Does the UC Davis Wine Program Lack Imagination?

A writer for the San Francisco Chronicle had some less-than-flattering things to say about the wine programs at UC Davis in a column last week.   

He said that the viticulture and enology students are “prepped for a life as a production cog in the wine factories of Modesto or Santa Rosa,” which, if it isn’t obvious, is intended as an insult.

In the column, wine writer Jon Bonné spends the bulk of his paragraphs suggesting that the program is scientific and stiff, burying his scattered compliments below the lede and delivering them in the form of future promise, rather than as assessments of the present.

The department chair asked Bonné why wine writers had issues with Davis. Why are they so critical?

“I had to admit that my own skeptical view came from repeatedly hearing about how Davis mostly taught by-the-numbers winemaking to help graduates get faceless, rubber-stamped productions jobs with big wine.”

But what does that mean, and is it a legitimate assessment?

“I think he’s talking about something he doesn’t know about,” said Mike Anderson, co-owner and winemaker at Berryessa Gap winery in Winters. “I think [Bonné]’s repeating a myth that’s not true.”

Anderson, who is also a viticulture researcher at UC Davis, adds that there is not necessarily anything wrong with making the so-called “big wine” Bonné refers to. The existence of Kendall-Jackson makes it possible for Stanko Radikon to do what it does. The idea that one could exit without the other isn't true, Anderson suggests.

Bonné later refers to “parts of the Davis routine that still bug -- like sensory evaluation training and the ‘aroma wheel,’ which have the same appeal to wine lovers as the Donner Party might have to mountain hikers.”

Clever line, but Anderson says the accumulation of knowledge does not automatically bar you from being imaginative.

“Understanding chemistry doesn’t mean you can’t be a creative winemaker,” he said. “As a matter of fact, understanding chemistry allows you to be creative. You know how to fix things when they go wrong. The whole idea that being educated is a negative thing is wrong.”

Department Chair Andrew Waterhouse is quoted in the article as saying that the role of his department is “to give budding winemakers an understanding of how to do things by the book, not to dictate their ultimate cellar decisions.”

Although Bonné tips his hat to the technology at work within the wine departments at the university, he says he still hasn’t “fully parsed Davis’s reality.”

For that reason, he has promised a return trip. So stay tuned.