1) INTERNATIONAL TELETIMES
The Environment & Human Rights
• Vol. 2 No. 9 November 1993 •
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-- The Wine Enthusiast: Winemaking and the Environment --
Like most industries, the wine industry has been affected by environmental issues. Recently wineries have been forced to replace lead bottle capsules (the cap which covers the cork) with plastic or tin alternatives, for health and landfill waste reasons. The most important impact that the production of wine has had on the environment however, is in the millions of acres of vineyard worldwide. Many of the lessons learned from the winegrape industry in the last decade are encouraging for the agriculture industry as a whole.
In the 1950's and ‘60's, agricultural advances promised to make grape growing more profitable by eliminating the effects of disease and pests, and increasing yield, quality, and lowering costs. Today it is evident that these objectives can best be achieved not through the dependence on pesticides, herbicides, fungicides, fertilizers and the like, but by employing more traditional, environmentally-friendly techniques.
The old ideal vineyard was bare as a billiard table, kept free of weeds by the use of herbicides which after successive applications, essentially sterilized the soil and kept it weed-free, except for minor touch-ups. This is not ideal though, in terms of creating a healthy environment for the vines. Weeds or grass aerate the soil and allow water to be easily stored by the soil and allow rain to reach the roots. They prevent soil compaction by tractors and soil erosion on hillside vineyards. They also provide alternative food sources for vertebrate pests and form a natural home for indigenous insect predators. As well, a cover crop helps limit vigor of vines, which in New World vineyards is probably the biggest single cause of quality loss. If, rather than allowing weeds to flourish, the grower grows a cover crop of barley, mustard, or clover the growth can be plowed under for use as a natural, mild, fertilizer.
Maintaining soil health, as opposed to neglecting it and then applying harsh vigor-inducing fertilizers, is a simple, inexpensive and sensible solution. The old European adage, "where plows can go no vines should grow" also illustrates some of the problems New Worldgrowers have created for themselves. In the past, New World growers typically chose overly fertile sites for vines; this led to lower-quality grapes, and demanded far more intervention to be kept weed-free. Rocky, or poor soils are often ideal for deep rooted vines, but inhospitable to weeds.
Similarly, mildew, bunch rot and other fungal diseases are best treated with preventive measures, such as pulling excess foliage, limiting the number of clusters and hedging shoots, so that the grapes are well exposed to sun and air circulation. With a good preventive regimen, elemental sulphur need only be sprayed to keep the vines disease free.
Sulphur is cheap and considered totally acceptable in organic growing. Unlike sulphur, expensive chemicals like sterile inhibitors, which are anti-fungal agents, become less effective after successive applications, because the diseases become resistant to the particular chemical. Like antibiotics, they must be used with restraint, or disease problems can be compounded. Just as in our health care system, growers have become hooked on chemicals which provide expensive, quick fixes, rather than long-term solutions.
Insect pests are far less troublesome in a balanced, well maintained vineyard, and can be usually controlled inexpensively during outbreaks with the release of ladybugs, spiders and other predators, rather than the wholesale killing of vineyard insects with pesticides - that kill predators as well as pests.
In California there has been a real swing back to traditional organic grape-growing. What is encouraging about this development is that it has been initiated not so much out of the marketing possibilities of cashing in on the ‘90's fears and fixations with diet, or out of Political Correctness, but because it makes good, long-term financial sense. Preston Vineyards in Sonoma County and Fetzer in Mendocino County are leading the way. Their philosophy is that long-term care of their vines and soil will produce better wines and cost less to maintain.
The promise of 50's and 60's agro-technology—cheap, bountiful, disease-free winegrape growing, was a false promise, partly due to unforeseen economic shifts like the rising cost of petrochemicals. The promise was also false at the core, because it is only through limiting vine vigor and yield that quality winegrapes and great wines are produced. The best way to achieve these ends is to keep the vines balanced and healthy, through good site-selection and sound, traditional vineyard practices - that just happen to be environmentally sound as well.
- Tom Davis, Vancouver, Canada
2) INTERNATIONAL TELETIMES
What's News to You?
• Vol. 2 No. 10 December 1993 •
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-- The Wine Enthusiast: Gamays
A few columns ago, I talked about a class of wines that seem to get no respect, that most light of red wines, roses. Well, another class of light red wines also receives little attention from consumers and producers alike, Gamays. Gamay is the grape variety used exclusively in Beaujolais, it was once one of the most popular red wines in the world, long before Cabernet became synonymous to consumers with red wine. (Beaujolais Nouveau has increased in popularity, but this most overrated wine won't be discussed here.) Over the last few decades, tastes have shifted to darker, more potent red wines for everyday drinking, and Beaujolais and Gamay wines have lost some of their appeal.
