Here are some lovely wines from California. 

Durell Vineyard was planted by Ed Durell in 1979. Ellie Price and Chris Towt bought Durell from Ed in the late 1990s. Essentially, they've been growers who have sold fruit to several big names in the California wine industry. As they grew to know the Durell vineyard they began to recognize the quality from a particular block they call the Ranch House Block. They replanted this block with chardonnay and pinot noir-- particularly masal chardonnay and 5 specific clones of pinot noir. They stopped selling the fruit from Ranch House Block and recently began producing their own wine with it, under the name Dunstan (First vintage of Dunstan was 2008). So, Chris and Ellie are essentially committed growers who continue to sell fruit, but also make some of their own wine.   

I once believed that good wine could only come from an estate, or from leased lands, and that contracted fruit could never make the grade. I always had it in the back of my mind that if the winemaker wasn't growing the fruit, they'd never get anyone who cared about the fruit enough to really grow it right. My position is evolving and changing on this issue, especially in regards to California/Oregon winemaking traditions. Sometimes I come across committed growers like Ellie and Chris, and a whole alternate way of winemaking emerges. 

In an empirical way, it can sometimes make sense to separate growing and winemaking. If one group can dedicate themselves to the full time job of farming and pruning, and the other group can dedicate themselves to the winemaking and cellaring, then both parts of the equation can get the full attention they need from their overseers. The key, I think, is to find a grower who has the same values as the winemaker, and a winemaker who can work with the fruit to make the type of wine that the grower forsees as the vineyard's expression. When the growing and winemaking are separated, there are many more variables that can lead to decreased quality, but this does not necessarily have to be the case. 

This is a bit off topic, since Dunstan is just the opposite: a grower's transition into estate wine. But what stands out to me is that Chris & Ellie still contract out parts of Durell vineyard. They like to see what the winemakers will do with the fruit. They taste the different results and may say "Oh, I really like what so & so did with that chardonnay that year," or "that didn't turn out so well-- they wanted those grapes too ripe." As a grower, you get to experience terroir in a whole new way, because you can see first hand the prism of possibilities in your own vineyard during a single vintage, as several producers attempt to work with your grapes in their own unique manner. 

Over the years I've met plenty of winemakers who have contracts with growers, but they will specifically request to farm the land themselves. So many estate-less producers (who usually have plans to transition to estates) can do beautiful things with someone else's plot. 

It's also inspiring to see what has happened at Durell-- one plot stands out over time, and inspires the growers to start their own label. 

Durell vineyard is unique because of its location-- at the center of three terroirs. The Petaluma Wind Gap brings winds in from one side, Carneros hits them from another, and the lower Russian River Valley swoops in on the third side. There are three natural terraces on which the vines are planted, and the wine from the gap brings in-- like clockwork-- a rip of air each day at 3pm that helps keep the air cool and the grapes maintain their acidity. 

Dunstan "Durell Vineyard," 2010 chardonnay
*14 mo. oak elevage, 100% old wente clones (hen & chick)
*about 300 cases annual production 
Earthy, green herbs, soft fruit, a savory meatiness in the aroma. Elegant complexity, great acidity. 

Dunstan "Durell Vineyard," 2010 pinot noir
*14 mo. oak elevage- new French. Here, the 5 different clones in the vineyard contribute to the complexity. Some clones were chosen "to bring out the high tones," while other "bring out the bass notes." *It was interesting to hear them talk about the clones like a composer talks about music, or a perfumer speaks about creating layers in a scent. 
*about 250 cases annual production
Really interesting nose: meat, fruit, raspberry candies, chocolate, earth, anise, a hint of smoke. Very complex with a bright, cleansing acidity and a hint of spiciness on the finish. 

"Pip" is an interesting case of the grower-turned-winemaker-turned-contractor. 

This is a project to make a wine that is more price accessible (the Dunstan is pretty high quality and can be pricey). "Pip" is chardonnay that these growers contract from their neighbor growers. 

