Terroir & Wine - Making It Real
“Whatever people in general do not understand, they are always prepared to dislike; the incomprehensible is always the obnoxious.”
~Letitia E. Landon, author (1802-1838)
Earlier this year we put together a tasting of real wine, inviting small independent growers from France and Italy to display and discuss their wares. Few trade tastings have a focus so we decided to look for a specific strong theme. All the growers seemed to be very much “growers” rather than “winemakers”. They would rather talk about the particularity of their region and their vineyards than discuss vinification techniques. They were all to a man and woman adamant about promoting biodiversity, all of them eschewed chemical treatments in the vineyard and many were active in various organic and biodynamic movements. To call them organic growers, however, would not be strictly accurate - “organic” has become a vacant political buzzword and the intellectual property of bureaucratic agencies - without proper certification, even if they were purer than pure and holier than thou, the term wouldn�t legally stick. Besides, the word organic diminished rather than elevated the enterprise in question; organic is a proscriptive term; most of the growers in question were considerably more proactive in the vineyard with sustainable methodologies promoting biodiversity. Several were working en biodynamie. But then biodynamics is a complex philosophy from which even its most ardent proponents tend to cherry-pick certain aspects.
The word “natural” was bandied about. Natural wines - Natural is an airy-fairy term used willy-nilly in crass marketing campaigns - such as “natural shampoo”. Eventually, we settled on the expression “real wine” which had both positive connotations, but also made the important distinction between the products that we were showing and standardised, over-manipulated wines.
So what is Real Wine? In one sense Real Wine is the antithesis or antidote to mass-produced, branded wines and the prevalent pretentious modern style of over-manipulated, over-flavoured, over-acidified, over-harvested, over-filtered and over-oaked wines that seem to dominate the shelves of the supermarkets and high streets.
Real wine, however, is not simply a broad counter-blast; it is a set of ideas underpinned by certain strong ethical principles. Although the practices in the vines and the cellars could never be codified in a strict charter, there is a rational attempt to tie together essential common practice. The priorities are: the life of the soil; a search for terroir; selection massale; the attachment to historic grape varieties and the refusal of the increasing trend to plant standard varieties; the use of organic treatments; the search for good vine health through natural balance; the refusal of GMOs; the prudent use of chemical plant treatments; the search for full maturity; manual harvests; the respect for the variability of vintages; the refusal to chaptalize systematically; natural fermentations; a sparing or zero use of SO2; minimum or no filtration; the refusal of standard definition of taste of wines by certain enological or market trends; the possibility of experimenting and questioning different aspects of work; respect of history, of roots.
It seemed a good idea to unite growers who practised these principles under one flag, but what was initially a feel-good notion began to assume clearer intellectual shape over the course of the next few months. Such crystallisation linked into and was reinforced by a clearer understanding of the nature of our wine epiphanies; those sublime moments when you are drinking something and are pulled up short by the sheer deliciousness of the wine and emit an uncritical joyful wow! The simplicity of the reaction somehow testifies to its immediacy: “You would want to drink the whole bottle” as our Eric saliently observes, or, as a winemaker famously said: “The best bottle on the table is the empty bottle”. In a certain respect we were beginning to taste wine in a more intuitive and less evaluative fashion.
We began to identify certain organoleptic similarities between our favourite wines. Displaying lightness and purity of the fruit and exalted levels of acidity, these were nutritious wines that skated lightly and brightly across the palate as opposed to the mesomorphic, lignified, indigestible specimens designed to acquire trinkets at tastings. In an age where wines were naturally reaching high levels of alcohol, we were discovering that some wines could be lean, fresh, mineral and utterly satisfying, and that certain growers, by using plot-by-plot knowledge of their vineyards and by having an acute awareness of their diverse microclimatic subtleties, could produce gentle, restrained, expressive wines no matter how difficult the vintage. The true grower was also one who would restrict or eliminate invasive interventions in the winery and we increasingly identified with vignerons who would use oak sparingly (or not at all).
The further you venture into the world of real wine the more layers of artifice you want to strip away. Ideally, real wines would have nothing added but also nothing taken away. The fermentations would use natural yeasts and the wines would neither be filtered nor fined and the additions of sulphur would be either minimal or zero.
We began tasting wines that were either protean, shifting according the mood and the weather, or were vital, prickly, tricky, edgy. Of course, you could identify technical faults: some volatility here, some reduction or a touch of brett there, but they tasted real and alive with their own blood pumping through them as opposed to the pinchbeck wines that we had grown accustomed to and somehow formerly revered as stylish and polished.
Once you get over the notion that wine has to be somehow perfectible and can be pieced together by laboratory clinicians like a chemical jigsaw puzzle then you can accept the wine for what it is. Human beings are not flawless; where is the rule that says that wines should be?
The winemakers, sorry, vignerons, under the real wine banner, are as part of an extended family. Unlike movements which promote only narrow regional interests these farmers are creating a substantive alternative ethical platform. They are passionate, even religious in their non-conformist conviction that real wine is made in the vineyard and the result of their endeavours is kind of natural truth: to restore true knowledge and to bring terroir back to life so that winegrowers and consumers can rediscover the pleasures of finding authenticity in wine. The growers are quite prickly about the critics, consultants and wine-buyers whom they view as apologists for globalism and consumer acceptance panels. One can understand their antipathy; they see an incestuous relationship between corporate interests and the media. They read about spoofed up, manufactured wines that receive critical plaudits, whilst their own wines are often dismissed patronisingly as being “quirky” or “commercially irrelevant”.
It is fashionable to debunk terroir. A lot of scientists think it’s a myth and yet educated consumers and producers are finding out that the taste of wine, its harmony, its beauty and its elegance stem from a qualitative world whose origins are intangible. These qualities cannot be slapped onto a wine as one replaces a layer of paint. Quality comes from an organised and intangible whole, which extends to the grapes only when certain laws that generate life on earth are respected. It is the aggregate of all the things that are not done to the wine with nature’s sublime genius (if you will) that makes the wine more real. Real wine is about naked typicity, the ultimate respect for the processes of nature.