December newsletter
Les Caves Newsletter - early December
As the year disappears down the vortex and you’ve got ice on your upper slopes, tinsel in your tonsils and all you can think a la Kurtz is “The holly! The holly!” you’ll be glad that the elves of Les Caves de Pyrene have been continuing to ransack goodies from our existing growers and as well as unearthing lots of lovely new things in Santa’s grotto. A few teasers to get the juices flowing. (All the following wines will be in early next year).
From Olivier Cousin (aka the wild man of Anjou), a Pur Breton and a Gamay, two new wines from Nicolas Reau, also in Anjou, a fabulous Terret Gris from Clos Fantine, an elegant Condrieu and St Joseph from Stephane Otheguy, a juicy table wine from Domaine du Matin Calme in the Roussillon and a couple of wines from Stephane Bernaudeau. We will also be pleased to welcome back three cuvees from Elian da Ros and various bits and pieces from Dard et Ribo.
Shootout at the Corral Nou - Colourful Collioure
Bruno was a mushroom merchant in Brittany, and then in Burgundy, evidently a truly fun guy to be with. Boom-boom. He discovered a love of and fascination for wine from his early youth and decided to enrol in a wine-making and viticulture course in Beaune. He then worked for nine months with Frederic Cossard of Domaine Chassorney in Saint-Romain (where biodynamic farming is used), it was here that he really learnt the art of wine-making (and wine-drinking, he adds with a twinkle).
Fast forward and journey to the south of the south where the spur of the Pyrenees meets the Mediterranean on the Cote Vermeille/ Costa Vermella (if you’re feeling Catalan), a land of rock, vine and not much else (except for the fearsome tramontana that blasts relentlessly out of the north). The vertiginous vineyards that tumble dramatically towards the azure Mediterranean are surrounded by a wild countryside of stunning colours and sheer luminosity, one that captured the imaginations – and depicted on the canvasses - of such great Fauvists as Matisse , Derain and Dufy.
Bruno’s four hectare estate comprises Grenache and Carignan vines on black schists. This is extreme viticulture, one to be undertaken by human mules only. He makes an assortment of cuvees in white and red, most notably Collioure Corral Nou (the new sheepfold) from 60-80 year old vines. A fruity wine with savoury tones Corral Nou is whole bunch-wild yeast ferment in wooden vats of 26 hl . Pigeage and remontage is according the nature of the vintage, but extraction is not sought. The wine spends seven months in used barrique before release. Medium-red in colour the immediate aromas remind one of confit fruits and liquorice but semi-sauvage leathery/bacon notes are also evident. The warmth in the mouth is offset by tonic freshness, savoury-herbal flavours of wild thyme and even a certain saltiness.
Il Templare – Tus-can do
Montenidoli may be Elisabetta Fagiuoli, but she prefers to claim that “the winemaker is ‘the land of Montenidoli”, and that she is merely the ’nurse’ or midwife.
The estate itself was founded in 1965 when Elisabetta and Sergio purchased the vineyard and is located between Florence and Siena, facing San Gimignano. From here you can enjoy the view down the valley, and up to the mountains of Chianti Classico, and even beyond, to the Appenines that form the backbone of the Italian Peninsula. About five million years ago, the valley where Montenidoli is located was covered by the sea, which deposited white sandy marine sediments on the porous rocks of the Triassic( formed 250 million years ago). The waters receded, leaving fossil-rich land which is also rich in carbonates and mineral salts, and perfectly suited to the production of white wines.
The vineyards of Montenidoli are situated in two hundered hectares of woodlands on the east-facing slopes of the ‘Poggio del Commune’. The vines are laid out in the ritocchino pattern, perpendicular to the slopes, following the lay of the streambeds that formed on the hills during the Pliocene. Yields are low.
The light, the primary source of energy life, is clear and extraordinary here, and the perfectly clean air carries the essences and aromas of the woodlands into the vineyards. Elisabetta and Sergio Fagiuoli came to Montenidoli in 1965, enticed there by the beauty of the 13th century paintings here,: the gold-backed Madonnas with child” works that broadcast a unique and admirable message to the world.”. Sergio was a teacher(he and Elisabetta would take in children with special needs to look after at their home during summer holidays. Elisabetta had the land in her blood, from being brought up in a family that cultivated vines and olive trees in Custoza since the 1700’s, and after spending her youth wandering the vineyards of Valpolicella. When they arrived the vineyard was in total disrepair. They began by breaking up the earth to create humus. They raised earthworms, and bred rabbits for their manure. The estate is farmed on a strictly organic/biodynamic basis and Montenidoli’s vines are planted on uncontaminated soils. “These soils have been farmed organically/biodynamically for centuries”. Elisabetta says, and she adds, “Sulphur and copper are the only substances that we use to treat infection, and only if absolutely necessary, because we find sunlight and clean air to be the best medicine to make our vines healthy and resistant to disease and bad weather”.
