Critical Thinking - Aspiration and Inspiration

 

 

In a recession, your job changes; the first line of your job description now reads, Looking after your Job, which in our business means protecting income and lifestyle. The foreign travel and restaurants are perks that some speedily get accustomed to; in fact, the sense of entitlement can become acute when we start living-off other people’s expense accounts - ask Charles Saatchi. PR agencies are awash with tales of irate wine writers ringing-up in the middle of the night to get their rooms changed because “the view isn’t a view, and the pool's too small to do lengths, if it ever warmed-up here, that is!” When people tell me they want my job what they really want is to sit in l’Arpège and Guy Savoy, though for my part, I’m never at home in these surroundings; there will always be part of me stuck in the Salford fish and chip shop where my family’s culinary roots were first put down.

The wine trade is in a mess. After years of expansion, people are drinking less wine, and once you strip out the Chancellor’s duty accelerator, they aren’t spending much more either. Robert Joseph continues to offer a Gibbon-style analysis of this decline and is fastidious and clear in his warning that if we don’t change our thinking now we won’t even be afforded the luxury of repeating past mistakes.

Everyone has their theory as to what went wrong - over-supply, cosy relationships between press and trade, discounting – but in 30 years of growth, the UK wine trade failed to significantly increase  equity within the category, and most wine drinkers view the different regions of production with a sense of equivalence that’s reinforced by an alternating offer in which the World displays all its diversity at discounted prices.

The situation is no better in the on-trade. “Support” is needed to facilitate many listings, and support has morphed from retros and incentives to upfront payments that have as many noughts as those premium bond cheques whose winners used to be paraded on the ITN news back in the 80s. Sommeliers can seem embarrassed at times, passing on the corporate neediness of an unseen FD - “And this guy” they will tell you, “doesn’t care if your Chablis is bigger than the other guy’s Petit Chablis, he just wants to see the size of your wad.”

What a lot of us are wondering – journalists, buyers, salesmen, managers - is what’s next? Like economists calling the end to the recession, we need to see a couple of quarters of growth and greater spend to confidently announce a recovery, but quite where and how this will come about is not clear. Jamie Goode recently challenged Robert Joseph to offer solutions rather than, as he saw it, challenges. I have some sympathy with Jamie Goode; I once joined a company that had a vortex of MBAs at its centre. Every week they confronted me about wine profitability (not their core business), put hurdles in my way and then forced me to jump over them. I took their questioning in good faith; I believed they were leading me in a particular direction - to an answer - but after 6 months of inquisition, I realised I was just going around the same piece of track, jumping the same hurdles. We were all lost.

On twitter, Tim Atkin MW offered “inspiration” and Robert Joseph “aspiration” as possible remedies for the trade’s current malaise. That day, Tim Atkin was inspiring 3000 people in Manchester with stories and wine, an effort which Robert Joseph likened to a “finger in the dyke”.  Joseph suggested that Parker 100s had created a culture of aspiration in the States, which still persists. Aspiration develops an aura of desirability, whereas inspiration promotes interest and access through improved understanding and education.

As bystanders to the argument, we don’t have to take a side. Both arguments are persuasive, and I think by accepting one you don’t exclude the force of the other. I’d raised “inspiration” in a previous exchange, when I wanted to draw out some similarities between books and wines. I don’t think Robert Joseph took exception to my likening the trade to a community of deluded literary critics who mistakenly thought people read Jackie Collins as a preamble to Dickens. Part of the misguided thinking of the 1990s was a belief that consumers who bought their wine from the supermarket gondola-ends were stepping onto our escalator; all we had to do was wait at the top and skim them off with lists of expensive Claret and Burgundy. It never happened.

The Robert Parker argument proposed by Robert Joseph is intriguing; Parker awarded 100s, but he also slammed underperforming Cru Classés. In a tweet last week, Steve Heimoff said that he could avoid giving low scores to his friends’ wines by writing rather than scoring.  I replied at the time that Heimoff’s attitude illustrated the difference between a fact and telling the truth, and that consumer trust didn’t arise from the facts, but from the truth behind the facts.  Robert Parker gained our trust and encouraged aspiration because he incorporated this distinction into his criticism from the start. The 100 point scores wouldn’t have meant so much if he wasn’t red-inking 50s to the underperformers at the bottom of the class.

The relationship between the press and producers is complicated. As Chris Kissack reminded me the other day, the critic must always be on the side of the consumer, never the producer. Chris is very principled and, as far as I’m aware, funds his own trips, but his expertise resides in the Loire and Bordeaux, short-haul destinations. Funding your own trips to Australia, South Africa and New Zealand is beyond the means of flying journalists, so inevitably there is a conflict of interest if they accept the hospitality of trade bodies or producers. I am not sure if this can be resolved other than by charging for content. I am with Tim Atkin and Chris Kissack on this inasmuch as you forfeit your right to criticise them if you are not prepared to pay for their content. We must recognise our part in this economy of trust; we shouldn’t expect their output to be free, and if we do, we have no grounds to doubt their integrity. I would go further: I would argue that paying for content builds trust, and is part of the solution to our current woes. Aspiration needs to be grounded in trust.

