The Decline and Fall of the UK Wine Trade

 

 

 

April 2013 (66750.4) DECLINE

When I joined the wine trade in the early 90s, it was like entering the Garden of Eden; actually, it was better, because there wasn’t an omniscient God punishing sinners, so we all gave into drink, temptation and each other. In an early episode of Star Trek, the crew of the USS Enterprise visited planet Psi 2000 and became infected with a virus that took everyone to the amorous edge of drunkenness. Kirk was always a tart, but even Spock was getting it on behind the Styrofoam rocks, just like I was getting it on between the wine crates.   The company I worked for imported wine, we sold it to retailers and restaurants, and youthful journalists recorded everything in words that could have been written by fairies with cuckoo quills and lily pads. We were all achieving our targets: I was selling, the customer was buying, and the journalists were breaking stories – Australia, Chile, California, New Zealand. We were so happy. And the wine trade grew. It grew boldly in places it hadn’t grown before, as it did, perhaps, for Spock and Nurse Chapel before the bare-chested Sulu went berserk on the bridge with a cutlass and the threat of castration.

The Australians have a line about the English, that we’re smelly, which is wrong because we spend most of our time trying to keep warm, and sweating isn’t as straightforward as stepping outside into 90 degree heat. What the Australians were right about, though, was our love of brands. Brands quickly take root in class-ridden Britain because we obsess over status, and the best way of elevating oneself above life’s flat trajectory - short of marrying a royal - is mislabelling. In 1985, when Leslie Muranyi was convicted of starting a riot at a Cambridge United football match his mother defended him by saying “He’s such a nice boy really…….and he wears those expensive Pringle jumpers!”

At around the same time Muranyi was buying his casuals from Bodger Brothers in Cambridge town centre, Penfolds was perfecting its global brand strategy. I loved Penfolds; they had a range of wines that, for a brief moment, attained the perfect symmetry between price and quality: Koonunga Hill, Bin 28, Bin 707, Grange; each successive bottle cost £7.00 more and was £7.00 better than the previous one. I got carried away, and so did the press; carried away and flown away, because the clever people in Australia had also worked out how nepotism and cronyism underpinned “our” way of doing things. This was the sort of connectedness we responded to, not the other kind that tells you how things fit together and work. It’s not what you know, but who you know would become significant later, when the big companies started sluicing through the cheap crap and repositioning Bin 707 and Grange so that the relationship between price and quality went from being linear to exponential. We were enamoured by our Aussie hosts, all those sunny days drinking tinnies and wearing their Akubra hats instilled memories and loyalties that would prove as durable as the pair of stockman’s boots I bought. Together we sniggered at terroir; talked about ripeness; tucker; Botham; Bradman; bushmen; sunshine in a glass; and dished-up tasting notes that sounded like they were being read off the payline of a slot machine – “PINEAPPLE, STRAWBERRY, MELON, CHERRY” – Streuth! You didn’t even need a pair to win that test of skill. And, get this; all the while somebody was stood by the pokie, slipping you dollars and pulling the handle. Life, jobs, wine, it all seemed so very, very simple. “LEMONS!” 

Most stuff changes, even the laws of physics aren’t immutable. Newton’s gravitational theory got Apollo 13 to the moon and back, but it couldn’t get Chekov to Psi 2000; only warp drive could do that. The last time I walked past St John’s College, Bodger Brothers had been taken over by Moss Bros. Gone, too, were the outfitters best customers, the Cambridge Casuals, who after the imprisonment of “General” Muranyi, just ended up looking like a load of shocking golfers. I started buying French wine rather than New World, and followed Robert Parker. I can pull Parker up on a few things – blind loyalty to Mourvèdre/underscoring Monte Bello – but he did hold châteaux to account, and when he saw how big the wine world was becoming, he looked around for help. One man can’t cover all the territory, so Parker sensibly recruited other critics and got close to a few enologists. You have to protect your reputation when you’re the best.

The force of its not what you know, but who you know is lost in French because of the difference between savoir (knowing a fact) and connaître (knowing a person). It’s easy to fall into the trap that Parker’s relationship with Rolland was all about influence and nothing to do with edification. After all, members of the UK wine trade visited lots of wineries through the 90s, but most squandered the opportunity to learn anything. We left Australia believing that the New World order of varietal labelling only needed to recruit evangelists to achieve its aim of global domination. We were  suckered in. 

There were wine factories in South Australia who made grape growing sound like an inane bureaucratic directive - technically superfluous, but legally enforced - but at least you could blend what you damned well wanted to. A policy document – 2025 – was issued. Australia was going to do for 21^st Century wine production what Japan had done for 20^th Century car manufacture. Cut the Big Red Land and it would bleed Shiraz. But just as Australia got bigger, so it also became more detailed. The behemoths of the Australian Industry could fight among themselves for market share, but evolution results in diversity, not a single winner. That’s not to say there weren’t extinctions along the way; some estates were lost. The death of individuals and species is part of evolution, it occurs to those who can’t keep up with change, or mitigate its effects. And that is exactly what happened to elements of the UK wine trade as well. One day the guy with the bag of coins didn’t show, and the reels stopped rolling. Business was better off talking to business directly; it didn’t need agents or the press to articulate what it already knew: that there are only so many possible combinations of melon, cherry, pineapple and banana. The story had become so simple it didn’t need telling any more.

