The volcanic islands of Graciosa, Pico, and Terceira, specifically the parish of Biscoitos, are the demarcated wine regions of the Azores, a Portuguese archipelago just over 900 miles from the mainland. Legally recognized in 1994, each area has, nevertheless, been producing wine for hundreds of years. The vines are grown in the near complete absence of soil and sheltered from the wind and salt water by walls of broken basalt painstakingly built over the centuries. The ’soils’, slowly in the process of creation (globally, depending upon a series of site-specific geo-physical processes, the generation of an inch of soil requires many thousands of years), may be broadly divided into two types: shattered, heavily fissured basalt and a slightly looser, sandy version, its additional material largely water runoff and wind transported. This is most strikingly revealed on Pico where the vineyards come within yards of the open Atlantic. Coaxing vines into healthy production in either matrix is nothing short of miraculous.
I will have much to say on another occasion about all of the above. For now I want only to touch on the narrow dimension of Biscoitos’ private bottle label art, this after a few preliminaries.
The agricultural center of Terceira, this small town is home to S.D.A.T., the Adega do Servico de Desenvolvimento Agrario de Terceira (the cellar of Agrarian Development Service), the wine-making cooperative where, upon deplaning at Lajes Airport, we were taken by winery representative, António Espínola.
Producing over 40,000 liters of wine per annum off of 60 hectares, the local economy of Biscoitos, the wine sector, took a severe hit in the aftermath of the terrorist attack of 9/11. All the islands did. With new international airline regulations banning all liquid containers with volumes in excess of 4 oz. from being carried onto airplanes, the many thousands of tourists visiting Terceira each year went from purchasing multiple bottles of wine to buying just one now secured in checked baggage. Wine sales plummeted 50% throughout the archipelago and the sector has still not recovered. And it has absolutely nothing to do with the wines’ price points, as our soulless business language puts it. Indeed, given the extraordinary labor required to work with all the elements of the archipelago’s harsh terroir, it is stunning to see any Azores wine sold locally for as little as €10. With sinew and muscle, the farmer’s near indestructible will to go on restores to respectability the idea of hand-crafted, a notion rather limply exploited in American wine marketing, for example. Further, the oft-repeated promotional concept of how inexpensive are Portugal’s wines in general, fails miserably to grasp that it is rather a question of a sustainable price. No better example of this critical distinction may be found than on the Azores.
It has become more urgent than ever, especially in light of reduced tourist numbers in these sour economic times, to find a way to lessen the great downward pricing pressure and get the many fascinating wines of the Azores into the international market at a fair, sustainable price.
Like all the demarcated regions of the Azores, grape growing on Biscoitos is suffering from a generational shift. No longer willing to struggle for a living in the same way as their parents and grandparents have, the young are increasingly drawn to cities. To be sure, it is a pattern repeated in all agricultural sectors throughout the world. But in the Azores it is painfully evident, the abandoned vineyards immediately visible as overrun thatches of tangled flora. The disruption of traditional family practice is a very real threat to the long-term survival of this viticulture unique in all the world.
While at the cooperative, we were given precious insight into Biscoitos’ recent vinous history. Located within an older portion of the adega, António showed us what qualifies as their ‘wine library, a wall of honeycombed masonry (situated at the right in the photo). From the rough, abrasive chambers, an echo of the vineyards’ basaltic walls just outside, he pulled bottle after intriguing bottle of private wines, some made before the existence of the cooperative. As a tribute to the farmers and vintners of these mysterious verdelhos, the dominant white grape throughout the Azores, I will close this post with their simple, mute images.
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Admin
The irrepressible Donna writes:
J’Arrive Vinisud!
Everyone who knows me, knows I love wines from the South of France. They are near and dear to me and I’m a firm believer it is the future of France as we see all the named and historically famous wines become prohibitedly expensive and disappear out of the hands of the regular wine drinker into the very wealthy and increasingly the Asian market.
Here you find amazing value to price ratios unlike most wine regions in the world, save for Spain, which is slowly creeping up and less the value it once was. Unfortunately as successful as the region is, there still is a wave of vine pull schemes which tug at my heart every time I see another report.
The Trade Office of France and Sud de France have very generously brought me to the Languedoc to experience Vinisud, the largest wine trade fair for wines from the Mediterranean. I have to give props to Marie-Helene Courade of the Houston France Consulate who never forgets how I love going on these trips, making fantastic connections and putting up with my indecision when making flight reservations. Also thanks to Sarah Nguyen the Director of the Wine and Spirits for the French embassy trade office in NYC,
The Sud de France organization gave us all a wonderful welcome gift with our itineraries plus small gifts and samples of regional foods. One really neat gift and excellent for quick reference in a fun way is a sampling of wine tubes. Each tube contains a sample of the different styles of wines from the region. The AOC’s are for each style are printed on the back of the tubes along with the authorized grapes of the regions. As a wine educator, I kinda feel like Martha Stewart when I say “It’s a good thing”.
There’s a very busy schedule at these events. Frequently there’s a different hotel every night in a different city, dinner until 1 am, back up at 6 am, on a bus by 8am, repacking every morning, bodies fatigued, palates broken down, livers distended no matter how much wine you spat out but the opportunity to be in an organized visit schedule to meet producers and potentially bring their products to the United States, is gold. This trip I am thankful to be stationed in one hotel and I was able to completely unpack my garment bag and take account of all the things I need which I forgot to pack, but I did remember my Dansko clogs and will decline competing with all the very fashionable French women so I can cover as much of Vinisud as possible instead of moaning about hurting toes.
In addition to all the wines from the South of France at Vinisud I understand there are some wines from Corsica (very excited), Italy and Greece to also be included. I also saw they have a blind tasting room which I’ll be sure to visit and find out what that is about to see how badly I can humiliate myself. For those of you wondering why I’m disparaging my decent palate, I’ll fill you in about two weeks what that’s about.
There is going to be about 12 Halls in total and I received the book on only Hall 1 which is about 350 wines. And looking at the map of the event, Hall 1 is one of the smallest. So potentially, looking at about 5,000 wines? It can’t be that many, although I was looking at the pictures from last years regular Languedoc trade tasting and yes it could be.
Here’s the video from the 2008 Vinisud to see how large this trade fair is.
There is so much to pack into 3 days. They are also doing 3 full days of conference programs. I have signed up for 3, including the International Federation of Wine Journalists and Writer’s roundtable and a course on the new quality labels which I just don’t understand why it’s been changed. I’ll let you know if I’m still cranky about the change after learning about it more from those who really know. I know I want to go to Ryan O’Connell’s presentation about using the internet as a marketing tool on the last conference on the last day. He gave me a shout out on Twitter and I want to see what this young gun and his family are doing to make their wines successful. First look at his website impressed me.
The schedule for February 20th tells me we’re going to Cite de la Vigne et du Vin Gruissan which is on the coast near La Clape and then Carcassonne in the afternoon and for the evening visiting Corbieres de Bourtenac.
Schedule for February 21st has me going to Montagnac then visiting area wineries and then dinner at the Restaurant Le Sequoia with wines from Perpignan hopefully including the famous vin doux naturels from the region. I understand 3 groups of importers are going to enjoying this even on 3 separate evenings and I’m thrilled to be included.
Then finally 3 days of the main event which I have no idea how I’m going to get it all in, plus hopefully do some interviews’ in the time allowed and then home. I still wonder if I turned my hair curler off before I left.
Donna
Friday night’s Dark and Delicious, the annual celebration of Petite Sirah and food, brought a friend and me over seventy miles to attend. Through slow south bay traffic, we finally crossed the Bay Bridge and picked our way through the bleak, melancholic expanses of the Alameda Naval Station to the Rock Wall Wine Company, our destination. Darkness had fallen by the time we arrived, and we couldn’t help wondering after the choice of venue; that was until, turning a final corner, we gasped at an unobstructed view of San Francisco skyline just sparkling to life this temperate evening.
Perhaps 6:15 p.m., the building was already packed. Arousing, rich aromas and a slightly harsh white light spilled over a long line of souls waiting to enter. And excellent live music could be heard. I mean, very good music, a superb band, the name of which I will post shortly. Of the crowd, I could see the dress code was casual, but some were decked out in their finest, including my companion. Dior mingled with Levis. Thankfully, very few wore perfumes or colognes. (Nothing kills the ability to taste wine more efficiently than perfumes.)
All ages were present. I was pleased to see a great many young people in the mix, twenty-somethings mingling with mature professional men and women. I would estimate the average age of the crowd to have been around 40.
The room was divided into three sections, long rows lined with winery and restaurant offerings. These rows were capped by yet another row of servers at one end, and tables covered with Silent Auction opportunities at the other. Although each row was crowded with guests, they were well behaved and polite, quite unlike the slow motion brawl of a ZAP event, for example. Indeed, folks at Dark and Delicious had ample chance to chat with winemakers and chefs; and more so as the evening rolled on, when the live music ended and the Bee Gees, Michael Jackson and the Commodores hummed over the speakers. Then the rows furthered thinned, many folks preferring to dance. This was my opening to more leisurely taste the Petite Sirahs I had come for.
I tasted extensively, sampling (and spitting) nearly every wine. But I do not think it fair to write notes in such an environment. There is simply no way one can credibly claim to have properly thought a wine. For wine is not about tasting alone. Petite Sirah demands careful attention, so varied is its terroir expressions. It is simply too easy to get lost in its mystery, to ‘rate’ in a purely reactionary manner what one does not immediately understand. I have held my head in shame at many of my blogging colleagues who write in this manner. In fact, one of the most fascinating aspects of Petite Sirah is how dramatically it changes in the glass, how it responds to humidity, the ambient temperature, the salt air, and most importantly, food. In addition, the finished grape’s great aging potential, routinely under-estimated in the traditional literature (witness Jancis Robinson’s faint praise), makes patience a necessity whenever a new bottle is opened. The finest examples are rather thrilling contests between the all-too-human, childish demand for immediate gratification and the immense rewards granted adult patience. Who has not been disappointed when finishing a bottle only to find the final pour to be far more sublime than the first? Like a selfish lover, no one leaves the experience any happier.
Of course, the wine of any variety may be so designed as to be ready by the time it arrives from the market to the table. And a heavy dose of new oak on garish display Friday night may fool some drinkers, but not me. The Petites I like best are mysterious, mercurial yet balanced . Now, because of both the cautionary remarks above and out of an abundance of respect for winemakers, their labor, heartache and unique agricultural challenges, I shall mention only two wineries of very special merit, in my opinion.
First up is the Aver Family’s ‘06 Blessings. This wine made from 100% estate grown fruit, wowed me months ago and it continues to soar. Mr. Aver, learning of the Dark and Delicious event late last year, was wise enough to set aside the few bottles he brought last night. His ‘07 was not ready so he made the painful decision to bring the last of his very first Petite Sirah effort. It is especially pleasing to know the grapes are grown in the Santa Clara Valley. The august California winemaking history of the area is perhaps taking a huge step forward with this wine, retaking its place as an important growing region. Petite Sirah growers take note! And drinkers, get your name on their list. As a small producer, they will sell out easily each year, as the ‘06 Blessings already had months ago. Great juice.
Next is a producer I know absolutely nothing about, a new discovery: Marr Cellars Winery. I tasted were the ‘05 Cal. PS Alger Vineyards, Tehama County(!), the curious ‘06 Cuvée Patrick PS, also from Tehama County, and the ‘05 Shannon Ranch, Lake County PS. I met the winemaker, Bob Marr, and shall interview him later this month. The prices are very competitive for such quality, between $18 and $20. Very well-balanced and focussed, the fruit quite pure. The higher acidity and the restraint of oak flavors won me over.
Finally, it was a great a pleasure to meet for only the second the man whose historical family-owned Concannon Vineyard is the first to have released single bottlings of Petite Sirah way back in 1964, an eternity by California standards. Founded in 1883, Concannon has long carried the torch for this lovely grape. Tireless in his promotion of the grape, this picture of Jim Concannon, too, captures the spirit of Petite Sirah itself, at once youthful, spirited and wise. It was an honor to have again shaken the gentleman’s hand. Good work, sir!
Hats off for Jo Diaz!
Admin
Presented here is a detailed look into a historic winery, the Adega Regional de Colares outside of Lisbon, Portugal. It is also the conclusion of my thorough interview with Colares enologist, Francisco Figueiredo. He was very generous with his time, spending more than two hours indulging my curiosity. I would encourage readers to, well, read the first two installments: The Vineyards of Colares, A National Patrimony At Risk and From The Vineyards To The Adega Regional de Colares. It is a strange twist of fate that well after thinking I should not soon pass this way again, in two days I shall in fact be returning to Portugal for more wine work. More details to come.
Admin You were bottling the other day? This is your machine?
Francisco Figueiredo Yes. It is a little messy in here because we just got forty pallets of bottles. We were bottling some of the red 2004 Colares. And this is our bottling machine.
I’ve seen these guys before. Is this Italian?
FF Yes. Many are. So are the crushers and de-stemmers. The press is French. We have, more or less, modern machines. We still have some work to do. We have some walls to paint. We laid down a new floor about two years ago. We have to go slow with the investments. We will repair the roof and the walls soon, I hope.
These are the old lagares where the grapes used to be crushed and pressed. And part of the reds were fermented here. We don’t use the lagares anymore.