Just as a neglected truth is required for the establishment of trust, so, I believe, there is a forgotten but shared truth anchoring our interest in wine.  Wine has a primal scene: it is the unbroken process of production - viticulture and enology - achieved and guided by human force and sensibility. Proximity and human agency, the coalescence of viticulture and religious devotion delivered us Burgundy, but these artisanal attributes became repressed through wine’s industrial evolution. The expansion of the wine business in the 80s and 90s exaggerated an already established trend for discontinuity within production. Mechanisation, contract growing and increased scale dehumanized the conception of wine, and caused us to forget the deeply personalised origins of our trade. Inevitably for some industrialisation is a heresy, but I am sure Damien Wilson is correct when he says that wine has to expand in order to protect itself; I think it is enough that we should remember and respect what came before, and thus resist the temptation to believe that there is an easy equivalence between the artisanal and the industrial. If we can hold onto this distinction and keep it separate from complicated considerations of terroir and appellation (the meaningless and the failed, from my point of view), we might nurture the same kind of interest and care for production that has helped develop value in categories like bread, whisky and beer. Returning to my analogy of hapless literary critics, the trade developed a delusion of uniformity: we started talking about the cheap stuff as though it had all the intrinsic values of the expensive stuff; it was as if we believed we could flog extra copies of Bleak House by calling Lucky a novel and declaring Jackie Collins the rightful heir to Cervantes.

Interestingly, the Californian wine Industry has a long history of bulk manufacture, but it is the recent increase in artisan and small scale production that has helped drive values up. As Jamie Goode consistently proves with his well-informed coverage of wineries and regions, we can desire both a product and the production of that product. How things are made really matters to some of us. There is a lot of new and untainted wine out there and we have some excellent people covering this emergence of talent; I just happen to believe if we paid them it would be even better.

California is blessed with a great climate and an industry that’s well disposed to developing its customers’ experience with wine. Up to this point, UK wine drinkers have been largely denied this sort of familiarity with production, but now, with the growth in domestic estates, vineyard access has never been easier, and a combination of cellar-door sales and chauvinism might help us to deepen consumer interest in the product. The UK industry is young and premium-priced, it just has to be very watchful about how it goes about nurturing its reputation; you are not going to maintain people’s trust for long by calling 2012 a good vintage.

 In my blog on the 1855 Classification, I warned about the dangers of rationalising wine into groupings and hierarchies. The 1855 classification is hyperbolic; it created its own reality of division by restraining opportunity for the majority of estates. From the Jura to Muscadet, individual producers were branded with an appellation name the value of which was determined by the worst offerings of the region. There was no escape, no consideration, and no incentive to change; the fate of individual growers was bound to the laziest and least sanitary domaines within the appellation’s boundaries. Now, with the advent of social-media, we are witnessing the democratisation of opportunity, and the concomitant weakening of the INAO’s authority. Regions long repressed by AOC law are beginning to flourish; their estates are profiled; the previously anonymous detail is being brought into the light. The hegemony of Burgundy and Bordeaux is loosening. There has never been a better time to be a wine drinker, if you have money and an open-mind.

The UK wine trade is in a period of decline and change. Last time I saw him, John Hoskins MW astutely remarked, “That perhaps the old stuff needs to die-off so that the new stuff can come through.” It’s not just the wine market that’s altering, production is too; among the vines there is a churn of birth, reinvention and mortality. Wine's New Testament march around the Globe has slowed, though the personnel that brought that burgeoning offer to the UK are still largely in control of it. At the time, I thought John was referring to Australia – he was backed against a fantastic wall of antipodean bottles - but reflecting on what he said now, I’m not so sure he wasn’t just talking about me.

 

Abe's Bookshelves

 

In a short video, Abe Schoener is talking and making wine at the Scholium Project. He says something about wine being somatic and sensual, but I’m not going to allow myself a second viewing in case I’m wrong, and this whole edifice of words comes crashing down. In one scene Abe is greedily devouring grapes, like a boar. Next, there is a beautiful tattooed woman treading white grapes against smoking nuggets of dry ice. It looks fun. Abe’s in a barrel, but the woman’s barrel looks more accommodating.

 

Then it’s back to Abe, now sitting in front of a bookcase talking rapidly about “the carnal, the body…” You can view it for yourself on HawkwakawakaWineReviews.com.http://wakawakawinereviews.com/2013/10/31/the-carnal-the-corporeal-the-somatic-indistinguishable-from-each-other-conversation-w-abe-schoener/ Hawk was a philosophy professor, as
was Abe. Philosophy has a loose connection with wine: Paul Draper, Randall Grahm and Jancis Robinson all studied the subject, and they are much better qualified than me to discuss its content. Indeed, if they ever read this they might become irritated at the thought that a non-philosopher is queering their patch, but then aren't we all on each other's patch a bit now, anyway? Besides, I've read books, some of which had philosophical themes. And it's the books that catch my eye on Abe's shelves, particularly the pastel 1983 Pelican reprints of Freud. Abe must have bought these at the same time as me - they're in my cellar now - but given the different directions our lives have taken, Abe obviously read his Standard Edition much more closely.   
 

