Another packed week, with more Barossa valley touring, a little first-class education (the chance to sit in on two of the Landmark Tutorial sessions) and an unforgettably muddy, smoky and companionable harvest festival up in the lost world of the Adelaide Hills (Basket Range) with Kerri Thompson of the Clare Valley’s KT and The Falcon, Tom Shobbrook of Shobbrook Wines in the Barossa and host Anton van Klopper of Lucy Margaux Vineyards … of which more in a later blog.
First, though, some questions from another Adelaide Hillsman (once they were called Tiersmen or Splitters), James Tilbrook. James has been reading The New France and has come up with a few questions about some of the things I wrote there. These questions recur frequently so I thought it might be useful to address them here. They’re all timely, too, as Australia hones its fine-wine package.
Barossa in Winter 1 - Barritt Rd Lyndoch
I would like to comment on some of the things you say in the first 21 pages. In no particular order:
“provided the chemical composition of the grape juice has not been altered”. An entirely noble aim, but how often practically does this happen? In France I suspect all, if they were honest, producers chaptalise. How is it possible if conditions are right for a wine to attain 12 % alcohol that it has 13.5% on the label, if chaptalisation has not occurred? ( EU labelling laws stipulate no more than a 0.5% deviation from the label claim of % alcohol). The exception is the ripest years, and it is interesting to read when these do occur top producers proudly saying there was no need to chaptalise in these years. One can only conclude that they chaptalise in lesser years! If we accept that all producers chaptalise except in the greatest years, how can the quote above be valid? Interestingly one hears French producers complaining that Australian producers need to acidify their juice, but it seems OK for French producers to chaptalise. Surely both are altering the chemical composition of the grape juice/wine?
Lots to answer here.
James is referring to my belief that if you wish to offer the market fine wines marked with a sense of place, then you should grow the most suited variety or varieties for your vineyard, and then try to modify the juice as little as possible in the winery, for the simple reason that the more you do to change its chemical composition, then the more you will efface vineyard character in the wine.
First of all, decide what kind of wine you want to make. Wines of place, as I have said often, can often seem strange or odd at first; they have to create their own unique space and comprehension in the market. There’s nothing wrong with making a consumer-friendly wine conforming to existing stylistic parameters instead, or some kind of hybrid of the two. But if you are making forceful interventions, don’t claim that the wine is a wine of place.
Second, remember that this is a qualified ideal, not an absolute ideal. Add nothing if you feel able or ready to do that. If you don’t, add as little as possible, and do so knowing that you are beginning to erase that sense of place in order to attain some other kind of ideal. I am convinced that adding less acidity (and, in the case of many red wines, extracting more tannin from grape skins) to the high-quality, fully ripe fruit often harvested in Australia’s finest regions would be greatly to the benefit of most of the wines made in those regions.
No one working in Châteauneuf du Pape would harvest their grapes, then decide that the wine needed the acid balance of a Pinot Noir made in Assmanshausen on the Rheingau and correct accordingly. To do so would be to annihilate the Châteauneuf character. Yet this is happening all the time in Australia. Nor would they pick early to preserve acidity and bring alcohol levels down, or pick a portion early to blend in later to preserve acidity; again this would be to destroy the sense of place and the natural balance of the wine.
If you want place, respect place.
I’ve often heard the “we acidify, they chaptalise” argument in Australia. It strikes me (and I mean no disrespect by this) as out-of-date and ill-considered. Let me explain this.
Very few serious efforts (I stress ‘serious’ – the incompetent and the misguided are everywhere) at making vins de terroir at any time over the last 15 years in France have involved chaptalisation, even in northern regions like the Loire and Alsace. Anyone who has travelled widely in France and visited good growers during this time will confirm this. Picking is much later than it used to be, and yields are much lower. Chaptalisation as a widespread fine-wine phenomenon was a symptom of the catastrophic state of French viticulture (combined with a dose of bad vintages) in the 1970s; it began to abate during the 1980s. Indeed the pendulum has swung so far in the opposite direction that the French often anguish about high alcohols nowadays, just like the Australians. (I think the anguish is often misguided in both cases.)