Pip -2010 (Sonoma Coast, Chardonnay)
Tarter fruit aromas and flavors than the Dunstan, bright acidity, dense flavor. 

Samantha Sheehan says her "Poe" wine is inspired by the ravens that populated her backyard growing up. She watched the smart ravens use sticks for tools, gather food, and protect their territory. Hitchcock's "The Birds" was filmed nearby, and the crew released the birds into the wild when they completed filming. Her childhood backyard visitors were descendants of Hitchcock's birds! 

She makes two different bottlings-- both single vineyard wines from Anderson Valley, California. 

 

Poe Chardonnay- Ferrington Vineyard, 2010
(Anderson Valley, California)
Ferrington Vineyard is one of the older vineyards in Anderson Valley, planted in the 1970s. Sam chose this vineyard, because she had a very special 1996 Williams Selyem chardonnay that she found exquisite. Inspired, she tracked down the fruit source, and got her own Ferrington fruit. The grapes are mostly Wente clone (prized for "hen & chick"- uneven bunches that have large ripe berries for sugar, and small tart berries for acidity). This particular vineyard is late ripening. Sam uses native yeasts for barrel fermentation, and she doesn't do too much stirring. 

Poe Pinot Noir- Angel Camp Vineyard, 2010 
(Anderson Valley, California)
Angel Camp Vineyard is located up on a hill that looks down upon Monument Tree. With this wine, she uses native yeasts for the fermentation, no acidification, 100% de-stemmed fruit, and 30% new oak. She de-stemmed in 2010, because it was a cooler year and she was unsatisfied with the phenolic ripeness. If you have your eye on future vintages, the 2012 Poe pinot noir will have been made with some stems, because of their ripeness. 

I went to a pretty interesting Gruaud Larose tasting the other week. 

Gruaud is a neat producer for several reasons. First of all, they have continued to make their wine from the same plot of land (in Saint-Julien-Beychevelle)-- it's technically 75 plots of land, grouped together in a single rectangle, with the building in the center of the plot. 

Bordeaux is a strange place, because the AOC system there functions in tandem with the sometimes-official, sometimes-unofficial 1855 Classification (Lewin 2009:45-47). To collectors and consumers, the classification trumps specific terroirs. A First or Second Growth wine producer can sell and buy plots of land, but the title of First or Second Growth will stick with the Chateau name. This paradox amid a culture that so tirelessly eschews the values of terroir can make it difficult to do comparative tastings over long swaths of time. And difficult for some people to accept the 1855 Classification as having the same value merit today that it did a century and a half ago. 

But Gruaud Larose is a unique exception in all this. They haven't expanded their property since 1781 (long before the Classification was set). Their property has been split apart in the past, and the wine was produced separately and sold under different labels, but the estate was reassembled in the early 1900s, making it a fascinating case study.  

Their plantings are primarily cabernet sauvignon, followed by merlot, cabernet franc, and tiny parcels of petit verdot and malbec. The blend very roughly follows this ratio, but is subject to change depending on the fruit quality of any given year. At Gruaud Larose they currently love the effect that a particular low-yeilding petit verdot clone has on the blend, and are in the process of changing the ratio of plantings by increasing petit verdot from 3% to 6%. Though it is just a dream at this stage, they wonder what effect carmenere (which has been in exile in Chile for some time) would have on the blend if it were brought back home to Bordeaux-- especially in the wake of global warming, which in recent years has had an effect on the ripening of certain varietals.

Some important years:

• circa 1725- knight Joseph Stanislas Gruaud begins to assemble vineyards
  
• late 1700s- two of Gruaud's descendants joined their properties and made two cuvees: Abbé Gruaud and Chevalier de Gruaud, named after the professions of Gruaud's descendants: a priest and a magistrate. 
• 1787- Thomas Jefferson visited Bordeaux to do research for then president Monroe. Jefferson placed La Rose (the wine was known as La Rose at that time) just after the First Growths, and on the same level as Rauzan and Leoville. (Ginestet 1984:140)
• 1812- the property was auctioned off and run jointly by several owners.
• 1855- Gruaud Larose was named as a Second Growth in the 1855 Classification System. 
  