I'm watching Abe in the barrel and remembering Eric Peter. In 1983, Eric was washed-up on the shores of Guadeloupe in a barrel, Ton-tiki. Penniless and wearing only a pair of jeans, he immediately claimed the record for crossing the Atlantic in the smallest ever vessel. “I knew I had to hit some land somewhere,” he said. “It didn’t matter where.” He had no compass, said he’d lived on a diet of Spanish olives and almonds, and drank rainwater which had collected in his barrel during a 4 day squall. The record was never verified.  (Daily Record, 8^th February, 1983)

 

I know as little about Abe as I do Eric. Abe cast off the obligations of being a professor of Greek Philosophy, came over to wine, and immediately cast off the obligations of being a winemaker too. Some of the sauvignon blanc bunches arriving at the winery reception in the video will be eaten by Abe, the rest will make an orange wine, unless the whole vat gets tipped away. Abe seems as frivolous about outcomes as Eric seemed blasé about his starting point. Eric originally sailed from England. The elements were against him. He launched into the surf, but the first big wave lassoed him back to the shore where he was arrested and his barrel confiscated. His enthusiasm undiminished, Eric began his successful navigation from the Canary Islands, whose easterly flowing waters were outside UK jurisdiction.
 

Winemaking and archaeology have their methodologies, strict codes of production that encourage re-production rather than freedom and virtuosity.  Thor Heyerdahl was a serious student of reed boats and hardwood rafts. Ra and Kon-tiki – part of the unseaworthy fleet built by Thor - were archaeological replicas. Ra 1 was an ethnographic experiment that sank (but then, I guess, reed boats have always sunk, otherwise the global village would have been with us since antiquity); and when Ra 2 eventually dumped its emaciated ultra-blonde crew on a tropical beach it had the buoyancy of a turd.

 

Eric's adventure sounds ridiculous, suicidal, but then, so do Thor’s. It’s hard to separate the rational from the irrational here. The fact that Ton-tiki and Con-tiki achieved the same thing just reminds us that stupidity and reason progress through time together, like matter and dark matter; like interlocking talons, which you prise apart at your peril.  Plato put reason on a plinth, separating the mind and alienating the body, and it took Freud, listening to hysterical voices two and a half thousand years later, to fit them back together again. Freud thinks Greek when he places the irrational id and burdened ego into a dynamic relationship with the instinctual drives, but he sounds like Jackie Mason when he says our best hope in life is to attain “the normal level of human unhappiness.

Wine is full of numbers, scores, cod-commentaries, and classifications. It tries to reproduce itself in styles, such that “Bordeaux-like” and “Burgundy-like” have become the trade’s two most overworked phrases. There is an attenuation of interest that comes with rationalisation, a narrowing of thought. Returning to those pastel reprints of Freud, I remember reading that we are drawn to those who exhibit patterns of desire we once had, but have now given-up. I am attracted to the Scholium Project, even though I’ve never tried a bottle, because their relationship with wine seems to be one of pleasure, expansion and indulgence; things I’ve repressed as my tastes have become more institutionalised; as I’ve drifted into a self-censorship that refuses to acknowledge wine in the immediacy and purity of its effects. Abe is right: we need to drink wine with our bodies, not just our minds.     

Champagne: The Power of Blends

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

It's worth considering that Champagne is not an extracted wine; the ratio of juice to phenolics derived from low yields can be detrimental to the quality of Champagne. Starchy tannin has a place in red wines, but in acidulous vin clair its presence only exaggerates austerity and bitterness.

Blending originally comes out of pragmatism, and the need to overcome seasonal climatic anomalies, but it has become creatively refined. Bad blends repel, like the identical poles of magnets that are forced together. The Chef de Cave is looking to create vectors of flavour, small synergies, and energies of combination. Too often blending is depicted as a potlatch which proceeds haphazardly, crashing the new into the old.

The Chef de Cave is like the Jesuit priest who takes the child and returns the man. He makes decisions at a very early stage of the process, the final elaboration and consequences of which may not become clear for 10 years.

Yields are something of a red herring in Champagne. The prise de mousse boosts the wine's power and intensity. Wines coming off a low yield may end up lumbering, particularly if the time in the cellar is over-extended. Champagne offers drinkers a reflux between refreshment and sapidity: salt, citrus, bubbles, malt. It entices its drinkers to drink again, so it needs to combine delicacy and intensity: delicacy comes from the climate; intensity from the terroir, blending and the prise de mousse. The best wines are mutually dominated by their origins and Champagnisation. Heavy base wines from low yields that are subjected to long lees ageing can be every bit as poor as wines given the minimal term in the cellars.