The American philosopher Hilary Putnam made the observation that atomic structure can’t tell us why round pegs don’t fit into square holes; to do this we need a different way of describing objects, one that covers 3-dimensional geometric shapes and their compatibility at a macro level. Paring everything down to µ isn’t always as edifying as we might think. There isn’t one big vocabulary of connectedness that links creation to a sliced 2-iron, unless you cling on to the bible. 

Putnam’s remark seems to offer support to critics who always opt for the glass of wine over the viticulture textbook. Remembering back to their time in Australia they might say: “Of course there are facts out there in the monotonous realm of electrons and atoms where all stuff is ultimately the same stuff, but the consumer wants light, colour, education, and the confidence to shout STRAWBERRY, BANANA, CHERRY, MELON when they smell it. They don’t need all the balancing dark matter of enology as well. There is one language of consumption, and another for production.”

If labelling by variety had succeeded in relegating “Gevrey”, “Grosset”, and “Napa” into history then I’d happily concede the argument, but it took 20 years for the trade to whittle its knowledge down to the level of regular drinkers, only to find out they didn’t take the bait. People sinking bottles of Pinot Grigio in pubs aren’t experimenting with grape varieties; and neither are they planning on leaving Psi 2000 for Jerez anytime soon. Articles on decanting or hyping Riesling didn’t achieve what we’d hoped they would, just as handing out golf clubs to Muranyi’s Pringle-wearing thugs was never going to get them off the football terraces and on to the driving range. Let’s be honest here: the Chinese aren’t buying Bordeaux because of education; they’re buying it because they’re rich.

There is crucial distinction to be made between mystery and mystique. The Côte de Nuits is the most complicated wine region in the world, and as an agricultural system, perhaps only Asia’s paddy fields are more tortuous. Paddy fields and Vosne Romanée tell us something important about humanity and the fluidity of our relationship with Nature, because it would have been easy for the Cistercians and the Chinese to have missed the faint impulses that flowed from their fields of rice and vines: the coded messages of flavour and texture that suggested walls and channels. “Cros Parantoux”, “biodynamics”, “natural wine” and “Monte Bello” open us up to the mystical possibilities of human devotion; dismissing them on the basis of a superficial understanding of enology, or a “mission to make wine simple”, sounds like ignorance.  Putnam’s suggestion is that we use different vocabularies to do different jobs, not that we give-up on the benefits of alternative explanations by positing one simple way of talking about things; like grape varieties, for example. Australia misleadingly gave the impression that the wine world was getting easier, when it was only getting bigger.

The Cistercian legacy is visible throughout Burgundy, but the raw passions of conversion and revelation are at their most evident in the less posthumous setting of the New World where they have led to magnificent new constructions like Rippon and Ridge. Just as man nurtures the vine, so the vine can nurture a longing in those that tend to it: the desire to know what can be spun from one’s own stretch of dirt. The intensity and reaction of individuals to these impulses helps us explain why some bottles are labelled “Grosset” and others “Yellow Tail”, but their resonance within wine might also tell us interesting things about our own sensibilities. Josh Jensen and Bailey Carrodus both recall an initial experience with wine rather than vines, which for them coincided with their having access to Oxford University’s cellars.

My first ecstatic encounter with wine was with Lindeman’s St George Coonawarra Cabernet 1979. The first glass primed my senses; the second glass ushered in pathological thoughts about resigning my job; and by the end of the bottle I was drunk. 14.5% ABV! I read, tasted, and took wine exams. My mother always said get between people and their money, but I never heeded a word she said, and within months I’d ditched law and run off to join the wine trade.

A week into my new career, I learnt the true value of all the study. My boss briefed me: Andrew Lloyd Webber was visiting the shop; we had a parcel of undrinkable 1986 Ponsot Burgundies; the Ponsots and Lloyd Webber had to leave the shop together.

Fifteen minutes after Lloyd Webber arrived, I interrupted the meeting, as planned, and asked my boss “If that rather good parcel of Ponsot wines was still available, because I had a buyer on the phone.”   I passed the audition. Lloyd Webber came in with a counterbid, and the wines were sent to his house for a dinner that weekend. The following Monday, the remains of the shocking Ponsot haul were returned to us. Lloyd Webber never bought again, and my boss eventually left the trade.

I changed jobs. On the first day with my new employers the chairman bragged that he always re-invoiced customers the moment they paid, and 70% of the time they paid twice. Mind you, it was worth keeping in contact with him because if he’d heard nothing from you for 5 years he sold your private reserves for cash. The company went bust.

April 2050 (73751.1) FALL

Edward Gibbon documents the fall of the Roman Empire in its "crimes, follies, and misfortunes."

Looking back from 2050, the decline of the UK wine trade now seems as inevitable as the rise of China. No nation has the right to drink Bordeaux and Burgundy ahead of another, or claim cultural propriety, and the redistribution of Crus Classés and Grands Crus wines at the start of the 21^st Century was, along with the art and yachts, just another way in which swashbuckling Asian entrepreneurs chose to reward themselves. After all, hadn’t the row between the British and Greek governments over the ownership of the Elgin Marbles set the precedent that whosoever dominates economically also dominates culturally?

