Good winemaking is a mix of apparent opposites: technology vs. tradition, stainless steel vs. oak barrels, chemical analyses vs. tasting and spitting. The hard and the soft. The objective and subjective. The controlling and the creative. By themselves, the technologist produces clean, sterile, lifeless wines, and the romantic waxes poetic about unique, "interesting", wines that are "full of life"--usually microbial lifeforms that, as flaws, will kill the wine--or wines that cannot be duplicated. Together however, they can make great wine. It's a balance. Like us treading Pinot noir manually (or is it pedally?) in a tank that is computer temperature controlled. Left brain and right brain.

Most of us admit to a blend of these dueling personality extremes. However, some of us have lived with an almost schizophrenic dichotomy for years. I'm a nerd some times, a romantic at others-- degrees in Chemistry and English only start to tell the tale. As with the elements of a great wine, we all seek to build a wholeness, strengthening complementary facets without losing those special features we prize. To create the sphere: ultimate purity, balance, strength and smoothness.

Life well-lived is indeed a matter of balance. I have over time come to believe that balance is the state which drives all activity. It is the equilibrium naturally sought in reactions, the stasis inevitable in moving objects, the benefit of teamwork, the subconscious reason for marriage and, perhaps, the centering we sit cross-legged droning mantras to achieve. Jumpin' Jupiter! It probably is responsible for the planets staying put.

Philosophy aside, winemaking needs the artistic. Winemaking style is our broad artistic statement, that personal stamp a winemaker puts on his or her wine. Look at wine style as a painting created from our palette of winemaking variables, many of them technologically derived, to satisfy our sense of what that wine should be. Even when vintage and terroir stamp themselves indelibly on a wine, the possible styles are still almost infinite and most are valid. Choices are ours as to when to pick, stems or not, whole or crushed fruit, premaceration or fast fermentation, what temperature and what profile, yeast strain, ML now or later, barrel forest/toast/cooper/new %, ....too many to list and all having distinct impressions on the wine.

It is not unusual for us to sail along in agreement and then find a barrel that throws us into verbal fisticuffs, shoulder shrugs, and idiot glances.

The palate is consummately subjective, both for us in the winery and for the consumer. We all have different levels of acuity, with almost everyone having both highly sensitive aroma and taste areas and blind spots. What is great or flawed may differ even among professionals.

With Cheryl and me making wine together we get the benefit of two good, but different palates. It is not unusual for us to sail along in agreement and then find a barrel that throws us into verbal fisticuffs, shoulder shrugs and idiot glances. Making blends together for "best" wines can be especially entertaining, with scientific-looking arrays of samples and graduated cylinders belying the fact subjectivity is really in control. And we usually invite several other palates to make the wrestling match even more chaotic.

It is OK to like and make different styles. For example, we make two Pinot gris: a crisp, fruity, clean style and a rich, weighty, complex style (Reserve). Pinot noir likewise sees an agreeable moderate intensity 3 Vineyard style, a big, brawny, macho Ridgecrest and the elegant, silky, complex Reserve. It is up to us to define a style and then reliably duplicate it. That's where art and technology link.

Or it links when we admit our very humanness is superior to technology. For two scientifically trained winemakers to abandon lab tests when harvest nears, to trust their palates' ability to sense and integrate a multitude of nuances, and then to pronounce "time to pick!", is a testament to happy coexistence of the art and technology of winemaking.