Champagne Houses understand the relativity of consumption. Most of their drinkers don't go through the Newtonian ritual of the ISO glass before taking a sip. Festivity is Champagne's natural form of expression, but this does not imply a lack of integrity on behalf of the Houses. Just as the handsome architectural facades of Reims hide a subterranean world of hard work, so most blends are the articulation of hard earned preferences. The best wines are an extraordinary expression of intellectual property that can't be revealed by disgorgement dates and the like. Sometimes it's best to wonder at a process, particularly one as beguilingly creative as blending.

 

 

 

 

 

Early Season Leaf Removal - Poni and Kemp

Over the last decade viticulturists have rowed back from Richard Smart’s original hypothesis that improvements to the light environment of vine canopies unanimously benefit the quality and quantity of grape harvests. In particular, it has been shown that the combination of high ambient temperatures and strong UV light can negatively impact grape colouration. In the warmer regions of the World it is possible to get too much of a good thing, and Smart’s original prescriptions are now customised to site and variety.

In separate studies, Dr Belinda Kemp and Professor Stefano Poni have researched the consequences of early season leaf removal. Belinda Kemp found that for Canterbury-grown (NZ) pinot noir, mechanical leaf removal around the clusters 7 days after flowering improved the perception of fruitiness for tasters, whilst simultaneously lowering the negative ascription of “green” characters. to the wine. Similarly,  Poni, working with grenache, sangiovese and graciano, attributes accelerated ripening and a rise in the ratio of desirable tannins and anthocyanins within the must to early season leaf removal.  Moreover, for both Kemp and Poni early season removal conditions the clusters to ultra violet light, and consequently the berries don’t scorch or sunburn. If complete fruit zone leaf removal at veraison improves a wine’s quality, then the chances are that leaf removal at flowering will bring an even greater gain, as long as you are prepared to tolerate some drop in productivity. Removal of basal leaves diminishes the vine’s photosynthetic potential at a crucial stage in the development of both this year’s inflorescences and next year’s buds

Poni has speculated that early leaf removal might bring about physiological changes in the vine that favour the production of phenols, but as yet no mechanism as to how this might work has been forthcoming.  Returning to Smart’s work, it seems logical that at fruit set intra-bunch shading – berry-on-berry light interception - is minimal, whereas closed or veraised clusters only present a fraction of their cumulative berry surface area to direct sunlight.  Strip leaves off early and the clusters expose every bit of their green-skinned-selves to mid-summer’s forceful sun.

 

Pinot at fruit set

 

UK Conditions

Dr Steve Smith estimates that at the equivalent latitude, New Zealand’s vineyards receive 40% more UV than those of France; whilst the regions of Champagne and Burgundy intercept between 15%-25% more light through the growing season than does Southern England. Moreover, differences in seasonal temperature accumulation between England and Continental Europe mean that even in our warmest vineyards, flowering and veraison occur later in the year than they do in Central and Northern France. On the Cote de Nuits, pinot veraises around the beginning of August, when UV levels are high and the sun tall, whilst in England veraison takes place three weeks later, when days are shortening and the sun’s trajectory is much lower. If you want to make a still pinot noir in England then the autumnal sun might just not be the strong radiating source you need.

With this in mind we have adapted the principles of Kemp and Poni to our vineyard. Removing leaves at flowering maximises cluster exposure to sunlight at a time of the year when light levels are at their highest and intra-bunch shading is at its lowest. It gives the grapes every opportunity to build their defences against the light, and we hope these adaptions will ultimately benefit the quality of our wine.

 

Pinot Noir

We have a few different clones - 777, 828, Abel - and some rows of massales.  Between flowering and veraison the clusters are held above the horizontal which means that it’s only necessary to remove the primary leaves (by hand) from the node adjacent and immediately above the second cluster (assuming two clusters per shoot). This has the advantage that the basal nodes retain their leaves which seems prudent given that we spur prune. We also remove the laterals around the clusters, which at flowering are just starting to elongate. In this way we create a window in the canopy just above the clusters. Poni and Kemp experimented with stripping primaries and laterals through nodes 1-6, but in our situation this wouldn’t necessarily increase the exposure of the clusters to direct sunlight. 



Pinot Noir with reflective mulch between the rows

Over the last three years, cluster exposure has been good all the way through to harvest, though this year we have only trimmed the vines once. Ripening grapes in a cool climate requires an active canopy late into the season, and we have taken the decision to retain more laterals this year. Sunlight exposure on the clusters may be slightly less through September than it was previously, but more leaves should potentially mean higher sugars and the prospect of increased hydric stress on our shallow soil. I am happy to eulogise the advantages of a long, cool ripening period, but vines slide inexorably towards entropy and rot under October’s lowering skies.  I am hopeful that the intermittent periods of hydric stress and photon flux experienced over the previous 3 months can cumulatively get us across this year’s finish line.

