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wordonthegrapevine

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For many years, I’ve bemoaned the unhelpful charac

For many years, I’ve bemoaned the unhelpful characterisation of Champagne’s grand marques as anachronistic, stodgy, and worst of all, industrial. Simultaneously, I’ve tried to illuminate the innovative and oftentimes courageous work of the region’s very best houses.

Most notably, I’ve closely documented recent releases at @champagne_billecart_salmon , where the team are elevating the estate’s wines to new heights: refining fruit contracts with growers across 300 hectares; managing a gargantuan barrel programme; increasing reserve wine in the 2020-base Le Réserve to 71%, including 35% from a perpetual reserve; extending lees ageing from 38 months in base 18 to 50 months in base 20; and inaugurating a new ‘nursery’ housing 50 tailored liqueurs for different cuvées and formats. The result is a series of increasingly impressive, consistent and characterful wines.

The merits of such exacting work are instructive in a region increasingly marked by faulty and compromised wines from both new and established growers, ranging from Lamblot and Prévost to Gaspard and Emmanuel Brochet. Ironically, these faults obscure the very terroir so often presented as the sole pursuit of many growers. In his latest report, @kristaps_karklins courageously highlights the prominence of both volatile acidity and volatile phenols associated with Brettanomyces spoilage, potentially resulting from poor vineyard management; ideological opposition to sulphites; long, difficult fermentations; poorly maintained second-hand barrels; inadequate hygiene; poor oxygen management at bottling and disgorgement; and insufficient routine analysis for volatile phenols.

Whilst the best growers continue producing some of Champagne’s most compelling wines, the unrestrained grower bonanza has become an unpredictable affair. And, following a period of impoverishing abandonment, in which metropolitan sommeliers and hip commentators snubbed grand marques, we are overdue a renaissance of indiscriminate enjoyment and greater curiosity, judging wines by finished quality not scarcity or scale.

#growerchampagne #billecartsalmon #champagne

Following a first dud bottle, the second 1997 @rid

Following a first dud bottle, the second 1997 @ridgevineyards Santa Cruz Mountains Merlot was utterly delicious, belying almost thirty years in bottle and reminding us all why it’s prudent to buy aged Ridge at every opportunity.

The wine was bursting with sandalwood, spice and, just like the 1997 Geyserville, that textbook Draper perfume—defined in part by a meticulous and considered barrel programme—with a deep, rich palate full of black fruit, velvety tannins, and a preserving and freshening acidity.

Thanks @davidlobe.wine for your inimitable generosity!

#ridgewine #ridgevineyards #napawine

I’ve been buying a ton of Bordeaux recently in a d

I’ve been buying a ton of Bordeaux recently in a desperate attempt to correct the worst of my wine collecting offences, so it was pleasant to open this 2018 @dugatpy Gevrey-Chambertin Coeur de Roy recently, which swiftly reminded me why great Burgundy is so irresistible and unrivalled!

Silky, sumptuous and sweet, this bottle has plenty up front with tons of ripe red fruit and a multidimensional palate full of lively acid and plush tannins to back it all up. This mere communal wine renders any such hierarchy obsolete, it’s strikingly layered and textural, and more than deserving its ‘baby Charmes’ moniker awarded to it by William Kelley!

#burgundylover #winegeek #finewine

As much as I enjoyed this 2008 Produttori del Barb

As much as I enjoyed this 2008 Produttori del Barbaresco Asili—now softened with age and showing brooding, spicy red fruits—I can’t help wondering how much more great Barbaresco there might be if these growers went it alone, or had history afforded independence a little sooner.

When Domizio Cavazza founded the Cantine Sociali di Barbaresco in 1984, there was no market for local wines; even the most enterprising producers had only just begun selling further afield. After the cooperative closed in the 1920s, Don Fiorino Marengo arrived in 1958 and founded the Produttori with nineteen farmers, believing he could emancipate people from poverty and ‘deep-rooted individualism’.

The first vintage was made in the priest’s house, and even then, profits were greater than had been earned selling grapes. From then, the group organised itself, offering members enological, viticultural, and administrative support, helping expand the enterprise and entice more growers. By the 1980s, it was recording large profits, and since the 1990s has achieved worldwide popularity, including listings in large retail stores.

Today, it totals 54 growers with more than 120ha producing 650,000 bottles annually. Members are paid upfront based on ‘fruit quality’ and excess profits are divided equally. In the winery, production is homogeneous; inoculated 30°c fermentations in steel with 28-day skin contact and ageing in 25-50hl oak barrels for at least 30 months.

All this means not only are growers disincentivised from going it alone or selling fruit to those who have, but the finished wines are cautiously pedestrian, lacking the sort of kaleidoscopic vitality which defines truly fine wine, and would otherwise be possible from such terroir shared by so many growers. Meanwhile, others are making great wine; the likes of Busso, Fletcher, the Sobrinos, Baldo, Cigliuti, and Paitin are producing singular, soulful wines towering above these, despite what some critics say.

Whilst these are decent wines for bigger markets, I do hope for fine wines’ sake we see more growers going it alone, who knows what wonders we might drink in future!

#barbaresco #barolo #nebbiolo #winegeeks

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