Gang of Pour - Putnam At-Large

A. Distinct, delightful cinnamon, nutmeg spiciness smoothly blended with chocolate flavor. Faint earthy, tea tones with a hint of pineapple fruitiness. Long-lasting, rounded, lightly creamy flavor with no astringency in the aftertaste.

B. The straw smell carries over into the (liquid) smelling a bit like a horse stable. The mouthfeel is soft and round, a bit earthy, slightly smoky, with more of the straw notes. There is indeed a fruitiness in the finish (like) that of the grapes in canned fruit cocktail.

C. This is a deep, dark mysterious liquor. It's muscular, musky and oozes languidly on the tongue. Its deeper tones are bitter chocolate, its high notes: ripe fruit... very ripe. It's slightly wild, rich, fat and funky. Not the fuzzy stuff of a monsooned Malabar - it's far too smooth for that - but still it's earthy and intense.

D. Soft, almost mousse like, it melts in the mouth releasing its subtle lemon zest freshness with hints of green walnuts and white wine on the finish.

E. Seductive aroma of sour cherry acid and Brett with an overlay of oak and cocoa. Initially tart, cocoa flavored and lightly funky. Huge vinous undertow. Airy but full texture. Medium full body.

None of these describe wine, but all of them might have. That's because all of these
describe things that, like wine, are fermented.

Of all ingredients that determine a wine's flavor, yeast is the most important.

In fact, many of the descriptors we read in wine reviews - chocolate, leather, coffee,
tobacco, cured meats, black tea - themselves depend on fermentation for their flavors and aromas.

This is the logic of tasting notes.

And apparently, only the flavors arising from yeast-affected produce are worthy of this
type of prose. After all, there are no "tasting notes" for raw vegetables, milk, or sushi. What could a raw apple taste like other than an apple? A rose is a rose. It doesn't smell and taste of roses; fermented Barbarescos and Gewürztraminers do that.

We see in these reviews how one fermented product may be used to describe another, and vice versa. Merlot may taste like chocolate; Venezuelan chocolate may taste like full-bodied red wine. Yet Merlot may never intelligently be described as tasting like full-bodied red wine. Fine Belgian beer may be "vinous", but please, never say it is "beery".

One rarely finds reference in these reviews to specific brands of alternative fermented
things. A chocolate tastes like "wine" or, at most, like "red wine". It never suggests
flavors of "Howell Mountain Merlot", say, or "Lavaux St. Jacques".

By the same token, Howell Mountain Merlot is permitted to taste of "cocoa", or "chocolate", but never of "Chuao estate chocolate". Invoking the complexity of one fermented discipline apparently does not clarify another.

Besides - suggesting to loyal consumers of one yeast-genre that there may be just as many cerebral thrills in another would not only be confusing, but probably bad for business as well. I don't know about you, but my budget for cheese comes from the same fund I use for wine. For me, more cheese means less wine; more wine - less Trappist ale.

It is also worth noting that authors of these reviews are careful never to trade the reader down the social hierarchy. Beer may be praised as tasting "vinous", but wine must never taste of ale. And neither wine nor ale may meritoriously taste of cheese.

I gather from these texts that the good in any fermented object is related to how well the raw ingredients are hidden. Wine may only derisively be referred to as "grapey". "Grainy" beer and "milky" cheese may be good for the gut, but not for contemplation.

So, in describing good experiences, connoisseurs of fermented drinks and edibles reference myriad other fermented objects. Of course wine tastes like wine. The question is what else does it taste like; especially what other fermented things?

These “descriptors” often describe chemical compounds that are, in fact, found in the
things they suggest. The yeast-made flavor that is characteristic of butter comes from
precisely the same chemical that gives many white wines and pub ales their own distinctive flavors and aromas. Reviews of such wines and beers use terms like “buttery” or terms for butter-based preparations such as “toffee” – i.e. Fuller’s ESB – and “biscuit” – i.e. Bollinger RD Champagne.

The chemical name for this butter flavor is "diacetyl", and while it may be accurate to
describe a Sleepy Hollow Chardonnay as tasting of "diacetyl," no wine writer should ever do it. The word not only obscures the point for those who don't know the term, it will scarcely sell the experience of drinking it for those who do.

Incidentally, if the case for yeast as the supreme force in good taste needed more support, observe this: “Butter gets its flavor through the fermentation of cream by bacterial cultures.”

As real as the chemistry may be, reading wine reviews for some people is like going to the movies. It requires suspension of disbelief – a pause in one’s loyalty to the literal truth. And, skeptics be damned, most of us are pleased to do it. It is entirely ordinary for even disengaged wine drinkers to enter my store and ask for a “buttery” Chardonnay. We all know there aren’t really any fatty bovine secretions in the bottle. Yet the meaning is clear.

I suspect that everything interesting about wine - or cheese, oolong tea, cigars, olives, kim chee, chandu and miso for that matter - comes from the surreal influence of yeast on its flavor. 1.

And there are heath benefits too!