Acolon

Acolon at veraison with two leaf excision

Acolon’s (blaufrankischxdornfelder) phenology is more precocious than of pinot. Veraison begins in the middle of August, when one hopes the energy in the atmosphere is dedicated to drawing water from the soil rather than depositing it at its surface. Acolon has a different growth habit to pinot noir, it grows straighter with fewer laterals, and berry and cluster weight is twice that of pinot. Retaining leaf area invariably means a tall canopy, so we’ve adopted a policy of green harvesting to one cluster, with 12-13 primary leaves retained per shoot.

We planted the acolon at a high density – 0.6mx1.5m – which is very crowded by UK standards, but rocky soil, spur pruning to four buds and the use of 161-49 throughout seems to have balanced the vines’ vigour. Close planting also keeps our yield per hectare high, so losing the 2^nd cluster doesn’t seem such a hardship.

The latter arrangement reminds me of UC Davis’s Mark Matthews comment about leaf plucking and green harvesting, that “It is the journey and not the destination that matters”. Viticulture is a way of gilding nature’s lily, not creating it. On a vigorous site you can hack at vegetation like the Prince in Sleeping Beauty, but you may never find your Princess.  If you are always fighting the impulses of the vine, the chances are your vines are in the wrong place. To paraphrase Smart: you think you’re in the wine production  business when you are actually in lumber.     

Prelimary discussion on water deficts in a UK limestone vineyard

The soil we have in Rutland looked so much like the Côte de Nuits that I talked myself into planting Pinot Noir: fissured Bajocian oolite with a gravelly 25 cm covering of clay loam. I’d spent so long in the company of Burgundians that I was entirely convinced that the ceiling for wine quality was set by geology, and that limestone is the plinth upon which great reputations are constructed.

And limestone isn’t just my obsession: the stories of Ridge Monte Bello, Bell Hill and Calera have the rock at their heart. For Paul Draper and Josh Jenson, limestone is intrinsically superior to other soil/subsoil/bedrock combinations.

Limestone is not homogeneous. Chalk, Dolomitic, Bajocian, and carboniferous differ in their physical and chemical properties; their hydrology is diverse, and these variances are carried over into the soil and subsoil to which they give rise. The high magnesium content of Dolomitic limestone can lead to water logging, while calcium carbonate from chalk can flocculate the overlying clays, making them free draining. We need to be circumspect when discussing limestone generically.  

Elsewhere I have written about the relationship between hydrology and grape quality in Burgundy; water deficits between 30%-50% of cropevapotranspiration (CET) positively effect gene expression, encouraging ripening rather than vegetative growth, whilst simultaneously increasing the ratio of skins to juice. Smart claims that reduced vigour impacts canopy density, and the resulting improvement in the light environment benefits grape quality, particularly in cool climates. Conversely, too much stress lowers quality and can lead to a cessation in grape development.  Again one needs to be cautious about extending these principles indiscriminately to all varieties and all environments.

The soil and vine combination we have at Rutland references some of the Côte de Nuits’ best sites. Calciferous clay loam, 25-30cm deep over limestone is the referent for many of the Grands and Premiers Crus, but the clay could be illite, kaolinite or montmorillonite; and the limestone fissured, massive, oolite or marble. Notwithstanding this, our soil/subsoil/base rock sequence could be neatly fitted into the Côte de Nuits fractured geology, I’m just not sure where!

Soil Moisture Results

The Sentek monitor gives us five soil moisture readings at soil depths10cm, 20cm, 30cm, 40cm and 50cm. These readings are aggregated together in the graph below.

 

Together the two datasets show how the rate of extractability of water varies with soil morphology. Water is extracted easily from the clay loam soil, and its reserves are rapidly exhausted. With a full canopy, CET on an average Southern English summer’s day is about 4.5 mm of water, but can peak at around 7mm on a hot sunny day if access to water is unlimited. When the soil is “full”, water is extracted unevenly: extraction from the clay loam is three times greater than extraction from the limestone, even when we mulched the soil surface with plastic to stop evaporation. Our vines are eight years old, so we might speculate that root density within the clay loam is much greater than that within the rock, and that the mechanical resistance to root penetration and the kinetic movement of water in response to plant suction is different for the limestone. From “full” to “onset of stress”, the extraction of water from the limestone was a constant, at around 1mm per day.  

The period between 14-07 and 24-07 was a period of high water demand: the sun shone continually; daytime temperatures peaked at around 28C; and night time minimums averaged 15C. With the moisture in the upper horizon of clay loam depleted the limestone became the vine’s principle source of water, so despite the fact that soil moisture was midway between the “full” and “onset of stress levels”, water rationing had already begun. In fact, with extraction constant at 1mm per day the reserves were sufficient to cover another fifteen days without rainfall, and 30 days without significant precipitation is rare for both Rutland and Burgundy.

The distinction between water deficits and stress is a fine one. If water is available for a prolonged period at less than 20% CET, vine metabolism and physiology may become compromised. We began to see shortening shoots and internodes on some of the shallower soils of the vineyard towards the end of the dry spell, when CET was equivalent to 7mm per day, but water extraction was only 1mm per day.

