Wine’s F-word
Listen to this article on the Beyond Organic Wine Podcast:
Wine’s F-word is the word Foxy, and I have been on a journey over the last few years to discover the truth about this word. It has been a surprising and surprisingly impactful journey because it turns out that this word is tied up with almost everything that is currently and perennially relevant to the wine industry because it has to do with deeply held prejudice. And that’s why I believe it’s important to understand what’s going on with this wine term. I don’t know of any journey that is more important than freeing ourselves of prejudice. Liberating our minds from the tyranny of misinformation and our own psychological hang-ups may be, I think, the only way that we will be able to adapt, evolve, and survive on a planet that is wired with a nuclear self-destruct button that has been entrusted to the care of chest beating apes.
Free your mind, and life will follow.
Part 1: Does Foxy Even Exist?
Growing up in rural Pennsylvania, a grapevine grew in my backyard. I’ve since confirmed with my father that we did nothing to care for that vine. We neither pruned nor sprayed it. Yet every year it produced an abundant crop of deep purple grapes with green flesh inside. My mother made a green jelly with them from time to time by pressing the pulp through a sieve, leaving the seeds and skins behind. The first time she made it she worried that my sister and I wouldn’t eat it because it was different from the usual store-bought purple jelly, so she called it “monster jelly.” We ate every last bit of it and loved it.
I’m now pretty sure it was a Concord grapevine, but at the time I didn’t know or care for its name, even less so its genus and species. I snacked on the grapes in late summer, and they linger in some of my earliest and fondest memories of timeless days and seasonal connections – bursts of flavor and sweetness that were real and free and part of the joy of being alive.
I’d mostly forgotten this grapevine when I started this podcast and began learning more and more about hybrid grapes and their wine. The ecological values that fueled my inquiries led me to see how valuable these hardy grapes are and could be to building resilience, adaptability, and diversity into the global wine monoculture. But I heard enough rumors of the F-word to know I would have to face this question, this reason for the lack of success of hybrid grapes, eventually, and so I began to seek it out. I wanted to confront the big bad fox in all its foxiness and embrace whatever truth I found there.
Strangely… I couldn’t find it.
Now, I wouldn’t be surprised if you’ve never heard the term “foxy” applied to wine. It has largely fallen out of use, mainly because the global wine industry has achieved peak vinifera saturation, and never discusses wine as wine unless it fits a very narrow vinifera-centric definition. In fact at first I was afraid that even discussing the f-word might act as a kind of revival of a dead idea.
When I asked a Finger Lakes winery owner if he considered any of his wines to be foxy, he said “Do people still use that term?”
But what I’ve discovered is that anytime hybrids get discussed by professionals in the mainstream wine culture, 9 times out of 10 the f-word rears its ugly head. And I believe that hybrids are on the brink of being talked about a lot more by everyone in wine.
So Foxy – just in case the term is strange to you – has been used to describe the aroma and flavor of some wines. What is usually implied, and what you may assume to be implied by this descriptor, are aromas and flavors that are animalistic, scent-gland or piss-tinged muskiness, rank and unpleasant. This descriptor has been used to describe hybrid grapes and their wines. In fact it has grossly incorrectly been attributed to ALL hybrid grapes and wine… but I’m getting ahead of myself.
With this flavor expectation in mind, I went looking for it in wines made with the hybrid grapes that supposedly imparted a foxy flavor. I tasted many of these wines, but again and again was confused to find nothing animalistic and funky musky. Instead, I actually found flavors almost opposite this. I found candy-like fruitiness and, for lack of a better word, grapey-ness.
I began to believe that foxiness was a slanderous myth, meant to discredit hybrid grapes.
It turns out I was mostly right.
Part 2: What Really Is Foxyness?
The problem is with getting to the truth about the f-word is that it has been so tied up with deep prejudice and vinifera-chauvinism for so long that most of the information you’ll find for it if you search online is actually straight up falsehoods, misinformation… lies. If you do an internet search for foxy wine, pretty much every page 1 through 10 results are negative and provide incorrect information.