Gamay wines are simple wines. They ideally are rather one dimensional, in the sense that the are not structured around a tannic core, or layered with tannins and flavors of oak. They are not vinified to extract maximum color and flavors from the skins. They simply must express first and foremost the brilliant fruit flavors and delicate aromas of the grape itself.
Gamay wines should typically exude fresh cherry and strawberry flavors, and soft floral aromas. The ideal in Gamay wines is to be homogeneous and pure, like the coherent light from a ruby laser, rather than opalescence expected from Cabernet wines.
Oak aging, extended fermentations, even low yielding vines are not necessary, or even preferred, to make good wines. The Gamay vine is a prodigious yielder -- wine quality does not suffer with yields up to five tons per acre, its basal buds are extremely fruitful -- which allows for mechanical pruning and harvesting, and it is tolerant of warmer and cooler growing sites, since it is has naturally high acidity, and is an early ripener. For New World wineries situated in moderate climates, Gamay can be a quality wine that can be produced at a very reasonable cost.
Gamays do benefit from a unique kind of fermentation however, called carbonic maceration. This is a different kind of fermentation than ordinary yeast or bacterial fermentation. In carbonic maceration the grapes are left uncrushed under a blanket of carbon dioxide, where enzymes within each grape berry break sugars down into alcohol and carbon dioxide. Delicate volatile flavors and aromas are produced and preserved through this technique, and few tannins are extracted from the skins. By varying the amounts
of must fermented through carbonic maceration and ordinary fermentation, the winemaker has a wide spectrum of winestyles from which to choose. Last year I tasted three '91 Willamette Valley, Oregon Gamays. They were some of the finest Northwest wines I've ever had, even though they cost under ten dollars a bottle and were made for immediate consumption.
California tried to break into Beaujolais' monopoly on Gamay wine years back, by making similarly styled wines with the inaptly named varieties of Gamay Beaujolais and Napa Gamay. Both are merely inferior Pinot Noir clones that make light, dull, and tasteless wines. Only the true Gamay grape it seems, known as the Gamay Noir (confusingly) in the Northwest, can pull off the impossible task of becoming delicious, and inexpensive light styled red wine.
I hope Gamays from the New World can achieve the levels of popularity and reputation that Beaujolais has enjoyed of the years, because the potential is enormous for the growing number of consumers interested in quality wine at a reasonable price.
- Tom Davis, Vancouver, Canada
3) I N T E R N A T I O N A L T E L E T I M E S
• Vol. 3 No. 1 January 1994 •
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-- The Wine Enthusiast: South African Wines --
In April, South Africans will hold their first true general elections in its history. South Africa is a wealthy, industrialized nation and despite its history of racial injustice and factional violence, it has, more than any African nation, the best odds at peace, prosperity, and social justice in the coming century.
With the end of apartheid, and the move to full democracy, international trade barriers that helped to enact this change, are being lifted, worldwide. This means that South African wines will be available in many parts of the world for the first time in many years. This may bring down the price of entry level varietal wines significantly, for though South Africa only produces about as much wine as Rumania, about 8 million hectoliters, the reputation of South African wines are very high indeed, and we should see fierce competition.
South African wine production is almost twice that of Australia, and its history of wine production dates all the way back to 1659, when it was a Dutch colony. Constantia, a rich dessert wine made from the Muscat of Alexandria, was famous the world over during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
Like California, South Africa's wine regions are blessed with very reliable, moderate climates. Poor growing seasons are very rare. There are two main wine regions in the country, the cooler, moister, Coastal Belt, northeast of Cape Town, and the Little Karoo, further eastward, past the rain shadow of the Drakenstien mountains. As with California, the coastal regions produce the finest table wines, and the Little Karoo, like the San Joaquin Valley of California, is a great, overly-fertile, irrigated, inland region best suited for dessert wine production.
The main sub-appellations of the Coastal Belt are: Constantia and Durbanville, Stellenboch, Paarl, and Tulbagh. All of these regions are moderate in climate, have good soils and topography, and produce South Africa's finest table wines. The main noble grape varieties used in this Coastal Belt are, starting with the reds: Cabernet Sauvignon, Cabernet Franc, Carignan, Merlot, Shiraz, Hermitage (Cinsault), Gamay Noir, Pinotage (a cross of Pinot Noir and Cinsault!), Pinot Noir, and even Zinfandel.