• 1867- the property officially split into two properties. 
• 1872- a ship carrying 2,000 bottles of Gruaud Larose 1865 sunk near Singapore on its journey to Saigon. 
• 1935- the Cordier family bought the parcel of land that reassembled the original Gruaud Larose property. 
• 1986- Gruaud Larose had been making unofficial second wines for years, but the 1986 was the first official year that Sarget de Gruaud Larose was released as the second label of Gruad Larose.
  
• 1992- the shipwreck from 1872 was discovered, and the bottles of 1865 Gruaud Larose were tasted. 
• 2006- last vintage of winemaker Georges Pauli
• 2007- first vintage of new winemaker, Philippe Carmagnac 
• 2010- richest Gruaud Larose ever produced, at 14% 

Bibliography
Ginestet, Bernard. (1984) The Wines of France: Saint-Julien. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston.
Kissack, Chris. (circa 2000-2013)  Chateau Gruaud-Larose. www.thewinedoctor.com
Lewin, Benjamin. (2009) What Price Bordeaux? Dover: Vendage Press. 

Roberto di Filippo 

In the 1970s Roberto's father moved his family from Salerno to Montefalco. They started with 6 hectares and today Roberto has grown their family winery to be 30 hectares, farmed by 20 employees. He hires a lot of people to work at the vineyard with him, and has an interesting point of view concerning agriculture. "Right now, only 2% of the Italian population is invested in agriculture. I'd like to see more human interest in agriculture. I'd like to see the 2% become 4%. A lot of people enjoy to work in the field." He has a second project as well: horse management. He trains horses for biodynamic field plowing (something he learned in Romania). The horses help break up the compact clay soils in Montefalco.  


In 1994 he switched to organic farming, and he has been biodynamic for the last three years. 

These are four of his wines. The first two on the left are white wines made from the grechetto grape. The third wine is a blend from Montefalco, and the wine on the right is the sought-after sagrantino. 

di Filippo Grechetto 
with this wine, Roberto does a "soft vinification" to keep Grechetto's natural tannins smooth. 

di Filippo "Sassi d'Arenaria" Grechett0
Grechetto has very small berries, and loads of tannins. Because of the tannins, this wine goes great with heavier foods and has great ageability. This particular bottling had soft tannins, great minerality, and a savory aroma. 



di Filippo Monefalco Rosso Sangiovese/Barbera/Sagrantino
Today, many people use cabernet sauvignon or merlot to flesh out their blends, but in previous decades barbera was used. Roberto likes to continue this. 

di Filippo (2007) Sagrantino 

"To get the good tannins, you need low yields natural farming." Roberto looks for brown seeds-- with sagrantino, green seeds are especially bitter, and if you pick the grapes to soon this bitterness shows up in the wine. But "if you pick when the seeds are brown and taste nutty, you catch them at phenolic ripeness and the tannins are much softer." 

This is a rich, bold wine, with plenty of tannins-- but soft, plush tannins- beautiful & intense! 

Laurent Cazottes' father was a traveling distiller; great spirits run in his family. With two stills from his father he set up a small artisanal distillery located about a 1.5 hour drive northeast from Toulouse. All of the fruit on his land is farmed organically, and processed in the small building pictured above. 

What's so special about these is Cazottes methodology; he hand pits every single piece of fruit. Yes-- that means that every individual grape is cut by him, and he takes out the seeds.

Pictured left are two of his eau de vie-- one is a brandy made from the prunelart grape, the other from the mauzac grape. 

Laurent Cazottes "Wild Cherry Sweet Wine"

<--Now here is something truly amazing and unique. Laurent has wild cherry trees that grow on his property. He harvests the cherries, hand-pits them, one-by-one. Dries them. Makes a cherry wine from them. Then, he distills part of the wine, and adds it back into the remaining cherry wine. Then, he macerates some cherries in the fortified cherry wine, leaving us this this: one of the most incredible drinks I have ever tried. 