Does anyone still use lagares?
FF Yes. In the Douro Valley there are places where they still use them. And some of our own growers, they also do their own wine at home, they use them… Here are the old cement vats, fermenters also. We don’t use them anymore, either. And here is an old centrifugal crusher. And our new one. We use a pneumatic press for our wines. We also have two hydraulic vertical presses over there which we can use if we have a problem with the pneumatic press. And we have a machine to fill the ‘bag-in-box’. We use that type of package for our table wines. They are the boxes with the small tap. We use vacuum filling. The wine stays good for quite some time. And that is now our substitute for the glass jug. We are getting good sales from using the bag-in-box system.
So we ferment in temperature controlled stainless steel. Some of the red, because we don’t have enough room in the stainless steel, we still use those big wood vats over there. We call them ânforas; we still use them for some of the table wine. Of course, we have no temperature control with them. An interesting fact about those is that, as you know, for our steel vats we have to use the pump to circulate the juice, from the bottom to the top, to pump over to get the color out. But in the wooden ânfora, the process is done naturally because the carbonic gas pressure that builds inside is enough to push the wine to the top; and it fills that cup on the top so that the pomace always stays beneath the wine. We can do this without the use of pumps or electricity, just the carbonic gas pressure which build up naturally during fermentation. I have not seen these anywhere else in the world. The system is the same for the cement vats called ânfora Argelina, but I have never seen wooden ones.
Where did these come from?
FF They were built here. The wood is Portuguese Chestnut. Each takes ten tons of grapes. And later we then bring over the pneumatic pump and open a small door to take the pomace to the press. This has a tube inside. The cup on top has a hole, in the center, so the wine goes up, fills the cup, and the wine then drains back on top of the pomace.
It’s like a giant coffee percolator!
FF (laughs) Yes. Almost exactly like a coffee percolator. This is the same system as the traditional cement that appeared in the ’60s.
May I climb up?
FF Yes. As long as you are not afraid of heights!
We climb up a narrow ladder.
FF You can see the tube. This is really spectacular to see during fermentation because the cup is filled with wine and it bubbles! It is a pretty sight.
The doors are very small. How do you clean out the interior?
FF We go inside. Someone has to go inside to remove all of the pomace. We put a ventilator up here and let the vat breathe for some time because of the danger of suffocation. In fact, four people have died in Portugal during this harvest time because of carbonic gas. They die without knowing it. We are very careful about that. For cleaning we have a special device that sprays hot water. But it is very difficult to be 100% sure that it is perfectly clean. It is wood, after all.
But we don’t have a problem with Brettanomyces because our wine has a low pH. And we don’t have a lot of sugar in the wine. We produce dry wines, around 12% alcohol. All the sugar is consumed by the yeast. So it is not easy for Brett. The main problem for us is not having temperature control here; not the wood but the temperature control. The wine can heat up quite a bit, around 40 degrees celsius.
Really?
FF Yes. That is high enough for the wine to lose a lot of the aroma. The tube, by the way, is connected to the crusher so that the grapes come through here. We use two or three of these vats or ânfora, each year.
Whose initials are these, JVN? The maker?
FF That means Junta Nacional do Vinhos, the National Wine Institute [founded in 1937]. Since the fifties, until 1994, this cooperative was a kind of hybrid organism; it was half cooperative, half was intervention by the state, the agricultural minister. Because of that all of the wine had to be made here in order to use the Colares DOC. That is no longer the case.
And what are these tools?
FF We don’t use them any longer, but they are for pushing down the cap. They were used if we didn’t put in a full 10 tons of grapes inside the ânfora. With less grapes inside, the carbonic gas would not be enough to push the wine out of the top. These forks would be used to push the pomace, the cap, down to mix with the wine. We now use a pump for that if it becomes a problem.
These are beautiful. I trust they will eventually end up in a museum.
FF Yes, yes. Some of them already are. And they are not permitted for use these days. They are made of wood and iron. What was done at the time was to paint, to use special paints to protect the iron parts in the tools and machines. Now it is all stainless steel. But every year all of the old tools had to be painted with the special paint that protected the iron from contact with the wine.
We climb down the stairs.
So, to be clear, someone has to climb into the anfora from the top…
FF Yes, yes. You go up to the cup and climb in from there using a ladder. The center tube is pulled out and someone goes down.
Do you ever have any cork issues?
FF No. We use only corks. I have never received cork taint complaint. Never. I will always choose cork.
I agree with you completely.
FF Would you like to taste some of the wines?
Of course! You know, I have a odd thing to ask. Being from America, we like to collect hats or shirts of the places we’ve visited. I’m looking for something with the name ‘Colares’ on it. Do you know where I can find such a thing? A rather silly idea!
FF No. But it is not a silly idea. It is an idea I have given to the directors. Why not a polo shirt or something? Even for the workers!
Not to mention Gonçalo, the winegrower we spoke with earlier. He wasn’t even wearing a hat!
Francisco laughs while getting two tasting glasses.
It must be very satisfying work for you. You’re doing so many things at the same time; preserving a way of life, preserving a wine culture, preserving memory…
FF Yes. It is all very important. I am also afraid that things might not go well in the future. The vines are in danger. That’s the only thing that I regret.
He uses a thief to draw a barrel sample. This is the white Malvasia, sandy soil, 2008. We will bottle it probably in a couple of weeks. [Late November.] Malvasia has a very citric, very minerally, acidic taste, and an almost salty taste, I notice. It also has an oxidative character; I think of hay or honey.
Very oceanic… very bright and fresh. How is the water quality here?
FF We analyze it inside our HACCP plant: ‘Hazard Analyses and Critical Control Points’. (laughs) There is some paperwork that we have to do. We have to analyze the water. It is good.
That’s one helluva name. So when you’re doing bottling session how many people would normally be here?
FF Working? Around four. We do it with a small crew to get into the rhythm. We can do about 1000 to 1200 bottles an hour. That is a good speed for a machine like ours. One guy puts the bottle on the carousal, another one taking it off and putting in the cork, another one carrying the bottles, another stacking the bottles. It would be quicker if we had one of those pallet movers, but we don’t have one yet.
Do you use wild yeasts?
FF No. We inoculate. The reason is that I had some experiences making the wine with natural yeasts, the wild yeasts, but I had some problems with starting the fermentation. It is too risky for me to risk that when I do 7000 liters of Ramisco or 2500 liters of Malvasia. But I did make an experiment. It is a question of trying to select a natural yeast from the area; that would be a project that I would like to do.
So you have experimented…
FF Yes, with several yeasts. For the whites we use a Portuguese yeast; it was selected in the Vinho Verde region, in the north of Portugal.
How was it done historically?
FF Naturally. But the big difference is that it would have been in an open lagar. That makes a lot of difference from using the closed stainless steel vats. I have made wine at my parents home using, not a granite lagar, but a small plastic lagar, more or less; and I had no problem starting the fermentation. Sometimes we have a problem with it stopping!
It can stop at 12% ?
FF Yes, before the sugar is depleted. That is a risk for the wine. But the main problem is fermentation within a closed tank. That’s when it becomes difficult. We would probably have no problem if I did the Ramisco in the lagar.
Francisco draws a second wine.
Have there ever been experiments done with fortified wines in Colares?
FF No. Just for the workers. I have done one this year. (laughs) We call it jeropiga or Abafado. I have taken the juice out of the tank before fermentation started and added our wine distillate. I made five liters last year. We give a small bottle for each of the workers. It is for drinking now. We have a tradition of drinking it during Saint Martin’s Day, the 11th of November. That day it is traditional to release the young wine for the first time; and you also drink abafado. An abafado is when the fermentation has started a little bit, like a Port, it is the same. Port is a special type of abafado. We add the spirits before the fermentation has started. One is usually a little bit sweeter than the other.
He pours the second wine.
FF This is the Ramisco. This has been in the big wood vats for around two years. Then it was put into these oak barrels. This is not young oak. It is three year-old oak. Our Ramisco wine doesn’t go well with new oak. It is too strong for our wine. So we use a two to three year-old barrel. What we are doing now is three years in the big exotic barrels in the other room [another part of the adega] and one year in the small oak barrels. We now see that this is the best for the wine.
How warm does it get in the other room?
FF This room is much hotter than the other. Even during the summertime the other room only gets to 16, maybe 20 degrees celsius. Here, no.
We drink the Ramisco. This Ramisco is regional because it has not yet been certified. It becomes DOC only after certification. Before that it is regional. Six months before bottling we have to send the wine to a certification board and they will certify the wine as DOC.
What does certification involve? And who is on the panel?
FF It involves a chemical analysis and a tasting. The panel is made up of one representative of the city, there are the persons who represent the associations and cooperatives of the Estremadura region, and then there are representatives of the producers. The panel or board has about 15 people.
What wine do you use for topping off?
FF We use the same wine held in a different vat. We can mix a maximum of 10% of different years of Ramisco. If we have the need we can do that, to play with the volumes. When you use new oak, and I’ve this experience in other places, you often have to use 15%. The Australians usually don’t top. They put the barrel on its side and leave it there for a only a few months. They probably do that in California as well.
Just out of curiosity, what do you think of wine ratings, and wine descriptions, the tasting notes?
FF They are very exaggerated. Wine is simpler than that. I think that is the beauty of wine. Sometimes a wine smell like something, but the critics exaggerate. Sometimes the wine smells like something tangible, but….
We exit the adega and make our way to his car where I retrieve my personal effects.
What do you have here in the back of your car?
FF My mother-in-law sent this to my mother. It is a basket of walnuts and some chestnuts, and a bottle of jeropiga! (laughs) It is my mother-in-law’s present to my mother.
Thank you very much, Francisco. This has been an eye-opening visit.
FF It was a pleasure, Ken. Let me give you some wine before you go.
Does the adega keep a wine library?
FF Yes. Since 1931, the first harvest in the year of the foundation of the cooperative; the first wine we made.
Back to 1931? My goodness. So what is next for you, your next series of tasks?
FF We will bottle a few things. We always have a busy commercial time at Christmas. After that, in January, we usually transfer the young wines to the wood vats, take the lees out. Then we continue to bottle if we have the need. And I start in the springtime I get out of the cellar to give technical support to the vineyards. And then the cycle begins again!
Admin
The title for this second and concluding part of my interview with Morgan Clendenen, owner and winemaker for Cold Heaven Cellars, comes during her detailed discussion of the very real practicalities of farming grapes. Make no mistake. It is fraught with anxiety and uncertainty. Not that there is much anyone can do about it. She holds farmers in the highest regard. They are different. They know what is within their abilities. Indeed, having learned her lessons well, Morgan approaches winemaking with a kind of dispassionate Eastern quietism, an attitude she will patiently encourage, well, wannabe winemakers to adopt. It is all about a clear understanding of what is within one’s power, one’s control, and what powers properly belong to the world. Small miracles and potential disaster struggle for ascendance in the brain.
This attitude is equally important to cultivate in the winery. After making wine for more than a decade, three truths have emerged for Morgan Clendenen: Do not hesitate to do what you must to save a vintage; there is always more to learn; and winemaking is not for whiners.
Part 1.
Admin Could you say a little more about your earlier Pinot effort?
Morgan Clendenen I haven’t made one since 2002. In 2003 I was getting all of my Pinot from Au Bon Climat and we lost our entire crop that year. That’s when I started making Syrah. The 2008 and 2009 are the first Pinots since then. I love Syrah when it is from a great vineyard. So many people do Syrah, and Syrah usually is not something I reach for. My 2005, I’m absolutely in love with this wine, but it has a Pinot Noiresque quality to it. That’s probably why I love it so much!
Yes. Syrah has fallen on hard times here in California. I like Northern Rhone expressions in any case…
MC Syrah is a real tough road here. The only thing I’ll say is that my Syrahs tend to stand out, away from the group, not being so ubiquitous, because we do two years barrel, two years bottle before release. I come from…, I was raised raised in the house of Au Bon Climat cuvée; the acidity and restraint are definitely a number of the building blocks of my wine education for winemaking.
Yes. Would you say a bit about ‘green’ practices on the property itself? The vineyards? Do you have certain standards, certain requirements?
MC Not directly, because I don’t own the vineyards. Sanford and Benedict was for a period of time organically farmed. I have issues with some of the organic farming. I find that there is a lot more ‘product’ on the grapes themselves than some of the people who farm non-organically. I see more product! And I just can’t help but wonder how much of that is getting into the wine, and how that makes it ultimately ‘better’.
What do you mean by ‘product’?
MC Well, there are a lot of organic compounds that they use in spraying vineyards. I don’t know. I’m not vineyard manager or viticulturist. I make wine. So I really can’t tell you those kinds of things. I know that Le Bon Climat is farmed organically, and I will tell you that they are the ugliest damn grapes I get. (laughs) They are! We have a motto in the winery: “Ugly grapes make great wine.” (laughs)
And I had some ugly Pinot Noir this year and I had some beautiful Pinot Noir, and I have to tell you, the beautiful Pinot Noir tastes beautiful! The ugly is o.k. (laughs) Now I’m struggling to decide what I want to do, whether I want to blend it all together or keep it separate.
With organic preparations you are often required to use them more frequently. Their effectiveness is limited if contrasted with more industrial strength pesticides. They break down more readily, and so on. What kinds of pest pressures do you have there?
