This is the second of a two-part series detailing my interview with Rodney Strong’s Rick Sayre. Part I is here.
Technology – including more efficient yeasts and improved techniques in the barrel room – has changed the way wine is made. It has given consumers more consistent quality and wines that provide better value (as well as those high alcohol monsters that cause so much controversy). But, says Rodney Strong’s Rick Sayre, it isn’t the future of winemaking.
“We’re almost at the end of technology in winemaking,” Sayre said during a visit to Dallas last week. “We’re getting to the point where we are reinventing the wheel.”
The new direction? “We need to focus on the vineyard, and not the wine room,” he said. More, after the jump:
When Sayre started working for Rodney Strong 30 years ago, the technology most wineries use today didn’t exist. There were, for example, concrete tanks instead of stainless steel. It was a simpler time.
“It’s actually more difficult making wine now,” Sayre said. “There are more distractions, more people involved. You have people to train. Thirty years ago, you did it yourself.”
In addition, winemakers then practiced the old world art of confusion. They didn’t share their knowledge, which made it difficult for young winemakers to learn. The difference came in the person of the legendary Andre Tchelistcheff, the consultant who brought a new approach to old world technique in California’s early days as a wine region.
Sayre, who worked with Tchelistcheff (as did many of the most important winemakers in California in that era, including Mondavi, Martini and de Latour), said Tchelistcheff was the man who convinced the wine business that what was good for one was good for all.
“We’re so free to share technology and innovation,” he said. “Thirty or forty years ago, if you had a secret, you kept it to yourself.”
And the next secrets to fall will come in the vineyard. There are two schools in winemaking – that the winemaker, with technology, can overcome poor quality grapes, and that great wine can’t be made without great grapes. Sayre belongs to the latter school, and is convinced that any future improvement in wine quality will come because wineries and winemakers will pay more attention to improving the quality of grapes in the vineyard.
Which will be a welcome change.
Part I: Wine writing, and why it needs to do more to educate consumers.
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