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Postmodern Winemaking CL ARK SMITH Pressing Matters: A Postmodern Tale P ost-World War II winemaking has hosted more alterations in wine production practices than the previous six millennia combined. Surely, we imagine, this has got to be a good thing. But to declare that we have actually pro- gressed requires that what was gained out- weighs what was lost. This calculation is seldom straightfor- ward. Gains tend to upstage losses. While the benefits of innovations are easy to see, what we have forgotten is, well, forgot- ten. Since leaving knowledge behind is usually not a well-organized process, it's often difficult to tell how much true prog- ress is occurring. Many 20th century changes in practic- es were made possible by suddenly abun- dant resources such inexpensive energy, stainless steel, aluminum and copper—all of which are possibly fleeting. Adaptation to changing local conditions does not qualify as progress, and if these condi- tions do not persist, we may wish we still had the old knowledge. What knowledge did we lose track of along the way? For illustration, the cal- culator replaced the slide rule because it was faster, easier and more precise. But in that shift, we lost a certain familiarity with how numbers work. Often we are so quick to throw technol- ogy at a problem that we lose track of the benefits of the old ways and inadvertently fail to keep our options open. In the agri- cultural realm, the genetic advantages of GMO corn ought properly to be weighed against the value of the genetic diversity it is so aggressively replacing. We know our reliance on fossil fuels is not sustainable. Oil is nothing more than 54 Wines & Vines JULY 2011 Highlights • Press designs have come full circle in the past half-century. • A close look at modern wine press de- velopment holds rich lessons for how we think and act as an industry. • The postmodern skill set changes our imperatives for pressing. ancient plant material rendered into a combustible liquid over the eons. An ideal solution to skyrocketing agricultural ener- gy costs would be a mechanism to convert cellulose (a cheap and abundant product of solar energy) directly into motion on site. Such a device actually exists, and it creates a high-grade fertilizer as an artifact. It's called a horse. Unfortunately, except for a few blessed Amish and Mennonites, the nitty-gritty details of horse-based farm- ing have largely left the building. Still, I'll bet L.L. Bean's team is already gearing up Gore-Tex saddles for the coming boom in high-tech tack. Nowhere is our break with the past more acute than in modern winemaking. In the era of vastly greater fermentation tank volumes made possible by electrical pump-over capability, the late Don Black- burn, founding winemaker for Emeritus Vineyards, argued strongly that the ancient method of pigeage (managing the cap with one's legs and feet) was essential to under- standing how a fermentation is going. Another case in point is the absurd story of the development of the modern wine press. In this rich tale we will find a use- ful allegory for the thrust of modern wine- making innovation and its inevitable reex- amination under postmodern scrutiny. In 1940 there were only two choices for a wine press: continuous screw and verti- cal basket. Large wineries used the former, small wineries the latter. Screw presses were disdained for their high tannin ex- traction, and since Roman times, its gentle action made the vertical basket the press of choice for fine wine. Then, in 1950, vertical basket presses somehow stopped working. Five minutes' reflection at that point might have saved us half a century of wandering through the technological wilderness. But no. Instead, we threw electricity at the problem and sent equipment manufacturers on an odyssey of invention and reinvention, only to return to the source 50 years later, when vertical bas- kets are once again all the rage. Today's problems are actually the solutions we found to the problems we had yesterday. After decades of banishment from com- mercial cellars, basket presses are making a comeback. More than a dozen suppliers have models on the market (see supplier box on page 59) and premium California producers such as Jordan and Opus One have jumped enthusiastically on board. The University of California, Davis' new pressing system, de- veloped and donated by the clever and gen- erous Silicon Valley inventor T.J. Rodgers, is a modernized basket design that presses experimental lots right in the fermentor, em- ploying hydraulics underneath that lift the fermentor itself against a fixed head. What caused basket presses to fall from favor just after the war? And why are they on the rebound? In a 2005 article about the basket press renaissance, Curtis Phil-