If you even remotely like cherries in any way shape or form (during cherry season there is a constantly refreshed bowl of them in my house) this will blow your mind. What I find incredible is that Cazottes does all of this painstaking work by hand. I imagine him sitting in front of a giant pile of cherries, pitting them, juice flying, hands stained bright red for days. 

<-- a portrait of patience  

And here is also something truly unique and wonderful. This is one of the most incredible brandies I have ever tasted. 

Laurent has .6 hectares of the remaining 2 hectares of prunelart in France. Prunelart was once popular a century ago, and makes a wine similar to dolcetto-- but at just 2 hectares it is close to extinct. Cazottes likes to work with the unique grape varieties from his region. 

He makes this in the same manner as the others-- he hand cuts each grape, removes the pips, de-stems, then raisinates. He makes a wine from the dried fruit, then distills it into this incredible brandy. 

The brandy was so pure-- so rich and flavorful on the palate, and it smelled so fresh as if you had just crushed a grape between your fingers. Sometimes with brandies you get an intense alcohol aroma with some fruit aromas behind it, but this one didn't have that sting at all. It was beautiful. 

This is what the prunelart variety looks like: 

Cazottes also makes a distilled spirit from pears-- the secret to his high quality is removing the bitter stems and seeds:

It's special to find someone making such tiny production brandies from rare varietals; and to me, the fact that he also makes a cherry wine and a pear brandy shows a creative streak, and a respect for the natural harvest already available to him on his property. 

He makes these mostly for a few high end restaurants in Europe, but I'm so glad a few bottles have made it to the US. 

The Barossa Valley is entrancing for many reasons... For me, what makes it such a special place is the abundance of pre-phylloxera vines planted on their own rootstock. In the Barossa Valley we can find some of the world's oldest vineyards, including plantings of shiraz/syrah (Langmeil/Moorooroo), grenache, mourvedre (Hewitson Old Garden), riesling, semillon, and cabernet sauvignon (Kalimna) that date back to the 1840s-1880s. Many of these vineyards are acclaimed to contain the oldest specimens of their respective varieties. These old vines produce extremely special grapes-- unique in their provenance, genetic rootstock, and sheer old age. And such special grapes can make truly unforgettable wine.  

We owe many of these old vineyards to a Silesian exodus that occurred in the 1840's. Silesia-- a former country in eastern Europe (now mostly Poland)-- experienced religious intolerance toward Lutherans in the 1880s, and dozens of Lutheran families relocated to the Barossa Valley. They brought with them elements of their culture, which included Germanic food (still popular today), brass band music (we can find vestiges of this in the namesake for Henschke's "Euphonium" wine), and, of course, grape vines for winemaking.

Many of these early plantings were used to make fortified, port-style wines (popular in the late 1800s and early 190os). In fact, many of these old vines were originally intended for fortified wine production. Even such famed and iconic dry wine producers such as Wynns Estate in Coonawarra were once producing mostly fortified wines. A mass-transition from fortified to dry wine production happened in the 1950s and 60s. Today, finding the great Aussie ports is difficult (but definitely start with Seppeltsfield). 

When placed against this historical backdrop, the uniqueness of the old mourvedre vines at Hewitson boldly express themselves.   

The Old Garden is an historic property, planted in 1853 (160 year old vines!) by Johan Friedrich Koch (b. 1793) and hand-tended by his family for seven generations! 

Dean Hewitson (pictured left) took over the Old Garden of mourvedre in 1997. He found the vines, which were being used to make fortified wines and table wines, and saw potential for serious dry red production. He released his first vintage in 1998. 

A couple weeks ago Dean visited NYC and put together an incredible vertical of almost every vintage he has ever made. He also came armed with detailed temperature an rainfall data for each year, which made the tasting that much more fascinating. 

Later in the week, Dean stopped by Public Restaurant and chatted with our staff about the Old Garden mourvedre, and about his "LuLu" sauvignon blanc, named after his wife. 

