San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Esther Mobley
The vintner who spoiled her wine on purpose.
Your typical California winemaker would be in despair if her efforts had resulted in the kind of wine that Mandy Heldt Donovan just made. But Donovan did it on purpose.
Donovan inoculated a wine with brettanomyces, a spoilage yeast that most winemakers here spend their careers desperately trying to avoid. Brettanomyces — or brett, to winemakers — can live in winery environments and can imbue wines, if it gets into them, with a spectrum of off-putting flavors: manure, Band-Aid, horse sweat.
Challenge accepted. “I was just curious,” says Donovan, whose wine label is called Merisi. “Is this a tool we could use?”
That’s a sacrilegious notion in some circles, especially Napa Valley, where Donovan lives. Here, brett is regarded as an uncontrollable agent of destruction. Often called the “junkyard dog” of wine yeasts, brett will feast on anything from sugars to acids, making it not just unpleasant to taste but also prone to proliferation, capable of overpowering all of a wine’s native fruity flavors with that smear of manure.
“Everybody’s scared of brett,” says Donovan. The prevailing wisdom, she believes: “This is why you don’t have a gorilla as a pet. It’s a wild animal. You can’t tame it.”
But if brett is so unpalatable, Donovan wondered, how to explain its popularity in craft beer? Brewers like Vinnie Cilurzo of Russian River Brewing Co. and Tomme Arthur of Lost Abbey have been making bretty beers on purpose since the late nineties — sometimes even letting brett perform the primary fermentation, leaving out the typical beer and wine yeast, saccharomyces cerevisiae, altogether.
In recent years the bretty beer category has exploded, with local breweries like Southpaw, Pedro Point, Almanac, Sante Adairius and the Rare Barrel getting in on the action. And craft beer drinkers, including Donovan herself, seem to love it. Could she make a wine that appealed to sour beer lovers?
So in 2017, Donovan siphoned off a little bit of Carneros Pinot Gris she’d made, took it to her home basement — she was careful to keep this experiment separate from the winery where she makes her normal wines, which taste clean and not at all funky — and inoculated it with a strain of brett she had purchased from a craft beer supplier.
“I chose a fruity strain of brett,” she adds, one that the yeast supplier promised would not taste like Band-Aid. (Brett has many hues, as we’ll learn later.) In that first year, Donovan made just 30 cases; in 2018, she made 50.
The resulting wine, called the Merisi Manic White, has something in common with a saison beer: It smells fruity, gingery, bright. The barnyard character, brett’s hallmark, appears most strongly on the finish, but before you get there you taste soy, green herbs, some smokiness. Donovan left a little bit of residual sugar to balance the wine’s sourness. It is strange, undoubtedly an acquired taste, and you may be more likely to enjoy it if you stop thinking about it as a Pinot Gris.
Sounds a little like natural wine, right? It’s true that natural wine fanatics, who tend not to mind when wines aren’t squeaky-clean and flawless, might be the most receptive audience to the Manic White’s funky characteristics. Yet the Manic White is far from a natural wine, not least because it relies on commercial yeast rather than ambient strains.
In fact, if part of natural wine’s imperative is relinquishing control over the winemaking process, Donovan is doing the opposite: attempting to harness the unharnessable.
The Manic White is a science experiment — one that engages with a crucial question posed by our current culinary moment. Is learning to love a bretty wine much different from learning to love kombucha or sauerkraut — or, for that matter, for foreigners learning to love Chinese stinky tofu or French washed-rind cheese?
Could an aversion to brett be more nurture than nature?
To be clear: Brett has always had a fan club. For centuries, before the modern era ushered in antiseptic hygiene regimens, European wine cellars and breweries teemed with brett (many still do), and the yeast was considered an integral part of the beverages made there. That je ne sais quoi in old vintages of Mourvedre of Domaine Tempier, or Chateauneuf du Pape of Chateau Beaucastel; the Flanders red ale of Rodenbach or the lambic of Cantillon — yep, that’s brett.