Yes, of course chaptalisation is a chemical adjustment of the must, just like acidification – but alcohol and acid are very different in sensorial terms. Taking a wine from 12.5% to 13.5% abv (supposing anyone would want to do that) is nothing like as forceful an intervention as banging 3 g/l of acid into a wine. The end result in flavour terms is wildly different. Even if the flavour of alcohol equated in some way to the flavour of acid, which it doesn’t, taking natural acid of 4 g/l up to 7 g/l in a finished wine is to correct by a factor of 175%. If you were to chaptalise a 12% wine by a factor of 175%, you would be taking it up to 21% and the yeasts would have given up and died half-way through. Taking a 12% wine and chaptalising it to 13.5% would be the equivalent of taking a wine with natural acid of 4 g/l and adding about half a gram. Which sounds pretty sensible to me.
Barossa in Winter 2 - Trial Hill Road
The whole tit-for-tat argument of ‘us versus them’ always strikes me as particularly pointless. Winemaking isn’t a Test Match. It’s just about people in different parts of the world working with a very special plant to try to craft something beautiful -- and unique to that place. The only question is how well or badly that is done. I love it when it is done well in France or Australia, and I hate it when it is done badly in France or Australia.
James continues:
You mention that some producers (in reality probably only the top producers because they are the only ones who can afford it) have RO machines for concentrating must. Aren’t Australian producers meant to be the industrial techno wineries and the French ones the traditional ones? At a wine marketing conference a few years ago, Andrew Pirie said that the French had done a great job of painting themselves as the traditional, small, family-run wine producers making wine in age-old cellars etc., whilst Australia was the exact opposite in all regards. This is the perception whilst the reality is France has more giant wineries than Australia (i.e. the regional co ops), and a lot of its more top-end producers had every winemaking toy imaginable, things most Australian producers could only dream of! On the other side of the coin, although we do not have the numbers that France has, we almost certainly have the same percentage of small, family run wine producers that they do.
The less RO, the better. It was used a fair bit towards the end of the 1990s in Bordeaux, but its use has now abated because the producers realised that they were over-egging the pudding and producing oddly dense, untypical wines (sometimes in rainy vintages!) lacking in the naturalness and elegance which should be a hallmark of mature Bordeaux. Small producers outside Bordeaux couldn’t afford RO machines and would have been deeply suspicious of them in any case.
Australia’s problems with the large-company image has come about because the dominance of the Big Companies in export markets suffocates smaller players. That doesn’t happen with France and other European countries because the branding of big co-ops is much less successful than the branding of Australia’s Big Companies – but more importantly because Europe has appellations which provide a banner for smaller producers to sell under. Australia’s GIs should help in due course, when they acquire more meaning and precision by the increasing efforts of those working in them to produce true wines of place.
James continues to quote:
“provided the chemical composition of the grape juice has not been altered, then the drinker can smell and taste everything that has happened to the vine in the course of its season.....”.
Perhaps this is possible with a wine that is tank-fermented and has not gone through MLF, eg a Sauvignon Blanc, but other than these types of wines, nearly all wine has gone through MLF either partly or wholly and quite a lot is barrel fermented and aged, sometimes in 100% new oak. How can then one say that one is tasting the terroir when in fact one is at least to some degree tasting the winemaking? Even the non-interventionists (my friends say that I am a practitioner of “benign Gallic neglect”) age their wines in a portion of new oak barrels and allow MLF to happen naturally, whilst of course using natural yeasts to do the primary ferment. The aim of doing nothing is entirely admirable but in reality one does not do nothing, or you would end up with vinegar at worst, or a not very interesting high-acid wine, at best.
John Jefford makes a physical intervention on Anton van Klopper's 09 Petit VerdotI am not suggesting you should pick your crop of beautiful grapes and leave them in a tub in the corner for six months and hope for the best. Winemaking is indeed intervention; but physical interventions are different to chemical ones. All of viticulture, after all, is a physical intervention. Physical intervention is essential.
