Honest Wines

The wine industry is a funny business.  Most wineries (the 99% if you will) aren’t necessarily in it to make a profit.  Sure, a profit is nice, and likely is a goal of most wineries, but think about all the startup costs for a winery.  Land.  Machinery.  Labor.  Time.  That’s a big investment for any would be wine entrepreneur.  I got to thinking about this after meeting the marketing and hospitality director of Ladera Wines the other day.  At dinner we began talking about the wine business and my parents mentioned a tiny winery they had once visited and voiced the question: how do they make ends meet?
The answer that we received from our industry insider surprised me slightly, but it also gave me hope for the industry.  He said that most people don’t open wineries seeking profit.  Most people open wineries because they want to make wine the way they believe it should be made.  I’m paraphrasing him here, but this caught my attention.  Most people open wineries because they want to make wine the way they believe it should be made.  An answer like this wouldn’t fly with the big boys of the industry that are out there to make a profit.  I also doubt that this answer would fly with the Robert Parkers of the world.  But, for me, your average enthusiast, I loved this answer and it immediately made think differently about the wine I was drinking.
I liked the thought that I was drinking a product that the winemaker designed for me based on his or her relationship with the grapes.  To me, this answer was a simple way of defining terroir and describing the winemaker’s relationship with all aspects of the wine making process.  From the land to the weather to the winemaker’s personal style and everything in between, making an honest wine so people can taste a winery’s personality is what wine making should be about.  These days where the mass produced wines are out there strive to be the same year in and year out, honest wines are hard to find.  I wish this weren’t the case, but since winemaking is still a business and because people like predictability, more and more wineries are making seemingly generic wine and losing some of that personality.
With my new goal of taking notes on each wine that I drink, I hope to be able to find some more honest wines so that I don’t find myself writing the same description each time I drink a Cabernet.  So, just a few weeks into my new mission, I have new ideas about how I will try to find honest wines.  I am going to strive to try multiple wines made by the same winemaker to see how his or her influence on wines varies from varietal to varietal.  I am also going to try to sample the same varietal from the same region made by several different winemakers in hopes of discerning style and trying to learn more about the terroir of a region.  I hope that taking these two steps will help me think about the process more and will help make me a more educated wine connoisseur.  I expect this to be difficult and I expect it to take some practice, but I also expect it to be more rewarding than the random approach to sampling wine that I have been taking.
My first test with my new approach will probably come in a few weeks when I make a visit to several wineries in northern California.  I also hope that I’ll get to try this approach out when I make it up to Napa again and visit Ladera for myself.  The wine we had the other night would have put Ladera on my list of places to visit by itself, but the insights into wine I received from our guest made it a must visit.
If anyone wants to take on this new approach to tasting with me, let me know and we will figure out ways to try different wines made by the same winemaker or we’ll start focusing on a region and see where that takes us.