On the Côte de Nuits, certain cultural practices are utilised that might exaggerate vine dependency upon the regulated deficits provided by limestone. High vine density yields high numbers of leaves per hectare, so the water demand will rapidly exhaust the moisture content of the upper layers after rainfall. In Rutland, the difference between the soil being “full” and reliance on the limestone aquifer is approximately 30mm, or about 4-5 days of warm, dry July weather. Moreover, in the context of this year’s Burgundian deluge, it is worth pointing out that once the soil is full, it cannot hold any more water, so intense episodes of precipitation will not adversely slow the return to deficit. Poor weather may impact flowering or the health of the crop, but stress will be established as rapidly after 150mm of rainfall in two days as it will after 50mm over the same period. It is conceivable that vines growing on the Côte de Nuits’ stonier Grands Crus were in water deficit within 4 days of July’s 70mm storm.

Ploughing is frequently used in the Côte de Nuits vineyards, and eradicating roots from the upper soil layers forces the vine to source its water from the deeper limestone aquifers. On a particularly shallow soil like “Le Musigny”, ploughing will restrict the roots almost entirely to the limestone strata, which offers the intriguing possibility of a vineyard almost completely buffered from the vicissitudes of seasonal precipitation, collapsing clichéd climatic thinking about calling a bad vintage, or the hapless reductionism of considering the fate of all the Côte de Nuits vineyards together.

The Rutland data also makes the case for vine age. Our vines were planted in 2005, and mechanical resistance to rooting over the intervening years was still limiting extractability in the spring of 2013. The meagre 1mm of water per day proved insufficient for parts of the vineyard, even when the vine shoots were at the 10-12 leaf stage. In all probability, our roots will further explore the limestone over the next decade or so, at which point they should maintain the vine at a beneficial level of water deficit rather than at the current potentially stressful level of extraction. The same is true for the Côte de Nuits, and this is recognised in AC stipulations about vine age.

Climatic differences between Rutland and the Cote de Nuits make comparison complicated. CET rates are not only higher in Burgundy, but phenology is more advanced. Moderate water stress at veraison encourages carbohydrate partitioning to the fruit, and in Burgundy this pivotal growth stage coincides with the warmest part of the year, whereas in Rutland CET rates are declining by the time verasion is reached. Post-veraison, water deficits also accelerate the ripening process, and again this is less likely in Rutland through late September and October. All this points to the delicate balance that exists on the Cote de Nuits between geology, climate and viticultural practice; just having limestone isn’t enough: leaf area, vine age, ploughing and climatic patterns all converge advantageously on the best sites.

I will post again at the end of the season on whether the use of vigorous grasses and water exclusion in Rutland can help overcome the disadvantages of a sluggish phenology.

Terroir and the Côte de Nuits Part 2: Hydric Stress and Pinot Noir

 

 

Bill Blatch’s excellent Bordeaux vintage report of 2010 gave a fascinating account of the vagaries of Bordeaux’s weather through the spring, summer, autumn and winter. The vineyards were, by varying degrees, subjected to heat, drought and deluge, but at the end of all the climatic involutions, the vintage is one of “embarrassingly good quality”.  In 2009, the ripening curve for both Cabernet and Merlot had been smooth and predictable, but in 2010 the tracks of decaying hurricanes, and the switch from El Niño to La Niña mid-summer, reacquainted the Bordelaise with the anxieties of grape growing in the mid-latitudes. Autumnal showers and a burst of unseasonal warmth in October finally blunted the sword that had hung threateningly over the region since high-summer. It will be fascinating to follow the development of this tannic vintage, both in terms of the absolute quality achieved by the very top estates, and its consistency across appellation boundaries. Really great claret vintages attain an imperishable level of perfection, and their finest wines gather within themselves, uniquely it seems, the silty scent of time’s gentle motion. 

 One of the consequences of climate change is, we are told, more weather, when “weather” is understood as a measure of deviation from climatic means. Climate and weather are very different and, as Bill Blatch’s commentary makes clear, at close quarters the latter’s progress can appear both causal and chaotic. Those who still think that the warming trend in global temperatures will be a gentle notching-up of just one climatic variable are in for a shock.

It is against the shifting backdrop of weather that “Terroir and the Côte de Nuits” is intended to be read. The article makes a strong case, I hope, for the role soil composition plays in buffering the vines against the uncertainties of weather…..”quantifying over individual cloud bursts and droughts, and delivering the vines into a realm, that at root level at least, more closely resembles the smooth curves and plotted trends of climatic means.”

Soil composition and depth show significant variation along the Côte de Nuits, but according to Seguin and Gadille, similarities do exist within appellation hierarchies.  In the Grands Crus and better Premiers Crus, the limestone bedrock is covered by an average 40-50 cm of clay, silt, sand and gravel, and the high levels of calcium within the soil aid drainage and root colonisation. Thus, while the bulk water storage capacity for these soils maybe as low as 50mm for some vineyards, these reserves are readily available to the plant. Supplemental to this, the soil’s load of porous stones together with the permeable bedrock, provide another water source that the vines can draw upon during times of drought. We need to remind ourselves that water movement can be multi-directional within certain soils.