For a while, the UK trade resisted, wedged itself between rich men and their wine, cast off the impression that it was led by pompous, self-important men who snored loudly and produced excessive drool; but a world of sophisticated logistics and instant communication really had no need of haughty middlemen.  

At weekends, Asia’s new class of connoisseurs would open bottles of Laffite and Coche Dury and say how fine they were. These were evenings to show-off, but some of the guests found the experience transformative. Wine inspired them - nurtured something deep within - so they spent their time reading books on wine, and visiting France, and even though language was a barrier, they understood terroir and classifications, because nothing in agriculture could ever be as complicated as paddy fields.

By 2030, Zhao Hui An, was established as the most important wine critic of his generation. He had a background in statistics, but devoted 15 years of his life to wine self-education. Like Parker before him, An was inseparable from Bordeaux’s reputation, though he found the 1855 Classification too hyperbolic, and encouraged Châteaux to re-engage with their primordial past. The Chinese market liked the complexity and traditions that lay beneath such man-made impositions; there is an old saying in Beijing that we go through life facing backwards, what is in front of us is our history, and this played well in Bordeaux.

The UK trade carried on in a much reduced form; it didn’t need an infrastructure of journalists, merchants and PR people to oversee its decline, just the odd specialist removal company to fulfil the sale and clearance of All Souls' and Parliament's cellars.  

 

 

 

Mouton, Hangovers, Bad Manners and Post-Impressionism

Rhône

Jaboulet’s Hermitage “La Chapelle” 1983(14/20) received 98pts from Parker. I read “Wines of the Rhône Valley and Provence” and became an early adopter when I followed Parker’s advice and bought some. Sadly, the case has given very little pleasure, because back in the 80s the bottles were put under an evil spell that turned all their contents into stone, scuppering mine and Parker’s fin-de-millennium drinking strategies. The spell was very specific, because Jaboulet’s Côte Rôtie “Les Jumelles” 1985(17.5/20) was juicy and sweet, and provided yet more evidence that this appellation could fit as easily into Burgundy as it does the Northern Rhône.  Interestingly, both wines had been bought on release, and cellared together. Tasted as a pair they supported my  long held conviction that the difference between good and bad vintages is not as great as we think, and the temptation for consumers to overvalue, and for producers to over-macerate hot, dry vintages needs resisting. 

Two white Rhônes were served, Chapoutier Hermitage Blanc “Chante Alouette” 94 (15.5/20) and St-Péray Domaine de Tunnel 2010 (13/20). Both wines were full, but if I was in the Rhône on one of those hot, drawn-out summery days, I’m not sure if either of these wines could wean me off Tavel Rosé.

The Southern Rhône was represented by Pignan Châteauneuf-du-Pape 1997 (17.5). The pallid colour lowered expectations, but on the palate, the wine swelled and deepened, impressing with a singular potency that suggested a high balance of Grenache in the blend.

Burgundy

White Burgundy struggled this year. Nature had gone about as far as it could agreeably go with Louis Michel’s skinny Grand Cru Vaudésir  1981 (12.5/20)  and 1er Cru Forchaume 1986 (12/20) , and the wines need to be gently euthanized or drunk before they attenuate any further. The two Ramonet wines, Grand Cru Bâtard-Montrachet 2001(13/20) and Chassagne-Montrachet 1er Cru Morgeots 2009 (15/20) were baffling. A tasting note that includes seaweed, chamomile and pinewood might flag complexity for some, but there was an underlying disharmony that some tasters were attributing to it being “a root day”. More and more “root day” is sounding like a cosmic anthropomorphism contrived to cover some very human failings.  And Ramonet wasn’t alone in disappointing, Drouhin’s Marquis de Laguiche Chassagne-Montrachet (Les Morgeots) 99 (15/20) also struggled to impose any sense of accord. It used to be left to Pinot to spin Burgundy’s mysteries, but over the last two decades Côte de Beaune Chardonnay has been vengefully miring itself in controversy too.

 

Ramonet’s red wine, Chassagne-Montrachet 1er Cru Clos de la Boudriotte 83 (17.5/20) was much more successful. Chassagne’s delivery so often cracks at the top of Pinot’s treble range, but the wine was pitch-perfect, and provided yet more evidence that we write-off difficult vintages at our peril. Two Dujacs followed, Grand Cru Echezeaux 99 (19/20) and Grand Cru Clos St Denis 96 (17/20). Dujac bolster their wines’ tannins with stems, but there was nothing obdurate about the Echezeaux, only the sustained release of flavour, like a lozenge of something sweet and wild slowly liquefying.

Jean-Jacques Confuron’s 2002 Romanée St Vivant (16.5+) was decanted early. There was a certain dissonance between the fruit and the tannins, the wine’s musculature remained cramped and stiff, but I suspect these are just growing pains, and there is a nimble future ahead. The next decade will be tougher for D’Angerville’s 1er Cru Volnay Fremiet 99 (13/20) which seemed as hapless in the glass as a jellyfish beached above the tide. The wine lacked structure and shape, so despite the abundance of fruit, I wasn’t sure whether I should drink the liquid or prod it with a piece of driftwood.

