The small decisions

I was in a wine store reading the back label of a bottle of Fixin 2015 from a grower with whom I am not familiar, thinking the information set out was saying all the right things consistent with high level of artisanal care and hands-ff winemaking. Perhaps I should buy some, especially since it seemed good value. But following a few minutes research at home I decided against it because the wines apparently are not especially good and certainly not of the quality you might hope for from the information set out on the back label.  This is not to single out the producer in question - especially since I haven't actually myself tried the wine - but merely to illustrate that simply describing even with some precision how the grapes are grown and the wine made evidently leaves out relevant details that must make a difference to quality. 

Of course we all know grape growing and wine making involves a series of dozens of interrelated decisions to take certain courses of action or not to do so.  But it remains surprising to me that when the headline decisions are truly the same - such as fermentation times and temperature, use of clusters and ambient yeasts, type of fermentation container, levels of extraction, timing of malolactic fermentation and so forth - two wines can vary so much in quality. Why is it the Gevrey Chambertins of Eric Rousseau are simply better, when ostensibly he makes the wine no differently than many ? I suppose it is reassuring there is no actual formula.  It is certainly true that what one might think of as the five or even ten most influential decisions in the winemaking process alone are not enough. 

Quoting from the Rare Wine Company site in relation to Bruno Giacosa, Bruno had told Gerald Asher in the early 1990s -  ”Winemaking involves a great many small decisions, each affecting the next. One can only hope to get them right, to capture what there was in the grapes to begin with”. It seems winemakers, quite understandably, are perhaps not always willing to divulge to the casual visitor every decision nor the underlying elements that go into making it.  Some of this is surely real talent - pure intuition in response to a particular set of circumstances, not necessarily replicable with the same results on a second occasion. Experience definitely counts too in assessing the benefits and risks of every little decision.  Some just have the magic.