Penedes be praised: the benefits and issues of an electric appellation

Behind my desk used to hang a large poster that said, in big red words, ‘blind idealism is reactionary’.

Sometimes, I see examples of this in the wine world. I cannot help but think there is a good dose of misty-eyed romanticism coupled with a slapdash approach to personal dogma, that means a lot of us inhabit a half-world where it is easy to have an opinion on wines, but an opinion whose ramifications are not dealt with in depth.

Now, I don’t want to cast aspersions while at the same time ignoring that the opposite is all too frequent. Many wine tomes are produced nowadays that, while lauding a region, its wines and its producers, do not ask more difficult questions of all three. Indeed, Andrew Jefford’s masterwork The New France is so popular (I believe) because it does not dodge these problems.

Anyway, back to the issue of misty-eyed romanticism. The relatively recent case of the Penedès DO granting an ‘icewine’ process that involves using freezers to cool the grapes is one such example (DO is an appellation, that is a defined, regional procedure for making foodstuffs). There has been a quite a wave of protest against this in the wine world. Many people protesting, I must admit, are people whose opinions I respect.

‘…do we really need a new wine category that requires electricity just to produce it? Maybe we should call this new DO: DO Vino de Electricidade?’ asked Ryan Opaz on Catavino.

‘I do not understand a DO for a freezer,’ said Alice Feiring on Twitter.

Now, I can understand why this gets on many peoples’ nerves – it is obviously not a natural process (as winemaking should be) and I do admit that it should not be allowed to be called ‘icewine’ – that’s just a slap in the face to those patient Germans and Canadians who have to wait for days in negative degrees Celsius for the temperature to freeze the water in their grapes so that they can extract maximum sugar.

I also agree with Ryan that Spain doesn’t really need another shoot in the DO branch.

But there are absolutely fundamental questions here that haven’t been answered. If you are against using a freezer to (essentially) extract more from grapes when they get to the winery, where do you stand on cooling in general? Red wines can be cold-soaked for days, sometimes going as low as 10 degrees, in order to best extract flavour. How many white winemakers don’t own a heat exchanger for their must lines, some of which might run at below 0 degrees? Indeed, how many white winemakers will you persuade not to cool their tanks during fermentation? Everyone likes a nice, crisp, white wine, but I’m not sure they’ll like one which hasn’t been cooled. How many producers in Germany and Canada don’t have cooling jackets on their tanks (all of which is essentially to aid a certain type of flavour extraction)?

I admit this isn’t as extreme as freezing the grapes in a freezer, but if you’re against this, why aren’t you against cooling jackets? On what moral basis are you able to say ‘yes, but cooling jackets aren’t quite the same’? And unless you require winemakers to be sun-deprived troglodytes that live below ground, you’ll find it difficult to get a winery with enough of a cool, ambient temperature to keep a white ferment from going off the charts.

Here we get to the reactionary part of the blind idealism. If we say that people should not be able to make wines without a freezer, and that therefore wineries cannot use cooling systems, we are on the path to taking retrograde steps in winemaking. This might please some people, it might not. But surely we have to accept progress for the good, which in the case of cooling, enables us to have lovely, fresh wines. In fact, wines made using cooling systems on their tanks can still display masses of terroir, so why not obect to the removal, by freezing, of water from those grapes? As far as I can tell, the terroir will remain.

[While on the subject of retrograde steps, I can't tell you - honestly - that hand grinding my own coffee beans gives a better flavour to my coffee than machine-ground beans. I can tell you I get a great deal of satisfaction from doing it, but the resulting product - my reviving morning coffee - is basically the same either way.]

In any case, I’m sure Alice and Ryan will disagree with me – that’s good – but my most compelling case in favour of the new DO is this: is not the irony that the creation of such an appellation that permits the use of a freezer better for the consumer?

Not following? OK, let me explain. Allowing just this kind of sacrilegious manipulation of fruit, giving it a name and a classification, brings honesty to the fore. Other producers worldwide don’t tell anyone about acid and sugar rectification, and I’m sure there are more wood chips, staves and other such products floating around our majestic appellations than we care to admit (give me a SWAT team and a global winery warrant, and I could shock the world). While these additions or alterations may be tolerated or banned by appellations, it is clear they occur and that producers who abuse these guidelines can, at the same time, hide behind them.

But in the case of this new DO, the negative aspect of the production is assumed and forms the basis of the whole appellation. You, the consumer, know exactly what you are getting. You can therefore decide whether or not to buy it (to use a very blind but perhaps pertinent, capitalist argument).

Perhaps one can make an argument to allow almost everything in appellations: any kind of manipulation, extraction, rectification should be permitted. Imagine it. Any appellation north of Clermont-Ferrand is defined by its use of sugar to rectify the wines, while every region south of that point adds acidity. Once this is assumed, the onus would be on the producer to prove, if they wished, that they did not do any of these things. Indeed, to me this makes a compelling case for enhanced production values and individuality.

It is perhaps a good thing that Penedès has been so transparent.