Bordeaux

Pointillism was a technique used by Seurat, Van Gogh and Angrand. Despite the fundamental discontinuity of its method, pointillism was capable of extraordinary subtlety. For me, pointillism provides a good metaphor for the Médoc and Haut Médoc, which seem grittily composed of opposites - fruit/tannin, glycerol/mineral, ripe/acid – just as Seurat believed in the fundamental graininess of all matter. If these differences are out of balance, or their constitution is too coarse, then the wine fails to attain harmony. Perspective is hard-earned. The most appealing part of this analogy derives from the fact that we, as drinkers, are actively engaged in the final constitution of elements; the wine offered-up to our senses isn’t quite the finished object; the intellect is needed to complete the picture.

We drank some fine Bordeaux. Château Cos d’Estournel 1995 (17.5) was loosening-up nicely, but on the day was outshone by a remarkable magnum of Château Cantemerle 1998 (18.00), which, at the moment of ingestion, tweaked the blurred elements of fruit spice and earth into sharp focus. Innevitably, everyone was pleased to get Château Mouton Rothschild 1986 (17.5) set before them, but the fragrance was slow to come, and we were all very impatient drinkers by this time. Château Bahans Haut-Brions 2005 (14.5) and Château Lynch-Bages 2000 (15.5+) were young, firm, and wanting. If the first three Haut Médoc’s served-up tender fillet, then the last two were like chuck steak, chewy and unyielding; and this mattered, because, if you hadn’t noticed, we were kings for the day, and after this much wine we’d given-up on being gracious monarchs.

We tasted one Pomerol, Château Vieux Chateau Certan 2004(16.0+), which appeared rigid and isolated, despite the fact it had resisted adding all the thick gym muscles of nearby estates.

Our final Bordeaux was white, Château Margaux, Pavillon Blanc 2001 (15-/20) which I scored 15, though I can’t remember why, which probably means it deserved less.  

Italy and Spain

If there was one Paulée wine I would choose to rendezvous with again, it would be Giacomo Conterno’s Barolo 2005 (18.0+). Where the soup of molecules within la Chapelle’s tannic shell remained confused and disparate, those in Conterno’s wine were gathering into palate pleasing configurations. You could already sense this ample wine’s inexorable slide towards perfection, like the slow, melting ride of a glacier towards the sea.

Conterno’s wine may have been on its way, but Vega-Sicilia Valbuena 96 (18.5) was indubitably “there”. This was a powerful wine, but "full-bodied" in this instance refers to the overall magnitude of effects. One saw, with Gibran, how the mountain looks to the mountain climber. I have never bought Vega-Sicilia; more fool me!

Riva al Fosso il Poggiolo 1998(17) was from Brunello, but (and this amused me) failed to make the classification because the stems of half of the bunches were twisted before the harvest. Despite all this labour, the wine was only medium-bodied, and my glass, with its whiff of tomato leaf, herbs and antipasti was doing a great job of publicizing Italy’s broad-base of provisions.

 

The Rest

We were served two Champagnes. Bollinger’s RD 99 Extra-Brut(17) had a hard brilliance, though, I have to admit, the extra-brut-thing kind of passes me by, because I always thought Champagne’s sweetness was something of a secret anyway; and Salon 96 (16), which seemed content just pushing champagnisation (the process) to its lumbering limits.

Willi Haag, Sonnenuhr Auslese 1990 (18.5) provided an unexpected peak to the day’s white wine drinking. There are more expensive producers, but the whole structure, body and balance of the wine was articulated through a succession of flavours. Unfortunately, the same couldn’t be said of Weinbach Grand Cru Schlossberg 1988(14) or Hugel’s Jubilee Pinot Gris 96 (12) which jogged my memory back to a lecture at which I’d learnt the end point of wine oxidation was CO2 and water. By this point in the day, my body craved water, but not watery wine.

European Irradiance Animation

Hydra

 

Animals won’t leave me alone. Dogs slip their leads and collars and run to me. Sometimes I ride wild ponies bareback over the moors. Whenever I walk through the fields at home, a bovine train falls into line behind me. I quizzed the cows once, and asked them why they were following me? But they just hung their heads and embarrassedly inspected their hooves.  Anthropologists tell us that humans took a momentous forward step when they started domesticating herbivores, but the way I read it, farming was a ruminant initiative for which we have ungraciously taken the credit. The raggedy, squat forbears of cows, goats and sheep just latched onto the raggedy, squat forbears of people like me. Animal magnetism was the giant evolutionary leap that began man’s hasty ascent.

Alvaro Espinosa’s Maipo-located farm, “Antiyal”, is far from being Neolithic or even neo-Neolithic - Alvaro drives a large V8 truck – but the small proportions and self-containment are indicative of a more pristine system of agriculture. Last time I stayed there were a few acres of vines and vegetables, and a menagerie of animals - ducks, geese, chickens, an alpaca - and, most conspicuously of all, an enormous mastiff that threatened to turn Antiyal’s other residents into dinner should the dog bowl go empty for too long. The industrious and talented Alvaro had built an adobe house at the centre of the property, together with a few outbuildings, which doubled as the winery and guest accommodation. He was better than me at all the things I really cared about, and could do all the things I normally pay people to do.

When I arrived, the mastiff charged the car. In Chile, big breeds double as crime fighters, but the hospital A&Es must be bursting with friendly-fire maulings, because dogs are about food and walks and other dogs; they can’t easily tell the good guys from the bad guys. The Mastiff was huge. It made me think of Giant Moas and Galapagos Tortoises, gargantuan Pacific Rim flops, except this beast looked like it might make a much better fist of bigness than they ever did. I stepped out of the car, sighed, and looked into the dog’s red-rimmed eyes. We were going to be friends.

