Napa. CA, June 26 -- After 60 years of trying to foster serious scientific inquiry into North American winemaking, the American Society for Enology and Viticulture (ASEV) has decided to bail--bag all the refereed journal crap, go for the moment.
Appropriately enough, this year's Annual Meeting was held in Napa, in the heart of the California wine country, after decades of rotating the gatherings of wine researchers and winemakers between cities large enough to have hotels with facilities that could accommodate a wine trade show--whether or not the locations (Reno, San Diego, etc.) had much to do with wine. The abrupt change in focus was announced by incoming president Christian Butzke, researcher and professor of Enology at Purdue University in Indiana, on the morning of the second day of the conference. The first clue was innocent enough, tucked into his introduction to a highly technical morning session, when he observed, "For all the science you're going to hear today, remember that we still can’t tell the difference in the lab between a $20 wine, a $200 wine, and a $2000 wine." The audience smiled, nodded, and zoomed in on the chemical chicken wire diagrams on the first PowerPoint slides.
The reaction was quite different later in the day when Butzke formally announced the shift in strategy. "This science stuff," he said at a plenary on wine microbiology, "bores the scheiss out of most wine drinkers, and for that matter, most winemakers, who want to believe they are artists, not technicians at heart. Why can't the industry pander to these people? Does anybody but Ralph Kunkee [retired UC Davis enology professor] really give a damn about malolactic fermentation, or gas chromatography, or the satellite genetic markers in different Pinot Noir clones? Give me a break." Butzke went on to lay out a revised mission statement centered around three main points:
* Drink more wine
* Drink wine more often
* Drink more Indiana wine more often
Butzke then followed with the announcement of a name change for the organization: henceforth, it will be the American Society for Experiential Vino. Keeping the same acronym, he explained, cut down the costs of converting website copy, printed stationery and business cards in the current depressed economic climate, part of his fiscal responsibility emphasis.
Reaction among the 800 or so attendees was understandably mixed. Maverick wine consultant Clark Smith, a UC Davis graduate who has made a career out of attacking UC Davis for what he sees as its hopeless wonkiness, was thrilled: "This is exactly what the wine industry needs--except for the Indiana part." Dr. Ralph Kunkee made a plea from the floor to at least continue studying malolactic fermentation. The large delegation from Cornell University, the pre-eminent East Coast center for enological and viticultural research, walked out in protest and headed for the nearest Riesling. Several of the participants in the previous day's seminar on High Brix / High Alcohol Winemaking were still too groggy to form coherent opinions.
"Hedonism is where it's at," said Butzke, concluding his remarks. "It's way more fun than worrying about titratable acidity."
I never thought of it like that, but it really is true.
Posted by: Term papers | November 03, 2009 at 09:28 PM