Many researchers have explored vinifera’s response to stress, and there is general recognition of vines’ inherent tolerance of water deficits. Vine water loss is not a constant. Each plant species has its own evapotranspiration coefficient, and for vines the peak period of water loss is likely to coincide with mid-summer, when temperatures and solar irradiance reach their respective zeniths.  In Burgundy, the monthly rate of evapotranspiration is at its highest in July, when it is equivalent to about 120mm of water. For June and August, the months either side of this peak, the value of evapotranspiration (ET) is approximately 100mm of water. The significance of these values becomes more apparent when we compare them with the rainfall means for the corresponding months.

 

Table 1

	June	July	August
ET	100mm	120mm	100mm
Precipitation(mean)	60mm	54mm	55mm
Precipitation as % of ET	60%	45%	55%

 

Plant water status is the difference between a vine’s water need (ET rate) and the water that is available through its root system. Soils with a high water storage capacity can buffer the vine from stress, as will a water table that is within easy reach of the roots. Both possibilities are met with on the Côte de Nuits, and when they occur, the wines they produce are most likely sold under the generic Bourgogne label. Where the vine roots have more limited access to water – the shallower soils of the Premiers and Grands Crus vineyards – stress occurs earlier in the season, and recurs more quickly after rains.

The effect of hydric stress upon the vine depends both on its intensity and the point at which it is exerted along the ripening curve. Experiments conducted with irrigation have found that the consequences of excessive stress before fruit set are best avoided: flowering may be compromised, and the vine might only develop a limited canopy that is insufficient for crop ripening.  Between fruit set and harvest, however, if precipitation only replenishes at a rate equivalent to 30%-50% of ET, then the quality of black grapes is generally improved. The benefits are physiological, inasmuch as berry size is reduced and bunch exposure improved, but there is also a hormonal impetus towards more rapid colour change and the preferential partitioning of carbohydrate into the fruit. For those interested, the unequivocally titled “Water deficits accelerate ripening and induce changes in gene expression regulating flavonoid biosynthesis in grape berries” (Castellarin et al, Planta 2007) provides further reading.  Importantly, hydric stress induces no benefits if precipitation is greater than 60% of the ET value, or if drought occurs and values for precipitation fall below 20% of ET.

How these scenarios play out on the Côte de Nuits is illustrated by table 1. When set out next to each other, we can see that through the critical pre and post-veraison months of July and August values for precipitation and ET lie just at the humid threshold of inducting beneficial stress. The table also highlights what Cornelius Van Leeuwen has called “the vintage effect”: if rainfall in July and August was +15mm above the mean, which is well within the standard deviation for the region, then the level of hydric stress (≥60%) would be insufficient to bring about the crop benefits outlined above. In addition to “the vintage effect”, we can also identify “a terroir effect”: vines grown on soils with low bulk storage capacities will be subjected to stress more frequently than vines grown on deeper and more humid soils, whilst the close proximity of porous limestone, either as bedrock or fragments, will limit the incidence of severe water deficit.

An understanding of hydric stress also helps to explain an apparent anomaly that exists between two of the world’s coolest climates: Southern England and Otago. Seasonal heat summation for the two regions is similar, 900-1000 growing degree days, but where Otago attains 14% of alcohol in its Pinot Noir, England regularly struggles to achieve the minimal level of concentration that is necessary for the production of sparkling wine. The month that precedes veraison in the UK’s maritime climate is not July (as in Burgundy), but August, when irradiance, if not temperature is falling away from its high-summer maximum. As a consequence, the ET rate is equivalent to about 70mm of water, or, if you prefer, equal to the mean value of August precipitation. By contrast, Pinot reaches veraison earlier in Otago, and through the months of January and February ET, under the luminous alpine sun, can be as high as 200mm, with precipitation trailing in at a meagre 30mm for both months. In most years, Otago needs irrigation to limit stress, whilst the UK rarely benefits from the (much needed) changes in carbohydrate partitioning and berry morphology that limited hydric stress might confer. In comparison with Southern England, Champagne is significantly warmer through the months May-August and drier across July-August-September. The convergence between Champagne’s climate and its thin chalk soils is, in most years (or else in reserve wine), sufficient to induce some stress into its vines, adding an extra element of concentration, and, arguably, an elevation in autolysis.   

There is an argument, a very good argument, that science lacks the subtlety and nuance to properly evaluate the quality descriptions we give to wine. I believe we can be sympathetic to this point of view, without accepting that we need three separate and exclusive disciplines called enology, viticulture and sensory evaluation. How we might advantageously fit these three elements together has been the real subject matter of my discussions of terroir.

