Wine Culture

by Jake Lorenzo

Jake Lorenzo sits sipping a very fruity Zinfandel, staring out the window at the gray sky.
The daylong downpour has slowed to a steady drizzle. Large puddles dot the backyard, and
water drips steadily through the downspouts.

Jake is thinking about culture. "Is there such a thing as 'rain culture'?" he wonders. "Could
there be a society based on rain gear? Would people be content to worship windshield
wipers?" Probably not, he decides.

Culture is a very special thing to Jake Lorenzo. Chuy's Burrito Palace has its own culture.
Burrito Palace culture is a shot of tequila in the morning cup of coffee; it is a Palace Taco for
lunch with plenty of the house salsa; it is listening to Chuy's eclectic music mixes of
Mexican, Latin and African music, mixed with odd bits of jazz crooning, punk drama and lots
of reggae. It is a casual culture. I never remember seeing a tie in the Burrito Palace.

All great cultures have religion and art. The closest the Burrito Palace comes to religion is
Tequila Sunrise Services on Sundays. The art includes whimsical bark paintings from
Michoacan, eerie skeleton ceramics from Oaxaca and three antique Hawaiian shirts from
Chuy's youth.

Here in Northern California, you'd have to say we live the Wine Country lifestyle. I'm not so
sure that is a culture, but it often acts like one. If there is a Wine Culture, it is clearly
dichotomized. There are the haves and the have-nots. The haves make wine in palaces, live in
chateaus, drive luxurious foreign cars, dine in expensive restaurants and sell their wine for
upwards of $100 a bottle. The have-nots drive pick-up trucks, live in rustic cottages, make
wine in garages and barns, eat at burrito wagons, pay corkage when they dine at fancy
restaurants and struggle with post-offs to sell their wine at all.

A huge part of the Wine Culture is the façade. What you appear to be is all-important. Lots of
the haves are actually as poor as a cellar rat before crush bonuses. They're leveraged to the
hilt, robbing Pinot to pay Paul. On the other hand, some of those have-nots have streams of
bankers hiking to their rustic cottages for loans, and they have to constantly decide between
taking their private jet to go skiing or opting for the yacht and a day on the bay.

Wine Culture art exists on colorful labels designed by all the best designers. Wine Culture
music is made by symphonies of tiny violins playing in unison while owners whine about
government regulation, the high cost of labor and increased postal rates now reducing wine
club profits. Wine Culture worships the almighty dollar. The cost of your winery and
vineyard, the expense of your glass and your label, and especially the price of a bottle of your
wine are critical.

Wine Culture has its own language and its own number system. The number system only
goes to 100, and anything below 90 doesn't count. In Wine Culture, sharpshooters have
glassy wings, buds break and caps are screwed. We have rootstock, fruit set and hang time.
We have words that no one understands but us, such as veraison, botrytis and micro-
oxygenation. We even have entertainments called winemaker dinners.
Archeologists will love the Wine Culture because of all the caves. They'll trace the different
types of barrel rack systems and the unusual drainage and venting systems, but they won't be
able to decipher the "great rooms." We know that every cave must have some personal stamp
to make it special, whether it is an underground dining area, theater, wine cellar or collection
of crystals. Archeologists in the future haven't a chance in a carbon dioxide cloud of figuring
out why those rooms are in the caves. (Jake thinks that some mystery is always good when
establishing a culture.)

Every culture has its heroes, and the Wine Culture is no different. Of course, you have to start
with the Gallos and the Mondavis; after all, that's the beginning of jugs and varietals. There
are winemaking legends like Brad Webb and Louis Martini, and glorious historians like
Gerald Asher and Hugh Johnson have documented the culture for decades. Marvin Shanken
and Robert Parker would have to be included in the pantheon, and perhaps we should give
Helen Turley her own pedestal.

Cultures all have some version of heaven and hell. In Wine Culture, heaven is a clean
fermentation that finishes malolactic, acquires the perfect oak balance and is consumed at the
optimum moment. Hell is a rain year, over-cropping growers, stuck fermentations,
Brettanomyces and a bad cork.

Future generations will come to revere cellar rats when they realize who did the actual work.
Cellar rats will be recognized as heroes for surviving the freezing cold of winter cellars
during cold stabilization, the blazing heat of summer sun during crush and the ear-splitting
clank of the bottling line. Cellar rats will be seen as the carriers of joy for the culture and as
the real drinkers of the product.

I don't know, maybe Jake Lorenzo is stretching things when he talks about Wine Culture, like
there actually is one. Jake knows one thing: mankind just doesn't like to give up, and the fight
for survival often defines culture. wbm