I recently read the book The Wild Vine, by Todd Kliman. In it he tells the story of one of the oldest and most widely acclaimed hybrid wine grapes in the world, Norton, which resulted from an accidental cross between Vitis vinifera and Vitis aestivalis. As an example of how deeply entrenched the misinformation about the f-word is, he makes factually false references and implications about it multiple times. In referencing the Catawba grape, he says, “There was still the foul, musky taste to contend with, the foxiness intrisic to all native grapes…” [emphasis added] (chapt 10, p 101)
And when he discusses the discovery of the new grapevine, devoid of the foxiness he claims to be inherent in all native grapes, he seems to suggest that the lack of foxiness was a random result of the hybridization with vinifera that caused this, rather than what is actually true, that Vitis aestivalis as an entire species, does not have this flavor.
The Oxford Companion to Wine's entry on "foxy" says that foxiness is "the peculiar flavour of many wines, particularly red wines, made from American vines and American hybrids.” This isn’t that bad, despite the gross generalization, but it gets worse. It describes the Concord grape – my childhood vine – as the most well-known foxy-tasting grape, by saying, “The Concord grape, widely planted in New York state, is one of the most heavily scented, reeking of something closer to animal fur than fruit, flowers, or any other aroma associated with fine wine, although the `candy'-like aroma is, incidentally, quite close to that of the tiny wild strawberry or fraise des bois.” [emphasis added]
I won’t yet go into the chauvinism implicit in the use of the F-word here. Does this description even make sense? How can a grape “reek of something closer to animal fur than fruit” and also have a “’candly’-like aroma… close to that of the tiny wild strawberry”? Apparently I’m not the only one confused about the f-word… and I’ll come back to whether the aroma described by the f-word can be associated with fine wine.
For now, let me clear something up once and for all: there is no connection between a grape being a hybrid, and it having foxy flavors. None whatsoever. In fact, of the 25 known species of grapes native to North America, only two are known to have flavors referred to as foxy, and those species are Vitis labrusca and Vitis rotundifolia or muscadines. But if the guy who wrote one of the most comprehensive books on one of America’s most historical hybrid grapes got this wrong, you can begin to see how unquestioned the misinformation caused by this prejudice actually is.
In addition to many samples of Norton, I’ve specifically sought out samples of wines made from both labrusca and muscadines.
I tried a sparkling Concord, that grape known by the OWC as the most reeking of foxiness, made by Chepika, Pasqueline Lepeltier’s winery, and discovered zero animals, only fruity fruits, like, again for lack of a better word, grapey alcoholic grape soda. I may not want that with a steak, but I found it perfect with a salad and sandwich lunch.
I had a sweet white muscadine from Arkansas and shared it with many who can attest that it was like drinking candy. My first muscadine wine is still my favorite. It’s a wine called Grapes Have Feelings from Botanist and Barrel in Asheville, North Carolina. I think the grape juice was blended with apple juice and the result was a fizzy delicious thing that I still crave. Zero musk. Try some and see for yourself.
I’ve had wines from Niagra and Catawba from Dear Native Grapes, Brianna from La Garagista, and others, and all of these grapes had labrusca in the parentage… but no fox in the bottle. Or, at least, not what I expected fox to taste like… and probably not what you would expect either. Each of these has unique flavors to be sure, but nothing “foul” … nothing unpleasant even.
It turns out many of the earliest hybrid grapes in the US come from v. labrusca. (As an aside, muscadine is used mostly as a pure native, not a hybrid because it has a unique genetic structure that makes it less likely to cross.) In trying to determine where the term “foxy” even comes from, it’s important to know that the first name given to Vitis labrusca when European settlers found it growing wild on the east coast of the US, was “the fox grape.” Was the grape named because of the flavor? It’s actually unknown. It’s actually just as likely that the term “foxy” was applied to the unique flavor of the grapes because the vine was known as the fox vine. In other words, the f-word might have nothing to do with trying to describe the flavor and only have to do with associating the novel flavor with its source.
There are actually many theories about why labrusca was named the fox vine, and where the term foxiness came from in the first place. In his book, A History of Wine In America, Thomas Pinney lists at least eight theories, only one of which is related to the odor or flavor of the grapes. I’ve given a link in the notes so you can read these if you’d like. For now I’ll just mention that the term foxy has been used in many different ways with many different meanings throughout its history, and there are more uses of it meaning something like wild and pleasantly intoxicating (think Jimi Hendrix’s Foxy Lady) than there are pejorative uses.
