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WINEMAKING It's hard to estimate the fraction of zany ideas that succeed. Clearly, it's pretty small. Proctor and Gamble's R&D Department budgets a 3% survival rate for new ideas. Even big success stories like Henry Ford and Thomas Edison ran far more failed ventures than successes. With that kind of failure rate, progress requires a gigantic pool of courageous, visionary, obstinate, lunk-headed spendthrift wackos to keep up the momentum. Oh, and vast sums of money— most of it completely wasted. How do you screen out the bad ideas beforehand? Beats me. Who would predict that a 47-pound chicken could resonate as a major national brand? Time seems the only dependable test. Training in the scientific method leads to an orderly, logical ap- proach to inquiry that is better suited to confirmation than to the cre- ative leaps new discoveries often require. The current debate about Biodynamics illustrates why the scientific process is constrained from much discovery. "Biodynamics is a make-believe world with no earthly connection to our functioning, real, material world," writes Stu Smith of biodynamicsisahoax.com. "I don't want to live in a soci- ety that can't tell the difference between fantasy and reality." The bottom line is that generating useful good ideas requires a very large number of independent, creative players driven by inspiration and unconstrained by common sense. Sounds like the wine industry to me. The missing link I am, of course, leaving out a step. The heroes of the exploratory phase do not speak the same English as the professional scientists who might later confirm their discoveries. Attempts to communicate holistic concepts may engender ridicule and frustration to a reductionist ear trained in science-speak. "Energy," for instance, is not a good word to bandy about between these groups, because it has very different mean- ings and applications both groups think they own. In "The Copernican Revolution," Thomas Kuhn explains that in a world view based on earth, water, air and fire, these elements obvi- ously arrange themselves in that order (e.g. air rises through water and earth falls). The idea that the earth is not at the center of the uni- verse is not just blasphemy—the statement just doesn't make sense. Similarly, the postmodern view that wine composition does not determine its sensory properties seems obvious nonsense. But Winemaking advances are sparked by a very strange mix of genius. consider that the sensory properties of a lump of coal, a graphite tennis racket and a diamond is not compositional (all are pure carbon) but lie entirely in their structures. Now we can talk. The first step in new thinking is to translate the new paradigm into old language that, however unlikely, is at least understood. What is needed is a translator. Someone who speaks both lan- guages and is slave to neither. Harvard ethno-botanist Mark Plot- kin spends his time following tribal medicine men into the Ama- zon's deep forests to learn about the herbs and vines they use.4 He takes their lore and presents it to the guys in the AMA, packaged a little differently than he heard it in the bush. This is the role to which I aspire, and why I write this column. Although I have done some pioneering, I lack the resources to ex- 2 Barrel Washers • 4 Barrel Washers Barrel Processing Lines • 1/2 Ton Bin Washing Systems 35 lb. Picking Lug Washers • Custom Cellar Equipment Tom Beard Company 1650 Almar Parkway, Santa Rosa, CA 95403 P. 707-573-3150 www.tombeard.com F. 707-573-3140 E. jmendoza@tombeard.com 106 Wines & Vines nOVeMBeR 201 1