Nicola Twilley's "Pour One Out"

Photo by Bobby Doherty, from Nicola Twilley's "Pour One Out"

I find myself still thinking about Nicola Twilley’s excellent “Pour One Out,” in last week’s issue. The piece is about the California wine industry’s quest to save wine from wildfire smoke. Twilley reports that smoke taint is costing the industry billions of dollars. She talks with researchers studying the impact of smoke on wine grapes. She visits their experimental vineyards at Washington State University. She participates in a smoke-tainted wine taste test at Oregon State University. She notes various techniques devised to solve the issue, including spraying grapes with a clay-based powder called kaolin, mixing smoky wines with activated carbon, and extracting smoky compounds from the tainted wine. None are satisfactory. The research continues. 

What sticks in my mind is the last section of the piece, in which Twilley shifts perspective. Instead of treating smoky taste as a flaw, she treats it as part of the wine’s “aeroir.” She talks with vintner Cyler Varnum, who had what she calls a “breakthrough.” She writes,

When people visited Varnum’s tasting room, in the Willamette Valley, they often asked how that year’s vintage had fared, given the wildfires. Varnum decided to take them back to a barrel and pull a sample so they could see for themselves. Some made a face and spat it out; others could taste the smoke but found it curious rather than repulsive; still others loved it. “That was the realization: we don’t dictate people’s tastes,” he told me, as we sat in his tasting room. “I shouldn’t be trying to tell people that it’s a flaw. I’d rather be, like, ‘This was 2020: you might like it, you might not.’ ”

“Still others loved it” – that made me smile. There’s no accounting for people’s taste. Twilley’s last paragraph is a beauty, worth quoting in full:

Varnum, in his tasting room, shared what little remained of his 2020 stock, starting with a traditional sparkling blanc de blanc he’d bottled under the moniker Toast, made entirely from Zolnikov’s Chardonnay grapes and fermented in neutral oak. “It’s interesting, because when you think about champagne, you want toasted-brioche, crème-brûlée notes—that’s actually a quality you’re looking for,” he explained. On first sniff, I was not optimistic: the nose, as Varnum delicately put it, was “more on the burnt side of toast.” But the taste was much more nuanced: light, clean, and bright, with a browned-piecrust quality that never built into the bitter charred note I’d learned to anticipate. Earlier that year, Varnum’s partner, Taralyn, told me, they’d had a bonfire and brought out the glasses. “I think I drank almost a whole bottle,” she said. “Around a campfire, it’s delicious.” 

“Pour One Out” is an interesting take on a challenging "climate change" issue. I enjoyed it immensely.