What Personal Characteristics Are Critical For A Great Winemaker?

There are no bad winemakers. There are just some who are less successful than others. But there are great winemakers. Some of these winemakers are professional, but many others are amateurs. Great winemaking knows no boarders or gender or training. Great winemaking is expressed in the glass. Who are these people and what guides them to repeatedly succeed where other diligent souls only occasionally get lucky? Is there some element or quirk in their character that propels them forward and upward? If so, what are these quirks and how can we incorporate those traits into our winemaking?

Pondering this question, I decided to ask some great winemakers, both professional and amateur, that very question: What characteristics in a winemaker can elevate a winemaker from acceptable to good, or to great? I was pleased that this question struck a chord and even more pleased to receive very insightful responses. Surprisingly to me, though their descriptions were different, their answers generally agreed with each other. This article will discuss those personal characteristics which help to elevate a winemaking from a craft to an art.

The Arc of Winemaking

Like all of us who try to create, we were all once beginners. There are many approaches to learning a craft. One can read manuals, ask fellow makers and one can try, and continue to try, until one succeeds. Best practice is all three methods. The joy of learning a new thing can seem like an adventure. A hobby is born.

Not everyone who has a hobby sustains it, or enjoys it on the same level. Some enter it more deeply, others only touch on it occasionally. Sometimes, the hobby can take the form of an annual tradition. Many families or friends, for instance, make wine together and the joy is in the making. Some winemakers, like Joe, one of the group, was kind enough to share his thoughts. He still remembers his family’s winemaking tradition and even the childhood smell of fermentation. Those memories erupted some 20 years later when he asked his father “Dad, I want to make wine. Where’s the crusher and press.”

Still others seek to elevate winemaking to a fine art. For those, what may have started with a kit wine leads to a small home winery. In John’s winemaking trajectory, desire came first. But intensity does not necessarily propel a winemaker upward. After the fun of learning a new thing wears off, there must be more to progress. Desire and passion were words I often read in their emails to me. Study and striving were terms also used. All of them suggested that a good winemaker must go beyond having good technical skills. Those skills might make a good winemaker, but not a great winemaker. This next step from basic winemaker to a good or great winemaker requires different skill-sets and, perhaps, different sensibilities.

Characteristics That Contribute to Becoming a Good Winemaker

Desire & Passion

Passion is a subset of desire. One can have desire to learn, without acting on that desire. It’s like a repeated January desire to lose weight and get fit. Are we likely to do so? Passion is desire in motion.

Winemaking is a craft, part science and part art. All of my group of winemakers agreed that to become a good winemaker, one must be willing to study and learn the techniques that are necessary to understand what your grapes are saying. Basic winemaking requires the understanding of sugar levels and acid levels. A good winemaker must go beyond the basic level of knowledge and understand deeper technical aspects such as SO2, TA and PH levels. These are the building blocks of winemaking and a good craftsman hones his tools.

It’s not just knowing what these tools are, but how and when to use them. Going from basic winemaking to good winemaking requires a winemaker to train their senses, what John called “your God-given tools.” He called it a “fundamental necessity” to train your “eyes, nose and taste.” This allows you to know when something is right, and more importantly, when something is wrong with the wine. Once your senses tell you there is a problem, then your acquired knowledge will help you solve or cope with the problem.

So, competence derives from passion. It leads us to try and be a better winemaker.

Flexibility & Patience

Patience was a central element of good winemaking according to the group. Thought they all mentioned it, many had different takes on why it is so important.  Joe suggested that patience allows your wine-skills to evolve. It also allows you to grow and learn from mistakes. Phil identified two areas of concern.  Nature has many moving parts which don’t always move in the same direction. “You head into every vintage with a plan,” wrote Phil, “but it is extremely rare for everything to go as planned, and sometimes deviations from the plan are where the magic happens. Being comfortable figuring things out on-the-fly when plans change is an indispensable quality for a winemaker.”

He also felt that gaining the patience to understand the difference between a wine in actual danger and a wine going through a “weird” phase is such a critical piece of a winemaker’s development. This ties in with learning to use your senses, keeping up with all the moving parts of a fermentation. Your senses alert you to a potential problem. Your patience allows you to consider if it is a problem, or a wine moving in an unexpected direction. Flexibility gives you the ability to sense that direction and act accordingly.

