The Wine Savant: A Guide to the New Wine Culture by Michael Steinberger

and other wines. For instance, another gripe about full-throttle wines is that they can be tough to match with food, which is true: the flip side of all that alcohol is that the wines tend to be low in palate-cleansing acidity. For fusspots like me, that’s a big problem, but for many casual wine enthusiasts, it may not be an issue. A survey a few years ago found that most of the wine consumed in the United States is not drunk with meals. Instead, wine is mainly used as a cocktail beverage. The news came as a cold shower to some alcohol agonizers, and that was a good thing: it was a reminder that our preferences are not everyone’s preferences. The fact is, a lot of consumers enjoy buxom wines, Pinot and otherwise, and I can’t fault producers for giving these people what they want. If I’m getting the kinds of wines that I like and other people are getting the kind they like, it is all good.
    C RUNCHY W INES
    All that said, we are now seeing a movement away from the fruit bombs that Parker favors and toward more elegant, terroir -driven wines. Not surprisingly, there is also a growing emphasis on ecofriendly farming practices and on ensuring that vineyards are tended in an environmentally sound and sustainable way. Interest in winemaking practices has increased as well. Vintners can now manipulate the flavor, texture, and color of wines in all sorts of ways; while these practices are safe, there is a lot of discussion about whether they constitute a form of cheating. Two big movements have sprung up in recent years that deal with these issues in one way or another.
    B IODYNAMIC V ITICULTURE
    Why are some of the world’s most eminent winemakers filling cow horns with cow dung and burying them in their vineyards, stuffing animal skulls with grated oak bark and burying these, too, in the dirt, and consulting astrological calendars to determine when to harvest their grapes? More important, why are these bizarre practices, prescribed in 1924 by a teetotalist Austrian philosopher, yielding such excellent wines? That’s the mystery, and controversy, at the heart of biodynamic winemaking, an ultraorganic, deeply ideological approach to viticulture that is winning the adherence of top wine producers on both sides of the Atlantic. But it has also drawn the wrath of the scientific community, which is convinced that biodynamics is little more than a cultish fraud. There is a cultish quality to it. But as always with wine, the ultimate test is in the glass, and right now the evidence is pretty compelling: all that interred cow shit seems to be producing superior Cabernets and Chardonnays.
    Three of Burgundy’s most celebrated estates, Domaine de la Romanée-Conti, Domaine Leroy, and Domaine Leflaive, have gone biodynamic. So has Zind-Humbrecht in Alsace, Michel Chapoutier and Beaucastel in the Rhône Valley, and Louis Roederer in Champagne. Closer to home, Araujo Estate Wines, which makes one of Napa’s most sought-after Cabernets, has embraced the biodynamic approach, as has Joseph Phelps, a legendary Napa winery. Each week seems to bring word of a new heavyweight convert to biodynamic viticulture. What was until fairly recently a fringe movement has become the biggest sensation to hit the wine world since the emergence of Parker.
    Biodynamic viticulture traces its origins to a series of lectures delivered in 1924 by the Viennese scholar Rudolf Steiner. In a city famed for its intellectual vitality, Steiner distinguished himself both for the breadth and depth of his interests and knowledge and for the peculiarity of many of the ideas he espoused. He is best known as the father of anthroposophy, a convoluted doctrine that seeks to examine the spiritual world by means of the same scientific methods used to explore the physical universe and that aims to help the individual transcend materialism in order to forge closer ties with fellow humans, with nature, and with his own soul. The philosophy has