Il Templare, from a blend 70% Vernaccia di San Gimignano, 20% Trebbiano Gentile, 10% Malvasia Bianca, is made from the free-run juice of destemmed grapes fermented with natural yeasts in wooden barrels similar to the little casks used in Tuscany since antiquity. The wine derives its name from the fact it may have been used for Holy Mass by the Knights Templar who resided at Montenidoli long ago( who only took communion with the wines issued from the land of San Gimignano).
A golden white with a rich bouquet Il Templare reveals greenish accents and gunflint supported by bright acidity and bitter white pear, green plum, herbs (vermouth) and spice. On the palate ample berry fruit, a honeyed, almost lanolin texture supported by savoury notes and a languid minerality that flows into a clean peppery finish. Amazing to think this wine is from 2003, a notoriously warm vintage in Tuscany.
This would work well with grilled tuna or swordfish.
A digression concerning bloggers and technology
Immured in my snow palace (read garret) during the past week I’ve been idly skimming the internet and whilst I’ve come across several well-constructed sites with thoughtful, intelligent commentary, so much writing, I’m afraid to say, is mere white noise (the clogosphere) designed to fill a vacuum. Not counting the ubiquitous cybersludge this writing is rarely well articulated, being snippets and sound lollipops, a gallimaufry of juvenilia, truisms and nostrums.
Before I launch into spittle-mouthed invective, let’s give credit where it’s due. Some journalists and writers flourish with the freedom of expression conferred by a blog. With one bound they may be free of the sniping editor who has no understanding or sympathy for the subject they are (badly) paid to opine about and then confines their observations to a paltry number of words. I admire those who write skilfully or with passion, humour and understanding.
“Today we are beginning to notice that the new media are not just mechanical gimmicks for creating worlds of illusion, but new languages with new and unique powers of expression.”
Marshall McLuhan (presciently)
I confess I am bored by the Panglossian exaltation of the various new media. The press blitherings about twitterers, for example, were neatly skewered by The Guardian in their recent April fool. “Novelty?” opined Frederick Lemaitre in Marcel Carné’s Les Enfants du Paradis, “It’s as old as the world itself”. I’ve been reading one volume of Virginia Woolf’s letters; she was a prolific scribbler - and I’m not talking frivolous billet-doux - but highly wrought literary pieces, presumably in the rafts of spare time when she wasn’t writing The Waves or To The Lighthouse. In the 1920s people would write letters with the same frequency as today they would text, twitter or e-mail – but what a difference… Modern written communication is functional (sometimes barely that) to say the least, often illiterate, without rhetorical beauty, a logorrhoea of diarised nerdlings rather than developed argument. Language is, or has the potential to be, an exquisite tool for expressing truths. We increasingly write as we speak and we don’t speak that well: words are disposable, tossed to the four winds. One expects writers to talk charismatically, wrangle fluently, to make elegant distinctions, harness aphorism and reveal subtle and remarkable ideas; however, it is only natural that that expectation will not be realised as they dwell, as it were, in privacy with their muse and spend time softening and polishing language into shiny affluence.
Dr Johnson expressed it well:
A Transition from an Author’s Books to his Conversation, is too often like an Entrance into a large City, after a distant Prospect. Remotely, we see nothing but Spires of Temples, and Turrets of Palaces, and imagine it to be the Residence of Splendour, Grandeur and Magnificence; but when we have passed the Gates, we find it perplexed with narrow Passages, disgraced with despicable Cottages, embarrassed with Obstructions , and clouded with Smoke.
Bearing Johnson’s image in mind we’ve seen a distinct move in recent years towards what I call “gizmoidal writing”. William Boyd observed that the advent of the word processor changed the way people wrote. One was able to shift text around and bolt ideas together, something that may not have happened with such frequency and deliberation were one writing long-hand. The medium, if not the message, creates its own style parameters. E-mail, for example, increased the frequency of written traffic but within that form sentences became pared down to phrases, then phrases to words and words themselves are thieved by symbols and abbreviations. Sending a message became its own lazy gratification, the written equivalent of a grunt of affirmation. Technology became the mother of the thought and the thought was a stripling. The message as the mediocre.
Technical progress, which for centuries grew by devouring nature, proceeds at the expense of culture and man himself. Having always in the past been a participant, or even a maker, of history, man is today furiously swept along by technical progress, whose stormy successes are contributing to a numbing of the person.
Our capacity for concentration and deep inner contemplation, which we are already forfeiting, is being overwhelmed by a tidal wave of inordinate superficial information. This avalanche leaves less and less room for spirituality, so that may have lost it altogether; less and less room for love not confined to sexual attraction alone. More and more, man is transformed from a cultural-historical type to a ‘technogenic’ type. This deep-seated psychological shift threatens humanity with the loss of its very self.