We ate lunch in the shade with the dog at my feet. Beyond the vines, in a small enclosure was the alpaca. Something was wrong. The alpaca was standing on two legs; it was seven feet tall. The long neck gave a high vantage point for the brilliantly lacquered eyes. Whatever eats alpacas on the pampas needs good stamina, because their spines are engineered like periscopes, so they can see the curvature of the earth and look round corners. Not that this alpaca was behaving like anything’s lunch. I’d taken the solidity of Alvaro’s ranch work for granted, but the alpaca was snagging its pen for weaknesses, lunging its chest aggressively against the wooden rails. Maybe my host and I did share a few husbandly failings after all, and some of his clever wood improvisations overlapped, at their weakest points, with my bodging.

Over lunch we drank a blend of viognier, chardonnay and sauvignon from St Emiliana. I usually find Chilean whites brittle and green, but this tasted like a field blend, or an assemblage that had been aged on mixed lees; there was a heady mellowness that made me wish I was on a hammock rather than a chair. And there was a hammock. Alvaro had made one and strung it beneath the shady eaves of the house.

At dusk we began the tour. Each vine at Antiyal recieved very individual attention. They were flood irrigated, which works well with cabernet, but most importantly they were grown biodynamically. Biodynamic preparations can be bought off-the-peg in Europe, but in Chile you had to make your own, and lobotomy is not for the squeamish. No synthetic fungicides were used, and weeds and insects were kept in check by the ducks, chickens and geese, which joined us as we continued our round of the property.

At the back of the house were the compost piles, through which everything was recycled. I learnt that alpacas always shit in the same place, which makes collection easy. Vegetable waste, straw, prunings and the dung were amalgamated, and then sprayed with dynamized teas. “Nothing wasted”. The mastiff was sniffing interestedly at the base of the pile. “Great”, I replied. Alvaro had presented such a nourishing account of recycling at Antiyal that it seemed the wrong time to ask about any connection Chile’s biggest canine might also have to the heap, but the question was there all the same.

Over my shoulder, I heard the sound of DIY failure, but this time it wasn’t shelves collapsing or a cheap table flat-packing itself; the alpaca was out, and bounding towards us. In 70s Britain we had llama parks, inspired by the push-me-pull-you in Dr Doolittle. I visited one, but nobody ever went back a second time, so they all closed. Llamas are just so dull and maintenance free. I suspect most of the beasts are still there; and when the herd gets too large they’ll burst out of their enclosures and die on the roads, and then we will all agree that they were just oversized, small-brained, timid sheep all along. But as the alpaca approached, I had some misgivings.

“Does it have teeth, Alvaro?”                                                 

“Sure, they have teeth”

“And a diastema?”

Alvaro looked blank.

The alpaca’s coat was springy, soft and irresistible. Alvaro’s wife, Marina, spun the wool into scarves, and things like scarves but bigger. I brought one back with me for my wife. I admired all the craft and resourcefulness, but I was beginning to feel overwhelmed. Historians put the defeat of the Incas and Aztecs by a small troop of conquistadors down to their exposure to measles and smallpox, and amid all the Espinosa’s industry and ingenuity, I was starting to feel like the next vector of European viruses come to devastate the continent, only this time they fatally de-skilled the mind and body, and left you hopelessly reliant upon others for food, warmth and shelter.

The sun was setting over the Pacific, and the stars were already beginning to swarm in the eastern sky above the Andes: Alpha Centauri, Canopus, Sigius, Procyon, the Southern Cross. You can join the dots of light to form a dome, but the geometry is illusory. Space is cold, infinite and utterly detached. And in that deepening moment, we all felt each other’s fear, so we drew close together for comfort, the animals and me.

That night, I watched the Hydra constellation slide lengthways across my window. At 3 a.m., I was joined by the mastiff, but I left a noisy duck outside, which punished my display of favouritism by grumbling at the door until daylight.

Alvaro consulted for several estates, Perez Cruz, Casa Rivas, St Emiliana, and Haras de Pirque, and we spent the next day visiting each in turn. I slept between appointments, and would wake-up to see yet another vainglorious winery looming into view. Whenever I asked Alvaro where the money came from, he replied their owners had “interests”. Chile’s major industry is mining, and mining and interests seemed to be the same thing, except the latter gave the impression that the country did more than break bits off itself and ship them abroad. The people who owned the mines owned everything else. 

General Pinochet was “our bastard”, and like the nasty dogs that guarded Chilean homes, Pinochet confused the good people with the bad. During his dictatorship, 3000 people were murdered, and 40,000 tortured. On the road between Valparaiso and Santiago, Alvaro parked the truck at the apex of a rocky hairpin and pointed to a village in the valley below.

“All the men from this village were gathered together and brought here”, he said. “Everyone was murdered.”

At the end of Kafka’s The Trial, Josef K is taken to a quarry to be killed. He still doesn’t know what facts establish his culpability, but in an act of well-mannered complicity he asks his executioners if sledgehammering his skull would be made easier if he were to lay his head against the slab this way, or that? I suspect that for many Chileans Pinochet’s guilt feels like their shame, but it shouldn’t. The only people that benefited were the cronies and Junta members who shared the spoils of privatisation when the General de-centralised the Chilean economy, creating a class of people with “interests”. When the wheel of fortune was spun, you had to be in the game. Pinochet may have gone but he left a legacy. Decapitate the monster and other heads grow back in its place.

