Trust

I've been thinking about this post for quite a while, moreso this past week while I'm away from Portland and my wines. 

As a winemaker, there's so much work to do throughout the year. Working with growers, visiting the vineyards to monitor the growing season, making the wine of course each fall, and then worrying all year long as there's everything at stake in the new wines but really little you can do about what they are and what they'll become. 

The cliches about winemaking being like  parenting are apt. And just as it is nice and even a requirement to take time away from one's own children to restore and gain perspective, it's important to step back from your wines and see things more clearly. 

I've come to understand that winemaking is really all about trust. Trust in your vineyards and the grapes they produce, trust in yourself as the one guiding the grapes through the process of becoming wine, then trust in the truth of those new wines so that what you put into cask at the end of harvest to age over the winter and beyond is, as one might reluctantly admit, what it is. 

Wines, like love, just are. We can analyze them, doubt them, even fear them at times, that they aren't as real as we thought or hoped, or are going to slip away if we do something wrong. 

But that's not how this works and as a winemaker I'm coming to understand that I need to trust my wines implicitly. And I hope they trust me as well. That's all that's necessary. The rest will take care of itself, in time. 

So often when I talk with other winemakers, I hear their fears. Of rain and other weather issues, of a lack of dynamic flavor in the juice, of problems or supposed problems or deficiencies in the fermenting wine, a lack of enough mid-palate density or aromatic complexity, things that yeasts and texture enhancers and whatnot allegedly help. Not to mention new barrels for their flavor impact. There's so much that people want to add to their wines in the name of making them better.

But what about trust? Why not just trust the grapes and a simple process? We work so hard in the vines, we're committed to bottling by site or region. We usually vintage date things. All these things are about variety, place to place, year to year, and yet so often we work against that to dial in some kind of consistency, a lack of variety, in the name of better wine, ensuring profitability, even simply sleeping more soundly at night instead of worrying about everything that's wrong.

That's not to say one should be neglectful or fatalistic. Not at all. No, we should trust in what we know we have and let the wines be their best. Wines can do nasty things. They can be horrible at times. Our role is to not freak out and overreact. These things pass, usually, and we will live with then no matter what. Our part is to trust in what we know is there. There are no guarantees about how things will turn out, just a certainty that the best results will come from giving up control and trusting in what's there. 

Lately I've been thinking about what I put into barrel this past fall. I was so excited at the time. I knew these wines were something special. Then time passes and I have doubts if they are what I thought they were, if I was mistaken or fooled. I can check in on them, and I do, but they don't always show me what I want. They can't, nor should they. Wines, like people, are in motion. They don't stay put well and that's something else to love about them. Talk about dynamic. 

Now I'm away from my wines and I understand anew what they are. They're changing but what they are doesn't change. I know now that, no matter how things go, they will turn out. Not perfectly, necessarily, but truthfully. 

I know what I have, how real it is. And I know I can trust. You can too.