Bibliography
Robinson, Jancis. (2010) Old Vines Register available on the subscription portion of www.jancisrobinson.com
Barossa Valley Vintage Climate Data Chart 1998-2012 

I've always been fascinated by astronomy. When I was a kid growing up in suburbia, I'd lie on the see-saw, balanced on the other side by my best childhood friend, and we'd stare up at the stars, point out planets and constellations, and think out loud about what might be up there. 


<-- NASA photo of the Milky Way, taken by the Spitzer Space Telescope in 2006

A few years later I went on a 2 week canoe trip in Maine, far from any city lights. I'd never experienced the night sky in such dazzling splendor as I did on this trip. Most nights of this journey, if we had made camp by still water, my sister and I would canoe out into the middle of the water around 9 or 10pm, and look up-- the stars seemed so close, so bright, exhibited in folding layers of endless depth. The center photo on the left is somewhere on Maine's Moose River, near the Quebec border, where we first saw the sky this way-- my first experience seeing the sky without the pollution of city lights! 

I had started taking some physics in high school by this point, and as we'd marvel at the Milky Way that ripped across the sky, I'd tell my sister Blair about how, by looking at the Milky Way, we are really peering into the center of our galaxy from a quiet corner on the very edge. I tried to explain how light travels at different speeds, and that, by looking up, we were actually watching images, projected across the universe, from different points in the distant past. 

Stardust and Us
More recently, I've been interested in stellar genetics (the life cycle of stars). Since the 1970s we've made great leaps and bounds in our understanding of the universe. Super-telescopes around the world, plus telescopes on satellites, and telescopes attached to spacecrafts (such as Voyager) have greatly filled in our knowledge of the universe. We've found thousands of galaxies and star systems, we've mapped the sponge-like make-up of galaxy configuration, and we've even caught a supernova on camera. Last year, in fact, in the span of a few months we had two monumental feats: the Higgs Boson opened up secrets to our micro-universe, while Voyager 1 finally broke into the final region of our solar system before it is expected to be the first manmade object to reach interstellar space and begin to transmit heretofore unimagined data. 

Here's what fascinates me about stars: all of our concepts of terroir, all of our ideas about how wine transmits the essence of land, these ideas are directly linked to stellar genetics. 

A star has a life and death cycle, much like a person, except a star's life lasts billions of years, and a star creates baby stars only when it explodes in death and forms a nebulous (or, star nursery). There are several kinds of stars. Some stars do not have the energy capacity to explode as a supernova; these types of stars collapse into white dwarfs, or expand into red giants. But large stars with powerful churning fusion power will come to a point in their life when the star's core has used up all of the hydrogen fuel. At this point, a star will start to churn heavier elements. The elements get heavier and heavier until the fusion process creates an atom of iron. 

Iron is kryptonite to a star. Once a single atom of iron is created, the star will explode as a supernova within seconds. The star's fusion process simply cannot sustain the process of breaking apart the heavier metals. In the last moments before a supernova, just before that second of explosion that could outshine our entire galaxy, the star will create the heaviest metals: gold, silver, platinum. Because the star can only make these in the final micro-second before exploding, these metals are much more rare than other elements, and this is why we find them in sparse quantities on our own planet, and why we consider them precious. The star explosion also creates the other, more plentiful elements (with lighter atomic weights, such as Carbon, Oxygen, Magnesium, and Calcium), that we often look for in our search for great terroirs. 

A star explosion is the only method scientists have identified that can create large amounts of matter from energy (though we have succeeded in creating tiny particles like positrons from photons in particle acceleration machines). Thus, it is most likely that every atom in your body, on our planet, in our solar system, and in our galaxy came from a supernova explosion that happened billions of years ago. When this "mother star" spewed out clouds and clots of pure elements it created a nebulous that, through accretion and a violent period of conglomeration, eventually formed our galaxy.  Our own sun is a baby star that ignited in the wake of the supernova explosion of this former giant star. 