The main noble white varieties include: the ubiquitous and versatile Steen (Chenin Blanc), Riesling, Sauvignon Blanc, Kerner, and the Semillon or Greengrape. Oddly, or perhaps thankfully, Chardonnay is not grown in great quantity, though this is quickly changing. In 1973 South Africa enacted a system akin to Appellation Controlee laws called Wines of Origin. Wines with the W.O. seal on their capsule, or W.O.S., of Superior Origin are to be sought after. This system has been successful in encouraging the existence of many smaller, quality producers. These wineries are pretty well up to date in their winemaking equipment and techniques, as well as their use of oak cooperage and sound viticulture.
I recommend taking Hugh Johnson's Pocket Encyclopedia of Wine along with to purchase South African wines, as you will need to familiarize yourself with the regions and their best producers. This writer has admittedly no experience of tasting South African wines, but I look forward with great anticipation to experiencing them in April, when these wines become available here in British Columbia. I also look forward to toast to the success and potentially bright future of the new South African nation.
- Tom Davis, Vancouver, Canada
4) I N T E R N A T I O N A L T E L E T I M E S
• Vol. 3 No. 3 April 1994 •
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-- The Wine Enthusiast -- Beer
Like wine, beer is a wonderful alcoholic beverage that can have complexity, sophistication, and be a delight to the senses. Like wine as well, the majority of beer produced is made to appeal to as wide a market of consumers as possible, and because of this most beers lack the above mentioned qualities.
There are now in North America many smaller micro-breweries and larger regional breweries that make superior products, many of whom have taken brewing in new directions. Wine is a very simple drink to make. All you need is a source of sweet, juicy fruit, - grapes are ideal - and a container to squish the fruit into, and wild yeast and bacteria will do the fermentation for you. All you need to do is pour off the fermented juice, now wine, and voila!
In winemaking most of the attention is placed on the origin and quality of the original grapes. I've argued a great deal in this column that viticulture and micro-climate are the major determinates of a wine's quality. Wine almost makes itself.
Beer-making is a much more complex affair. Though beer contains essentially only water, barley malt, other grains, hops and yeast, producing (modern) beer is more technologically demanding than making wine. (Ancient beers made in Egypt or Mesopotamia must have been downright simple to make, but probably awful to drink.)
But like wine, the quality of ingredients, and thus the expense, have a great deal to do with the finished product, as well as how the beer is made.Since the end of prohibition, the large breweries bought out and absorbed almost every regional and smaller brewery in North America, leaving the marketplace dominated by a handful a large producers. These producers have largely shaped the marketplace in their own image. In an attempt to appeal to the widest possible market they have literally diluted beer to suit the lowest common denominator.
Discriminating consumers, that seek beer different from mass-appeal products traditionally have bought imported beers, many of which, in turn have been bought and produced under license by the same major breweries.
In the early 1980's all of this began to change. Hundreds of small micro and regional breweries sprang up, many of whom have passed into obscurity, but much of whom are thriving enterprises providing stiff competition to the large established breweries. Consumers began to demand more from such a an unlikely, inexpensive beverage as beer. Quality beer that had the same cachet as trendy wine, that was of course, slightly more affordable and accessible, had an immediate appeal. Consumers also had a belated recognition that beer was not something uniquely American or Canadian but was transplanted from Europe, and so consumption required a new perspective placed upon the experience.
The same recognition struck consumers and producers of wine in the early sixties, that a Napa Valley Cabernet or Chardonnay could, approach the qualities of a Bordeaux or Burgundy. It was upon this fertile ground that the seeds for a truly inventive new brewing industry was founded. Copying the styles of old-world brewing was not sufficient, in fact, the nature of New World malt and hops made this a virtual impossibility. Barley grown in Washington State or Saskatchewan was significantly different from European malt, and new varieties of hops grown in the Pacific Northwest were astoundingly more powerful and rich than any European hop.
From this set of circumstances New World brewers have created an unique tapestry of variety and richness of beer styles by reinventing old and new. Today because of the proximity of quality hop and malt producers Washington, Oregon, and California brewers are producing a wide range of beers that are every bit as impressive as the superb beers of England or Germany. Many New England states as well, with their rich brewing heritage, are on the cutting edge of this fusion of beer tradition and New World materials.
Anchor Brewing in San Francisco, Yeungling of Boston, Red Hook of Seattle, Full Sail of Portland are truly on the cutting edge of beer style development producing rich, heavily hopped, zesty, quenching styles of beer, that have no real equal in European beers. Beer making has finally matured in the post-prohibition world of North America, and the future looks bright indeed.
- Tom Davis, Vancouver, Canada
I N T E R N A T I O N A L T E L E T I M E S
• Vol. 3 No. 4 May 1994 •
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CONTENTS ISSN 1198-3604
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-- Sex, Art, and American Culture --
By Camille Paglia
(Vintage, 337pp., US$13)
Camille Paglia is a something of a renaissance woman, a Professor of Humanities at the University of Arts in Philadelphia, a verbose master of criticism, and a truly imaginative post-modern intellectual. Her style is witty, engaging, full of humor and passion, and cuts to the point with awe-inspiring ferocity. At times her prose reads more like Ginsberg's poem "Howl" than an academic essay, but this is precisely one of her strengths.