The 1855 Classification is the Antithesis of the French Concept of Terroir

1887 Eiffel began construction on his Tower, completing it for the opening of the World Trade Fair in 1889. The Tower was a conceived as a monument to the Revolution of 1789, an edifice to the Republic’s virility in the hundred years that followed the regicide of Louis XVI. The structure was meant to be temporary.

From the top of the Tower a tourist might think they are at the centre of the City. Le Louvre, l’Etoile, la Défense are all visible, but they are diminished by the perspective. Roads and boulevards connect one destination with another, but the people for whom Paris is home, those that give the City its life, are lost. Elevation creates an illusion of structure, hierarchy and centricity, when the Eiffel Tower is actually located in the 7^th arrondissement. The representation of Paris by the Eiffel Tower is, in effect, hyperbolic, because its dimensions take it beyond ordinary city life. At 320m, the tower dominates and imposes an erroneous order on a City that exists, for Parisians, at street level. 

The 1855 classement had similarly vainglorious beginnings. It was contrived for the Universal Exhibition of the same year, and categorized the wines of the Médoc according to price. The Médoc has a long history of wine production, but it was the draining of the marshes by Dutch engineers in the 17^th Century that established the pattern of 19^th Century land use. In comparison to Burgundy, where the classification had filtered down through 2000 years of unbroken cultivation, the Médoc was, and is, a fledgling region. Neither did the Médoc benefit from the attentions of the Cistercians, who through their intertwining of viticulture and religious devotion developed a deep receptivity and openness to the impulses of flavour and texture that flowed from their wines: - the subtle prompts that suggested walls and intricate methods of nurture. Terroir has its origins in the submission of man and nature to one another.

We can speculate that the motivations of the Médocaine may have been more mercantile than those of the Cistercians, but this is a moot point if the divisions between the Médoc’s estates draw upon the same interactions of proximity and tenderness. Terroir is not a rigid set of prescriptions; it is a synergy that develops from the very fluid relations between man, vine and environment. The foundations of terroir lie in human sensibility and partiality, and the boundaries between what is “objective” and what is “subjective” become blurred. Inasmuch as terroir is the consequence of experiment, its methodology follows an unusually tender empirical direction.

The opacity of terroir to definition has led to the term’s extension. Nowadays everybody has terroir, or at least that appears to be the claim. Twenty years ago, Chateau Palmer’s owner, Peter Sichel, advised that only a fraction of Bordeaux’s vineyards showed the benefits of terroir, and urged parsimony in the terms application. At around the same time, many New World growers rejected the concept, though now they embrace it. The epigrammatic “sense of place” means that at the start of the 21^st Century terroir reads like a postcode.

Ubiquity may have weakened terroir, but this doesn’t prevent us from invoking its spirit. As discussed, Burgundian’s attribution of terroir was not dramatic; it took two millennia for “le Chambertin” and “Clos de la Roche” to emerge out of the rubble of limestone fragments. Moreover, even within Burgundy arguments as to Meursault-Perrières 1er Cru status, the homogeneity of Clos Vougeot, or the underperformance of La Romanée persist. The essential fluidity of the interactions that underpin terroir means the term can never be definitive.  Terroir is a way of being; it demands proximity, devotion and love, and the Côte d’Or is, arguably, the finest exemplar of these traits in a vitcultural setting.

Through the prism of the Côte d'Or the 1855 classement looks expedient. Wine is inseparable from commerce, but in positing a price-based classification the process of ordering the Médoc’s vineyards according to their intrinsic wine values became skewed. The Eiffel Tower re-configured Paris to outsiders; it became the signifier of Paris; a monument to monuments, if you like. Similarly, the 1855 classement imposed its own organization upon the vineyards of the Médoc that, overtime, proved hyperbolic; that is, it gained an importance and significance over and above the vitcultural reality it sought to represent. The structuring and division of the vineyards of the Côte de Nuits into generic, village, premier and grand crus seems to adhere to the principle of submission to nature in a way that the 1855 classement doesn’t. This is not to say that the classement is the antithesis of terroir - some hedonic link between wine quality and price was already established in 1855 - rather that the qualitative relationships that existed between man, vine and the environment were, from that point on, subjected to other influences that sought to dominate. The New Testament was wrong: once the merchants are in the temple you can never get them out!

The Eiffel Tower encouraged the building of other towers elsewhere, just as the 1855 classement has hatched facsimiles of itself in other wine regions. The urge for ordering and classification can be a useful trait, but I question its worth in regions like Montalcino (Tim Atkin MW) and New Zealand (Matthew Jukes). The lesson of Burgundy is that terroir is the discovery of engaged and devoted generations, not the opinions of individuals who, no matter how well intentioned, are distanced from the experience of production.  The Cistercians' response to nature was nurture. Only by looking attentively did they get to see things so clearly.

 

 http://t.co/88ZUXeIvBt @winekat's version

 

(Thanks to Elaine Brown, David Clark, and Monty Waldin for some of the ideas expressed above. I met them after the MW, and would have written a different essay if I'd been asked the same question back in 1999)