David Schildknecht reviews One Thousand Vines: A New Way to Understand Wine by Pascaline Lepeltier.
Four things need stating at the outset: One Thousand Vines: A New Way to Understand Wines is a book on wine utterly unlike any other. No serious enophile should neglect to read it. Expect that to be slow-going, though, given at times challengingly convoluted syntax or unclear referents, a wealth of technical terms, and above all the sheer informational density and layering that constitute the book’s claim to uniqueness. It ranges from the scientifically technical, through the historical, economical, and sociological, to the epistemological and unapologetically metaphysical (as befits Lepeltier’s background in professional philosophy). Few significant aspects of wine are left free from extensive consideration. On top of this, many of the author’s contentions are themselves both novel and challenging.
Lepeltier’s work as a sommelier on two continents, leading to her being awarded the titles Meilleur Sommelier de France and Meilleur Ouvrier de France, has made her familiar and highly respected among gastronomic professionals. One Thousand Vines represents her collaboration with no fewer than three translators, and it appears two years after the publication by Hachette of Mille Vignes: Penser le Vin de Demain. The genesis for this book, as she tells, was its author’s own felt need for an overarching account of wine,
“[one] that would square the circle between super-specialized knowledge and popular understanding [and] forge a link between the disciplines involved in this oh-so-complex subject, with a view to cross-fertilization of points of view gleaned from areas of expertise that all too rarely meet, from ampelography to botany and even anthropology, from climatology to geology via geography, from microbiology to history, from economics to aesthetics.”
Related
Rendered in narrow font, it comprises 352 oversized pages, of which only rarely do more than three pass without the (generally welcome) intrusion of some colorful, frequently complicated chart, map, schematic or other illustration (many of these credited to Loan Nguyen Thanh Lan). While occasionally wanting for relevance or explication—in the midst of Lepeltier’s “Terroir” chapter appear two pages of maps chronicling the evolution of alcohol prohibition in the US by territory and state—these graphics are sometimes revelatory even when esoteric. One Thousand Vines is further studded with more than five dozen text boxes offering intriguing asides on the widest conceivable range of topics. (“Natural Wine and Punk Rock,” anyone?)
One thousand vines: Provocative readings
Under the rubric “Reading Vines,” Lepeltier generates chapters covering what is known about the origination and domestication of the vine, its means of propagation, its morphology, metabolism, and ecological niche. Among provocative perspectives arising from her extremely detailed expositions of vine science are hybridization viewed as an urgently needed source of genetic revival in the face of stock depleted by thousands of years of exclusively vegetal propagation; plants viewed not as individuals but as colonies; the plant interpreted via Goethe’s methodology as “in and of itself nothing but a metamorphosis” rather than a sum of parts (not that plant parts aren’t discussed at length); and the grafted vine as “chimera or artificial plant.” There’s even a nod to the notion of “vine intelligence.” There are certainly contentions to challenge here, such as the seemingly dogmatic, or at least conceptually revisionist, assertion that if vines are not given “20 to 25 years” to establish an optimum root system, “the upshot is the impossibility of producing terroir wines.” Lepeltier adopts a surprisingly institutionalist position vis-à-vis clones, expressing a faith in governmental institutions to guarantee high-quality vine stock, “no longer leaving this to the winemaker or nurseryman as has historically been the case.”
The author’s attempts to set semantic parameters and operative definitions are to be applauded—in the face of it being, as she writes, “difficult to invent conceptual tools to pin down [the vine’s] complex reality correctly.” But despite excellent intentions, the results occasionally fall short on clarity and usefulness, even where fundamental concepts are at issue. “Cépage in this book,” writes Lepeltier, for instance, “is understood as a collection of clones sufficiently related to one another to fall under the same name, and variety or cultivar are understood as a subgroup of cépages (like Pinot Noir, Pinot Gris and so on).” Granted, when one takes a hard look at the relevant conceptual as well as underlying genetic issues, delimiting what counts as a cépage or a grape variety is going to involve some technicality, as well as an ultimately arbitrary residue of decision-making (which in fact precludes one “correct” answer). But Lepetlier’s chosen convention encumbers readers by introducing the further technical term “clone” and begs the questions in what way and to what degree clones must be related to one another. What’s more, it implies a highly restricted applicability of “cultivar” and “variety” at odds with common usage, implying that those terms, too, demand a technical definition—but none is ever clearly spelled out, notwithstanding lengthy excursus on historical usage and underlying science. (Are Pinot Noir and Pinot Gris really intended as paradigms of variety or cultivar, given that they represent the specialized case of differentiation via bud mutation?)
Content from our partners
Under the section head “Reading Landscapes,” Lepeltier traverses meteorology, climatology, and geology en route to an anticipated lingering over terroir. Along the way, there are occasions to recognize that for all of the detail and citations offered in this book, one sometimes could wish for more of both to support its author’s views. For instance, Lepeltier shares with legions of wine growers and promoters a conviction that “[a]lmost all high quality vineyards […] seem to have [this] point in common: cool nights after veraison.” By way of potential explanation, she offers, plausibly but sketchily, that at cool temperatures “vines respire less and can use their sugars to mature their secondary compounds—their polyphenols, colour, and aromatic palette—while retaining their acidity.” But scientific studies connecting cool nights (or wide diurnal temperature shifts) with the aromatic evolution of grapes are conspicuously scarce, despite the manifest importance of any such connection, and Lepeltier offers no citation. She contends that “vines grown at the very edge of their maturation zone […] express most fully the characteristics of the[ir] cépage. So the most nuanced, terroir-driven Chardonnays are said to be made in Chablis, the most complex Syrahs in Côte-Rôtie and so on.” Indeed, these are familiar refrains, but what is either their plant-physiological or their aesthetic grounding? Why do such claims appear to be made solely on behalf of the cooler “edges” of temperate climatic zones? And isn’t “terroir-driven” something of a buzzword most often used to contrast with dominance of “varietal expression”? We are informed that “On a global scale, the dates for bud-burst, flowering, fruit-set and veraison have advanced by an average of one week” without being told the range of years in question.
