert Parker probably and there are very few wines in California that she tolerates, she could count them in one hand maybe. Actually, she has been thinking a lot of the reasons why, for her next book which is due for 2011.. She says that in the US, there is a factory approach in making wine, even though people say they make hand-crafted wines, a word that she can't stand with wine.There's a company who grows the grapes for the people who own the land, then there's other people who make the wine, plus several people who market the product.
I ask if women share in the wine public couldn't be they key, maybe their taste go for leaner, lighter wines, we already heard that the Japanese palate is fond of natural wines for example. She says that women will not drive the change, markeeters will. Wine is made like a television show with lots of communication so as the market follows. If women ask for lower-alcohol wines, these will be made with efficient machines (reverse osmosis) as opposed to alter the farming techniques which they don't want to do, that's all. She adds with a laugh, you see, I'm quite a cynic...
I asked if there was not some sort of investor side in the wine buyer, which makes them looking for top scores and "secure" assets. She says yes, there has been this Screaming Eagle thing, a California wine which reached astronomical prices completely disconnected with its actual quality. She saw recently an amazing offer here in New York with five different vintages, people try to dump it right now. I ask about another iconic wine, Montebello ? She says it's not in the same way, it doesn't reach the same prices, Montebello is more a connoisseur wine. Screaming Eagle reached 3500 dollars a bottle, that's crazy, and ridiculous for crap, she adds... But she says that it's almost over and Screaming Eagle will be known as a big canard in the future.
__ Alice : it's a real conundrum because the biotech industry is where the money is, and the schools need money to keep going. Of course there's going to be ties because the funding of studies comes with some expectations in return. She says that she is certain that there wouldn't be such a fear of natural processes regarding wine making if it wasn't partly funded by Lallemand, Scott and companies like that. She reminds me that she wrote in the book that she found appalling that natural winemaking (without using biotech additives) isn't taught as an option at UC Davis when a growing number of outstanding vintners work this way. It could be taught in the enology school even marginally, so that the students can decide for themselves later. She finds it shocking that there's no information or teaching in that sense. She says that she would like to have a natural-wine tasting organized at UC Davis, this would help raise question and start a dialogue...
Alice drifts on this pesticides question and tells me about a weird French horror movie from the late 70s', which is named the Grapes of Death and which tells on the gore mode the story of people getting crazy because of pesticides sprayed in a vineyard... When I see the pictures of the movie scenes, there's a kitsch 1970s' feel that makes me want to see the movie, with also this vineyard spraying story which may inadvertendly bring some light on how people viewed the chemical-sprayings dangers already then.
Edit :
Alice Feiring says at some point that she may sound cynic. Wrong. Here are real cynics : I forgot to post this item on winenews :
The UIPP people were answering questions to a gulible public about the many benefits of their profession and plentuful products and in case this was not enough, they hat automated answering machines (picture on right) with ready-made answers for formatted questions...
Bert, you would enjoy Ruth Reichl's autobiographical works: a very similar story to Alice's, and much the same journey, but more with food and not so much with wine. I don't know if they have been translated into French.
Posted by: Frank | April 15, 2010 at 08:23 PM
Like almost all hyper passionate wine lovers, Ms. Feiring allows her passions and admitted cynicism to take her on flights of utter silliness such as calling Screaming Eagle "crap". No wine is "WORTH" $6,000, even the 78 Romanee Conti I bought in 1982 for $150.00 and Screaming Eagle is no exception. Frankly, I have gotten more pleasure and greater enjoyment from many far less expensive wines, but none of that means the wine is crap. I guarantee you if you open a bottle of Screaming Eagle with a good steak frites you are going to have a very good time and a terrific meal. If the bottle cost you $20, you'd call it one of the world's greats, and that's the problem. Wine should be judged and enjoyed on its own merits, free from the marketing hype, and indeed the market itself. In the end, the ratings and the prices are there because we lack the confidence to admit that we like what we like so we need other people to tell us we're right, that we picked a real winner. Yet, the person who gets the most pleasure from his/her glass of wine is the real winner, regardless of what's in it. The pleasure of a glass of wine you truly enjoy is everything it's cracked up to be...maybe more.
Posted by: Mark from Honolulu | April 17, 2010 at 05:34 PM
good points mark. for her palate screaming eagle may very well be crap though. a fair amount of people, especially people who have been drinking wine for 40+ years, are only interested in a very old world style of wine and nearly anything made in the US (or australia, etc) will be a turn off to them. it wont taste the way theyve trained themselves to think good wine should taste.
cheers, mike
http://www.wineweirdos.com
Posted by: mike landucci | April 17, 2010 at 09:27 PM
Hey that's me in that second picture! The one with Alice and Dominique hugging. I have my back to the camera. I wish I had known you were there, would've liked to say hi. :)
Posted by: Nick Gorevic | April 28, 2010 at 07:57 PM
Ms. Feiring (and this article as well) fails to mention that there are no wines made - especially in France - without the use of pesticides. Even so-called organic and biodynamic growers spray pesticides on their fruit to ward off diseases that would otherwise render their crop unusable or non-existent. In fact, both organic and BD viticulture rely a great deal on the use of copper sprays to control downy mildew and petroleum oil to control powdery mildew. Copper is particularly noxious due to its toxicity to soil microbes and its extremely long half life. This is a disingenuous ideology.
Posted by: David | February 04, 2011 at 04:34 AM