{"id":16964,"date":"2017-02-10T00:42:10","date_gmt":"2017-02-10T00:42:10","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.wineanorak.com:\/wineblog\/?p=16964"},"modified":"2017-02-10T00:42:10","modified_gmt":"2017-02-10T00:42:10","slug":"pinot-noir-the-alchemy-of-people-place-and-time","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.wineanorak.com:\/wineblog\/pinot-noir\/pinot-noir-the-alchemy-of-people-place-and-time","title":{"rendered":"Pinot Noir: the alchemy of people, place and time"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"corton\"<\/p>\n

This is a written version of a talk I’m giving today at the Mornington Peninsula Pinot Noir celebration.<\/p>\n

Pinot Noir is the grape variety that seems to inspire the most devotion in wine lovers. Finding great Pinot is a lifetime quest, filled with challenges and disappointments. But the highs make this quest worthwhile, and there is a lot of fun to be had along the journey.<\/p>\n

Today\u2019s topic is the alchemy of people, place and time. All are involved in forging and enjoying great Pinot Noir.<\/p>\n

First, people<\/strong>. Wine is a partnership between place and people: vines are planted, wine is made, and sites are interpreted. Then, people consume the wine: when we taste, the perceptive event \u2013 our experience of the wine \u2013 is the result of the interaction between us and the wine. We bring quite a bit to the wine-tasting experience. And it is people who decide what constitutes greatness in Pinot Noir: the community of judgment. As we taste and experience and share our perceptions, we learn and decide together which wines are the best and most compelling.<\/p>\n

Second, place<\/strong>. The site \u2013 terroir \u2013 is at the heart of interesting wine. Pinot Noir is a lens for interpreting site, and it\u2019s actually a very good lens, able to distinguish among quite closely related sites, picking out characters and amplifying these differences. And it is only good sites that can produce interesting expressions of this variety. For Pinot, not all sites are created equal.<\/p>\n

Third, we have time<\/strong>. There are many aspects of time that relate to Pinot. The first is vine age. Young vines produce fruity wines that display clone and climate more clearly; older vines interrogate the soil and have more resilience. They are less swayed by climate, the clonal difference isn\u2019t as strong, and the place is more evident. There\u2019s substance and structure. They can be picked earlier. Bottle age is another aspect of time: we expect that great Pinot should evolve in the bottle and not just survive, growing into itself. Then there\u2019s time as in the evolution of the wine industry, as the growers learn about their site and the sorts of interpretations of it that work best and are most authentic.<\/p>\n

I will be exploring three elements in this talk. First, how we perceive wine and how this is relevant to Pinot Noir, and discussions like this. Second, what constitutes greatness in Pinot Noir, and who gets to decide? And finally we will take a quick trawl around the world of Pinot, putting Mornington in its place.<\/p>\n

Perception of wine is multimodal<\/strong>, involving all of our senses. It\u2019s not just about taste and smell, and we don\u2019t operate like measuring devices. This is important.<\/p>\n

By the time we are aware of the \u2018taste\u2019 of wine, it has already gone through several processing steps that aren\u2019t accessible to our consciousness. This is because of the way that the brain processes sensory information. It\u2019s as if we are the CEO of a big company, and have many minions working for us. We get the executive summary, and are spared the details. This is shown beautifully in visual illusions, such as the caf\u00e9 wall illusion, where we perceive what is not actually there. This demonstrates that some higher order visual processing has been taking place at a pre-conscious level.<\/p>\n

We model reality, and effectively produce a map of what is out there. It\u2019s a useful abstraction that helps us navigate the world. We don\u2019t have all the details: a map that is an exact correspondence to the world would be useless. Look at the wonderful simplicity and utility of the London Underground map first devised by Harry Beck in 1931. It doesn\u2019t correspond with reality, but instead is purely about utility.<\/p>\n

The fact that our brain is creating reality for us has relevance to wine tasting. We need to be humble in the face of wine, and recognize that our experience of wine has something to do with us as well as what is in the glass. Also, the language we have for wine will in some way shape our perception of wine.<\/p>\n

So who gets to decide what greatness is in Pinot Noir<\/strong>? What does great Pinot look like? Here we enter the world of aesthetics. We decide together what is great as a community of judgment. We taste together; learn together; we share our notions of good versus bad. Then we reach a degree of agreement about what is great, although we need to recognize that sometimes conflicting aesthetic systems arise, such as the US critics and the field of natural wine.<\/p>\n

What is great Pinot Noir?<\/p>\n