MC We have mealybug, I know that. White fly is a huge problem out at Sanford and Benedict over the years. The white fly basically shuts down photosynthesis, that it causes your grapes not to be physiologically ripe in the end. That’s a bad thing. Mealybug is really horrible because it kills the plant. We’ve really been watching the mealybug problem. We have a big mealybug problem at Le Bon Climat. And I think part of the reason we have a really big problem is because we are organic. What’s being applied over there is not proving effective enough to take care of the problem.
That said, I want to be greener. Hey, I moved my winery into Buellton and moved my house to within a mile of my winery. Before I was driving 45 minutes to get to my winery every day. That doesn’t feel green! Especially when you’re driving a big truck. In those terms, there is always something we’re trying to figure out; how to be a greener business, how to leave a smaller carbon foot print. And I have toyed around with biodynamics. It’s something I’ve read about, studied some… I’ve even gone as far as to procure the horn! (laughs) But I have never buried it in the ground.
Where do you keep the horn?
MC I have the horn at the winery, actually. It’s a buffalo horn; it’s not a cow horn.
Well, buffalo horns won’t work, of course.
MC I don’t know. The place where I was doing it, at the ranch, (actually it’s my ex-husband’s ranch, but we’re pretty friendly on that; basically, I let you keep your stuff. We’re cool.) So over at the ranch, because I was growing organic vegetables over there, I was extremely interested in biodynamics. Yves, my French partner, just laughs his ass off at biodynamicism. He says it’s a fashion, and then takes me to look at vineyards that he knows are biodynamic. And they are pretty sad looking. But I can’t say that they make terrible wine. You know? Biodynamics has some interesting things about it. It is rather archaic in some of its principles.
I remember meeting Telmo Rodriguez, a Spanish producer; and he said his vineyard was biodynamic. It was a time when I really didn’t know much about it. I asked him about it. He wouldn’t tell me! Finally I asked, ‘if you’re not willing to share with people what specifically you are doing in the vineyard, then don’t talk about it being biodynamic’. It is a vineyard he owns, after all. I think what’s going on is that Spain is a Catholic country. Biodynamicism is a little bit of witchcraft mixed in with some homeopathy and astrology. In that way it makes it interesting to me. But, I’ve never had the chance to actually see it in action. So… I’m almost dead certain that Beckmen Vineyards is all biodynamic.
I think that anything that puts you in your vineyard more frequently, that makes you more connected with it, is better for your vineyard. Period.
I think that is exactly right. But now, with respect to the mealybug problem at Le Bon Climat, it might be interesting to think about one of the major selling points of the biodynamic approach is that it restores a certain kind of balance. It would be interesting to see whether you could do like a test block.
MC It’s at a point where nothing, not even biodynamics is going to cure it. (laughs) It’s really bad. I’m sure the rains are not helping. Rain just spreads it around. It’s a constant battle. I have a total respect for farmers. How to deal with that kind of uncertainty in a job… you can’t predict what the weather is going to do. And even when you try to predict it, that doesn’t mean you can always do something about it. I can’t imagine how stressful it must be to be a farmer.
It’s funny. During harvest, when it starts raining, everybody around me gets all nervous an upset; and I say, ‘you know. I’m just not gonna’ because there is nothing I can do about it’. The best thing I can do is that when my fruit comes in see what the deal is and go from there. To winemakers I ask ‘Why cry over spilled milk?’ Now, I don’t hear the same bellyaching from farmers out there working their butts off.
Yes. I had a wonderful conversation with Bryan Babcock last year sometime. He is a hard core farmer, I’d say. And he is very outspoken in this regard, about the exigencies of farming. He’s a tough guy.
MC For Le Bon Climate vineyard, Jim (Clendenen) would be in total agreement with Bryan. And I think it is the same thing with wine. If you get wine that doesn’t have any acidity in it you’d be a fool not to put some acid in it, in my personal opinion. I had a guy at Morgan’s Halfway House for Wannabe Winemakers this summer (laughs) who was making some Syrah. I looked at his numbers. He told me how much acid he was going to put in, and I said, ‘you know, I would put in twice as much.’ He said that he was afraid to do that. I told him not to be afraid of the acid. As perfectionists, we want to produce the best wine that we can. That is very trying. In your mind’s eye you’d really love to have fruit and juice that’s perfect; juice you don’t have to add anything to. Everything is natural, and so on. But that is just not reality. Yes, you can take your natural fruit and just let it go, don’t do anything to it. Or you can hold its hand, make sure it gets to the end point, the right place, and still have it be commercially viable. If you don’t do that you’ll end up with wine that the public may not necessarily want to drink.
So, just as in the vineyard you have to address problems as they come up, sometimes you have to be a lot more pro-active than in your heart you want to be, whether it’s chemical or whatever. And in the cellar it is the same thing. You want perfect fruit, but that does not mean you’re going to get it. You have to work with your boundaries to make the best wine you can.
Last year at Le Bon Climat the grapes were absolutely perfect. The numbers, perfect. I didn’t have to do anything. It was a cakewalk. I loved the wine. But that only happens once every two of three vintages, that you get the perfect balance. So, yes, we’re going out there, we’re testing the sugars and such, but sometimes it’s a box of chocolates; you get what you get. This year was very odd for me, the 2009 vintage. The sugars were not very high. I don’t think I picked any Viognier above 23 Brix. Most of it was 21.5; but it was physiologically ripe. Very, very strange vintage. But they will have low alcohols; they will be fresh. It not going to be green, I can tell you that; which is what 21.5 would suggest.
I thought about additions and that sort of thing, but the fruit tasted good. The juice was yellow, with a green tinge. It was a very unusual year for Viognier. A friend of mine, Karen Steinwachs, who is the winemaker for Buttonwood, I met her for lunch right before Christmas, and she said she brought in, I think it was Sauvignon Blanc at 22 Brix, somewhere in there, and she still got 14.5 alcohol! We can’t figure it out. How does that translate? It doesn’t make any sense. There is something going on, but we can’t figure it out. And she is meticulous. She tested it at her lab and she sent it off for testing. Now, we know within 99.9 % that fruit, the Brix level, was at 22. We’re stumped. Perhaps different yeasts are responsible. There are so many different yeasts now, maybe that’s the reason. Some scientist may tell you that’s just rubbish, but in five years maybe some breakout scientist will say something different. There are certain things that I don’t know to be always constant. So I told her that I’ll tell her what my alcohol is in the end. I’m not predicted to have anything above 13.5% alcohol. It’ll be interesting. If it goes higher then she and I will definitely be contacting Davis! Houston, we have a problem. (laughs)
Is she using wild yeasts?
MC She’s using commercial yeasts. I use commercial yeasts. The Saints and Sinners is a wild yeast, however. I am not a big fan or wild fermentation because most of the time some of the wine gets stuck, it doesn’t finish. If you’ve ever restarted a fermentation I don’t think there’s anything more unnatural that you can do to wine. It made me sick to my stomach and I never want to do it again. When you have to take wine and heat it up, and then add 25 pounds of sugar… that does not feel good. It does not feel natural. It feels intrusive.
Strictly speaking, with the wild yeasts on the grape skins, and even though you may use a commercial yeast, you really don’t know which yeast finished the fermentation. There is no way of knowing. There are thousands of yeasts in there.
Yes. Indeed, a number of commercial yeast companies now include combinations of wild and commercial yeasts, Saccharomyces cerevisiae principally. The idea is that the wild yeasts get a toehold before the commercial populations overwhelm them. Some qualities are imparted before others.
MC That’s what we’ve been doing in my cellar. We’ll monitor the juice, and when it is starting we’ll let it go for a couple of days. And then we inoculate. I do like natural yeasts; I just don’t want to have to deal with restarting the fermentation. You’d then have to use commercial yeasts in any case. I think that is the dirty little secret of natural fermentations. People always talk about using nothing but wild yeasts, well, ya know, bullshit! I don’t believe you! Especially for California with the high sugar levels, if you then go with wild fermentations it is a recipe for a stuck fermentation, in my mind. You don’t really know what goes on behind closed cellar doors! (laughs)
And just because it’s ‘commercial’, that does not make the yeast unnatural. It’s yeast, for god’s sake. It’s not plastic. In the past I played around with making sourdough starters from red grapes. One year I did one from Sanford and Benedict and two other vineyards. And it was interesting! The sourdough starters themselves were so very different in the breads. I had one from Gold Coast vineyard that, I swear to god, tasted like cinnamon in the bread! And that was because of the yeast starter. I took some red grapes; I put some flour in at a certain temperature, and created a starter. Once I had it started it was like having a newborn. You had to feed it… I mean, ok, I can’t deal with this anymore! (laughs) So I really like my yeast that comes in a packet! I am very comfortable with it.
I actually use a Champagne yeast for most of my Viogniers because I like the clean expression; it is a clear expression of the grape without adding this fruit factor or floral factor, all these things that the different yeasts are supposed to do. If it ain’t broke I’m not going to fix it.
Well, wonderful. I have a lot of material to work with here. I want to thank you…. wait, one more question. What do you think of the usefulness of new Social Media for a winery’s promotion? Does it help? Can you see the benefits?
MC You know, I use Facebook for work all the time. I get accosted by my friends all the time. ‘Ah, you’re on Facebook all the time, blah, blah, blah.’ Well, it allows me to get in touch with people in San Francisco, New York, Chicago, France… boom, all from one place. I think if you’re smart and learn how to use it, it offers great benefits. And it’s free. How many things out there are free that you can also benefit from, certainly on a business level? It can be intrusive. At times I wonder what the heck am I doing. I do get stalkers! But for the most part it has really helped my business.
I’ve always been a little behind the scenes, a little bit underground. I am not, as my Facebook persona may suggest, as out front as you might think. I always been more of a ‘behind the scenes’ person.
Thank you very much, Morgan, for the opportunity to speak with you. Oh, one last question, did you really ride an elephant in a vineyard?
MC Yes, I did. That is totally true. A socialite that used to live here in the valley held very elaborate parties. She chose her guests based on their entertainment value and willingness to go along with her party ideas. For her 50th birthday she had an Indian themed party. All the guests, all women, were required to wear a sari. The party was held by their pond located in the middle of their vineyard. I actually ordered a sari from India and learned how to fold the layers of cloth; there were many! Nothing like being swadled in a colorful sheet when it’s 100 degrees out! But the surprise of the party were the three elephants… I must say it was a majestic feeling, lumbering slowly through the vineyard, slightly higher than an elephant’s eye. I will never forget that view, for a time an Indian princess riding in a California vineyard.
Very cool. Take care, Morgan.
MC Bye, Ken.
Admin
Morgan Clendenen of Cold Heaven Cellars has been quietly perfecting her take on Viognier since 1996. She writes:
“My mission and goal as a winemaker is to illuminate and define Viognier, to elevate its profile and explore its potential through keen observation and copious tasting. I seek to sound the depths of this enigmatic grape, to reveal its secrets and shine a bright light on the extraordinary fruit grown in the cool vineyards of the Santa Maria and Santa Ynez Valleys of California ’s Central Coast.
Despite this strong ambition she flies under the radar, working and experimenting diligently according to her own vision. She has little interest in the expansion of Cold Heaven if the proper fruit cannot be found. Though her love of Pinot Noir may eventually require a call to a local contractor. And neither are Cold Heaven’s labels festooned with marketable tropes. They are reserved, dignified. Yet Ms. Clendenen is also a vivacious, quick-witted soul, and seems easily capable of commanding a room. So her wines, her beloved Viogniers, possess these complimentary aspects of her character: finesse, balance and a lively acid.
I spoke with her just last week, Wednesday, one of many days California was being flattened by a runaway train of foul weather. A last note, I have enjoyed only three of her wines. That will certainly change.
Part 2 will post later this week.
Admin What a lot of rain! How are your vines? Any vineyard erosion?
Morgan Clendenen This is the time of year you want rain. It’s good for the vineyards. As long as we don’t have any frost, we should be sitting pretty. The abundance of rain usually means an abundance of grapes. But Mother Nature… she’s a tricky bitch! And erosion is always a problem in California whenever it rains. So if you’ve planted in a dubious place then it may happen. But Le Bon Climat vineyard is constantly dealing with erosion factors. We try in various ways to slow the water down. But it’s an ever changing Earth we live on. Ours is a constant struggle to try to control the environment. It’s kind of funny. Well, maybe not funny: it is what it is.
About water. Do you folks irrigate?
MC Most everything I deal with is irrigated. And I’m very happy because in the past few years we’ve had some tremendous heat waves right before harvest. When you have these heat waves what you get is sugar ripeness but not always physiological ripeness. I saw a little bit of that this year. It was interesting that the sugars were there but the physiological ripeness wasn’t. And then it kind of switches places where the grapes became physiologically ripe but the sugars were not as high because we had a cold snap after a heat wave. Irrigation helps us moderate these swings.
There is only one vineyard that I can think of, I’m sure there’s more around here, and that’s Foxen. They have a specific vineyard that they dry farm. But everything that I deal with is does have irrigation. It’s a drip irrigation system.
On a personal note, just to get this out of the way, why is it that there are no two pictures of you that look alike? It’s the oddest thing. You’re like a changeling!
MC (laughs) I don’t know! The picture on the Home page of the winey site is odd because what you see is a reflection of me off the glass of a painting. You see what I see in the mirror, not what you would see looking normally at me. So I look very different to everybody. But I think I look the most like me in that picture! (laughs) It’s just how it is. When I look at myself it is always a reflection.