We drove into Santiago where I was leading a tasting. Most of the winemakers we had met through the day were there.  The tasting was blind, and the wines were French. We started with Burgundy, a monopole 1er Cru from Michel Gros, and Bonnes Mares from Christophe Roumier; and we finished on five clarets, with Haut Brion 89 the last wine. In Central Chile, the vines are irrigated and the weather is predictable. There are cool climates and warm climates, but wherever you are in Chile, the ultra violet is unrelenting and gives a thick accent to the country’s red wines. Only when we reached the bottle of Haut Brion was there any acknowledgement of hue and tannin.  Everyone was sympathetic towards the plight of the Burgundians; somebody had to make wines under impossible marginal conditions, and the tasters in the room were just happy it wasn’t them.

In the heat of the Chilean summer, I'd thought the lighter style of French wines might get some plaudits, but we were starting from different places. Champagne and Burgundy had given me a taste for limpidity and delicacy, whereas my hosts seemed capable of ingesting any amount of tannin and anthocyanin. I had been labouring the point about over-extraction all day, and I'd hoped the Grand Cru Burgundy and First Growth Bordeaux would support my position, when they actually achieved the opposite.

We re-corked the bottles and drove back to Antiyal. It was dark. Marina was cooking. 

Alvaro took me to the back of the house. A wood fire was burning underneath a water-filled 500l inox tank. The dog was there.

“It’s for you”, said Alvaro.

The mastiff watched. I took off my clothes, and imagined myself being relegated down his Armageddon ration picks as I did: women and children first, and save the mottled one with the swatches of hair until there’s nothing left. I lowered myself into the vat and a little water lipped over the edge and hissed against the fire.

Alvaro returned with two glasses of Antiyal, and we spoke some more about Pinochet and the Junta. Chile was moving on; it was getting wealthier, but still there was desperate poverty. When terrible things have occurred so recently in a country’s history, people are scared to confront the past. Look back at the snake-haired Medusa and you’re instantly turned to stone.

I swirled the wine. Nothing would appear so dark again that night except sleep.

We talked of Alvaro’s time at Bordeaux University. He’d worked in Champagne, which had given him an appreciation of the product, but no ambition to make it. “This is Chile”, he said.

I understood the sentiment: day and night, this was the most iridescent place I’d ever visited.

It was late, the night sky shone, and Alvaro’s black wine tasted of Chile, then Maipo, then Antiyal.

Marina called us in for dinner. Alvaro chained the mastiff at the door.

“He won’t bother you tonight.”

“That just leaves the duck”, I said.

Alvaro raised his eyebrows. We walked into the kitchen: potatoes, tomatoes, spinach and, in the middle of the table, duck.

Hydroponics vs Vosne

Reading a recent article about grape growing in Santa Rita, I was struck at the fine line between irrigation and hydroponics. Without their weekly fix of water, vines grown on Santa Rita’s sandy valley floor would die. Albert Hammond’s contralto has familiarised us to the fact that it never rains in Southern California, and the limited capacity of their soils to hold onto water only intensifies the problem.

Water enters the vine primarily through the roots.  Up until veraison, the xylem conducts water around the vine unimpeded, to the leaves, stems and bunches. Easy access to water at this vegetative stage of growth influences vine vigour and berry size, and red wine grapes in particular are thought to benefit from a measure of early season stress. Skins become thicker, and the berries are better exposed to light; the two processes reinforce each other.

After veraison, the picture becomes more confused. The xylem flow into the berries becomes severely disrupted, and the direct link between soil moisture and berry-size is broken. The continued swelling of berries after veraison presented something of a conundrum to researchers, but recent investigations in Germany have shown how water also enters the grape clusters through the skins, rachis and pedicles. Rain falling on the berries is absorbed through the skins (though this movement also declines with maturity), yet even without rainfall, grapes will normally continue to expand as they ripen. Just why they do this continues to be the cause of speculation, but one plausible account suggests that bunch closure creates a cylinder around the stem tissues of the bunch. Fluctuations in ambient temperature will cause water to condense onto the interiorised rachis and pedicles, which then wicks into the berries, causing them to swell. If this is the case, then one can easily imagine a feedback mechanism in which large berries pre-veraison result in tight clusters, leading to water condensation and more rapid enlargement post veraison.

One of the significant differences between the vineyards of the Côte de Nuits is their underlying pedology and geology; climatically they are near-identical. The best soils shed water rapidly, but their depth and structure facilitates the vertical movement of water from the underlying limestone during periods of drought. They are precisely irrigated, if you like, though the pipes and pumps are in this instance of a geological origin. The berries remain relatively small in humid years; while in drought years, like 2005, the top vineyards can still access sufficient water to maintain metabolic function. Of course, the best vineyards will still be subjected to the climatic trends of a particular vintage, but they will be buffered in a way that the lesser vineyards are not.