Alexander Solzhenitsyn - The Wall Street Journal 1999
The computer as an instrument can teach, it can illuminate, yes, it can even inspire. But it can do so only to the extent that humans are determined to use it to those ends. Otherwise, it is merely circuitry in a box. The media celebrate the liberating value of technology, particularly the internet. With freedom comes responsibility; without restriction there is the opportunity for abuse, without censorship there is pornography and fanaticism.
Blogging attracts more than its fair share of extremists. The creation of a forum for response and counter-response and the fundamental freedom to express personal views leads to an assortment of vicious kings of nincompoops, princes of superficiality and anti-artists, to parade their slovenly invective-hurling literary tantrums in playgrounds of lyrical terrorism. They speak an infinite deal of nothing. A more odious collection of spleen-tossed weasels, mewling, boil-brained clotpoles, cankerous beetle-headed maltworms and lumpish motley-minded joltheads never stirred a bigger cauldron of vile racism and ignorant prejudice. The argument normally advanced is that it is better for these people to rant and peddle their propaganda in the same way that it is better to know where in the room the wasp is; however, the inarticulate, barely expressed rage is part of the problem for the inability to produce rational thought leads to incendiary drivel which in turn incites violence. There is a big difference between passionate pamphleteering and the inchoate ramblings of someone who wants their voice to heard for the sake of it.
The medium in this case acts as a viral conduit for ugliness. One thing leads to another. The more you read such rantings the more you feel impelled to reply in kind. Sometimes, the forum is more like a bearpit.
Recently, I read a contentious review from a very well-known restaurant blogger. His representation of the evening was flatly contradicted by several other accounts of the same events. From objective reviewer to egoic, misanthropic, unreliable narrator. Those in the business of making licentious pronouncements need to face up to criticism of their own methods. When a couple of people ventured to disagree with his views there was a chorus of disapproval from his claque of supporters. A blog is someone’s argumental fiefdom; once the review is written, no matter how partial and actively misleading (and this was) it is out there festering.
This is not crabbed fogeyism and don’t get me wrong; I don’t want to turn back the tide of progress and I think the networking possibilities are wonderful. My laptop dwells permanently on my lap and I’m addicted to my crackberry with the best of them. It strikes me, however, that we communicate more and more about less and less. As we filter experience through the various media, our imagination, and then our language, becomes more impoverished as it is not being employed in a muscular fashion. We believe that technology can free us (remember Arbeit machts frei?), that it has the endless capacity to refresh our lives. We want it to do more and more for us. Isaac Schoenberg once remarked, with a twinkle, about television: “Well, gentlemen, you have now invented the biggest time-waster of all time. Use it well”. We wrongly equate technology with progress. We ourselves need to progress if we are to adapt to the challenges that technology brings.
As one of the characters says in The Picture of Dorian Gray: “We all take such pains to over-educate ourselves. In the wild struggle for existence, we want to have something that endures, and so fill our minds with rubbish and facts, in the silly hope of keeping our place.”
Age shall wither them nor sulphur stale their infinite variety
Does natural wine age? Surprisingly, a lot better than Dorian Gray’s portrait. One assumption doing the rounds amongst the test tuberati is that the absence of sulphur to protect the wines automatically means that everything is rank, sour and oxidised, dying from the moment of bottling. You only have to taste the wines to scotch this fallacy. The supposition invariably ignores what is in the wine itself. More sensible to say that some wines are predisposed to age, some may age in spite of themselves and some may require a sell-by date on the label. Despite what many journalists think, however, there is plenty of methodology underpinning the madness of natural wine with different vignerons work in their own individual way in the vineyard and the winery to achieve their ends.
Wines don’t need sulphur to prevent collapse. The more matter in the grapes, the longer the elevage, the greater the extraction, the lower the PH, the greater the ageing potential. There are myriad chemical reactions going on at a micro level that we can barely understand. I always adduce as an example wines from certain of our growers, that according to some drinkers, are “reduced beyond belief”; “riddled with mercaptans and VA”, “not fit for human consumption”. Well, you would pour them down the drain, wouldn’t you? In fact, I carafed them and left them for a few days and the result was amazing. Gone were the stinky aromas, the VA had dissipated and the wine had developed a fruity freshness. An open bottle – with five days exposure to oxygen? Obviously, this is not ideal if you want it for a dinner party that night or in a restaurant on the same day, but the point is that the logic declared the wine dead, and it self-defibrillated.
These are isolated examples for wines is usually made to a purpose: Lapierre’s Beaujolais Nouveau was never intended to be an epic wine, but fulfils its brief of being a fun, chillable, thirst-quenching wine, whilst a Vin Jaune from Ganevat or a Brunello Riserva from Il Paradiso di Manfredi starts its slow journey with about seven years under the hood and with some way to go before its complex component parts harmonise, and yet all of the wines are natural, linked by low/zero intervention regimes in the vineyard and winery.