So no Grace Jones-like body doubles! Well, one of the reasons I wanted to speak with you was because of a wine of yours I enjoyed many years ago, an early, maybe the first bottling of the Domaine des Deux Mondes, Saints and Sinners. I’ve had Viogniers from all over California since then but I’ve never forgotten that wine. Your winery’s name stuck in the back of my mind. And then to have encountered the winemaker herself on Facebook, well, there you go.
MC Well, thank you. That wine is basically just a recipe I followed from Yves Cuilleron [from Condrieu] to make a wine in his style. It’s a partnership I have with him. He’s very well known for his wines. He makes several single vineyard Condrieus. His sense of doing more than one, playing around, manipulating the grapes to some degree, is always very interesting to me. In fact, his sweet wine has always been a benchmark wine for me. But with that wine, the Domain des Deux Mondes, we decide that we do this fun thing where we would blend finished wine from one of his vineyards with finished juice from one of mine. It was a 50/50 blend. We had so much success from that, and had enjoyed doing it, we decided that we would take some of my grapes and use them for Yves style.
Now, Cold Heaven’s style is nothing like that! Nothing like that. Deux Mondes is not Cold Heaven. It’s not the wine I personally would go for in a line-up. It’s very oaky and it tends to be a little riper than everything else I do. But it shows that, yes, I can make lots of different styles besides what I do. But I choose to go in a different direction with Cold Heaven because I like it the best. And that typically means lower sugars; I like high acidity. I like it to be natural.
I buy very few grapes from warm sites. I’m not interested in warm sites for Viognier, quite honestly. I’ve been working with Sanford and Benedict vineyard and Le Bon Climat vineyard which would always serve up a good helping of acidity; and I would barely, if ever, have to acidulate those wines. The first Deux Mondes was a 2004 vintage.
That may have been the vintage. I’m a little surprised because I am no fan of oak and I like high acid. But palates change. Clearly, I was still evolving! But about Sanford and Benedict. On your website you describe having found there a then “rare clone” of Viognier. Could you tell me something about that clone?
MC What we have over at Sanford and Benedict is not really known to us because whoever planted it seemed to fall off the face of the Earth. They had grafted a bunch of Viognier onto Cabernet rootstock. Then a section of it died and they went in and replanted on some other rootstock, also unknown to us.
And why did the section die? Do you know?
MC We don’t know. I wasn’t around during that period of time. It was in the eighties. So, there was a lot of change-over over at Sanford and Benedict about who was farming. When I came on board there the guy who was farming was never seen. I never saw him! He was like a mythological creature. So when that job was taken from him and the new people took over, I see them all the time. They are very pro-active in that vineyard. Coastal Vineyard Services. It’s questionable, the clone. We just don’t know.
We were approached at one point by the former owner of Sanford and Benedict. He said he wanted to plant more Viognier for me. We wanted to get a specific clone but we couldn’t get it. We ended up getting a Davis clone. What is planted mostly in California is the Davis clone; that’s what’s there. So when we planted Le Bon Climat vineyard as my primary vineyard, we planted that with a Chateau Grillet clone.
Then when I was dealing with Vogelzang, they called me up and said, ‘Look, we planted what we thought was Roussanne but it turns out that it is Viognier’. (We call it the ‘R’ clone. As in ‘Randall’. It was supposedly brought in by Randall Grahm as Roussanne.) When they tasted that wine they swore it tasted like Roussanne. I said ‘You’re out of your mind! I don’t think it tastes anything like Roussanne’. Now, I like Roussanne. I don’t like Marsanne at all. I won’t work with Marsanne. I hate Marsanne. It is my least favorite grape in the entire world! But I love Roussanne. If I could get Roussanne here I would be excited. I would like to work with that grape more. But there’s not a lot of it around here. And quite honestly there’s not a lot of cool climate Viognier vineyards around here. Cold Heaven hasn’t gotten bigger and bigger every year because I don’t want to make wine just for the sake of having my name on a label. I make the wine I want to make, you know? Unfortunately, not every vineyard is up to snuff where that’s concerned.
Let me add that I don’t think the Davis clone planted in a hot sites is good. Our clone I work with is in a warm site, but I like it a lot because it seems to hold its structure better than the Davis clone does. It seems to keep its pH lower, it seems to have a little more acidity. So I particularly like this grape. It doesn’t go as tutti-frutti as I think the Davis clone does in warm sites. I like that clean, more acidic expression of the grape. I just think it’s more food-friendly. The Le Bon Climat is just a great catch-all wine for things you normally have difficulty pairing foods with: Mexican, sushi, Asian, Chinese, spicy, Indian… it is very interesting that acidity really blends so well with spicy foods.
It’s an anomaly in California. What I do is an anomaly compared to 9/10ths of the industry.
The Vogelzang tends to be (we call it) ‘blousy’. It’s bigger, more fruit forward… it’s big on everything! The alcohol is not through the roof. It’s 14%. But it’s well integrated. Then you move into Le Bon Climat. It’s so funny. People come into the winery and love the Vogelzang, but they don’t get the Le Bon Climat! Then you’ll have a sommelier from a restaurant come in and he will go absolutely apeshit for the Le Bon Climat over Vogelzang. That’s the great thing about making more than one expression. But they are not different styles. They are stylistically different in their clonal selection and their vineyard sourcing.
So the winery treats the different grapes in pretty much the same way.
MC We do. We don’t use any new oak. We don’t like any oak flavors in the wine. We have such naturally high acidity in most of the wines that we do barrel fermentation that rounds that out a little bit. Whereas stainless becomes a little too eye-popping, I think. I’ve done some stainless experiments. I did some Viognier in stainless this year. Once it was though primary fermentation, I put it in barrel for malolactic. It’s not that I’m against stainless steel. I use it when I’m kind of curious what kind of product it’s going to give. But my wines do better with some neutral oak. And I use neutral French oak, mostly Francois Freres.
I’ve been using neutral oak since 1996. It’s been our philosophy since the beginning. Then when Domaine des Deux Mondes came around, Yves used considerable new oak. I had to start buying barrels for the first time in 2004. So we use about a third new oak on those wines. And we use Ermitage as our barrel producer specifically for Viognier. I don’t like Francois Freres new barrels for Viognier. It’s not a good fit to me. Neutral barrels are fine. But as far as the oak, for whatever reason the Ermitage just seems to be a lot more seamless in the wine.
Do you specify the tightness of the grain?
MC I don’t. When we first started the project Yves told the guys at Ermitage what was going on, they actually just gave us three barrels in the beginning. Then one year old barrels were shipped from Yves cellar. They were cleaned but one wonders just how clean can you actually get something. Are you still getting some yeast cells in there, whatever? So Ermitage gave us these barrels. There wasn’t deliberation on my part. Since then I’ve stayed with that because it just seems a good fit. So, no, I don’t get into tightness of grain… all of that. But I am starting to more of that because I’m now making Pinot Noir. This year I have a lot of new barrels in the cellar and we’re constantly tasting the wines side by side. I am very, very curious what each barrel is bringing to the plate on the Pinot. I have a 2008 and a 2009 in barrel.
END OF PART 1
Admin
This post comes under the heading of ‘unfinished business’. Some months ago I wrote a piece that caught the attention of Robert Cartwright, the winemaker at Ponte Family Estate. I thanked him for his comment and asked after his work. He generously offered to send me some samples. I received the wines a couple of months later, but owing to the hustle and bustle of my schedule, they were set aside and forgotten. Entirely my fault! Recently rediscovered, I thought it best to revisit the conversation, the well-designed Ponte Family Estate website and, of course, the wines.
Now, I don’t usually write tasting notes, a detail I made clear to Mr. Cartwright; but it became clear from reading the excellent Environment portion of their winery blog that I had to respond in some way. Truth is, they are doing a commendable job on the ‘green’ front. From using light weight bottles, to sourcing locally produced ingredients in their restaurant, from using 100% CFL light bulbs, to the elimination of plastic bottles from their facilities, they are making an effort. And ‘green’ extends to home life. Even the winery owner, Claudio Ponte, had turned in his SUV for a Prius; he advocates replacing lawns with drought tolerant plants and planting a vegetable garden. Small steps, to be sure. Of course, no mention is made of solar power or water recycling. And some ‘innovations’ are just plain silly, such as this one: “Our winemaker and his team are harvesting at night whenever possible. This effort allows the must to be chilled without using much energy.” But by and large, the greenwash is kept to a minimum.
The Wines
– 2008 California Chardonnay 13.6% alc ($23.95)
I tasted this wine at room temperature on a stormy afternoon. The nose is very tropical, with peaches, bananas and a strong coconut. It tastes very similar. The coconut is much stronger. A bit too much sulphur for having been open for half an hour. A hint of sourness that someone else described as green apple, but it’s more like a green apple Jolly Rancher candy to my taste. Very unctuous, thick mouth feel. It is not my style or to my liking, but I can taste no obvious faults. I know many wine drinkers who would like this wine.
– 2006 Temecula Valley Meritage 13.5% alc ($34.95)
This wine is a blend, naturally, of Cabernet Sauvignon, Cabernet Franc, Merlot, Petit Verdot and Malbec. The bottle notes list the varieties in that order. No percentages are given. The nose is very sweet, with bacon fat (yes, though a vegetarian I can still remember the smell and taste of bacon fat) and bright fruit. A bit of sourness on the nose as well. Quite nice. Good acid, smoky body (oak), I would guess the Cabernet Franc percentage to be quite high. An entirely agreeable wine. Perfumey after taste. Long finish. Good, solid bottle of wine.
– 2007 Temecula Valley Holiday Reserve Zinfandel 15.1% alc (2006 sold for $26.95)
One of the most unusual Zinfandel noses I’ve ever smelled. Very curious. Sweet, baked trout? Almost an ocean spray and very ripe fig. Baffling. Medium bodied, sweet and sour cherry. A bit green, perhaps. Uneven ripeness from a multiple vineyard blend, I’d guess. Hot. Acidified. For a California Zinfandel collector this wine should definitely be added to the cellar. I’ve had a hundred Zins from throughout California and this one is a puzzle. Warming in the glass, the wine has taken on more of a Zin character. A bit of cinnamon candy now. Oak. Very unusual. Weird, but I like it for that reason. Take it to a blind tasting and no one would easily identify it! I don’t detect any microbial mayhem, by the way.
Very high quality corks were used for each wine.
Great thanks to Ponte Family Estate and Robert Cartwright for their generosity.
Admin
It has been an extraordinarily productive second year on Reign of Terroir. Founded in early December 2007, this merry band of writers has continued to improve and deepen our work. With undiminished passion for the culture, history and future of wine filling our sails, we expect to be around for many years to come. The guiding principle of this blog is that no topic, story or individual will be approached without the writer learning too. I share with my colleagues this principle: if we don’t learn alongside our valued readership there is no point to the work. We would prefer, we insist, that something durable, something of lasting value come of our untold hours of scribbling!
But for the purposes of this post I will speak only for myself. What follows are the ten (okay, eleven) of my favorite interviews of the year, listed in chronological order. I decided not to include narrative and/or more technical pieces, despite my fondness for many of them, in favor of those posts where the idea is to let another speak with limited interference. The interview format, each requiring hours of (mostly) faithful transcription, has proven a favorite of mine. Even my sole complaint, the hours of tedious transcription, is actually a benefit. I am compelled to listen closely, in some instances to replay a dozen times difficult accents or wind and noise-buffeted passages and sentences to finally understand the sense of my interlocutor. (I’ve had migraine-inducing days teasing the meaning from an international phone call with an Aussie! Did he just say he wore women’s dainties?) For it is not always easy to receive clarification in a timely manner.
Just as with learning a foreign language, through repetition I am left with a lasting memory of the encounter. Indeed, though posted, I often keep the tape, not only for the resolution of the rare dispute, but because the voices of these people are fascinating, their speech rhythms and word choice, very much a part of the story. Sadly, the ‘performance’ of the conversation cannot be adequately conveyed. Perhaps I’ll begin posting audio files alone. Seems lazy to me, especially in a culture where the written word is under threat.
And doubtless the greatest reward from the interview format are the details which emerge from the brains of these gifted people. Some individuals are more guarded than others, to be sure. But in the fullness of the time I spend talking with folks much does emerge that seconds ago was unsaid and, perforce, unknown. Of course, the reader, too, will have to spend time with the people mentioned here to learn these things. Let me assure you, there are some wonderful insights to be found.
Let me add that many of the interviews are broken up into parts. The ‘infinite’ WordPress page is not. Reader patience is also a consideration. In any event, links to subsequent parts may usually be found at the end of the post. Sometimes after the introduction.
I have a couple of hours of recorded voices still awaiting transcription. And I will be back on the phone in a few days speaking with a new, creative soul. Stay tuned.
The charming and delightful Ariel Ceja of Ceja Vineyards.
Forensics scientist John Watling.
Swiss winegrower Peter Schmidt.
Sonoma winegrower Will Bucklin.
A lovely soul, Neal Rosenthal.
What a voice! Clive Coates.
Founder of Santa Cruz Mountain Vineyard, the magisterial Ken Burnap. (I still have one portion coming. Fascinating man.)