All this is fascinating because it suggests that if irrigation can be precisely controlled, then grape quality can be favourably manipulated.  In a hydroponic system, watering could be tailored precisely to the qualitative needs of production, keeping berries small and clusters open, whilst the berries could simultaneously be protected from the effects of deluge and damaging water absorption through their skins. Of course, you would need climatic control, but this is the same for hydroponically grown tomatoes and peppers as well.

If this is all starting to sound expensive, you are right. But at the end of a week in which mediocre Burgundies were  offered at £thousands a case (and knowing there are Grands Crus coming through that will make these prices look like pocket money), how long can it be before somebody takes a punt on creating their own minutely managed terroir?

Spur Pruning Tixover Vineyard

Shoots of even vigour and length, carrying similar crop loads is the aim of most viticulture. Some people achieve this with cane pruning, but we prefer spur pruning.

On a low vigour site like Tixover, spur pruning requires patience.Try and elongate cordons by more than four buds at a time, and they suffer from acrotony: the canes shoot at their ends, but not in their middles, so that the distance between renewal points the following year is too great. Likewise, lay down canes that are too long, and already established spur positions further down the cordon will fail. Normally 10cm is a sufficient distance between shoots, but inour damp and sunless climate we look to achieve 15cm of separation between 1 bud spurs.  

Each Cordon will eventually carry 6-7 spurs, with a renewal spur just above the rootstock graft. This basal renewal spur gives us an option to replace and rebuild the vine’s aerial structure if the vine becomes diseased, or we start to drop spur positions along the cordon. Secateurs are a useful measuring tool in the vineyard. The gap between single-bud spurs needs to be less than the length of the secateurs, and cordon extensions again run the risk of acrotony if they are longer than the secateurs.

One unanticipated consequence of spur pruning is improved frost resistance. When we have suffered frost damage, shoots on spurs seem a degree or two hardier than shoots on canes.

 

 

 

NATURAL WINE: a reply to @ Jamie Goode

Doug,

 

I was interested to read your broad defence of Jamie’s position, even if it did fail to answer the specific points I raised in my post. Urging me, and for that matter Jamie, to come and float with you at wine’s discursive surface is, I’m afraid, harder than you make-out; it’s not that we can’t swim, I’m sure we both enjoy a lark in the shallows every bit as much as you, it’s just knowing that there is a world of explanations, causes and effects churning in the depths below makes some of us want to dive down deeper. When I use words like terroir and aldehydes, or consider the consequences of a lifetime spent drinking non-“natural” wines, I want to know exactly what I have committed myself to.

 

As critics, buyers and sellers of wine we come to the production process quite late on. Notwithstanding this, few of our customers share in the kind of privileged access we have to production – to the people, vineyards and landscapes – and it is incumbent upon us to represent them in an accurate and interesting way as we can. In choosing Paul Draper as an exemplar of everything that is worthy of adulation in the wine industry, I wasn’t making a cheap shot. When someone as coherent, respected and successful as Draper makes statements about typicité and terroir I find it hard to maintain objectivity, because the quality of the wines leaves little room for scepticism.

 

It’s worth reflecting on the success of Ridge Monte Bello ‘71 at the Judgement of Paris 30^thAnniversary re-tasting. Producers like Draper are in many ways operating in the ugly, primordial stages of a wine’s life. Young, cloudy, CO2 saturated wine shows little congruence with the finished products that are sold to consumers or tasted by critics, yet it is during this period that most of the repercussive decisions about a wine’s future evolution are made. Rather like the Jesuit mantra which takes the boy at seven and returns the man, winemakers intervene at these early and confused stages of development to provide positive and predictable outcomes. In the case of Monte Bello, or the blending of vin clair in Champagne, the implications of these decisions are realised within an elongated temporal framework that is in a substantial way determined by the winemaking; the released bottle of Monte Bello or Blanc de Noirs is not like some capricious desert flower that blooms fitfully, rather its flowering is actively nurtured and sustained. When Paul Draper says that S02 addition is necessary for his wines to reveal their typicité, I suspect he is alluding to this very point. The ‘71 Monte Bello was as recognisable and representative of the limestone hills of Santa Cruz Mountains in 2006 as it was in 1976. Durability, it might be argued, is part of the vineyard’s intrinsic character.

 

The same nature/nurture argument can be made in a different way. Each year, candidates put themselves through the MW exam. Thirty-six wines are tasted blind, and every year candidates identify and differentiate claret from Napa Cabernet, Pauillac from Margaux, and one vintage year from another. When I took and passed the exam in 1998 I correctly identified 5 vintages of Cos d’Estournel, even though the most valuable bottle I had tasted in the six months prior to the exam had been a Château St Pierre, St Julien, 1989. There was no heavy hand of winemaking here, nor the obfuscation of origins; how could there be? Blind tasting is the ultimate test of typicité, and the Institute’s position on natural wines is that their inherent instability makes consistent identification impossible. In the year-long preamble of tastings that leads up to the exam, natural wines show too much variability; the students wouldn’t stand a chance: they are not considered a fair test of ability.  Nature alone only gets you so far, and it certainly won’t allow one to conclude that natural wines provide the best viewpoint from which to assay either typicité or terroir.