Her first book, Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson, was published in 1990, and received little notice until after the publication of an essay in the journal Arion. The essay was entitled "Junk Bonds and Corporate Raiders: Academe in the Hour of the Wolf." This brilliant essay is the core of her latest book: a compilation of articles, essays, a lecture and an interview, is entitled Sex, Art, and American Culture.
After the publication of "Junk Bonds" in 1991, and the paperback release of Sexual Personae, Paglia became a full-fledged phenomenon, appearing in various video and print media, as a self-styled defender of reason against a tyranny of post-structuralist art theorists, feminist zealots, and commissars of Political Correctness.
"Junk Bonds" is itself a book review of two books from the field of Gay Studies: One Hundred Years of Homosexuality, by David Halperin, and The Constraints of Desire, by John Winkler. Both books are representative of the views and methods of Humanities scholars at leading universities. Both authors are post-structuralists, a class of scholars which emerged in the seventies and eighties inspired by the writings of several French scholars: Foucault, Derrida, Lacan, and Louis Althusser.
The post-structuralist approach, which like Marxism, claims to be "scientific," while displaying nothing but contempt for the scientific method, is based upon the interpretation of art or culture in terms of textual analysis and the process by which the "text" is deciphered. Feminist and Marxist scholars often apply the typically dense and problematic concepts of these hermeneutists in the fields of art criticism.
Paglia is merciless and unrestrained in her attack on Halperin and Winkler. Her wrath could even be termed Medea-like. She speaks with outrage at such academics, who in her analysis are self-serving get-rich-quick yuppies, the moral equivalent of junk bond dealers:
"The French invasion of the seventies had nothing to do with leftism or genuine politics but everything to do with good old- fashioned American capitalism, which liberal academics pretend to scorn. The collapse of the job market, due to recession and university retrenchment after the baby-boom era, caused economic hysteria. As faculties were cut, commercial self-packaging became a priority. Academics, never renowned for courage, fled beneath the safe umbrella of male authority and one-man rule: the French bigwigs offered to their disciples a soothing esoteric code and a sense of belonging to an elite, an intellectually superior unit, at a time when the market told academics they were useless and dispensable. It is comical that these vain, foolish and irrelevant people, so contemptuous of American society, imagine themselves to be leftists."
The academe's addiction to French post-structuralism has been at the expense of an entire generation's education in humanities, Paglia contends. This is something that I, as an art student during the early '80s would testify to as well:
"Lacan, Derrida, and Foucault are the perfect prophets for the weak, anxious academic personality, trapped in verbal formulas and perennially defeated by circumstance. They offer a self-exculpating cosmic explanation for the normal professorial state of resentment, alienation, dithery passivity, and inaction. Their popularity illustrates the psychological gap between professors and students that has damaged so much undergraduate education."
After a relentless assault upon Halperin and Winkler, Foucault and Lacan, academic feminism and Marxism, in an attack that roams over a breathtaking battleground of ideas, she speaks prescriptively to graduate students about to enter the academe:
"This is a time of enormous opportunity for you. There is an ossified political establishment of invested self- interest. Conformism and empty pieties dominate the academe. Rebel. Do not read Lacan, Derrida, Foucault, and treat as insignificant nothings those that still prate of them. You need no contemporaries to interpret the present for you. Born here, alive now, you are modernity. You are the living link between past and future. Charge yourself with the high ideal of scholarship, connecting you to Alexandria and to the devoted, distinguished scholars who came before you. When you build on learning you build on rock. You become greater by a humility towards great things. Let your work follow its own organic rhythm. Seek no material return from it, and it will reward you with spiritual gold. Hate dogma. Shun careerists...Among the many important messages coming from African-American culture is this, from a hit song by Midnight Star: "No parking, baby, no parking on the dance floor." All of civilized life is a dance, a fiction. You must learn the steps without becoming enslaved by them. Sitting out the dance is not an option."
This quote vividly illustrates Paglia's one-of-a-kind style, enthusiasm, and her commitment to truth. She continues in this vein in her lecture given at M.I.T., entitled "Crisis in the American Universities." This lecture should be required reading for any university student. The rest of the book is made up of tantalizing and thought provoking essays on pop culture and such dangerous (thanks to Political Correctness) topics as date rape.
While some of her messages may infuriate, her ideas cannot be overlooked. She possesses a unique voice that demands the attention of anyone interested in culture and politics in the world today.
- Tom Davis, Vancouver, Canada