Once again, the question is: how true to place and to season do you want to be? If you do want to reflect season and place, then everything you do physically to the wine should be designed to enhance rather than efface that character. Natural yeast and natural MLF will enhance that character, as those who have dared to work with both on appropriate raw materials have found. You have to put wine into some container or another: up to you to decide how you want that container to stamp the wine. You could indeed argue that aggressive or intrusive new oak is altering the chemical composition of the wine – but then so is the controlled oxidation of an older cask (to a lesser degree). Doesn’t matter. I repeat: the ideal is a relative and not an absolute one. All I am saying is that disciplined and courageous restraint is vital if you want to make wines which reflect a place and a season.
On to James’s final point:
Another thing that one must say is that the concept of terroir is fine if one is talking about single vineyard wines and more specifically wines from specific parts of a single vineyard. The classic expression of this is the Côte d’Or. Other areas are beginning to go down this route e.g. Alsace. But what about Champagne, does that express terroir? – in its strictest sense the expression of a specific place – or the sum of its region (Kimmeridgean marl, cool to cold climate, all the nuances of weather), since nearly all Champagnes are blends of numerous sites within the region. The same, to a lesser extent, could be said of Bordeaux. The bigger Châteaux have 100 acres or more of land under vine. Sometimes their blocks are not all in one whole, but can be a few km apart. The wines are a blend of different varieties. Each variety “likes” certain soil and other conditions. No doubt over the centuries where these places are has been worked out and the right variety is on the right soil. So the wine ends up being a blend of different sites and different varieties. Is this terroir in the strictest sense? Or the expression of a meso climate and regional soil types? Of course I recognize that some châteaux have better sites than others. My point is, is it one terroir or several?
My own view is that terroir is indeed expressed at different levels with different degrees of precision. This is even true at much larger scales than the ones James refers to. Australian wines in general taste different to Chilean wines in general; Oxford Landing Cabernet Sauvignon tastes different to Concha y Toro Cabernet Sauvignon. A sizeable percentage of these differences are attributable to winemaking practices, but the fundamental composition of the grapes is a factor too. Drinkers tend to find the level of terroir which suits them. Some are just happy with the faint trace you’ll find in any Australian wine, or any Italian wine; others want Barossa or Barolo; some seek out Hill of Grace, La Turque or Bricco Boschis.
Champagne is indeed a region where terroir is rarely expressed with single-site or single-village precision, though this is slowly changing. Terroir is present in Grange (which tastes very different to anything from the Rhône), though with a different degree of precision to that which you find in Hill of Grace. There is no moral superiority in either – though I do believe that if you find great single sites which can truly produce complete, balanced wines which endure, mature and accrue in beauty, then it is less interesting for us drinkers to blend them than to leave them on their own. But I accept that commercial logic has to have a say in this too. If Champagne had as many single vineyard wines as Burgundy, it would be a much less wealthy region. Many Bordeaux properties could make better wine by blending from their top parcels alone, or by doing no more than bottling the unblended wine from their best parcel – but then they’d only have 500 cases to sell rather than 8,000.
Once again, it is important for everyone to understand exactly where they want to be, or where it is most appropriate for them to be, on this pyramid. If you don’t have a good or great site, if you’ve got the wrong varieties planted or if your viticulture is geared for quantity rather than quality, you’ll be better off working with blends and making chemical interventions. (The less the better, of course.) If you have a good or great site planted with an appropriate variety and farmed with care and effort, you are squandering its potential by making forceful interventions to its chemical balance and/or blending its personality away.
I’ve tasted some wonderful Australian wines recently which have been made without any additions other than a little sulphur, and using natural yeasts and natural MLF – as well as some equally wonderful Australian wines made in a more conventional manner. I’ll write a few of these up in the next blog.
Your subject is simply too
Your subject is simply too juicy and controversial for me to resist weighing-in, however I must apologize (or perhaps that is the wrong word!) for confining myself to abbreviated remarks that fall short of any sustained argument.