And it’s important to understand that while many of the early hybrids were crosses that included labrusca, many of the modern hybrids don’t include labrusca at all and some hybrids have such huge family trees that even though they contain some labrusca somewhere in their parentage, they don’t display any of their flavor characteristics.
But I still wasn’t convinced that foxiness in labrusca or muscadine wine – as in a rank odor that is a turn-off - doesn’t exist. I just began to think I’d needed to seek outside of the excellent producers with great winemaking ability that I’ve mentioned, if I wanted to find these foxy flavors. At this point in my journey, after tasting all of these wines I had only found one common flavor – that thing I keep referring to, for lack of a better word, as grapeyness.
Well, it turns out I keep referring to it this way for a reason.
In attempting to isolate the cause of the f-word in grapes, scientists have discovered at least three separate compounds that account for the aromas and flavors referred to as “foxy:” methyl anthranilate, o-aminoacetophenone, furaneol. If you search online for these chemicals you find the following about aminoacetopheonone at the National Library of Medicine (PubChem):
“Ortho-aminoacetophenone has an odor similar to that of methyl anthranilate and is chemically (structurally) similar.”
And you find the following on Wikipedia about methyl anthranilate:
“Pure, it has a fruity grape smell; at 25 ppm it has a sweet, fruity, Concord grape-like smell with a musty and berry nuance.[3][4]
Dimethyl anthranilate (DMA) has a similar effect. It is also used for part of the flavor of grape Kool-Aid. It is used for flavoring of candy, soft drinks (e.g. grape soda), fruit (e.g. Grāpples), chewing gum, and nicotine products.[5]”
Wikipedia On furaneol says:
“Furaneol, or strawberry furanone, is an organic compound used in the flavor and perfume industry…
Although malodorous at high concentrations, it exhibits a sweet strawberry aroma when dilute.[2] It is found in strawberries[3] and a variety of other fruits and it is partly responsible for the smell of fresh pineapple.[4] “
What you don’t find in the wiki entries is any reference to the term “foxy.” Concord grapes are even mentioned, in conjunction with the chemical that has been isolated as the origin of the infamous “foxy” flavor of these grapes, yet the only mention is a “sweet, fruity… grape-like smell with a musty and berry nuance” or, for furaneol, a “sweet strawberry aroma…” I don’t know about you, but that sounds pretty good to me… In fact, it sounds really good. Like something that people around the planet would love.
As it turns out… they do.
Part 3: What if Foxy is not a flaw but a Feature?
Two weeks ago, my friend Ryan Opaz, who you may remember as the co-author of the books Foot-Trodden and Amber Revolution, and former sponsor of this podcast through his company Catavino Tours in Portugal, came to visit me here at Paicines Ranch and poured two wines for me that were like the treasure at the end of a long quest. He poured quite a few incredible wines, actually, and you should probably go visit his shop in Porto if you want to have your wine mind blown.
One of those two wines was from the Azores, an archipelago in the middle of the Atlantic ocean where the viticulture is some of the most extreme I’ve ever heard of. The other was from Kerasus wine, in Turkey. I interviewed Gizem, one of the partners of Kerasus, for this podcast not too long ago, and they are making wine only from married vines, or vines growing with living tree trellis partners. The tree/vine partnerships they harvest from are over 100 years old. Both of these wines were made with a really special grape known as Isabella.
The Isabella from the Azores was tried by more than just me, so you don’t have to rely on my sole testimony. It was like a bright, deep rosé in color, with what I associated with a strawberry candy aroma and flavor, and something a bit deeper and non-fruity too, that made it incredibly compelling, like the sear on a grilled salmon.
Isabella is a hybrid of vinifera with labrusca from the US. So how did it get to the Azores and Turkey over 100 years ago? This question led me to do a bit of research to discover that Isabella is actually a global grape. It’s the most planted grape in Brazil and Columbia as of the last accounting. Believe it or not, the French are likely responsible for it being in Turkey today. They exported so many of the vines through the Black Sea that Isabella became locally known as Odessa, the port that it came through. It was honored by poets, planted and vinified in every culture around the Black Sea. And then it was ultimately made illegal in France and prohibited from being used for French wine since 1934. I’m no historian, and there’s a lot of history in just this one grape, so I encourage you to do your own research. It’s a fascinating history.