There is one aspect of yeast chemistry – esters – that emulate raw, unfermented,
biosynthetic nature. Scribbling tasters must describe esters directly rather than calling
on a repertoire of other cellared, funky farm goods to do the work for them.

Esters give fermented things their "fruit". A good, live, cask-conditioned English Bitter tastes of baked apples; not because apples are used in the brewing of course, but because the yeast used to make it combined certain alcohols and certain acids into the very same flavor compounds that are naturally present in, and characteristic of, real apples.

The so-called "fruit" found in wine depends on this transubstantiation too. Cabernet grapes don't taste like cassis; the particular acids of Cabernet are exploited by particular yeasts to generate cassis-flavored esters - the same goes for Sauvignon wine that tastes of gooseberry; Pinot Gris wine that tastes of apricots; and Riesling wine that tastes of green apples.

By the same token, unblended chocolate from Venezuela or the Caribbean can possess raspberry "fruit"; while chocolate from Madagascar may taste of limes.

Much has been made - by traditionalists especially - about the influence microbiological technologies have had on the yeasts used to make our wines, breads and cheeses. It turns out particular, flavor-giving strains of yeast have been isolated in labs and packaged for commercial use. These can be inoculated into a vat of grape juice, for example, to provide very specific flavors in the finished glass of wine. Yeast catalogues even reveal to what degree specific flavors may be designed into a wine.

Also noted is the degree to which yeasts are isolated and cultivated to satisfy economic imperatives such as speedy and complete fermentations. There is a fascinating inverse proportion that opposes such industrial values to those of good taste. It is always the arduously slow, unpredictable fermentations that result in the greatest complexity of flavor.

While such regimes sometimes result in "off" flavors, startling quality always depends on them.

Technology oriented, modern winemakers - trained in chemistry, not taste, and hired by corporations to minimize costs - must craft flavor into their wine. They employ devices such as oak and rotofermenters as eagerly as children squeeze chocolate syrup into thin, growth hormone-infused milk. These cosmetic enhancements may cover the void of flavor left by turbo yeast, but they can't be endured for long by anyone interested in beautiful flavor.

These yeast technologies are the result of rigorous selection in labs and neutral growth media. Their appeal is purity. The ideology that underlies their use recalls a supposed dark age of ignorance where wine would unpredictably become vinegar.

Yet in the time before Pasteur (1822-1895), yeast may indeed have been cultivated - if not exactly "cultured". Only it was surely by accident.

In that time, successful batches of wine would have been racked off of compressed solids in the bottom of a tank. These solids, teeming with live yeast, were used as mulch between the rows of vines on the estate vineyards (fermented gunk is probotic for plants too!)

From here these proofed, benign yeasts competed ever more successfully with air born yeasts to dominate the "bloom" of active microbial culture living on the skin of every grape. All a winemaker had to do was stomp on the berries. The wine made itself.

Over years and over generations an ecological equilibrium was established. A circuit of what is termed "wild" yeast passed through the selective bottleneck of the vintner's
cellar, while the vintner, in turn, survived in the market based on his luck with these
wild yeasts, the biology of which he may have been blissfully ignorant.

What is wild? What is cultured? These terms frame the wrong debate.

Nowadays incompetent, insensitive wine manipulators (and brewers) are enabled by yeast technology to cheaply create merely tolerable, fermented, alcoholic drinks. And it's popular in the commercial wine press to claim that the general quality of wine has improved greatly. Making that argument is like saying Bud Light is an improvement on traditional Flemish ale because it is so clean and consistent. I don't buy it.

What is biodynamic? What is industrial? That's more to the point.

Everywhere, yeast culture is overlaid by human culture. A mutual determinism affects both. Just as the human species altered its social behavior to begin farming more than 10,000 years ago (archaeologists say we were lured by beer and wine), so wild yeast has adapted to the demands of human culture.

Interesting is how certain benign, indigenous, wild yeasts are still so prized for their
unique flavor-giving properties, in spite of our technological advances.

Lambic beer in the Senne valley, sourdough in San Francisco, Sherry's wild flor cultures in Jerez, all thrive in their local environments, and in the modern marketplace.

Can anyone walk through the limestone caves below Roquefort-sur-Soulzon and doubt they are in God's Petri dish, verified by the finished flavor of the cheese raised there? Sure, many modern examples of Roquefort cheese are inoculated with tidy, laboratory-grade cultures, but travel and changes in pressure derange yeast, causing them to mutate and degrade. This is why there is no chance of making passable Roquefort anywhere other than where this strain of yeast was born.

This is why tasting is like traveling. And this is the real meaning of terroir.

1. Donna Fellman informs me that tea is not fermented with yeast, but rather with a process referred to as enzymatic oxidation. Apparently, it is not yeast enzymes, but enzymes found in the tea leaves themselves that turn them those shades of brown and black and give them their fruit and spice notes. Chemical reactions catalyzed by enzymes are what yeast-based fermentation and tea "fermentation" have in common. More here.