I think it would requires argument(s)that you fail to offer to establish which viticultural or vinificatory methods do - and which do not - "destroy a sense of place." To cite one of your examples, it isn't clear on the surface how or why harvesting a vineyard in two disparate passes and then blending the results in an effort to produce a more interesting and balanced wine "destroy[s] a sense of place." The place has not changed between the two pickings. I assume that you are objecting to the sense of deliberation or ends-means reasoning with which a grower might calculate that the early-picked portion of his or her (hypothetical) Sauvignon will bring acidity and cut whilst picking a portion later will prevent the wine from tasting vegetal or dare I say simply too-Sauvignon (of grass, gooseberry, boxwood, cat's pee &c.). But you would have to do some work to convince me. I am in fact a partisan of block picking even for botrytis-affected Riesling in Germany (where such a departure from strict selectivity and return to an earlier tradition has begun to attract many growers) because I am captivated by the notion of capturing a picture of the vineyard in a given vintage, at a given time, and in all of its diversity; I am a sucker for the notion of "tradition;" and, above all, I like the taste of many of the results. But that doesn't mean I consider the results of a Kabinett "Vorlese" at time t, a Spätlese picked at time t+1, and a Beerenauslese picked at t+1 by separating the more heavily-botrytized bunches or berries into a separate bucket to be somehow less representative of the vineyard in which all of them were picked, much less "destructive" of anything.
I would have to disagree with your comment about chaptalization of French wines. The majority of Burgundy growers I visit in my regular journalistic rounds add some sugar to both their Chardonnay and Pinot musts. The reason given is to extend the fermentation rather than to increase the alcohol per se, and I readily concede that the amount of adjustment is typically under 0.5% of finished alcohol and is performed on musts fully rich enough in natural sugar not to require chaptalization. But it is still (by a slight percentage) the minority of growers I visit who say they have not chaptalized in recent years, or that they avoid this on principle. I also concede that in many of France's sunny regions - Alsace, the Rhône, the Languedoc, and others - no only is chaptalization unnecessary but also rare among top growers. In Burgundy, though, that is certainly not the case. And it bears mentioning that in Burgundy and other regions of France, acidification is also pretty widespread, laws notwithstanding.
I agree by the way with your point about the extent of correction typically involved in acid-adjustment as compared with chaptalization, and I would add that I think there is a further argument for the disanalogy between these two practices, in that each wine represents a soup of different acids, whilst adjustment normally represents simply the addition of tartaric acid. With chaptalization, on the other hand, the alcohol produced from added sugar is (as far as this lay person is aware) chemically identcal with that rendered from the sugar in the grapes at harvest.
I would also challenge you on the issue of what practices do or do not - in your words - "destroy the natural balance" of a wine. Your use of this expression simply begs the question, since "natural" is being used as a term of approbation, and in any case the devil would reside in the details of any operational definition of or at least set of criteria for "natural" that you could devise. As is the case with most wine writers who use this term, I am still waiting ... . (Not that I deny it could be well-done. I'd be happy to see it well done. I'm just not sure it can be.)
As for reverse osmosis machines, I have seen some in French wineries that were not enormous and were not located in Bordeaux (and I'm sure many others were hidden away) although I share your observation that this approach seems to be waning in France. I'm not sure about a waning in the use of cry-extraction in Bordeaux, as I don't spend much time there or report on that region's wines any more.
Of course, I remain a convinced terroirist myself and share your arguments (as well as having devised and published others)as to why the manifest influences of wine "making" do not obviate the basic insight that wines reflect their place of origin just as they do their vintage and the way in which they are vinified.
Great to read your reports and all the best for your continued adventures Down Under!
Andrew replies:
Thanks very much to David for his uniquely well-informed and characteristically rigorous response. Apologies for the delay in putting it up: I have been on the road for ten days in Tasmania and McLaren Vale. (A very wet road. Never have I seen so much rain result in so many smiles.)
We’re debating, I think, the tension which exists between making ‘the best wine’ and ‘the most reflective wine’. (Reflective? Imagine Walden Pond reflecting both the earth banks and trees which surround it as well as the skies and cloud patterns above it. Most reflective of place, in other words.) My fundamental assertion is that the most reflective wine is created by harvesting fully ripe grapes of an appropriate variety grown in a distinguished site, and then vinifying those grapes without chemical interventions but with appropriate physical interventions.
This may not, in fact, be the best wine which could be made under the circumstances. Herein lies the exquisitely difficult challenge of winemaking. A winemaker may consider that he or she could make a better wine by alternative picking strategies, and by using chemical as well as physical interventions. By craft, in sum.
