Abe Schoener has this theory that the more reductive a wine is, the more minerally the wine will be. This doesn’t sit well with me. To my palate, reductive notes and mineral character are completely different tastes.

“Reductively-made” just means that the wine was made with minimal exposure to oxygen. A fruity and inexpensive California Zinfandel or a New Zealand Sauvignon Blanc are good examples. Their existence is only made possible by the use of stainless-steel tanks, refrigeration, and inert gases. In a way, this fruity-fresh style of wine is a modern invention; it could not have existed a hundred years ago.

The opposite of “reductive” winemaking is “oxidative,” but that’s not to say such wine belongs in the same “oxidative wine” category as Sherry or Vin Jaune. Oxidative winemaking just means that the wine is made in the presence of oxygen.

Both approaches are practiced in both the New World and the Old World. I’ve loved reductively-made wines from both Worlds. My friend Rudi Pichler in the Wachau makes cutting, expressive, and severely mineral white wines that I’m completely obsessed with. He makes these wines in a very reductive environment using all the modern tools and techniques noted above. Conversely, winemaker Isabelle Meunier makes astonishingly mineral-intense wines at Evening Land Vineyard in the Willamette Valley. And yet her ELV wines receive similar “oxidative” treatment as wines produced by top domaines in Burgundy: indigenous barrel fermentation, natural malos, barrel aging, etc.

Despite the popularity of fruit-forward wines, reductive winemaking presents certain challenges. The same reductive techniques used to produce “fruit bomb” Australian Shiraz can also cause off-putting sulfur smells during fermentation. Yeasts, without enough oxygen, can produce “reduced” sulfur compounds such as Hydrogen sulfide (H2S) which can smell like rotten eggs or cabbage. A winemaker might attempt to counter this H2S problem with a number of additives like diammonium phosphate (DAP) or treating the wine with copper (sounds yummy doesn’t it?). Many winemakers, however, feel small amounts of H2S can also provide a positive perceived minerality. But I don’t see this as minerality at all: I see it as reduction.

Minerality is not H2S nor is it an imagined quality. Minerality is minerality—period—and the degree to which one perceives it in a wine has much more to do with the strength of the terroir (and quality of its farming) than some would care to admit. Minerality is very much present in the wines that I love and drink on a regular basis, and as I mentioned earlier, the methods of production can vary greatly in those wines.

A wine’s minerality is perhaps the clearest indication of the wine’s origin. Nowhere is this more obvious than the wines grown in a band of special soil in France known as Kimmeridgian. Kimmeridgian is a mix of marl and limestone and is prominently featured in the wines of Chablis, Sancerre, and Champagne. It gives a strong, wet-chalk character to the wines that are grown from it and its character is so pervasive that Chablis and Sancerre are often confused in blind tastings. Paolo Vodepevic makes some of his wines in porous terracotta amphorae buried below the earth. This is obviously a very oxidative technique but I’m not sure I could imagine a wine with more hard-stone mineral intensity.

It is just a bit farfetched for me to imagine that while tasting at Comte Lafon in Meursault, Dominique would explain that he made the Perrières more reductively than the Charmes because Perrières should be a more minerally wine. I'll concede that vignerons do a bit of channeling in their cellars but Perrières is Perrières. I could go on with examples like Barolo, Priorat, and don’t get me started on the oxidative wines of the Jura, but this is a blog and not a book so let me get back to Schoener.

I found Schoener’s comment so puzzling because he doesn’t seem to have a reductive bone in his body, and yet he also seems to greatly value minerality. Schoener always looks for rocky vineyard sites from which to produce his own unique expression of California terroir. And no matter which vineyard the wine comes from, Schoener seeks to de-emphasize the fruit character of his wines. “One should sense decay,” Schoener says. He wants secondary and tertiary qualities in his wines, and after a night of drinking numerous wines from his cellar recently (out of 12 wines, just one was his own), I’m convinced he wants mineral in his wines as well. I’ll try to coax a better explanation from Schoener; I’d love to hear your thoughts also.