The brilliant Jonathan Nossiter. His mind moves like quicksilver.
Portugal’s First Family! My friends, the Sequeira’s of Carcavelos.
Another intellectual hero of mine, Portugal’s White Knight, Virgilio Loureiro.
Colares’ enologist, Francisco Figueiredo.
Happy New Year!
Admin
Jonathan Nossiter’s Mondovino, The Series, is a revelation from beginning to end. On four dvds, ten one-hour episodes, not only does it build upon themes pursued in the original 2004 theatrical release, but it substantially deepens them as well. For those who have only seen the original, they will be greatly rewarded by viewing the enormous amount of material that had to be set aside to fashion a marketable film. For those who come to Mondovino, The Series fresh, they are in for a hilarious, educational ride.
One of the most fascinating aspects of The Series is the sheer number of new insights uttered by all the original players. I well remember the harsh criticism heaped on Mr. Nossiter for his alleged politically motivated edit, especially of remarks by Robert Parker and Michel Rolland. Well, in The Series each gentleman greatly expand on their positions with respect to globalization, tradition and the use and abuse of history. Threadbare do the protestations of a slanted edit become when throughout The Series Parker and Rolland insist on digging deeper holes. But, one the other hand, they thereby become much more human, frail, seemingly caught in an echo chamber, a hall of mirrors of mutual admiration. For here recounted is no ordinary love story. Flaubert’s brilliant Bouvard et Pecuchét does come to mind. Yes, let us not forget Mondovino, The Series is high comedy.
And there are many new characters: Jan Shrem of Clos Pegase, Bill Harlan, Jose Espinoza, psychoanalyst Jean Laplanche of Chateau de Pommard, Catherine Montalbetti, editor of the Hachette Wine Guide, a very curious plastic surgeon from Paris, Dr. Eric Auclair, Steve Harvey of Folie à Deux, Pierre Siri, proprietor of the artisanal-class Iris du Gayou, Becky Wasserman, Charlie Rodriguez, José Mounier… the list of new and interesting voices is vast. Indeed, Mondovino, The Series swallows the theatrical release whole. (Though there are a small number scenes in the original that did not make it into The Series. But I’ll leave their identification to the film buff!) Incidentally, the world premier of this expanded film was in December, 2006, at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. I have not been able to determine if that release differs significantly.
What I would like to do for the balance of this post is to provide a brief summary of each of the 10 chapters for the convenience of the viewer. (All images below are used with the generous permission of Jonathan Nossiter.)
1) Where’s Asterix? (or Little Town, Big Hell)
This first episode expands on broader themes most closely identified with the theatrical release, the global versus the local, narrowly drawn, the battle was between the town of Aniane in the Languedoc, pop. 2,300, and the Mondavis of California. The conflict revolved around two nominally independent issues: the preservation of a forest and the resistance to a global corporation. But there is much ambiguity introduced into this new cinematic presentation. Of course we are introduced to Aimé Guibert of Mas de Daumas Gassac, wine consultant Michel Rolland (I wonder if he still smokes?), Laurent Vaille of Domaine de La Grange des Pères, the Mondavis and their winery staff, Bernard Magrez, the former socialist mayor, André Ruiz and his elected replacement, the communist Manuel Diaz. We meet Mr. and Mrs. Gay, the founders of Citizens for the Protection of the Forest. Many new locals speak about the conflict, and we hear more from the clergy and from a very entertaining police officer most concerned with parking problems additional tourism might bring!
Interestingly, the more the ‘players’ in this episode speak, the more nuanced do their positions become. A viewer upon finishing this first chapter comes away with a far greater appreciation of the multiple meanings, as much personal and political, of the battle to save the forest. There is as much bad faith as honesty, as much cowardice as courage. No political position is as it seems. It is in this discordance that comedy reigns surpreme.
2) Magic Potion
Next we’re off to Burgundy. In Volnay we meet Hubert de Montille, his wife Christiane, and their three children, Isabelle, Etienne and the sublime Alix. Lighting up the screen is the magisterial Aubert de Villaine of the Domaine de la Romanée Conti (pictured). Also in part two we are first introduced to Jean-Charles Boisset, Director of the Boisset Group, and young Alix Montille’s employer at the time. Jean-Charles Boisset will make numerous appearances throughout The Series, each more ‘revealing’ than the last. Of great amusement is Floris Lemstra, General Manager of Marketing for Boisset. He awkwardly spies on Alix’s every exchanges with Mr. Nossiter while they are on the Boisset grounds.
Of the Montille children, truly remarkable new footage is included. Our understanding of Alix and Etienne is improved, both fascinating people. We follow a harvest with the workers grumbling over labor issues and the family’s response. Greek and Libyan students on break from the University of London stir up trouble but are seemingly placated by a fabulous lunch prepared by Christine. Great exchanges are enjoyed throughout!
Back to Napa where we are introduced to Chateau and Estate Wines (Diageo) employees Gregg Fowler, the head of Vineyard Operations, and Peter Hall, VP of Consumer Strategies (can you say Red Chardonnay?) We close with a visit to Sterling, a subsidiary of Seagrams, a subsidiary of Diageo. Much mayhem is set upon the world! Here the noose tightens another inch on the issue of globalization.
3) Rome Wasn’t Built in a Day
This third episode is the most revealing, weird and refreshing one-hour look the wine industry likely to be shot for a very long time. Deserving of wide circulation, it is a virtually perfect series of contrasting personalities. We meet the eccentric Jan Shrem of Clos Pegase, a comic figure of the first order, reflecting on art, the good life and the triumph of a kind of western aesthetic imperialism. Throw in eerie footage of Bill Harlan haunting his own winery, opening and closing each and every door, briefly opening then drawing drapes in an apparent effort to contain or exclude some prowling malevolence; mix in the strangely remote Staglins, Sheri, Garen and their daughter, Shannon; add farm worker observations about working conditions and the absence of overtime with an explore of antiseptic environment of Opus One, all capped by a sunset barbeque with former farm worker, now winemaker, Luis Ochoa, his wife and neighbors outside their trailer/winery…. This is the merest hint of the brilliant cross-cutting hilarity Mr. Nossiter assembles. (I hasten to add that of all the dogs and cats we meet, it is in Luis Ochoa’s back forty where we see the one and only jack rabbit in the entire ten-hour series.)
There was one moment I found very affecting. Owing to the fuller fleshing out of characters the longer series permits, we are given, per force, finer shadings of the Mondavi brood. For reasons not entirely clear to me, when Michael Mondavi says, “I got my father back”, he relates a painful truth that was quite beautiful, at least to this viewer. Margrit at Copia is equally touching. Indeed, the Mondavi story, built fragment by filmic fragment through the ten-part series, will finally add up to a tour de force in its own right by the series’ end.
There is much else that is commendable but I cannot resist mentioning Bill Harlan’s reply to Mr. Nossiter’s question, “Does Napa have an identity?” Mr. Harlan replies, “To me the Napa Valley is kind of as it’s always been. It’s been in transition of becoming what it will be in another 100 years.” No post-modernist academic (or Stephen Colbert, for that matter) could have uttered a more confounding sentence. A pitch-perfect summation of episode 3.
4) Pax Panoramix
We begin in Jurançon, Pyrenees at the Domaine de Souch where we meet Yvonne Hegoburu. An exalted woman, she offers powerful insights into what growing grapes means. As well as in Sardinia, Bosa specifically, where next we land. Battista and Lina Colombu, again, express puzzlement at the increasing homogenization of wine globally. This episode is particularly rich in contrasting opinion. Neal Rosenthal hits back hard. Michel Rolland blithely goes about his business. There is more push back in Burgundy with wisdom from Hubert Montille and Aubert de Villaine. Michael Broadbent joins in. Patrick Leon of Chateau Mouton-Rothschild does not seem to know an artisanal-class winery’s vines are interplanted with his, those of Domaine Iris du Gayou’s. Pierre Siri, winemaker for Iris, is a shrewd addition to the film. There is shown a fascinating meditation on the 1855 Bordeaux classification from multiple points of view. Perhaps most delightful is an interview with Jean-Michel Cazes, owner of the 5th growth Lynch Bages. He takes the filmmaker on a delightful tour of the bizarre architecture of prominent Bordeaux wineries. “There is really no local architecture!”
5) The Appian Way
The viewer might be wondering what is left to prove generally about the globalization of a limited wine style having heard multiple voices either pointing to or demonstrating the affirmative. And yet we are only four episodes into The Series. Previously critics have laid the blame for the argument forcefully made in the theatrical version of Mondovino at Mr. Nossiter’s feet. It was his selective editing that was to blame. That argument can no longer be sustained. And with episode 5 the beat goes on. But a more aggressively drawn contrast begins to emerge. Here is considered the influence of Robert Parker. From Rolland to garagiste Jean-Luc Thunevin of Chateau Valandraud in St. Émilion, from a visit to Leo McCloskey of Enologix, the largest wine consulting firm in the US, to Parker himself, it is in this episode where the rubber meets the road. I defy anyone to sit through Mr. Parker’s greatly expanded comments on his own influence, on pricing, terroir, his indifference to history and not come away astonished at his arrogance. Michel Rolland, as well. And a new, fresh voice is heard here, Catherine Montalbetti, the editor of the Hachette Wine Guide. She speaks well of the standardization of taste. And she goes on to say, “Because no way can you tell whether it comes from California, Chile, Bordeaux or Languedoc.”
6) Quo Vademus?
What does an older bottle of wine taste like? Neal Rosenthal laments the way prominent critics interfere with the cultivation of a tasting culture. In a cross-cut Parker explains “As I get older, I like them younger.” Jean-Luc Thunevin, much to the displeasure of his wife, says “Well, I say I don’t like old women.” Quo vademus? Where are we going? This episode explores the ‘plastic surgery’ of wine, especially the increasing use of new French oak. Parker dwells on his liking of vanilla and toastiness, and considering its prevalence and that he likes wines younger, it is very amusing we are taken to the Paris office of plastic surgeon, Dr. Eric Auclair. Back in Napa, Leo McCloskey, CEO of Enologix, notes the similarity of palates of Parker and the Wine Spectator. Indeed, so closely have become the palates of leading critics that Enologix specifically works with wineries to predict what the critics will say! Tom Matthews of the Wine Spectator is interviewed. More from Burgundy. Marketing has assumed a central role. Among the Montille’s family, Etienne explains that the enemy is ignorance and standardization, over-simplification and money, of course. Diversity, he insists, is the highest value. It was a pleasure to see Becky Wasserman and Russell Hone make an appearance. Yvonne Hegoburu, Aimé Guibert, Aubert de Villaine, and Michel Lafarge all join in discussing the matter of marketing.
Tourists are caught plundering the grapes of Romanée Conti! Aubert de Villaine’s reaction is priceless. We close with a brief moments with the eternal Charlotte Rampling.
7) All Roads Lead to Rome
Episode 7 is framed by the question of authorship versus midwifery in the creation of a wine. We begin in Paris at the Ministry of Finance. Alain Châtelet of the Govt. Bureau on Wine Fraud leads us through the delicate question of consumer protection with respect to fraudulent wines. Very difficult to prosecute owning to the reluctance of victims to step forward. Great ego investment in wine. And what can you say about a wine that is both pleasurable and a counterfeit? Indeed, this entire episode could be called “the psychoanalysis of wine” for we next meet Jean Laplanche of Chateau de Pommard. “I have a complex life, to tell the truth. Did you know that?”, he asks. Laplanche remains one of Jacques Lacan’s greatest students. Author of a dozen books on various aspects of the Freudian oeuvre, Laplanche introduces us to what might be called the ’strong’ argument: that only the author’s signature on the bottle is the guarantee of quality and authenticity of the contents. In stark contrast to his position are those of Montille and Villaine who hold that they are simply midwives. In broadly psychoanalytic terms you have a repositioning of the question of the Father and the Mother. (The consumer plays the role of child, constantly put on the spot to declare his unconditional love for one or the other.) Great anxiety! But what all gentlemen can agree upon is that for Robert Parker, as Laplanche puts it, “The complexity of Burgundy repulses him.” This is, I believe, a brilliant insight. There is a tremendous amount of important material here. Why do consumers feel the need for the strong hand of wine gurus? Why the anxiety over being cheated or of not knowing how to taste? How is it that powerful marketing forces have come between the consumer and their palates?
We next meet Scott Harvey, winemaker for Folie à Deux. That winery was named after the founders’ madness of the same name: the condition of two closely related people sharing the same delusional idea, in this case, of starting a winery. But perhaps the most interesting moments of this episode belong to Jean-Charles Boisset, Director of the Boisett Group, #1 in Burgundy sales. I shall not soon forget his unique method pf punching down the cap! Or his plan to produce a limited edition of a super-blend of wines from diverse Boisset holdings, a wine with no origins, possessing neither Mother nor Father, neither terroir nor authorship. The episode closes on a very painful recollection by Bernard Magrez. It seems his father used to pin a very public sign on his back reading ‘I am a lazy boy’ when he was a child. As he says, “If you’ve lived through that it is much harder to love anyone”.
