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Spring 2002 Newsletter
General Winery News Winemaking News Special Report Uncorked! From our Hospitality Staff New Releases Awards and Reviews Personnel Corner |
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Winemaking News: My Daughter is in
By Craig Williams, Senior. Vice-President & Director of Winemaking
 Our daughter left for college this year after 18 years of care, love and guidance. Almost two years ago, my wife and I performed the obligatory task of reading an array of college reference books, sending our daughter to SAT preparatory classes, visiting colleges and filling out the dreaded application forms. Most daunting was the high cost of this education. During the time we were waiting to hear from the colleges we had applied to, an April 8, 2001 article in the New York Times clearly explained why these costs would only get worse. (And in the process, unintentionally shed light on the high cost of quality winemaking.)
The authors* outline the difficulties experienced by labor-intensive industries such as health care, law, education and social work in controlling the cost of sales or increasing productivity. When compared to "hard industries," the cost of delivering these services goes up, not down, over time. In economic circles, this condition is known as Baumol's disease, named after William J. Baumol, director of the C.V. Starr Center for Applied Economics at New York Univer-sity, who first explained this disparity in productivity. Dr. Baumol uses Mozart as an example. Although centuries have passed since the composer's death, playing one of his quartets for string still demands four instruments, four players and the same number of minutes. No method has ever been discovered to make this process more efficient despite the enormous gains in industrial productivity during the same time. The authors reveal that education shares a similar fate. Schools have tried to increase class size, insist that the professors teach more classes or have teaching assistants assume more educational responsibility. None of these approaches are popular with students, parents or faculty. The real cost of teaching has risen 67 percent over the last 18 years and still, the number of students taught by each professor has remained relatively constant. Yet despite this high cost, international student enrollments are up 108 percent over the last 25 years and they continue to come in droves willing to pay full price. (Obviously, for American colleges and universities quality of education remains the overriding motivator.) Which brings me to the subject of quality winemaking. Despite all of the technological advances during the past century, we have not yet found a shortcut to produce quality wine. Yes, technological advances have provided wineries with improved winemaking and processing equipment. Some of the advances are quite sophisticated allowing wineries to carefully and without detriment remove water from grape juice and alcohol or acetic acid (vinegar) from wine. Yet, the time allotted to growing, hand harvesting, crushing and fermenting grapes into wine remains the same. We barrel age our wine for the same amount of time used years ago. Sure, we could add oak chips into a tank of wine to quickly extract oak flavor without the inconvenience of filling hundreds of oak barrels. We could also bubble oxygen through the tank of wine to shortcut the aging process but the fragrance and flavor results would not be the same. Rotary fermenters, capable of extracting color and tannin within 2 days compared to traditional 10-14 day fermentation, produce wines similar in quantitative chemistry but the qualitative taste tells a different story. Rotary fermenters used this way provide speed and low cost but don't provide much flexibility in the fermentation process; seed tannins, depending on the vintage, sometimes take much longer to extract. Or, we could substitute our gentle and time-consuming batch press equipment with a continuous press operation increasing our yield per ton and reducing the cost of production. However, the press wine, an essential component in producing the appropriate balance and longevity in a wine, would be compromised in quality, making it unsatisfactory for blending. Even in the vineyards, we spend increasingly more time not less with hand vine care procedures to ensure the highest fruit quality at harvest. As with Mozart, any compromise during the process inexorably changes the result. Quality wine that embodies the characteristics of its region or place cannot be produced cheaply. Like a quality education, I wouldn't want to settle for less. |
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