The "Pale Blue Dot" 

Earth is unique for so many reasons. 

Once the supernova explodes, it takes thousands of years for planets to form, as large asteroids knock together until they reach a critical mass to have a significant gravitational force to make them round. During this period of our solar system, Earth was lucky enough to accrete vast amounts of several elements that are considered vital to certain great terroirs. Plus, of course, Oxygen, which is the main feature of our atmosphere. 

The following is a list of the top elements found on the Earth's crust. As you read through the array, think back to your talks with winemakers and how they have often mentioned the presence of these elements in their soils, and how certain combinations of these elements make their terroir special: 




46.6% Oxygen (O)
27.7% Silicon (Si)
8.1% Aluminum (Al)
5.0% Iron (Fe)
3.6% Calcium (Ca)
2.8% Sodium (Na)
2.6% Potassium (K)
2.1% Magnesium (Mg)
.62% Titatnium (Ti)
.14 Hydrogen (H)
.13 Phosphorus (P)

As you peruse the list, a few of these common elements stick out in relation to terroir. Calcium (the Calcium rich soils of Burgundy are probably what popped into everyone's mind first, also certain regions of Champagne), Iron (grapevines originated on Iron-rich terra rossa soils in the Fertile Crescent, and terra rossa soils around the world produce some top quality wines with unique flavors, such as Coonawarra), Bordeaux's great crus are usually characterised by high Potassium, and low Magnesium and Nitrogen. Furthermore, many winemakers discuss the importance of the ratio between Calcium and Magnesium-- in certain proportions, these two elements facilitate water flow through the soil. The ratio in which we find these elements on our planet (very) roughly correspond to the proportion in which they were created in the supernova that made our galaxy. We owe the nature of our greatest terroirs to the explosion of this ancient star.

We are lucky that much of the .14% of Hydrogen has bonded with Oxygen to form the water on our crust. Interestingly, Earth is only .02% water; we are lucky that all of this water is on Earth's surface. We are also lucky that we have the amount of water we have-- with just a small amount more, we would have no protruding landmasses, no land vegetation (no vines), no land animals (no people), and Earth would be a water world.

We are also lucky in our distance from the sun. A little closer, and we'd be too hot to sustain life as we know it, and our water and atmosphere would have burned off long ago. A little farther, and our planet would have formed very differently as a gas giant.  

We are also lucky Earth has magnetic poles that create a bubble, allowing our atmosphere to rest on the crust and not be blown away by solar wind. Scientists posit that during the formation of our solar system, a large mass banged into the newly-forming Earth and blew a huge chunk of Earth into the sky, which went into orbit around Earth (our moon). Our moon, therefore, is essentially made up of similar substances as Earth-- but we see how desolate and waterless the moon is, and can come to realize the importance of having magnetic poles that allow this sliver of atmosphere where we can thrive.

We are also lucky to be in a certain period of our solar system's life cycle. A little earlier, and life would be unsustainable in the violent period of accretion. A little later, and Earth would have already been swallowed up after our sun expanded into a red giant. 

So as our understanding grows of wine, terroir, the Earth's chemistry, and stars, we see more and more that they are all inter-related. 

But there is another side of this to consider:

Ultimately, the fact that we live in this incredibly small envelope of time when all of the millions of conditions make life possible on our planet and in our solar system leads me to consider the heightened value of unique genetic lifeforms, including grape vines. 

I often hear people speak reverently about terroir, and yes, the qualities of unique places are special. Terroir is important- amazing, really. But special terroirs are commonplace throughout the universe, even billions of lightyears away in distant galaxies. What is truly unique, truly phenomenal, truly spectacular and mind-blowing is the possibility of the multiple variations of life that can and do abound on our planet that include us, grape varieties, yeast species, and the multitude of microorganisms and animal life that make "soil" possible. So often, one such incredible and unique grape variety-- whose existence is so magnificent and tenuous in the grand scheme of things-- will get slammed and dragged through the mud by sommeliers and wine writers (just remember what happened to merlot after Sideways came out, or zinfandel after the white zinfandel craze), or an AOC board will see no value in a particular variety of fascinating genetic richness that it will no longer allow it in the AOC, or someone will completely dismiss wine made from any other grape variety aside from Vitis vinifera despite the fact that wine as we know it depends on the rootstock of other species. 