Donovan became fascinated with brett during graduate school at UC Davis, while working in the lab of Dr. Linda Bisson, a yeast microbiologist. There, she got a crash course in wine sensory analysis, and began to see brett as a multifaceted, even potentially beautiful, component of wine.
“How you process smells is totally tied to the emotion center,” Bisson explains. “What we’re calling the putrid character, which can take on a rotten, almost vomit-like flavor — for a lot of people, that just tastes like cheese.” It all depends on whether your brain links that taste sensation to a positive memory.
If you accept that premise, the idea that any aroma or flavor is intrinsically “good” or “bad” feels as wrong as assigning a value judgment to, say, a color.
In 2013, Bisson created the “brettanomyces aroma wheel,” a diagram that categorizes the different sensory qualities that 83 different brett strains can express. They range from the familiar barnyard and horse sweat to burnt beans and sour milk, and even to pleasant aromas like lilac, maple syrup and tamarind.
Donovan’s education in brett continued — and intensified — after graduate school, when she went to work at Cain, a Napa Valley estate where brett occasionally makes its way into the wines.
“Most people are too afraid to experiment with brett in a winery,” Donovan says. But as she stuck around with Cain winemaker Chris Howell, she saw that brett didn’t make the Cain wines taste like manure or Band-Aid. Instead, the yeast contributed floral, earthy characteristics that she liked.
Howell is probably California wine’s most masterful brett whisperer, but even after 30 years at Cain he still doesn’t understand how the yeast works. “Everybody thinks that once your cellar’s infected with brett, everything goes,” Howell says. “But it’s just not true.” Wine from certain Cain vineyard sections tends to go through a brett fermentation more often than others, suggesting that the winery building itself isn’t the only vector.
Could it be that brett is just as much of an attribute of Cain’s unique vineyard sites as their soil type and elevation? “Is the microflora part of the terroir?” Howell asks.
Donovan’s work in the Cain lab was crucial to deepening the winery’s understanding of brett’s mysterious ways, Howell says, especially her discovery of patterns in the timing of brett fermentations, which were picking up after wines had already been in barrel for almost a year.
“Mandy really helped us look at brett as an organism, not a malady,” says Howell. “We don’t know everything about brett, but I know that if it were gone I’d miss it. We want to know how to work with it, not kill it.”
That’s precisely what Donovan has been devoting herself to ever since — while, of course, also making plenty of nonbretty wines. (For the record, the rest of the Merisi wines are made with little manipulation, starting with a native-yeast fermentation.)
She sees a potential audience for Manic White in aficionados of sour beer, who may have more positive emotional responses to the flavors and aromas of brett than longtime wine drinkers. When pouring Manic White at a wine festival recently, Donovan says, “people kept coming up to my table saying, ‘I heard you had the sour wine!’ ”
So is learning to like brett a matter of retraining our palates, or simply opening our minds?
I’ve never minded a small amount of brett in a wine — Cain, for instance, has long produced some of my favorite Cabernets in Napa — but I admit that I find a total brett takeover in a wine or a beer hard to swallow, literally. When that sour funk overpowers everything else, I miss the taste of fruit. Then again, I spent years training my palate to identify brett as a flaw. If I were drinking a bretty beverage with a naive and open mind, would my brain pick out the lilac and maple syrup notes in brett, rather than the Band-Aid and manure?
“The strength of the wine industry is tradition, but it’s also the weakness,” Donovan continues. “We’re very reticent to change.” As recently as the 1980s, she points out, California wineries were reluctant to embrace malolactic fermentation in white wines, now a standard practice. What other tools are we rejecting prematurely?
Ultimately, though, what drives Donovan to work with brett is not the intellectual exercise. She just thinks that brett, if we can understand it and to some degree control it, can be beautiful. “I know not everyone agrees,” she says, “but I just don’t think the flavor of brett is that out of reach.”