Unauthorized

Explaining the demonstrable difference between the world’s best producers and the rest is a task that frequently taxes the wine commentariat. In many cases, the challenge is only compounded by the fact that the best producers employ many of the same practices as other, less successful producers who do not attain such consistent quality or as distinctive a style. The concept of “talent” is sometimes invoked to make sense of the differences. At its most reductionist, certain producers are credited with a sort of “magic touch”: a genius of such magnitude that the mere presence of their name on the bottle (even, in extreme instances, when someone else made the wine in question) is considered to guarantee a peerless wine. In other instances, a particular technique or process is singled out as the critical factor.

Such explanations rightly meet with resistance from those more intimately acquainted with the production process: it is unclear how “talent,” in the sense of innate ability, could apply to many of the mundane but critical steps in grape growing and winemaking; and if any great wine producer’s success were really owing to a single clearly identified practice, or even a set of practices, those practices would surely soon see widespread imitation. If we accept that some producers really do set themselves apart (as I believe is the case), then why do so few follow in their footsteps? Instead, more realistic observers are liable to point to hard work as the differentiator that explains excellence. Yet the sad reality is that plenty of the wine world’s Stakhanovites do not produce great wines—or at least, not wines of a greatness proportional to their efforts.

After over a decade’s observation of the world’s best producers at close quarters, this subject has naturally absorbed a good deal of my attention. As my dissatisfaction with the triteness of the notion of “talent” grew, so did my conviction that misdirected hard work is functionally (though not morally) no better than laziness. Over the course of this decade, informed by exchanges with some exceptional individuals in other fields, I have instead come to the persuasion that the aggregation of marginal gains is what explains why some producers attain a level of excellence that few others are able to emulate. Quantitative, incremental refinements, in other words, can compound to create a qualitative difference.

Certain conditions must be met if producers are to harness this compounding effect. The most critical prerequisite is a coherent guiding vision of the wines one wishes to craft—what Nietzsche spoke of as “a long obedience in the same direction.” Key agronomic and winemaking choices must be integrated into a holistic system if they are to compound. While many different approaches can deliver excellence, “borrowing” elements from a variety of different approaches without any guiding vision is unlikely to produce a coherent ensemble. It is this guiding vision that aids producers in adapting to vintage variation and elements of uncertainty, bringing coherence to their choices. Importantly, this differs from an ideology, which prioritizes abstractions over outcomes.

Consider, for example, a white wine producer whose farming delivers beautifully ripe, high-acid grapes with thick skins. He decides to crush and press firmly, fermenting in barrels with high levels of solids. These choices satisfy the preconditions for a long, reductive élevage, likely to deliver a wine of considerable depth and complexity. However, perhaps due to space or cash flow constraints, he is obliged to bottle in the first summer, when the wines have yet to digest their new oak, haven’t yet gained from extended lees contact and before they are fully clarified, necessitating filtration. Compound benefits are not captured, despite the promising beginnings, because the production process is not coherent.

Another example will illustrate the difference between an animating vision and an animating ideology. Producer A aspires to produce pure, vibrant, expressive wines; she decides, therefore, to vinify her wines and mature them for as long as possible without sulfites, in pursuit of more refined textures and more vivid aromas. Thanks to regular tasting and analysis, she perceives a loss of precision in the first summer and sulfites her wines, securing all the advantages of a sulfite-free vinification but precluding any deterioration, an achievement she goes on to replicate from year to year, adapting to each vintage.

Producer B, a great farmer, is ideologically opposed to sulfites, considering them an “unnatural” industrial byproduct. He refuses to add them except in the case of a dire flaw. From time to time, his wines are brilliant, and they find an adoring clientele that embraces their extreme inconsistency as proof of authenticity. (A neighbor, producer C, notices the commercial success enjoyed by producers A and B, so he decides to reduce his sulfite doses at crush, producing several cuvées that are flawed by ethyl acetate).

In these contrasting cases, producer B’s ideology imposes blind risk-taking for an intellectual objective, as opposed to producer A’s managed risk-taking in service of a wine quality objective. The inherent potential of producer B’s exceptional farming will only be realized haphazardly, as more often than not, microbiological flaws will interrupt the compounding effect. Meanwhile, producer C’s partial emulation of a fashionable technique without any real comprehension of its rationale is doomed to mediocrity.

Coherence is also related to consistency over time. Radical changes, by introducing new practices or processes that must now be perfected and which interact unpredictably with existing elements of the holistic system, are liable to reset any compounding effect to zero. In the words of the late Charlie Munger, “the first rule of compounding is to never interrupt it unnecessarily.” In this sense, I suspect even a less-than-optimal approach, doggedly pursued with perfectionism, is likely to do better over time than an intelligent producer, replete with good ideas, who makes big changes every few years. Winemaking, after all, is an endeavor that permits only one experiment in the winery every year and thus offers very limited opportunities to perfect a process.

For example, the decision to move from destemmed to whole-cluster ferments will require rethinking of key production steps, including picking dates, sorting practices, extraction profile, vatting duration and managing residual fermentation after pressing. Similarly, changing maturation vessels, whether as comparatively minor as introducing a new cooper or as dramatic as moving to alternative vessels such as glass globes, can change the entire dynamic of élevage, impacting optimal ripeness at harvest, the optimal duration of settling, frequency and manner of racking and the eventual bottling date. If such changes are to be made, it would be well to make them early in one’s career, as the effort required to refine the new practice and adapt existing practices to accommodate its consequences is considerable.

The value of consistency over time helps to make sense of the dynamics of generational change at estates, a transition that must be navigated in both familial and corporate-structured wineries. Where wineries succeed in perpetuating a certain vision of wine—while allowing the new generation freedom to refine and perfect on the one hand and adapt to changing conditions on the other—compounding benefits are retained, and estates that achieve this balance open a gap that only remarkable individuals are capable of closing in a single generation. The alternative, when the new generation makes multiple radical changes in a short period, resets the clock to zero, particularly when the new generation lacks an animating vision to guide those changes beyond a numinous belief in the merits of “progress.”

The slow timescale of wine production also does much to explain why simplicity is such an advantage if one wishes to harness compounding effects. Many observers, learning how simply many of the world’s greatest producers’ work, become incredulous, searching for some undisclosed secret. In fact, simplicity itself is surely among the reasons for their success: because simple systems encompass fewer variables, they are more easily perfectible than complex ones. (Herein lies a more intellectually robust argument in favor of so-called “low intervention” winemaking than a mere distaste for intervention a priori.) Simple systems are also more robust to the logistical and organizational pressures of harvest, freeing producers to devote more mental energy that might otherwise be sequestered by the execution of the process itself to critical observation of the raw materials. As Pasteur put it, “chance favors the prepared mind.” The temptation to overcomplicate is a particular risk to intelligent, thoughtful producers (this may help to explain why some exceptional winemakers have produced their best wines in the first decade of their careers).

If this thesis is correct, then great producers will have a clear and coherent vision for their wines, distilled into a simple production process that they will perfect over time with tireless attention to every detail (some large but most small). While they will make obsessive refinements, they will be unlikely to make radical changes to their practices. Instead, the agglomeration of marginal refinements that many less-obsessive producers would consider of little consequence will create a qualitative difference that sets them apart from the rest. The internal coherence of their choices will also deliver a stylistic signature and consistency in quality from year to year that others will find difficult to emulate. When we reduce this cumulative process to “talent” or to any one particularly photogenic practice, we fundamentally misunderstand the dynamics of progress in wine production. There is no secret, in short, but there are reasons.