8 ) Crossing the Rubicon
9) Et tu Brute…
Intrigue and regret in Italy. Here is recounted, finished in episode 9, the story of the Antinoris and the Frescobaldis, both aristocratic families of great antiquity. It is a grand tale of betrayal and familial discord, of false starts and of finding the courage to go on. A deep history is on display. Ornellia’s loss is recounted. It is a particularly ugly aspect of contemporary wine culture that history counts for so little. From Rolland to Parker, Boisset to Mondavi, there is simply no room for historical reflection in the pursuit of global markets. Unless one may make a buck off of it. But as The Series reveals again and again, whether it be Lafarge recounting German occupation of his family’s winery, Aubert de Villaine describing Burgundy’s religious patrimony, or Aimé Guibert railing against the erasure of cultural memory, real families, real histories are grinding forward.
Among the most bizarre and destructive of personalities on display is that of James Suckling. His casual child’s play with the meaning of the lives of others is both laughable and chilling. I’ll say no more except that his comments are greatly expanded from those presented in the theatrical release of Mondovino. Episodes 8 and 9 are truly a tour de force.
10) Veni, vidi, vendidi (I came, I saw, I sold)
In the final episode we may take a bit of a breather. Introduced to Chile, Brazil and Argentina (and the film crew’s mysterious denial of entry into Paraguay) we meet many fresh faces, many new winemakers. But we are also introduced to the persistent racism and class struggle that have blemished so much of the southern continent’s history. Rolland’s shadow falls even here. There is a strange, indeed, terribly tragic way in which the world of wine is repeatedly limited, boxed in, by the presence of so few authorities and consultants. How strange to wander the back country of Argentina and still hear the names Parker, Rolland, the monotonous incantation of so few names. But now, at the episode’s conclusion, we, too, have names, new names: Charlie Rodriguez, Isanette Bianchetti and Mauro Tedesco, José Mounier…
I highly recommend Mondovino, The Series.
Admin
Marlborough’s Awatere Valley is part of New Zealand’s thriving sheep industry and is the home to the historic 1847 Flaxbourne Station, so the arrival of another flock isn’t anything new, however, the latest additions to the region are unusual for two reasons; firstly, they’re tiny – the miniature Babydoll (SouthDown) rare-breed – and secondly, they’re being used as lawn-mowers on a vineyard.
The Babydolls are intended to keep the grass and weeds in check between the vines on Yealand’s Estate based just outside of Seddon, on the North-Eastern tip of New Zealand’s South Island. The goal is for sheep to eventually replace tractors over the whole 1000+ hectares (ha) on the estate, but they’re starting off slowly with just 10 of the woolly grass-cutters in 125 ha of organic Sauvignon Blanc.
Originally from the South Downs of Sussex, England, it was America that developed the breed in the late 19th and 20th centuries, though Yealand’s have imported theirs from Australia at $2000 (US) each and are hoping to increase numbers by another 10-20 over the next few months before starting a 5-year cross-breeding program which is hoped to produce a flock big enough for all the vines.
Adult Babydolls reach only 24” (60cm) when fully grown so should be no direct threat to the vines, although this isn’t the first attempt at replacing tractors on the estate; traditional sized sheep were tried first, but they started to eat the grapes, while guinea pigs (Cavys) proved more successful until hawks in the area developed a taste for them! A local 3news video gives a great summary of the events.
I chanced upon this story after winning a bottle of the Yealand’s Estate 2008 Sauvignon Blanc at a recent tasting. While researching the winery details via their UK importer, Liberty Wines, I saw the Babydoll press release and delved deeper, discovering that it’s not just a PR exercise but part of an integrated and well planned environmental strategy for the new winery set up by Peter Yealand.
In April it became the largest winery certified under the CarboNZero scheme and their website states “we’re creating the first fully sustainable winery in New Zealand” – from its outset the winery started off greener than other established businesses with its use of wind turbines, solar power, water collection & recycling and a host of other initiatives including wetland development.
I contacted the winery to find out a little more about the business and the man who set it up.
It seems that 61yr old Peter Yealand is a true maverick, a self-made millionaire who doesn’t conform to any business template; he has never got round to buying a suit and is more at home behind the wheel of an earth-mover than behind a desk. Peter started off his business life carting hay around South Island before getting into construction, including repairing the marine defences at the end of Wellington airport. His big break came in the early 70’s at the start of the country’s mussel farming industry which he successfully helped develop for nearly 20 years. A spot of deer farming followed which got him into land development and, importantly, an appreciation of environmental concerns (in contrast to his earlier life) which would stay with him to the present day.
It was in 2002 that Peter started his ventures involving vines after buying up a marshy area around Blenheim and sculpturing the land to create a new lake alongside a 20ha vineyard. Soon he had 3 separate vineyards and was selling grapes to established wineries including Montana. The strong, year-round coastal winds prove a challenge to viticulture in the area so he developed a reusable plastic vine guard, the Alto Microclime in 2004 as an improvement to the existing, often makeshift alternatives (such as milk cartons).
Disgruntled by what he saw as poor management, by the end of 2005 he attempted to take over Oyster Bay (Marlborough Vineyards) and ended up in a messy bidding war with Delegat. Although he eventually lost that encounter the idea of running his own winery had taken hold and within 3 years Yealand had consolidated his existing vineyard holdings, purchased new land and spent hundreds of hours behind the controls of his earthmoving equipment – Yealand’s Estate was opened in August 2008.
The winery was conservatively valued at $30 million (US) when it opened and the Estate media brochure claims it is twice as efficient in terms of energy used per bottle of wine compared to the industry standard – in its first year of operation the energy efficiency and alternative production schemes saved nearly 1 million kilowatt hours, equivalent to 120 family houses. From 2010 LPG use will be replaced by a grape pruning oiler and an extra wind turbine alongside the existing wind & solar generators should see the winery completely self-sufficient for energy production and even selling off any excess to the National Grid.
500 ha of vines are currently on-line but full production from total land holdings of over 1000 ha is expected by 2013. The Babydoll sheep are currently roaming around the 125 ha earmarked for full organic operation for the 2010 vintage.
There are 4 vineyards;
– Seaview, 1000 ha and New Zealand’s largest privately owned vineyard
– Flaxbourne, 100 ha in traditional sheep country – these are both in the Awatere Valley south of Seddon.
– Grovetown, on reclaimed marshland
– Riverlands?- these make up 50 ha of Sauvignon Blanc on the Wairau Plains, near Blenheim.
The head winemaker is Tamra Washington, born and bred in Blenheim and lured back home by Peter after working in wineries in California, Italy and Australia. No doubt inspired by Tamra’s wanderings, experimental vineyards of Fiano, Gruner Veltliner and Tempranillo hint at future offerings under the Yealand’s banner and in New Zealand a Tempranillo is available under the “Pete’s Shed” label (a reference to Peter Yealand’s eccentric “garden shed” inventor habits). For now Sauvignon Blanc and Pinot Noir are available in the US, with Sauvignon Blanc, Vioginer, Riesling and Pinot Gris in the UK (and Marks & Spencers customers may have seen the Flaxbourne Sauvignon Blanc, made especially for M&S by Yealands).
With one of the windiest vineyard sites in New Zealand the Estate vines tend to be lower yielding and with thicker skinned grapes, hopefully leading to a greater concentration of flavours. The planting of 27,000 native trees and flaxes to act as a wind barrier has also encouraged birds and other wildlife into the area and around the wetland areas also set up. This information and much more is available on an enjoyable interactive wander through the 3-page Flash version of the Yealands website – be sure to listen out for the sheep in the background and imagine the patter of tiny feet between the vines!
Greybeard
Cork versus screw cap. The conversation has gotten quite stale for the wine drinker. And that is because the terms of debate largely revolve around the issue of the preservation of wine alone. Nothing but the noise of competing industries on this topic may be regularly heard. A drinker may be forgiven for believing that it really doesn’t matter how wine is sealed. Has cork improved in recent years? Has the incidence of TCA contamination been dramatically reduced? Are there reduction issues associated with screw cap? And does cork matter? To all of these questions the answer is a resounding “yes”.
Robert Parker, recently returned from the WineFuture Conference in Spain observed on his website just this week that
“…the tiny percentage of corked bottles confirms what I have been seeing for the last 3-4 years…that industry has awakened following the decline in cork quality…”
Yet how does this information influence the drinker in their purchasing decisions? Perhaps not at all. Something is missing from the popular discussion. Indeed, much more than something is missing.
There exists a broad range of important issues that the cork manufacturer Amorim has taken the lead in publicizing. Cork is a renewable, entirely recyclable resource. Cork forests play an indispensable role in plant and animal ecosystems and sanctuaries, as reservoirs of biodiversity and even speciation. Family traditions remain intact and thrive through the careful husbandry of cork oak trees generations-old for a fair price. Local economies are sustained by its stable cultivation. Harvesting requires skills patiently acquired. And manufacturing offers productive employment to 1000s. These and still other positive social and environmental values are available for all to read on Amorim’s Cork Facts page, a rich source of current information on the state of the culture and industry.
Doing my part to celebrate this noble product, I offer an account of a tour of the the Quinta da Lagoalva, both the estate and winery. As a very fine part of the 2009 European Wine Bloggers Conference in Lisbon, Amorim and Lagoalva graciously offered an in-depth look at virtually every aspect of cork’s profound backstory. This is the substance of part 1. In part 2 I will recount a tour of the Amorim production facility in Coruche.
A word about our guide from Amorim, Carlos de Jesus, the Director of Marketing & Communications. Rarely have I met an individual with such a complete mastery of a subject. I knew we were in for educational experience when the first thing the gentleman said was “Ask any question you want. Make them as tough as you like. If you don’t ask the hard questions, I will. And I will answer them.” Carlos was no company flak, but a man deeply dedicated to the life and culture of cork in all its many dimensions. A truly brilliant fellow.
Enjoy.
Diogo Campilho I am the winemaker for Lagoalva. I studied in Portugal for four years, and then I went to Australia where I worked for three years until I came back to Lagoalva in 2004. Lagoalva belongs to my family. It is a family estate. We have in total 6000 acres; some of them are together and then we have smaller pieces around.
Of the cork trees, we have 3000 acres. We have harvested bark here since 1932, quite a long time. We harvest all the cork every nine years. In those years there are only two years in which we don’t take bark. Yields per year are around 50,000 arrobas (an arroba is about 15 kilos). We use the arroba because it is the unit of measurement here.
About 25% of our bark is top quality; 50% is normal to average; the last 25% is not so good [but still usable]. With respect to TCA, that occurs mostly at the bottom of the tree. We don’t sell that part. We cut it off, a certain number of centimeters is removed. The bark is then placed on top of plastic sheets [tarps] for a time.
We have here a guy who will show you how we harvest from the tree; from that tree which is on the ground. He will demonstrate. We sell the bark that only we harvest. Why? Because our workers have been with us for ages and they know how to do it well! And for us it is important that it is harvested properly so as to not damage the tree. We work carefully to preserve them for as long as we can.
The first time the bark is harvested is after 25 years. We call it ‘virgin’. We don’t sell it. It is not of good quality. The second harvest we don’t sell either. It is only after 18 years, with the third harvest, do we begin selling the bark.
Carlos de Jesus You can never harvest everything. There is no mathematical formula but it is a function of the height of the tree and of the diameter of the trunk. That gives you the amount of cork that may be removed. By the time these guys come back to this tree in 9 years the tree is going to be bigger. They are going to be able to take a little bit more. So every cycle, every nine years, a little bit more will be taken as the oak reaches its maturity. But you never harvest 100%. That would be too much stress on the tree.
See how rough the bark is? This afternoon when we go to Coruche [one of Amorim’s cork processing centers] you will be able to see the planks of the third, fourth, and fifth etc. harvest. And you will be able to see how much smoother the bark becomes over the life of the cork oak. Subsequent harvests have a smoothing effect on the bark. But much of this will be too hard to compress.
One of the reasons why cork works so well in a bottle, and in flooring and shoes, for example, is that it compresses. In fact it is the world’s only natural solid that may be compressed on one end and not increase its size on the other end. That is the reason why it seals a bottle so well. So you want to maintain that elasticity as much as you can.
Visiting Blogger For the first and second harvest, is it possible to use the bark for other purposes?
Carlos de Jesus Yes, it is. There is flooring, for example. It does not require the same elasticity you need of a bottle cork. You can use it for insulation. This is a good example because it is a 100% natural product; there are no glues in it.
Visiting Blogger How do you store the bark until it goes to processing?
Diogo Campilho We sell it only after 21 days from when harvested. Why? Because of the humidity on the bark. We store the bark in stacks 2 meters high and 10 meters long.
Visitin Blogger You’re waiting 21 days so you’re selling on cork weight and not on water weight?
Carlos de Jesus Yes, basically. There is something I want to emphasize. When Diogo says that he puts the stacks onto plastic, not directly in contact with the soil, that is absolutely fundamental. About TCA, you cannot defeat anything measured in nanograms just by using curative measures. Everybody loves miracle cures. We all like to open the newspaper and find that ‘XYZ’ disease was cured.
We also need prevention. Prevention starts right here in the forest. So when Diogo cuts the lower end of the plank he is making my life easier. When he then keeps all those stacks from contact with the soil where you have all the precursors of TCA, he’s making life difficult for those precursors! So when we have to apply curative measures, which we still need to have, you’re not applying curative measures upon a huge departure base; but on a much lower departure base. It is one thing to deal with a big migraine, it is quite another to deal with the headache at its onset. But if you have a headache everyday, don’t take an aspirin everyday. (laughs) Go and find out why you have that headache!