I truly believe that the genetic diversity on Earth is one of the most amazing and incredible phenomena in the universe, and the trend in the wine industry toward monoculture is dangerous and in direct conflict with the premise of life. As we narrow down allowable and acceptable varieties we focus in on monoculture, and as this happens our precious varieties become more genetically strained, and less resistant to the constantly evolving threats they face. In a way, the trend toward monoculture is the sommelier's fault, and the fault of New World wine marketing. When a wine label distinguishes the type of wine as a specific grape varietal ("CHARDONNAY" written in big letters across the front), or when a sommelier groups a wine list by grape varietal (of which I am guilty), we signal to the wine consumer that they should fix upon these chosen grape varietals and look for them elsewhere. The emergence over the last century or so of the International Varieties has fed into this obsession with a few grape varieties while others are ignored and fall into extinction, causing genetic diversity in grape vines to continually narrow. We've all seen laments over the effluence of International Varieties in Spain at the cost of many Spanish indigenous varieties falling by the wayside; but really, this is happening on a global scale. In a new region, most winegrowers go immediately to that crutch of the International Varieties; and I get it. It's an economic decision to have a sellable product. But it's an economic decision made because as a group we enable consumer dependence on a tiny selection of varieties. 

In new wine regions, people have the opportunity to attempt to discover new varieties (by panting from seed), but this is seen as a crazy thing to do. Most winegrowers who want to experiment or at least steer clear of International Varieties will work with an obscure variety brought in from elsewhere, or an unusual winemaking technique. I find it mind boggling that so few growers are willing to experiment with new varieties, because grapes have seeds for a reason. Imagine if we lived in a world where we were no longer allowed to have children, and the only way we could propagate was to clone ourselves. Then imagine if the government started to impose laws on what types of people were clone-able "only people with perfect pitch, or an affinity to mathematics, or perfectly symmetrical facial features." The types of people would become similar-- everyone would want a clone of Brad Pitt or Beyonce or Albert Einstein as their child-- and we'd lose the diversity of human genetics and along with it the resistance to disease that emerges over long periods of evolution. The average person will react negatively to human cloning, but this same person might say to you in a restaurant "Oh, I only drink sauvignon blanc." Cloning grape vines is great for uniformity, but the extent to which the entire global market is obsessed with a few varieties is dangerous. I don't see it too much in Manhattan, but in many areas of the world the lack of diversity can be startling. 

And I'm not just disappointed by the lack of genetic diversity in global grape vine plantings. Wine is a crossroads of grape varieties and microbiology, and industrial farming mostly ignores the diverse microbiology present in soil and on plant material. There is a bit of a renaissance with yeast strains right now, which I find exciting, but I often sense there is not enough focus on soil microbiology. 

I love a good pinot noir, and it's amazing to try these museum-like varieties that have been cloned for over 1,000 years. But why do we need to find another Burgundy in the next wine region? Why does every new region have to emulate an established European wine region? I would love to see more emerging regions searching for their own identities. And as consumers, by taking the time and the risk to drink outside of the box on a regular basis, we can honor the magnificent array of genetic diversity that exists in the brief season of life on our planet, in our solar system, and--ultimately--in the universe. 

                                                        



                                                              If places like this exist ---->
then surely there can be room in our lives for a little Norton or Rotgipfler. 


30 Doradus image by NASA, ESA, & F. Paresce (INAF-IASF), R. O'Connell (U. Virginia), & the HST WFC3 Science Oversight Committee

Bibliography
Seguin, Gerard. (1986) "Terroirs" and pedology of wine growing. Experentia 42 861-871. 
Smart, Richard. (undated paper) New World Responses to Old World Terroir.