I am not a fundamentalist; I have no objections to that. I simply think it is important that winemakers realise that they are then moving away from a possible truth to place, and towards a different ideal.
I should add, though, that I think that (assuming a suitable variety has been planted in a distinguished site) the best wine often corresponds to the most reflective wine.
Indeed the pursuit of the best wine often seems to me to result in a worse wine than the pursuit of a more reflective wine would have delivered.
But it often goes against both instinct and training for winemakers to do less rather than more. It also often involves taking what are perceived to be unacceptable risks. These risks are particularly hard for employee winemakers to take.
On the question of block pickings and timed vineyard passes, I agree with everything that David says, since I understand his remarks to refer to picking within the overall spectrum of ripeness. Devilish detail, of course! Different varieties pass through different spectrums of ripeness in different locations with different speeds, and the embrace of botrytis obviously extends the spectrum greatly.
But there does seem to me to be a moment for most varieties in most locations which is indisputably unripe, and which delivers hardness, rawness, starkness and inarticulacy of flavour – the adolescent rather than the adult. Use of the adolescent rather than the adult can create sensational wines, or it can create wines which eventually achieve, with time and bottle age, a strangely modulated articulacy and beauty. But if you have an appropriate variety in a distinguished site, it strikes me as a shame to make a merely sensational wine, or to condemn drinkers to years of frustration before finally delivering on an ancient promise.
All of this is true of wines containing a substantial portion of such materials. Small portions matter less.
David’s knowledge of Burgundy is unrivalled and much more up-to-date than mine, and I am happy to defer to him on all of these matters. Yet I remember asking growers about acidification after the leonine summer of 2003, and finding roughly as many who claimed not to have acidified as those who did. Moreover few if any of those who said they had not acidified in 2003 seemed to regret the omission. Indeed they often reported that acidities seemed to have risen again during fermentation. I heard the same thing in Bordeaux after the 2003 harvest. My favourite 2003 burgundies include the wines of those who did cautiously acidify as well as those who didn’t, so I am not saying one strategy is correct and another erroneous. I am just saying that, even then, acidification didn’t seem to be essential to create balanced and successful wines.
I am aware that small amounts of chaptalisation continue to be used in Burgundy for the reasons which David refers to – and because even climate change has not yet made Burgundy a region in which full ripeness can be counted on every year. But my remarks were based on recent travels in France as a whole.
Balance is a colossal subject, and I am heartened that almost all commentators regard it as the hallmark quality of fine wine. I am aware that use of the term ‘natural’ here is problematic if there is dissent about the meaning of ‘ripe’. But if we can agree on a definition of ripeness, then natural would refer to the unadulterated constituents of the must at the point of ripeness.
What is balance? We are largely in the realms of the subjective here: palates famously differ. But, for what it’s worth, my palate repeatedly tells me that certain wines have an easiness of gait and a grace and serenity in their passage through the mouth, and then most importantly on into the oesophagus and the stomach. No internal violence or discord; no afterburn, even at higher alcohol levels. In most (though not all) cases, these wines tend to be those which have been made with the kinds of restraint we are discussing. They are not necessarily expensive or complex wines.
Further contributions to the debate are welcome, and I will endeavour to head them up on to the site speedily. And with minimum intervention ...
Great discussion. The extent
Great discussion.
The extent to which Australian winemakers add acid and tannin to wine has really only dawned on me in recent months. I felt a bit dissillusioned by this lesson. I have a winemaker working with me at the moment and he has helped me understand the reasons why. I began to agree that it might not be possible to make balanced wine in Australia without these additions.
Then, a couple of weeks ago, Steve Pannell dropped into my shop and showed me his range of reds (and white), which is made without addition of tannin or acid. These are wines from warm Australian climates, but they have such satisfying tannin and juicy acidity that I again wonder why the makers of our better wines feel the need to adjust as they do.
Andrew: I am a big fan of
Andrew:
I am a big fan of your writing and try to read most of what you have published relating to wine.