Ageing potential of some of our natural wines
*To be drunk young – cool carbo wines (closed ferment, dry ice, tank ). These are the nouveau style fruit bombs – Foulards Rouges, Raisins Gaulois, Scarabee, Maxime Magnon, Poignee des Raisins, J’en veut, Ganevat, Langlore, Crozes « Printemps », Dard et Ribo, all Pet Nats…
*To age no longer than 2- 3 years – may be carbo, semi-carbo or trad, but fruit to the fore. Morgon Classique Foillard, some Gramenon from a light vintage, Bout du Monde wines, Duchene, COS Frappato, most Puzelat reds, Morantin, Saumur-Champigny, Roches-Neuves, Chahut et Prodiges, Grolleau Cousin, Breton Dilettante, Souteronne & Syrah, Romaneaux, Barberas from Bera
*To age 3-5 - more elevage, more colour and a hint of tannin. Dard Crozes & Saint-Jo (whites and reds), Romaneaux-Destezet St Jo, Ganevat Poulsard and Pinot, Claude Courtois reds and whites.
*To age 5 -7 – Usually from older vines, traditional ferment in cement or old barrel. Matassa red, Houillon red, white wines with skin contact (Princic, Zampaglione, Barranco Oscuro), traditional ferment red wines such as Lo Vielh, Truffieres, Foulaquier Granit, Faugeres tradition Clos Fantine, most Chenin, Pierre Frick, Jean-Baptiste Senat
*To age 7 – 10 – Reds with tannic structure, long elevage in vat or barrel or made on the lees Brouilly Lapalu, mid cuvees of Breton, Domaine Hauvette, Navarre St Chinian, Massa Vecchia, Faugeres Jadis & Valiniere, Chenin fermented and aged in barrel (Courault, Pithon-Paille)
*10-15 - Domaine Hauvette, Valentini, Verdicchio San Lorenzo, Massa Vecchia, Marginale, Paolo Bea, top Barbera from Trinchero
*15- 25 – Riserva wines from Roagna, Il Paradiso di Manfredi, top cuvees of Breton
*To age 30 years plus – Vin Jaune and oxidative wines from Jura and Sicily, Musar…
There are also those naughty wines that may go one way or the other, where intuition dictates that the apparently flimsy structure will only glue the fruit together for a year or two tops, but then, when one finds a bottle lodged in the recesses of the cellar with some age on it, the genie therein still possesses a full set of gnashers.
Supermarket sweepings
The recent modest proposal that supermarkets may have to sell wine at cost price should be reassuring, but if you crunch the numbers the so-called Asda formula is meaningless. The idea is that the minimum cost of a bottle of booze should be duty plus vat. Does anybody really believe that winemakers can make the beer, put it into bottles and deliver it? Then the supermarket staff can unpack it and put it on the shelves - FOR NOTHING? In this looking glass world anything is possible perhaps. But the fact is the cost of the booze itself has not been taken into account – just the taxes. Selling wine at cost price or even 10% above won’t make you any profit but will make you a lot cheaper than your competitors which has always presumably been the point of deep discounting and presumably why supermarkets can demand that growers and companies pay them vast sums to stock their wines.
An alternative suggestion is introduce a minimum charge per unit. This approach is the classic case of attacking the symptoms rather than the causes of binge drinking and is an additional punitive tax for consumers. I don’t believe in cheap alcohol, but I don’t believe in reactive taxation either.
So what is to be done? Governments and their civil services have been racking their brains for decades. I think simply that supermarkets should be brought into the economic reality of the rest of the wine world. The formula should be recalibrated so that the minimum charge for a bottle of wine should be the cost of the wine plus duty and vat plus. There should be no discounts or promotional lubrication.
Brancott - a Sauvignon by any other name
“We were the first to plant and create the world’s first Marlborough Sauvignon” so the puff goes. Am I the only person to think the advert for Re-Brandcott (sic) is superlatively bad? Maybe that’s the intention. To me Brancott will be forever Montana, just as when the Artist Formerly Known as Prince changed his name I still called him Prince. They are trying to bamboozle us into believing this is a traditional estate so what do they do? Create a half-assed CGI effect of vineyards spontaneously sprouting up from bare land, because that’s the way it sort of happens and nothing reeks of pure tradition like an instantly propagated 1000 ha vineyard. I was reminded of the massed armies of orcs seeming to multiply at will in Peter Jackson’s Return of the King. Actually, that would have been better as an advert. If Pernod Ricard really wanted to alter the name of one of their brands I would venture to suggest they begin with their Argentinean winery called Colon.