The authors of the Wiki on Isabella exhibit the prejudice of the f-word supremely. They go to great lengths to malign the grape in the very first paragraph of a quite lengthy entry, saying, “ The Isabella, Vitis x labruscana, being of hybrid parentage, imparts a "foxiness" to the wine and because of this is thought to be objectionable,[1] therefore, it is not seen as a grape capable of making fine wines. For the table, the flavor is good, though the tough astringent skin and "foxy" aroma are objectionable to some tastes.”
There are several issues with this paragraph. First “Vitis x labruscana” doesn’t make sense. Vitis is a genus, while labrusca is a species. This betrays the “vinifera” prejudice behind the author of this as much as anything.
Second, the clause “being of hybrid parentage” – which leads to its “objectionable” character – is so bigoted as to be alarming. Imagine speaking about people this way. It’s both ugly and inaccurate, because it implies that the fact of being a hybrid imparts a negative quality to a grape, in this case “foxiness”, and which, as I’ve already mentioned, is completely and even maliciously false.
With these slanders of Isabella as a foxy grape, I began to wonder why a grape like Isabella, with such widely touted objectionable aroma/flavors, managed to spread around the globe?
Again, I’m no historian, but could the widely accepted maligning of Isabella have anything to do with France’s ban on hybrids in 1934? Could it be that prejudice was used to support a political and economic agenda? Could it be that France and the English who facilitated the French wine cultural exports, as the sources of our modern wine monolith, might have had some influence on the telling of wine history?
Further, does it seem reasonable that the French would export huge numbers of vines that they thought tasted terrible? Sure, it is prolific, hardy, and resilient, and made vinifera look like a sickly, weak, temperamental prima dona… but would it have been adopted so readily in so many diverse nations if its flavor reeked of foulness?
When you look at the history of Isabella, a reputed foxy grape, and the way it swept the globe, and still persists, doesn’t it make more sense that its success was because of its flavor rather than in spite of it?
I’ll just add one more bit of trivia for the record. The most planted grape on earth right now is a hybrid grape with labrusca in its parentage, known as Kyoho. I’m sure the most popular grape in the world must taste terrible.
Part 4: Sense Perception Is Neither Simple Nor Objective or Chauvinism Coup De Grace
So what if foxy is real? What if it’s not just a product of vinifera chauvinism? Much evidence suggests that there really is a musky aroma that was at some point in history associated with the f-word, and one of the compounds that may be responsible for foxiness can be found in the scent gland of a weasel… which, while not a fox, is pretty evocative. But even if we assume we can find some musky scent in some of the so-called foxy wines, so what?
As my wiccan friend said when she was called a witch by a fundamentalist: You say that like it’s a bad thing.
How different is the term foxy from the terms “gamey” and “leathery” which we apply to Syrah? How different is it from the mushroomy, humus aromas we associate with Pinot Noir? Why is foxy Isabella bad, but tarry Nebiollo good?
The more we learn about how we perceive aromas, the more it becomes clear that most of what we think we know when we taste wines is, to put it scientifically, complete horse shit.
At a molecular level, we know that a wine can contain hundreds of flavor molecules, close to 1000 actually, that we know of. We also know that between any two people there’s an average of a 30% difference in our receptors for these aromas. That means that a whole chunk of things that you perceive, I actually can’t perceive, and vice versa.
We also know that the same molecules make up very different smells. Remember my mention of one of the foxy compunds – furanone? It is a compound that makes up both strawberry and pineapple aromas, and others. Our cultural associations, like whether your grandmother served you a bowl of fresh strawberries, or a chunks of fresh pineapple for a snack, can determine what flavor you identify in a wine… and both can be correct, or incorrect because you’ve only identified your association with one molecule in that aroma and not the majority of other molecules that make up what you smell as pineapple… or strawberry.
In a room of 20 different people, if you give them all the same unfamiliar scent molecule to describe, you’ll likely get 20 different scent descriptions. And if you blend two scent molecules that people can identify, they won’t be able to determine, from sniffing the combined aroma, what either of the original aromas are.