While I enjoy the ongoing discussion about wine style and winemaking intervention, I am surprised the issue of vineyard practices is often left unmentioned.
Of these practices, the “elephant in the room” is in my opinion, the issue of irrigation; surely you must agree that the prevailing climate and weather should have a central role if you are trying to express a site and a season.
Further, unlike winemaking intervention (that only affects the wine), irrigation (as some other viticultural practices) impede the natural adaptation to site that any vine would undertake in its life; this adaptation amplifies unique expression of the site.
I have not been able to understand your opinion regarding irrigation and I’d be curious to know what you think (and don't let those Aussies you’re hanging around with influence you...)
If on the other hand you have already written on this issue, could you point me to your writing?
Thanks in advance.
Emilio
Hi Emilio and thanks for
Hi Emilio
and thanks for your comments. On irrigation ... my view is that wherever it is possible not to irrigate without jeopardising the health of the vines, then growers should try hard not to irrigate. Not watering the vines leads to deeper root penetration (assuming penetrable subsoils) and better balanced vines. This in turn, I believe, furnishes growers with more complex fruit, and wines which more comprehensively reflect their physical origins.
However, there are locations where the total rainfall is inadequate to preserve vine health, or where the rainfall pattern is so winter-weighted that the vines may struggle or die during summer. These places sometimes produce wines which we would all be poorer without. Mendoza in Argentina, for example, where in most locations if you fail to irrigate you will have dead vines in four months. A world without Mendoza Malbec would be a poorer place. Irrigation is better than abstinence in this case.
I am sure that many irrigated vineyards could perform as well or better without irrigation. They will, though, almost certainly produce lower crop levels. That may not be economically possible for growers in less prestigious locations.
Hi Andrew At the moment I am
Hi Andrew
At the moment I am back in blighty having a well earned break. Possibly one reason you haven't heard from me in a while.
Irrigation, that's another can of worms. 12 years ago I worked with two French vignerons at a Barossa winery for vintage. They were dead against irrigation, but they did come from Champagne and the Loire.
When setting up my vineyard I chose a region with high, but winter-dominant, rainfall. Soils with relatively good water-holding capacity and air with higher RH than many Aussie regions.
When establishing the vineyard I planted across the slope to increase water infiltration and used undervine sprinklers to mimic rainfall rather than the conventional drip systems. I installed high-tech water-monitoring so as to irrigate only when necessary.
In short I did everything I could not to irrigate and follow my French friends' wish.
But the reality is that 90% of the rain falls in winter and spring -- which leaves little for when the vines are growing (after they have used what's in the soil).
It's all very well to be against irrigation if you live in Northern Europe, but as I am experiencing right now it rains nearly once a week in the summer in England and nearly as often in France too. As I say to my English friends, if you didn't have rain in summer, England wouldn't be a "green and pleasant land", it would be brown and parched like summertime Australia.
But if you're lucky enough to have 100-year-old vines and you're growing red grapes then dry-grown is do-able in this parched land.
But if you are growing whites that need good leaf area to cover the bunches then you can't turn the tap off or you'll end up with very sunburnt or raisined berries.
For two years I dry-grew Pinot Noir, but it all ended up being eaten by the birds as there weren't enough leaves to ripen the fruit or shade it from the sun.
Can't say I didn't try.
Sorry forgot to mention: I
Sorry forgot to mention:
I have taken on board your comments about the percentage difference with additions of sugar and acid. The question is how to grow grapes here that are ripe but don't need acid-adjusting.
I have also taken on board your comments about making a wine reflective of site. Sometimes it is a question of someone coming along, like yourself, and challenging the status quo. That said I think Aus is going down the path of regionality which is the first step towards "place".
Small growers who are producers also have the wherewithal to grab "place" as they source usually just from their block.
The question therefore is again how to make a wine with minimal intervention, that is deemed reflective of place, which is also eminently drinkable.
I fear the latter may be a hurdle for growers who are not well known or large enough to be able to sell the concept of why their wine lacks the normal colour or is murky.
I don't think winemakers find it hard to do nothing. It's just the commercial reality is that they need to sell wine and they are fearful of making a wine that people won't buy. Or at least buy enough of it.
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