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 30thAnniversary
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
For Doug's response - http://t.co/yYsID8gl
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