A tenuous hold on terroir
When it comes to terroir, Lepeltier’s explications—and the plural here is essential—heavily emphasize the cultural and socioeconomic, including a six-page chapter on Jean-Robert Dion’s (in her words) “revolutionary reading of terroir” as “a social fact not a geological one.” Yet in arguing Dion’s case for the importance of geographical and economic factors in determining which regions have achieved lofty reputations, Lepeltier asks, “How else can we explain remarkable wines from mediocre terroirs or exceptional terroirs that produce nothing special […]?” Here, “terroir” appears meant in something other than the sense attributed to Dion. Is Lepeltier referring to quality potential, as the words “mediocre” and “exceptional” would seem to imply? Surely that is a function of how site and soil are capable of influencing flavor, regardless of whether geographical and socioeconomic circumstances have historically given them the opportunity to do so.
But anyone looking for new insights into how underlying rock and its influence on soil might in turn affect flavor will come away disappointed. Lepeltier hews closely to the skepticism familiar from a majority of soil scientists and geologists writing about wine, most notably Alex Maltman, whom she cites at length, whereby flavor influence is limited to hydric and thermal regulation, and vines are considered to take in all and only such ionic nutrients and in such measure as “they need.” The closest Lepeltier comes to addressing what many of us consider not merely the remarkable mystery of terroir influence but precisely the sort of phenomena that we are looking to geologists, soil scientists and plant physiologists to explain, is in a text box where she acknowledges that tasting Clemens Busch’s red-, blue-, and gray-slate Riesling bottlings
“is an astonishing experience. They seem so different even though they come from vines planted in the same way just a stone’s throw apart, and grapes that are vinified in exactly the same way. Is it due to the rock?”
It would seem so. But how? In the few sentences that follow, Lepeltier juxtaposes Maltman’s skepticism of ionic influence with “[a]n increasing roster of agronomists tak[ing] another view […] that these trace elements are the metallic cofactors of enzymes that may be involved in the genesis of aromatic molecules.” Yet this view is subjected to no citation or further explication, while the text box’s very next (and concluding) sentence—“The minerality of wines is a question of vast proportions”—not only leaves the reader unavailingly hanging but risks perpetuating a ubiquitous and lamentable equivocation on “minerality.” There is namely no need to call upon “mineral” vocabulary to capture the strikingly distinct aromas, tastes, and mouthfeels of Busch’s three Rieslings. A very late chapter in the book directly addresses “minerality,” contending that for this expression to have “spread so widely and with such success, it clearly has a purpose and meets a need.” But is it conducive to greater understanding of wine or to more sensitive tasting and communication?
At one point, Lepeltier refers to terroir as “a complex and vague concept,” and a corresponding impression is conveyed by her text, with its patchwork of geological, pedological, geographical, socioeconomic, and historical details. Her consideration of vinification is, in the nature of that topic, far more focused—namely on chemistry and microbiology—not to mention less conceptually fraught. But there are occasional inadequacies, as for instance this account of icewine: “grapes that have been raisined, botrytized, or both are left on the stem [where s]uccessive freezing and thawing concentrates the sugars.” Healthy grapes that freeze just once are both the norm and the ideal—the must weights of grapes that are already raisined or botrytized would barely budge further, since they have little water left to freeze—
and thawing is necessarily inimical to cryoextraction.
Concise condensation
Lepeltier’s frequently concise condensation of technical material is nowhere more evident than in her account of wine tasting and wine evaluation. One may remain unconvinced that, in her slightly baffling wording, “a new approach to tasting would emerge” in the 1960s and ’70s, credited to Jules Chauvet, “that was capable of distinguishing the substantial quality of a wine’s typicity” by “moving away from the mouth-based tasting that had previously prevailed.” One can question Lepeltier’s contention that “historical neglect of the semantics of smell […] in part explains the lack of a specific vocabulary for odours in Western societies [leaving us] obliged to reach for metaphors and analogies”—
as if this were a deficiency that either evolution, inculturation, or closer attention could correct. But Lepeltier has done a great service by calling critical attention to such issues and by systematically comparing various approaches to tasting and evaluation from ancient Greco-Roman times to the present. Similarly, when it comes to considering the neurobiological and chemical underpinnings of taste, she seems successfully to have distilled the current state of scientific consensus and rendered it relevant to the practice of tasting, while adding emphasis on overlooked topics such as the role of saliva and “introception” (gustatory response to signals from within one’s body). Also included are expositions of theories that will draw skepticism from most scientific quarters, such as David Lefebvre’s postulation of “mineralization.” Lepeltier’s nuanced account of how we struggle to communicate tasting impressions nicely balances epistemic skepticism with recognition of both theoretical and practical bases for shared experience.
Even this book’s later chapters, treating what are normally considered practical issues—bottles, closures, glassware, labeling, and food pairing—are replete with historical, technical, and theoretical detail, reinforcing a resensitization to the complexity of wine and the open-ended multitude of head-scratching questions that wine presents—and leaving one grateful for, as Lepeltier expresses her aim, “an opportunity […] to experience wonder.”
One Thousand Vines: A New Way to Understand Wine
Pascaline Lepeltier
Published by Mitchell Beazley; 352 pages; hardback; US$55 / £45 / €57