Terroir has always been one of the touchstones of the natural wine movement, and as I said at the start, it’s one of the topics that encourages me to dive through the discursive surface of wine descriptions. The late Peter A. Sichel once claimed that only a small fraction of Bordeaux’s vignoble properly had terroir, and he urged parsimony in the term’s attribution and use. For a long time he had the support of wine producing allies in the New World, who mockingly depicted terroir as either a pernicious European marketing stunt, or an apologists charter for unripe fruit and poor hygiene. But then, somewhere along the track these protagonists either gave-up on this line of attack or lost the argument, because today terroir is everywhere.

 

I have written extensively on the terroir of Burgundy, but Sichel’s home region of Bordeaux throws up some often alluded to but scarcely understood examples of terroir. The soil at Pétrus is predominantly clay, but incorporated into the clay is smectite, a volcanic mineral that dramatically changes the soil’s physical and chemical properties. Conditions within damp smectite clays are so anaerobic that new roots struggle to grow, while old roots die. Consequently, the vines' extraction of water is impeded, even though the clay can feel wet to the touch. The expansion is so dramatic that after 10mm of rainfall, the soil self-seals at its surface, so in a wet year like 1967, the vines can still be subjected to beneficial levels of water stress. Conversely, in dry years smectite clays shrink and crack, encouraging water and root penetration which, in turn, maintains a restricted but valuable flow of nutrients and water to the vine - invaluable in an anisohydric variety like merlot. This is an empirical account of how the soil at Pétrus regulates vine performance, but it’s not the full account of terroir, because it takes human intervention to shape the raw materials from the vineyard into a finished wine that contains all the identifiable tropes of Pétrus, which include homogeneity and stability, and the concomitant ability of the wines to age and plateau.

Accordingly, in Sichel’s historiographical account, we are better-off thinking of terroir from a qualitative perspective, as a tool that provides us with a means of differentiating between the quality of wines drawn from a small, circumscribed area (here, Pomerol), rather than a system of demarcation built upon regional taste. In other words, the pedological element of terroir is best applied qualitatively at the micro/vineyard level. The fruit that comes off the vine that grows up my house might yield a wine with a distinctive character, but this doesn’t mean it has terroir. Thus far, there is no differential, qualitative subdivision that needs adjudicating upon in Lyddington.

 

The meaning of terms changes over time, but terroir now seems so ubiquitous as to be rendered meaningless, which is a shame because people like Cornelius van Leeuwen at Bordeaux University are patiently building a detailed scientific account of the term as articulated by Peter Sichel. Like so much of science, huge efforts are required to move small distances, not that this discourages people like Van Leeuwen. Cheval Blanc took the decision to exclude certain vineyards traditionally incorporated into their Grand Vin as a result of Van Leeuwen’s survey of the property, which is a useful example of the way in which empirical analysis can help inform viticultural decision making for the better. The same point can be made about Paul Draper; I don’t know any winemaker who makes a more detailed study of tannin polymerisation, and while the results of these analyses don’t ultimately decide maceration lengths, racking intervals, or, indeed, SO2 additions, they do bring additional qualification to the scheduling of these procedures.

 

The global appropriation of terroir has lessons for the natural wine movement. It’s a logician’s slogan that there is “no entity without identity”, thus if you define yourself too loosely, anything goes. As far as I can work out, given that there appears to be no specific definition for what is allowed or prohibited in “natural” wine, the production of natural wine is compatible with a range of beliefs and practices whose adherents would normally be quite antagonistic towards each other, like genetic modification (GM promises disease-resistant, no-spray vines), organic production (“chemical-free” farming), or the sanctioned use of synthetic fungicides via Integrated Pest Management or so-called “sustainable” regimes (lutte raisonnée).

 

Re-joining you at the discursive surface again, it may surprise you to learn that I have bought, and will continue to buy wine from AA Pian, Cousin and Mazel; they are good wines, in fact, they are very good wines, and part of the 5% I identified in my original post. As I recall, I didn’t say all the wines were bad, I just pointed out that the natural wine movement has a long tail of unstable, acetic and, at its tip, quite horrid wine. I think it would be impossible for us to arbitrate between our respective opinions on some of these wines, although I am more than happy to concede that clumsy, heavy-handed oenology is just as capable of returning disappointing bottles.

 

My real difficulty however is with your invocation of terms like typicité, and terroir, used interchangably and as a defence of your position. You accused me of being a self-styled wine academic, but from my perspective you have misappropriated terms and then nominated yourself as the guardian of them. By countenancing instability as a price worth paying, you demean winemakers; and you deprive them their role in the remarkable aesthetic transformation that turns perishable fruit into, balanced, enduring, age-worthy wine. Ageing is a property of terroir but for you the temporal element of production risks complete evisceration. By minimizing man’s role in the terroir mix you posit a false dichotomy between winemaking and terroir. Yet terroir has always been a synergy between man and nature; without human sensibility, creativity and intervention it’s hard to see how we even get started along this dirt road in the first place.

 

Most conspicuously, the use of sulfur dioxide brings a degree of consistency to the product (as evinced by Draper), and allows blind tasters to successfully adjudicate on age, origins and grape varieties, yet this is not typicité as you construe it in your argument. You are like a painter who believes he’s done his job once the paints are mixed. From my side of the glass at least, nature is not a sufficient condition for art; terroir is qualitatively-driven; and the best test of typicité is via blind-tasting.

 

Wine is one of the more satisfying ways through which we view turbulent nature, so let’s agree to keep the chaos outside the bottle, not within it.

For Doug's response   -   http://t.co/yYsID8gl