And we know that your mood, your level of hunger, what you just had in your mouth, your biochemistry, and your memory associations all change what you smell and tastes. And we know that what you perceive with your other sense has an immense impact on what you smell and taste as well, from the kind of music you listen to while drinking a wine, to the setting in which you drink the wine, to your awareness of its price, to the look of the label and the color of the wine.
The color of wine study is one of the most damning of our ability to produce anything beyond, again scientifically speaking, horse shit when describing the taste of a wine. In this simple study, repeated multiple times, tasters are given a red wine to blind taste and describe…. Only after they finish describing the wine as jammy and full bodied and red fruited and plummy is it revealed that it wasn’t a red wine at all… it was a chardonnay died red. Try this on your unsuspecting wine friends yourself. It works every time.
All that is to say that what we know is that we don’t know much at all, and that our judgment is extremely suspect in matters of taste and smell. So when someone describes a wine by saying, “This smells like x,” whether that X is fruity or foxy, the statement requires a lot more investigation to understand than we have commonly thought. Tasting and smelling are incredibly complex sensory experiences that are tied to our personal histories, psychologies, values, beliefs, cultures, and what the person we just kissed had for breakfast. And we know this, yet we still use a tasting wheel and believe it when someone critiques a wine for being foxy.
The problem, as I see it, is that as long as we cling to the assumption of objectivity in the assessment of wine flavors and the values attached to them, we will continue to be susceptible to being used as tools in someone’s political, economic, or personal agenda. If we don’t embrace complexity, we will continue to make choices that are influenced by prejudice.
One other finding relates directly to my personal quest to understand wine’s f-word.: the perception of a smell changes with the concentration of the responsible molecule. For example, one of the odorants that causes the smell of grapefruit starts to smell sulfurous in larger concentrations.
As an aside, is the word grapefruit the stupidest word ever? It’s redundant and it isn’t what it says it is. Can we all just shift to using pampelmousse or something instead of grapefruit?
Anyway, This change in perception based on the amount of an aroma compound may be part of why “foxy” aromas have been so elusive to me. The Wikipedia entry on furaneol does mention “malodorous at high concentrations.” This may give some insight into how these grapes could have both a very positive and very negative reception, depending on the specific levels of the compound in a specific instance as well as, it’s important to note, the sensitivity of person smelling it. The same molecule can be responsible for very delicious and very repulsive aromas, simply based on concentration. That means that even grapes that have strong aromas that some may consider malodorous could have the potential to make incredibly yummy smelling and tasting wine simply through winemaking techniques. This has clearly been proven to be the case with many hybrids with labrusca parentage,,, if foxy is a real thing.
If I’m honest, It’s entirely possible that the Concord vine I grew up with conditioned me to the foxy aroma. My psychology was formed with fond memories of all of the sensory experiences that vine gave me, and that could have pre-disposed me to love foxy wine.
And so what if it did? That vine is entwined in the forest of my memory. It wound through the culture that helped to shape me. It provided an integral part of my family connection. Those flavors have become part of me. Should I now hate them because they don’t fit some bigot’s definition of “fine wine?” Should I now think of my tastes as unrefined, as course? Should I refer to myself as having an uneducated pallet? And whose education, whose culture shall we determine is valid and exclusively worthy of value?
The reality is that most of the people talking and writing about the f-word have never grown or made wine with the v. labrusca family of grapes or other grapes referred to as foxy. Most have never even drank a wine made from these grape, and so they merely parrot the f-word because it has never been questioned before. They’ve never actually tasted “foxy” before or they might be just as confused as I was.
If you haven’t tried these wines, I hope you will. Don’t be afraid of the anti-foxy propaganda. Maybe you won’t like them, maybe you will… vive le difference. I just hope you’re now armed with a strong dose of inoculant against prejudice.
Because it is definitely time to stop incorrectly claiming that all American native and hybrid grapes have the same flavors. And it may be time to start seeing the f-word as ignorant at best, and start reviewing our sacred wine texts for chauvinism disguised as assessment. It’s possible we need to re-examine our use of this word with a careful eye to how much unconsidered prejudice it embodies.
But it’s also possible, when we’ve actually started tasting some hybrid grape wines, that we may discover that “foxy” is a compliment.
The End