Flexibility also gives the winemaker the magic power to see what a wine is unlikely to become. Trying to make a California Chardonnay style with cool climate grapes is likely to be unsuccessful. But tasting the grapes, smelling the grapes and testing the grapes may point to a more edgy style, such a Chablis style Chardonnay.

As passion is necessary to spur us toward becoming a good winemaker, patience and flexibility help us achieve that level of making.

Characteristics of a Great Winemaker

Striving & Listening

These two elements of great winemaking seem at odds with each other. Striving means putting forth great effort especially in the face of many challenges. We think of this as a characteristic within one person. Listening means more than just hearing, but also understanding and accepting. This requires more than one person. But these two characteristics go hand in hand and are necessary to elevate your winemaking. Another central theme from the group was the need to strive to be a better winemaker vintage after vintage. Making a good wine is not good enough for a great winemaker. Great winemakers always strive to make a better wine.

As Joe wrote, “All your successes and negligences are right in your glass.” Striving starts there. What did I get right? What did I get wrong? How would I make this wine differently? Should I learn new technique, or refine the skills I have, or both? Yes, striving can be a lonely occupation. But paired with listening, it becomes less introspective.

Jan suggested that a winemaker seeking to improve might want to have a collection of different tasting groups who have different palates. The wider the audience, the wider the perspectives on a wine’s profile. John agreed that a great winemaker invites opinions and accepts constructive criticism. This made me recall a lecture by the late Clive Coates, a highly respected British wine writer and educator. He believed that the general winemaking quality in the Burgundy Region of France had slipped in the 1970’s. His diagnosis was that the makers were not progressing but stagnating. One reason, he thought, was that the old winemakers were only tasting each other’s wine, and even that only within each village. So even professionals and traditional makers can fail to learn from constructive criticism from a range of palates.

Developing good listening skills, sharing your successes and failures, can ground you on your winemaking arc and guide forward to a new level. One great benefits of a winemaking club is the experience of the many.

Curiosity and Playfulness

This category surprised me when I first read the comments of the group. Playfulness? But thinking about it, I feel they are on to something.

Most of the winemakers expressed the sentiment that curiosity was an important part of great winemaking, though in slightly different ways. Jan calls characteristic “enthusiastic curiosity.” To John it is “experimentation.” Phil’s comments were the most depictive. He feels a great winemaker needs curiosity as an “essential ingredient of innovation, to understand why things work the way they do”, which, he thinks, may lead to trends “the rest of us chase.” But he also described a great winemaker as needing a “mischievous streak,” as the “most serious” wines are made better when “infused with the playfulness” of a winemaker.

Maybe this category is one of the most important characteristics a winemaker can have. Searching and seeking have moved humanity forward for all of our history, for bad and good. This is true of winemaking also. The curiosity of Pasteur led to the realization that yeast are living things that make wine. Someone had to discover that wine can be stabilized by adding a sulfur product, rather than the ancient practice of adding pine tar. Was someone mischievous when developing controlled fermenters, like steel vats?  Or was someone playful when they discovered that maybe we should seek out and non-steel options such as concrete eggs?

To dedicated winemakers, making wine is serious business. But in the end, winemaking, especially for amateurs, is not a necessity. We can survive without winemaking. But it is the joy of making wine and sharing our harvest with others that gives us satisfaction. Making the same wine in the same way may not please as much. A great winemaker must go beyond just having technical skills. Many good wines are made the same, adjusted to taste the same and are reliable. That is an important element in winemaking. But great winemakers seek to explore the potential of every vintage. Curiosity and playfulness keep us at the top of our game.

So, making a failed wine, that is making a wine you feel is below your abilities, is not a failure. The only failure is to fail to learn from your mistakes and failure to apply that knowledge to your winemaking going forward. It’s not how many medals you have won, but how much you have improved your skills. It’s how many times your friends ask for another glass of your vintage.

Learning to adopt those characteristics we see in great winemakers, such as striving, patience and curiosity may help move us upward on our own arc of winemaking. As Joe wrote to me: “It’s all your successes and negligences right in your glass. Life’s too short to drink bad wine!”