Vintage 2050

Like Gastronomica, grapes follow yearly cycles. Vintages, like volumes, evolve from year to year. Over its quarter century, Gastronomica has examined wine’s lessons for broad questions of labor, environment, and taste. In 2003, for example, Robert Pincus published an early warning about how “the changing climate will affect wine production” (Pincus 2003: 87). Twenty years later, I examined how long histories of climate ruination in northern Italy shape the way small-scale winemakers understand the climate crisis (Bender 2023).I’m continuing those conversations in this special anniversary issue of Gastronomica to reimagine the key labor process of tasting as sensory ecocriticism, revisiting the concept of vintage. What will wine taste like in 2050 (when Gastronomica turns 50) as climate changes? Wine tasters typically understand vintage simply as market conditions determined by weather. I understand vintage capaciously as an encounter of human labor, tradition, and craft with climate. Writing in Gastronomica in 2023, Charlie Leary noted that tasting as “sensory analysis” shapes production choices and market success but remains firmly outside of the university (Leary 2023: 55). Elizabeth McQueen, in our pages, delves into the historical ambivalence around the idea of ‘terroir,’ notes that global environmental degradation shapes taste, in dialogue with the locality of terroir (McQueen 2024).As an academic tool, tasting is analytical, evaluating human creative and artistic intent as it relates to environment. Taste (like any other sense) is dependent on personal biological and cultural background, but it can be trained and communicated. It is also an ecological sense. Gastronomica has been a valuable place to rethink some of the key concepts, like taste and terroir, in the academic study of wine. Drawing on this rich tradition and the links to food studies, we can articulate new ways of engaging the practice of wine tasting as ecocritism, that is, a social, political, and cultural diagnostic of the impact of environmental crisis. Tasting vintages—once narrowly cast as an exercise in evaluation for market pricing and consumer ratings—offers sensory engagement with the changing climate.Wine tasters, including those who trained in sensory evaluation to work in wineries, shops, magazines, and restaurants, consider 2001—our journal’s first year—a good, but not great vintage in Bordeaux. Unpredictable weather marked the growing season, beginning with a spring that sluggishly transitioned from cold to warmth, hampering flowering and fruit set.By the time summer arrived, growers already knew that grape yields would be reduced. Periods of intense rain, punctuated by extreme heat, then challenged ripening. Rain at harvest dilutes flavors as grapes swell with moisture. In ripening, sugar levels rise while acidity levels fall (Jones et al. 2021). In hot summer spells, sugars accumulate too quickly, but picking early is not an option because sugar levels rise at different rates than the maturation of flavor compounds. Grapes can reach high sugar levels without developing complex flavor precursors. Later, during fermentation, yeasts convert sugar to alcohol; too much sugar will produce undesirably high alcohol levels. When grapes overripen, wines can lack the acidity that tasters associate with freshness. Overripe grapes also lose the firm tannins that tasters recognize as balanced fruit flavors. With lower tannins and acidity, such wines are unlikely to age well, a characteristic valued with Bordeaux’s best wines.Commercial tasting happens at every stage of winemaking. Winemakers will sample the fermenting must and young wines from barrels. They will taste again when they blend wines made from different grapes to produce a final bottling that respects the typicity of a region and winery. As in most European wine appellations, the wine is sampled by an official tasting panel to determine if it meets the organoleptic profile of appellation laws. Then, independent, trained, and accredited tasters evaluate the vintage. In Bordeaux’s more desired châteaux, they will taste wines and publish reviews and ratings before bottling. At every stage from winery to table, including as wines age, bottles are tasted by critics, buyers for shops and restaurants, and sommeliers. Using definable and, ideally, reproducible measurements of structural elements like tannins, acidity, and alcohol, and a shared vocabulary, we can communicate complex ideas about the character and quality of wines from a particular vintage. After all, most consumers buy wines with the corks intact.Château Langoa-Barton is in the prestigious appellation of St. Julien on the Left Bank—the south shore of the Gironde River—in the larger Bordeaux wine region. In 2001, the château’s field workers began manually picking grapes on October 2 and finished by October 12 (Langoa-Barton n.d.). Viticulturalists and winemakers identify the ideal dates of picking based on sugar levels in the grapes and the phenolic development of flavor compounds. Experienced viticulturalists determine ripeness based on their tasting of grapes, confirmed by laboratory tests and refractometers (tools that measure sugar levels on site).Throughout Bordeaux and at Langoa-Barton, harvest dates are advancing with the changing climate. In 2022, a sweltering year marked by unprecedented fires in the nearby Landes Forest, pickers