Traditionally we didn’t talk [to the cork oak growers]. Our grandparents were playing a zero sum game. They wanted to sell as high I possible; I wanted to buy as low as possible. And we would meet every nine years around that zero sum game. But that is not how you establish confidence! That is not how you understand the other guy’s problems. They think it is very easy for us; we think it is very easy for them. But it is not! It is a very, very complex relationship, especially when you have more plastics and screw caps coming onto the market. I cannot deliver the quality that you guys demand [the wine drinking public] if he doesn’t know what I need.
So the amount of dialogue that we have today is completely different than what we had as little as ten years ago. That makes a big difference.
Diogo Campilho A few more things I want to show you. In the soil we make pH adjustments and we use the organic manure from the our more than 1000 cattle and 3000 sheep. We use no irrigation.
Visiting Blogger Do you prune the trees?
Diogo Campilho Yes, but only in the beginning. We remove the branches lower on the trunk and prefer the straighter limbs.
Visiting Blogger Why does the ground have to be kept so bare?
Carlos de Jesus So bare? It doesn’t have to be. It is their choice to do so. But you have to realize one thing. If you look around you will see you are looking at sand. If you take away the cork oaks there will be nothing here, not even this grass. This area is prone to desertification. The cork oak plays an effective role. Imagine this sandy soil in the Summer when it is 110 degrees fahrenheit out there and 70 degrees in the forest! Nothing would survive without the trees.
Visiting Blogger Are you saying that if the humans disappeared for 100 years this would all be desert?
Carlos de Jesus If the humans disappeared this would be a much better place for the animals. If the cork oak disappear this will be a much worse place for both animals and people. You can take people out of this world and nothing happens to the world. There are plenty of Hollywood films that tell you about that. (laughs) The point here is not people protecting the oaks as much as the oaks protecting people.
He owns the trees but he doesn’t own the trees. Because he cannot cut them down. If a tree is dead we have to ask for permission to cut it down. We need to give something back. And what the oaks demand is very little. They give a lot. To me one of the most important things that the oaks give is the ability to show the world that economic, social and environmental issues can co-exist. You do not have to choose one or the other. These guys have been around for decades and decades illustrating that you can have it all.
We are then shown a demonstration of how the bark is removed.
Diogo Campilho I want to explain one thing. Normally this kind of job is done to a living tree! I don’t know if you know that the harvesting is done in June. Why? Because that is when there is a good relationship between the humidity and the heat. It would be impossible to remove the cork from the tree now [Nov. 1st] through Spring. For each tree there are two guys working. So we have a total of nine couples, eighteen people, harvesting oak; and we have four women who pick up the planks immediately and put them on a tractor to be taken to the stacks. A good average per tree would be 45 kilos.
Carlos de Jesus The bark is now dry. If you were to touch the trunk immediately after a proper harvest it would be wet. Not with sap but with moisture. The sap runs inside, in the wood of the tree.
Diogo Campilho Over there you can see a tree with the number six written on it. That means it was last harvested in 2006. This tree has no number on it because it was harvested in 2009. So this is a cork tree that was harvested this last June.
I hope my great-grand children will still be able to harvest these trees.
Visiting Blogger Is this an average density of trees for a cork forest?
Carlos de Jesus It really depends. If your comparing to the rest of the Alentejo it is pretty much average. In some other areas they can be quite dense. Here it is about 60 trees per hectare.
Visiting Blogger Once the cork is harvested I am curious as to what you do with the waste after all products are made?
Carlos de Jesus Nothing is wasted, absolutely nothing. I’ll give you an example. The plant your going to visit this afternoon, 95% of it’s energy needs come from renewable sources. And that renewable source is essentially cork dust. So when the granules are so fine that nothing else can be made with them, we use them as fuel. Nothing is wasted. This is one of the things I like the most.
We pile back onto the bus and head for the grounds of the Quinta da Logoalva de Cima itself for a lunch. The dirt roads were rutted with tractor and truck ruts. In our full sized air-conditioned bus the way was slow. How strange to be straddling the generations of viticultural and cork agricultural practice, experiencing the whiplash of historical/modern moments in such a behemoth as was our bus. Its garish splashes of blue and white, its logo bigger than a man, all was very much out of place among the coffee brown of the oaks and the blond weeds.
We enjoyed a brilliant lunch. I am sure I speak for all of my colleagues in offering great thanks to Diogo de Campilho for his generosity.
Next stop: The Amorim cork processing facility AI Coruche.
Admin
Colares is centuries-old wine growing region on the Atlantic Coast of Portugal. A forty minute train ride from Lisbon, Colares enjoys a very different, adaptive agricultural practice than that found in vineyards only a few kilometers inland. The vines are planted in sand. Actually that is not quite true. The sand is excavated and the vines planted on the clay layer beneath, often to a depth of 3-4 meters, and then the cane is progressively buried in sand as the it grows. As the reader will discover, this practice has had a number of interesting consequences, including the survival of the perhaps the greatest acreage, around 12-14 acres, of pre-phylloxera vines in the whole of Europe. Granted DOC status in 1908, the authorized grapes are equally adaptive and rare, Ramisco and Colares Malvasia. But details of all of this may be read below. Enologist/winemaker Francisco Figueiredo of the Adega Regional de Colares was my guide.
As has been true of my every waking moment since touching down in this astonishing country to attend the European Wine Bloggers Conference, Colares, too, provided both intellectual pleasures and something like heartache. I spent time in pre-Olympic Barcelona and returned years later to find old neighborhoods I had known utterly transformed. Much was swept away in the march toward modernization and something like international respectability. A similar transformation is also underway everywhere in the small portion of Portugal I traveled. And wine making traditions themselves are in the crosshairs, as my earlier interview with Virgilio Loureiro made perfectly clear. Colares is yet another example. Development, especially of weekend homes for Lisbon’s wealthy, has taken many vineyards.
The Ramisco grape produces wines that are out of international favor. Lean, low alcohol, high in acid, requiring many years of cellaring to become approachable, the wines of Colares are challenging; a different kind of reflection about wine is required of us. And if the challenge is refused or ignored, then Colares inches closer to oblivion.
Below you will find a mix of historical and current pre and post harvest photos, many from Francisco. I arrived well after the harvest. Some of the topics he discusses are best illustrated by images taken before my arrival.
This is the first of a two part interview. (Part 2)
Admin How long have you been working here?
Francisco Figueiredo Ten years. This has been my tenth harvest. For the first few years I worked here only at harvest time. I was still studying. I’m an agronomist and have done post-graduate work in enology. Since then I have worked here in Colares. I also give support to growers/producers not in the Colares region but in the Estremadura region. I’ve always been in this region. My parents live here. So I’ve known the region well since I was a child.
The Colares DOC is a very small wine region. It is between the Sintra Mountains and the Atlantic Ocean, which is very near. It is a short line along the coast, the demarcated region. And we have to meet two conditions for the wine to be Colares DOC. The vines have to be planted in sandy soils, and as we will see, it is loose sand, like beach sand; and we have to make the wine using mainly two local grape varieties. The red is called Ramisco and the white is called Malvasia.
The vineyards are very traditional and quite unique. They are old vines, mainly, ungrafted and pre-phylloxera, some of them still. Because of that we don’t have to use American rootstock. We plant the vines directly on the clay that is underneath the sand, not in the sand itself. To plant a vineyard we dig down in the sand to the clay layer, which can be from 1/2 a meter to 4-5 meters deep. The vines are planted in the clay for the roots to get the moisture, the humidity and the nutrients; then gradually we place sand around the vine as it grows. It takes about two years until the terrain is level again.
Is there a qualitative difference in the grapes whether a vine is planted 1/2 a meter or 4 meters?
FF No, not exactly. The main difference is that if we get the clay layer closer to the surface we can produce a little bit earlier. We don’t trellis the vines. We are doing some experiments but in the traditional vineyards the vines are not trellised. They are left on the ground. And that is important for maturation because of the heat off the sand. The heat reflects off the sand and helps the maturation go a little bit faster. That is important because we are in a region with a lot of humidity and moisture, lots of wind and mists, fog. It is usually 10 degrees celsius less here than on the other side of the mountain and Lisbon during the summer. So the maturation is slow. We usually harvest late, around the beginning of October. The last week of September, beginning of October we are harvesting the sandy soil vines.
The sandy region called Chão de Areia (meaning sandy soil), has a sub-region called Chão Rijo where the soil is only clay. It means ‘hard soil’. They are more like trellised vineyards, with higher production [yields] as well. We use different varieties on those clay soils. But we can’t use the Colares DOC designation on the labels. They are sold as table wine or labeled Estremadura regional of regional Lisboa.
Is sand constantly being added to this area or is there erosion?
FF No. We protect the terrain with free stone walls. And we also use dry cane palisades to protect the vines from the strong ocean winds. So there is constant shelter. The vines and the sand is protected.
What kind of yield do you get from an average Colares vine?
FF We get very low yields; one and a half to two tons per acre. In the clay soil you can get around eight to twelve tons per acre. Much more. That’s a big difference!
How many winegrowers are there in the Colares DOC?
FF There are 55 associates. But most are small. The total sandy soil area is about 12 to 14 acres. A very small production. Unfortunately the area has gone down. Not now. It’s stable now for the last ten years, with a small increase. But we have lost a lot of vineyards. In the 60s and the 70s there was a lot of development. We are very near the mountains and the sea. This is a place people want to build homes, people from Lisbon. Most are weekend homes here. [We are driving along the coast. Large homes and apartments climb up the hillsides] All of this used to be vineyards. Not in my time! I am 30 years old.
About the matter of the preservation of the Colares vineyards. Do you go before city hall to argue that a development shouldn’t proceed because of the vineyards it would destroy, that your patrimony is at stake?
FF Yes. We are inside Sintra/Cascais Natural Park, which should be protected. But it isn’t. It is very difficult. And of course for someone outside even if they wanted to invest in a vineyard would find it very difficult because the price of the land is very, very high. People are expecting to sell for construction, not vineyards.
What legal protections do the winegrowers have?
FF Practically none.
So someone could walk up to a grower tomorrow and offer them a large sum of money and there would be no objection.
FF Yes.
Francisco added to this subject in a separate email. “I can’t recall any government role in the direct preservation of vineyards. Indirectly the government supports wine sales, mainly outside, through ViniPortugal and partially funding exportation projects. The only thing I can recall regarding the Colares vineyards were two specific measures which gave some annual funding to the grape growers. The objective was for growers to maintain the landscape aspects related to the sandy soil vineyards (conservation of the free stone walls and the dried cane palisades). One of these fundings came from the Sintra-Cascais Natural Park Authority (the protocol only lasted 1 of the intended 5 years due to lack of money!). The other was a specific environmental measure from the Government which lasted 5 years and ended 2 years ago). None of these fundings were directly made to avoid selling the vine land. Wine is one of the agricultural products that the government supports more intensely, but not by trying to avoid the selling of property (that would be difficult because we are talking about private property). I can’t recall any protest related to the selling of a vineyard.”
FF This road we are on used to be all dirt. It is asphalt now. They put the sewer line down the middle of the road. I am beginning to worry about this. We are in one of the main growing areas, a place called “Chão Verde”, outside the small town of Fontanelas. These are probably the only vineyards in the world with a sewage system outside the vineyard! It is very difficult.
Are there people in the government who are sympathetic to the issue of preservation?
FF Yes. It is not with me directly, but the directors of the Adega Regional are in constant contact with associations and politicians to try to make some progress for the vineyards. But it is difficult. It’s difficult.
[We get out of the car.] This is an old vineyard. You can see the stone walls and the dry cane palisades. In the vineyards we usually grow the vines with apple trees. They are also low. It is very common to see this type of association.
The apple trees are blossoming now…
FF That is because we had a lot of heat in the past few weeks. You came at the wrong time of the year to see vines. It’s after harvest. These are very old vines. They still produce. This is one row. Over there, beyond the free stone wall is another vineyard. One of the things we do is raise the grapes so that they are not in direct contact with the hot sand. They can get burned. We prop the bunches up with a small stick.
It sure doesn’t look like Napa Valley! Someone driving through who did not know of Colares’ viticultural history would not ’see’ anything.
FF That is true. (laughs) It is obvious that there can be no mechanization in these vineyards. So we are doing experiments with low trellis systems to see if it is possible to mechanize the vineyards, to make them more economical and more affordable. All the picking now is done by hand. But so it the spraying and the digging of the vineyards for planting. And it is all done with the family.
With respect to the families, do these vineyards pass from generation to generation? Are the young interested in continuing?
FF I am afraid that the next generation isn’t very interested in wine growing. Some of the growers are old people from 60 to 70 years old. But I don’t see that their sons are very interested in the wine growing business. They have other jobs doing other things. The wine growers themselves have other jobs. Some work on different agricultural products. Others keep the vines as a hobby. The cooperative has to make some effort to try and keep tending those vineyards that will be left behind when the older generation passes. That is the only chance for the region: the cooperative will have to work directly taking care of these vineyards when the time comes.
So that I understand, all the 55 associates of the cooperative harvest their grapes and then send them to the cooperative. All the grapes are mingled, fermented together, and bottled under the single Adega Regional de Colares label.
