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Innovation does not stop. It surges forward, through oil spills and volcanoes, war zones and elections. The people in our ninth annual roster of dreamers and renegades are the ones behind it.
Winemaking is an ancient craft. At last it's being reinvented.
By Robert Willey
Last summer, inside a corrugated-metal barn east of Napa, California, an aspiring young French vintner on a two-week research tour put an unwashed, streaked glass to his lips. He was silent for a moment, this man schooled in the classic flavors of grapes now standing in a workshop cluttered with hydrometers and refractometers and lined with copies of Darwin, Gibbon, and Borges. And then he burst out laughing. This sauvignon blanc rocketed beyond its usual harmony of melon and citrus into an earthier realm of ... mushrooms and cheese?! This petite sirah was - how do you say in English? - violating his mouth?!
The man who made this wine, Abe Schoener, used to teach college students ancient philosophy. Now, after a midlife career change, he runs the Scholium Project, a winery rooted in the philosophical belief that only by experimenting at the precipice of disaster can we challenge our understanding of what wines can be - and create new ones. So while most of the wine industry sits on its hands, constrained by orthodoxy and the bottom line, Schoener, forty-nine, explores the outer limits of each wine's microbiological potential.
Take the Sauvignon Blanc the Frenchman was tasting. Schoener starved the fermenting juice of nutrients, which stressed the yeasts, which in turn started throwing off funky aromas - first rotting eggs and later, long after most winemakers would have intervened, the ripe stink of Parmesan. The breakthrough wasn't some newfangled technique he'd invented; it was Schoener's confidence in the wine's ability to access new dimensions of flavor without imploding. He trusted the wine to recalibrate in the face of stress and, in doing so, achieve a more shocking state of deliciousness than most winemakers would have dreamed possible. "Sometimes I look at Abe and think of that old Somerset Maughm book The Razor's Edge," says Paul Roberts, the former wine director at the French Laundry and one of Scholium Project's early fans: "You might like what you find out there, and you might not."
by That Crazy French Woman
Luca is one of my top natural producers in Piemonte. I have been tasting his wines for two years now. They are in the very traditional camp, i.e. no new oak, no extraction and he does long maceration on the skins for between 30 and 90 days on his red wines.
Luca is a 5th generation grower and he and I share having lost one of our parents to what we believe is excessive chemical spraying. Both his mum and my dad died of lung cancer without ever having smoked. In my dad's case, it seems likely that it was a result of the chemicals he sprayed in large quantities on his vineyards whereas for Luca's mum it may have been due to the proximity of neighbouring conventional vineyards where they were spraying similar synthetic chemicals. Luca's family vineyards are organic and have been for over a century. His family have been making natural wine since 1880.