harvested from September 8–23 (Langoa-Barton: n.d.). In the glass, advancing harvest dates translate into changing tastes.Langoa-Barton produces about 7,000 cases of wine annually. A few bottles from the 2001 vintage remain, mostly in private or restaurant cellars, occasionally in shops specializing in mature wines. I bought, opened, and tasted one of these few bottles (and that evening served what remained with dinner). That bottle helps craft my effort to reimagine formal wine tasting as ecological, political practice.In 1821, Hugh Barton purchased the château and its twenty-one acres of vines. A generation later, the 1855 Bordeaux Classification, an official ranking created at the behest of Emperor Napoleon III for the Exposition Universelle de Paris, identified Langoa-Barton as a Third Growth, establishing the château as one of the Left Bank’s elites. Unlike many other Bordeaux estates that have changed hands until they became part of larger winemaking conglomerates, Langoa-Barton remains in the Barton family with the tenth generation, Lilian Barton Sartorius serving as winemaker.Hugh was the grandson of Thomas Barton, an Irish wine merchant who founded the Barton & Guestier trading house. As historian Charles Ludington notes, Irish merchant houses like this one shaped the taste of modern Bordeaux wines, partly in response to climate (Ludington 2019). These merchants filled out the thin, acidic taste of wines that struggled to ripen in the cool climate by blending in richer, riper wines from warmer areas in France and Spain. Today, the addition of such “medicine” wines (as they were termed in Hugh’s era) is illegal. Instead, Bordeaux’s regulations permit producers to vary the percentages of Cabernet Sauvignon, Merlot, and a handful of other varietals to maintain style consistency year-to-year. A higher percentage of earlier ripening Merlot, for example, can provide additional body and fruit character in cooler years when Cabernet Sauvignon struggles to ripen.This practice of blending, embedded in the wine laws that define different Appellations d’Origine Contrôlées (AOC) throughout Bordeaux, recognizes that vintages change. This modulation of percentages represents an effort to control the phenolic—taste—impact of a variable climate to fit a cultural standard of how Bordeaux wines should present. However, as climate change departs from predictable fluctuations and threatens the very ability of wineries to cultivate these varietals, winemakers are scrambling, not simply to grow grapes, but to make wine that refers to the baseline expectations of Bordeaux wine. From the point of view of winemakers in vulnerable regions including Bordeaux, distinctions between weather as short-term temperatures and precipitation and climate as conditions over a long period are dissolving. Localized events like hail, scorching heat, late frosts, and fires are making wineries think less about seasonal patterns and more about climate change as the key variable in crafting vintages.My tasting notes: I cut the foil capsule. The vintage date is stamped into the cork itself. Age indication is the first moment of my tasting; I read the date, first, before I see, smell, or taste the wine. I pierce the second ‘0’ in 2001 and remove the intact, firm cork. For the last quarter century, the bottle has been well kept, anticipating its future use.I pour two ounces. The wine is deep garnet and when the glass is held at a forty-five -degree angle, the shallow rim is clear. Both observations demonstrate the wine’s age. On the nose, the wine has medium + intensity with a few remaining fresh fruit flavors, despite the bottle’s age. These primary flavors have mostly disappeared in maturation. Cedar bark and smoke are hints of initial winemaking choices, including some new oak aging. Tasters call these secondary notes. The wine’s aromas of dried cherries, stewed raspberries, and brandied prunes complement spice notes of dried ancho chilies and earthy aromas of black tea, dried mushrooms, and piney forest floor. Such characteristics show the effects of aging and are called tertiary notes.I sip and spit. The wine is dry with medium + acidity, and I’m surprised that the high tannins remain so assertive despite a quarter-century of aging. As wine matures, tannin molecules form longer chains. Heavy, these sink to the bottom of the bottle. The tannin chains that remain in suspension are still long enough that they bind less persistently to the proteins in our gums than the smaller tannin molecules in a younger wine. That binding produces the mouth-puckering sensation that would have characterized this wine in its youth. With maturation, the tannins become velvety.The alcohol is medium, only 12.5 percent ABV; the winery picked the grapes before they became overripe, resulting in a wine with well-defined, but not jammy or cooked, fruit flavors. These complement the elevated acidity and tannins. Alcohol levels have been creeping upwards in recent vintages in Bordeaux, including at Langoa-Barton. In the warm 2022 vintage, for example, alcohol reached 13 percent. On the palate, the wine features pronounced flavor intensity that generally matches the nose, though I note more dried blue fruit notes, like blueberries, and more assertive spice, especially black cardamom. The wine has a medium + body, reflecting the moderated alcohol (alcohol contributes to heavier body). The finish is long; I can easily