Role of Technology

[balex]

There seem to be some extreme positions in the use of technology in wine-making. One one hand you have people like Gravner in Friuli who are experimenting with very primitive techniques and on the other hand you have people using chemical analysis (like Enologix) to optimise the presence of flavour elements that will lead to high scores in influential publications. What's your view on the two extremes -- do you think it is worth pushing the boundaries at both ends or do you feel it's pointless? Do you like the resulting wines?

More radically, what do you think the future holds in terms of technology in the long term for winemakers? Do you think additions of synthetic flavors, or naturally extracted flavors will ever be widely accepted in wine? Some winemakers admit to the use of oak chips in a bag; there is probably some other stuff going on that isn't admitted to. What about genetically modifed grapes? This is all still science fiction but these days, science fiction can turn into reality pretty fast.

I'd be interested to hear whether wine makers are thinking about this or whether they are still debating synthetic corks

[Jancis Robinson]

I'm afraid I'm too much of a romantic to warm to the Enologix idea, however clever (I wrote 'artiful' initially but realised that was the wrong word) and effective it may be. And I HATE the idea of relying on added flavours. But I'm not a complete Luddite. I'm sure wines are generally made better today than they ever have been, with greater understanding of what's going on. But, as I've written before on this forum, happy vines tend to make wines that make us happy - so long as we're prepared to expend a little effort on trying to understand them rather than sitting back and shouting at the glass "ok, impress me". Of course every budding wine producer has to experiment a bit and work out their natural limits but often the best lessons learnt seem to me to be NOT to do something intrusive.

As for GM vines, I can quite see all sorts of useful applications, and my guess is that if and then it gets the go-ahead, it will be for thoroughly positive purposes. It's in the bigger, global agribusiness than I have my doubts about some of the uses to which this technology is being put. As you hint, however, I suspect the wine world is not thinking hard enough about this issue.