discern specific fruit, spice, and earth flavors ten seconds after spitting.If I were writing a tasting note to determine quality or price, I would now consider how the various structural and sensory traits interact. However, I am concerned with its market stature only to acknowledge the wine as cultural reference and valuable commodity. At this moment in tasting, sensory ecocriticism diverges from sensory evaluation (Foster 2000; Clark 2019). The tasting—ecotasting—that I’m proposing here consciously employs a language and rubric familiar to formal, commercial wine evaluation. I am tasting to gauge the intent of the winemaker in their relationship to climate and weather and to understand the ways this aging wine provides a reference that determines contemporary style.Formal tasting can open a dialogue between the labor practice of wine evaluation and a sensory approach to academic ecocriticism which considers how literature and other artifacts evoke sounds, smells, tastes, sights, and textures, and how these experiences shape our understandings of nature and, specifically, the climate crisis (Heise 2008; Cooke and Denney 2021). Ecocriticism, I’m arguing, need not be restricted to the textual, an approach that only reinforces the primacy—the tyranny—of the visual. The methods I’m drawing from formal tasting and rendering into humanities interrogation, can be deployed to understand wines, perfumes, foods, and more offensive things like air pollution or oil spills.Rather than framing wine as ‘text’ to be read, I’m suggesting that there we can deploy smell and taste as powerful tools for climate advocacy that can meaningfully engage customers, servers, winemakers, and pickers. Wine, as vintage-dated bottles, represents vital climate data that we can usefully compare to ice core samples. If the ice sample is frozen in time, bottled wine evolves. The former is hermetically preserved; the latter is a cork-sealed commodity, and cork is a permeable natural and human barrier between today’s climate and yesterday’s weather. Cork admits measured amounts of air, catalyzing the wine’s slow aging. Today’s flavors of mushrooms, dried fruit, and complex forest floor represent the intent of 2001’s winemakers to make wine for future consumption.The ice sample determines past atmospheric, weather, and climatic conditions while a wine sample, analyzed in the glass, considers how such conditions relate to tradition, artistic intent, and even legal norms governing taste. This bottle of opened wine is a sensory diagnostic of the sociocultural impact of climate change. In tasting, we can isolate specific climate markers that, in their interaction with human ingenuity, create wine as both cultural/environmental artifact and commodity. On the nose and palate, the wine offers both red and black fruits and, even as dried tertiary notes, they show a just-ripe character, without the telltale stewed fruit profile of wines from hotter climates. Wine is the material product of watching skies for storms, canopy management through training vines and plucking leaves, sampling grape clusters, testing sugar levels, and measuring phenolic development. In formal tasting, we can sensorially discern the intention in all that labor to create a wine capable of long aging.This particular bottle likely would have changed hands multiple times and moved from cellar to cellar after leaving the winery. In this slow process of sensory deferral, the exchange value of the cork-sealed bottle matures into use value when the bottle is served. The wine, as commodity, promises future sensory pleasures, alongside the human desire for the prestige that comes from opening a rare bottle. In my own experience, the use value is realized as I transition from formal tasting to social drinking. Use value, writes Marx, is linked to “the physical properties of the commodity” (Marx 1990: 126). As my tasting notes suggest, those physical properties—its structure and phenolics—are sensory and they emerge from a climate relationship mediated by plants, soils, and microorganisms. The exchange value—to extend Marx once more—is ultimately determined by those laboring within the climactic and weather conditions of the vintage.Fermented liquid becomes commodity partly because it can be stored, packaged, and traded, and partly because of the labor of tasting that evaluates desirability. Langoa-Barton is linked to global drinkers through a vast network of trade with medieval roots. The ‘Place de Bordeaux’ is a distribution system revolving around négociants (distributors), courtiers (brokers), and producers. Courtiers link producers, large and small, to négociants who, in turn, distribute a château’s wine. The majority of Bordeaux’s producers depend on the Place to reach drinkers in 170 countries (Ouvrard and Taplin 2018).Prestigious producers like Langoa-Barton also presell much of their wine through advance ordering called ‘en primeur.’ In the spring after harvest, designated tasters, usually noted merchants, négociants, journalists, and critics, sample wines from and publish their They taste, not for but structural and phenolic they its future after maturation and aging. these tasting notes, in with the of winemakers and viticulturalists (and the observations of provide a of the vintage. A winery produces a commodity but one value I’m arguing, exchange and with vintage. 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