FF Exactly. We just separate the grapes from the sandy soils [Chão de Areia] from the clay soils [Chão Rijo]. With the clay soils we differentiate two types of vineyards: the ones that produce ‘less quality’ grapes, let’s say, so those grapes go into simple table wine; and the best grapes from the clay soil go to the better Regional Estremadura wine. In the sandy soils there is no need for any differentiation. This is, by the way, the only DOC where the Ramisco grape is grown, and the Malvasia Colares. But it is also permitted in the Estremadura Regional, of course.
So is the Ramisco grape itself in danger?
FF Fortunately, no. I will show you another vineyard where we, along with the School of Agronomy, the Technical University of Lisbon, have selected throughout the region several cuttings from the best vines, and we have planted them in this vineyard. There are several clones in the region. They are now being kept, safeguarded in the vineyard. The idea is to protect the varieties.
This is a very old wine region. We have records of consistent wine production since almost the foundation of our nationality, since the 1100s.
These rocks that make up the walls, where did they come from?
FF Usually each grower has a piece of land on the sandy soil and on the clay soil, sometimes more pieces of land. So when the planted the ‘hard soil’ vineyards they took out the stones and they brought them to the sandy soil terrain to build the walls.
Notice the trenches of this vineyard being filled. As you can see, we plant after making a trench, a ditch. We put the sand to the side and gradually fill it in as the vine grows. In this area we had to dig about three meters down. I saw how deep when they were paving the road. It was about three and a half meters down to the clay layer.
We see a gentleman cross the road ahead of us.
Oh, this is Mr. Gonçaol. He is an associate of the adega. You are lucky. His vineyard is closed but this way we can see it. You can see again the apple trees. Always the protection, the shelters. These rows or groups of rows separated by the dry cane palisades of vines we call manta. The direct translation of manta would be a blanket. The clay in this vineyard is about one and a half meters down.
I see he has dug around the vines. What is this for?
FF On of the jobs that is done this time of year, this season. The job is to take these roots out, to cut them away. Sometimes we will also add manure for the vines at this point. The roots are of no interest to us. We want only the deep ones. And there is no irrigation. It is all dry farmed. That is the importance of planting the roots on the clay. No drip irrigation. We have some modern vineyards, not from our association, but from another association, which they drip irrigate. You can easily see that they are not strong vines because of that. So this is the natural way to have water, to plant them directly on the clay.
And over here he has new plantings.
So all of these vines are ungrafted, of course. And the source of all the cuttings?
FF All the cuttings are done here. There is only one nursery site for Ramisco vines just in case someone needs cuttings for a vineyard. For the traditional growers like Mr. Gonçaol, they do their own cuttings. And they choose only from the best vines.
Now, you don’t have phylloxera here. What are the disease and pest pressures?
FF The main pressure here is powdery mildew…
And second homes…
FF (laughs) …and building construction. That’s a real pest pressure! But of simpler pests we have what we call Cicadella, sharpshooters. Growers like Mr. Gonçaol didn’t know about the pest. It started about five years ago. We have seen some increase in the average temperature. And the sharpshooter came from the Alentejo to the north.
We say goodbye to Gonçaol and continue on our tour.
End of part 1
Admin
I came to Carcavelos in search of the grounds where a regional wine museum will be built. Yes, I was looking for a patch of dirt. I had also hoped to speak with people familiar with its grand history of fortified wine production; but the idea of simply stepping off a train and into the life of a community is foolishness. Given my limited time and naive expectations, what chance would I have of learning a thing?
I had recently read, more accurately, pieced together the general sense of Portuguese newspaper reports of the building of a wine museum in this Greater Lisbon community, itself a part of the Estremadura Province on the Atlantic Coast. Whether ground had been broken I could not ascertain. So it was to Carcavelos that I went in search of answers.
Estremadura, the Vinho Regional (VR), is coextensive with its socio-political boundary. Though the VR boasts of many winemaking areas, for my purposes I shall mention only the DOCs, Bucelas and Colares, moving quickly to the Carcavelos DOC itself.
Informed sources tell us,
“Carcavelos can be a blend of up to nine different grapes. The principle grapes of the Carcavelos region includes Arinto, Boal, Galego Dourado, Negra Mole, Trincadeira and Torneiro. The wines are usually fermented completely dry with some fermenting must known as the vinho abafado containing some residual sugar set aside prior to the fermentation’s completion. The wine is fortified with a distilled grape spirit to bring the wine up to an alcohol level of 18-20% and the vinho abafado is added back in to add sweetness to the wine. Carcavelos wines are then aged in oak barrels for three to five years to give the wines a tawny color and nutty flavor.” (Please see the wiki page itself for links to the grapes mentioned above.)
Like many oceanside parishes here, the real estate industry has been booming in past decades with terrible effects on the local civil and agrarian culture. Wine growing no exception, of course. Though always small, what used to be a thriving wine industry, making among the most sought after sweet, fortified wines of Europe, in recent years the DOC has been reduced to a very few small properties amounting to a couple dozen acres (exact figures unconfirmed as of this writing).
Spoon fed such internet info, I entered the town. Wandering to the center square, clutching my map like a white flag, I began a harmless but still mildly offensive search for English speakers. Who might help me find the museum yet-to-be-built?
Every person sent me in a different direction. Others looked at me with amusement.
“There is no museu da vinha.”
“I know. I know. I’m looking for the (variously used) l’espace, la terra, the empty lot!”
In a men’s clothes store a gentleman did tell me a bit more about the project: Funding was short, the political will, firm but practical. Maybe they had planted vines. Maybe some flowers. And yes, the museum’s future site is somewhere over there by the church.
A church and a bar later, I gave up. I passed through an open market on my way back to the train station. What a fine waste of a morning.
There was a bookstore/tabac. I stopped for a bottle of water. Just on a lark I asked the proprietor, Jose, whether he knew of a museu da vinha being built. He wasn’t certain of its location. But his grandfather used to make Carcavelos wine many years ago. And his mother knew a great deal about its history here. Would I like to speak to her? My spirit leapt to the very end of its tether. Yes.
“Come back at 1. I’ll take you to her. It’s about a five minute walk.”
I had a little more than an hour to pass. Passing by some kind of retirement housing complex, I again began asking people after the museu. A North African gentleman emptying the trash finally put the pieces together. In perfect English he sent me to the abandoned winery, Quinta do Barao.
Loosely translating from a pamphlet I was later given by Jose, Carcavelos, a Vinha e o Vinho, published out of Cascais.
“The Quinta do Barao, up until the 1980s of the 20th Century, was the most important center of the cultivation of vines and the production of Carcavelos wine, a view all share in their memory, especially the people of Carcavelos (os carcavelenses).”
It is for this reason Quinta do Barao was selected to house the museu. And when I retuned to the bookstore/tabac as 1 o’clock came around, upon mentioning my discovery of the quinta, Jose Maria Ramos Costa Sequiera, his full name, quickly added details as we walked to his mother’s apartment.
(In all the discussion to follow I shall interfere with the Portuguese to English as little as possible. I am responsible for all errors of their actual intent.)
“It’s a sad day to destroy everything they used to sell. It is now owned by a private owner. But I think the city wants to maintain it because it is very old. Oeiras came and took the vines, and moved them within the city walls of Oeiras, our neighbor. They want to start to produce again [Carcavelos wine] with the old vines. But there are many problems with legalities, some not very clear, but they also plan to plant olive trees for olive oil.
We are at the end of the territory [DOC]. It begins in Cascais and ends here. When you see the towers, that is Oeiras.”
Jose added that it was the construction of the freeway through the middle of the Quinta do Barao vineyards that brought about the beginning of the end of wine production at the facility and in Carcavelos overall. The final blow was the construction of apartment towers he mentions above which effectively blocked the breezes off the Atlantic, breezes necessary for the proper maturation of the grapes. It is that freeway which now divides the two cities.
Correction: I learned today (11/03) that as a matter of public record the apartment towers were built over twenty-five years ago. The freeway was put in around only seven years ago. And according to this source the owners Quinta do Barao very much wanted out of the wine business. That the Atlantic breezes were blocked is, therefore, met with considerable skepticism. In any event, the property was sold in the mid-eighties. Wine-making then ceased. The balance of the property, the larger division, was sold to a real estate concern with plans to build a luxury hotel. Same result. Only the details have changed. Admin
We arrived and waited for his mother to return from her volunteer work at the Fire Station. Jose continued.
“Carcavelos used to be little houses and all farms, farms, farms. Now people come here only to sleep. It’s not a town now.
It is very interesting. I bought the shop three years ago. I was an accountant but I retired from accounting and bought the shop. Here, everybody knows who I am. It’s very complicated here. People go to work somewhere else and come here only in the night to sleep.”
Up walked his mother and into the apartment we went. Her name is Licete Das Dores Ramos Costa Sequeira. (Jose helped with the Portuguese translation. Licete and I found common ground in a bit of French. To protect their privacy I took very few pictures.) Her voice was very strong. And she looked at me with combination of amusement and grace.
“My mother wants us to go upstairs. But she is concerned that it is a little disorganized. She is the vice-president of the Fire Station organization. It’s her hobby! She goes everyday to the station.”
We climb up a very thin and narrow, iron circular staircase. From the landing I immediately see dozens of framed labels, their vintage dates beginning from more than a hundred years ago. The room is filled with books and thick binders. Everywhere I turn I see drawings, old bottles and posters, all related to the family’s wine history and that of Carcavelos. Indeed, much of the material will be or has been given to the city for the museu. There for a few minutes, we head back down (but not before Licete gives me the poster pictured at the top of this post as well as the labels pictured here).
Owing to my sudden arrival, we quickly agree to meet again on Tuesday, November 3rd. Then much more will have been planned, including, if possible, a meeting with the author of the definitive text on the region, A Vinha e o Vinho do Carcavelos, Ana Duarte Baptista Pereira. As Jose turns the pages he explains,
“Published by the Cascais city hall, it is the story of every farm. Here is a picture of my grandmother and grandfather. My father wrote many texts and collections because he wanted to write this book. But he died five years ago. He had a lot of documentation about this farm and other farms. This book is very interesting because it contains everything.”
Licete has disappeared into the kitchen. I hear glasses clinking. Jose takes me to the wine cabinet and begins pulling out bottle after bottle of old Carcavelos wine, the oldest dating from the late 1890s. I ask if I may be permitted to photograph them. Yes. And as he places them near Licete’s working desk, she enters with a tray of walnuts, mildly sweet biscuits, and tastes of a 1948 Carcavelos. I take a glass but suddenly realize how much better it would be to take a picture of her holding the tray. So I put the glass back and raise my camera. She says something I ought not repeat. Jose laughs.
“She does not serve that to everyone!”
—–
End of part one. Please read Part 2.
Admin
Getting around Lisbon is very simple. And it is just as easy taking a combination of train and bus for day trips to local wine producing areas, to the DOCs in Greater Lisbon. I visited Colares the other day, for example, with absolutely no difficulty. From the Rossio train station it is just over two euros for the train to Sintra, a worthy destination in its own right. Trains depart every 15 minutes or so. The ride is roughly 40 minutes long. Once in Sintra it is a euro and a half by bus to Colares, just a few miles further on.
The bus ride to Colares is itself quite thrilling. Full-sized municipal busses whip down a road almost too narrow for the two-way traffic of compact cars. Indeed, it is a great mystery to me why so few vehicles here bear no signs of collisions or fender-benders at all.
Colares is a small parish of the Sintra municipality with just over 7000 souls, according to 2001 figures. As a wine region, its history is quite dense, dating back to the 13th century. But it was in the 19th that Colares entered the more general European imagination when the parish escaped the devastating phylloxera epidemic that brought not only the balance of Portugal but the greater European continent to its knees. By virtue of their vines being planted in sandy soil, a habitation unfit for the offending insect, Colares has the lion’s share of ungrafted vines surviving in the whole of Europe. My understanding is that there are exists a very few hectares scattered in France, but it is the environs of Colares where these unique survivors remain in abundance. It is for this reason, among others to be discussed in another post, that the region was given its DOC status in 1908.
Of the vineyards, to say they are grown in sand requires significant qualifications. The Wines of Portugal, an official Portuguese wine industry text published in 1979, writes
“When planting grape vines, holes are dug in the sand to a depth of often three metres until ‘firm soil’ is found and the vines securely anchored.”
But from the same text is written this ambiguity,
“‘Sandy’ soil wines may only be marketed bottled but those produced on ‘firm’ soils may be sold in 5-litre demi-johns provided they indicate the designation of origin. They must, however, be blended with ’sandy soil’ wines.”
I shall try to discover the meaning of this distinction. Indeed, I shall provide details and photos when I return to the area in a matter of days. A full tour of vineyards and the adega is planned. But for my purposes on this occasion, it was the adega (wine cellar) that I came to visit, properly titled the Adega Regional de Colares. A cooperative, only wines made in the adega, on the premises, may carry the name Colares on their labels. Grapes are therefore brought in from the surrounding vineyards near the Atlantic for winemaking, all on shared equipment.
Owing to the luck of the draw I arrived on the very day a private tasting was planned! I had all of ten minutes to wander the grounds before the guests were to arrive. No amount of pleading would help. That is not quite true. As mentioned above, I have been granted a hosted tour and interview(s), the details of which I shall post in the fullness of time.
Much, much more to come.
Admin
A little bird from the Alentejo told me of a wine tasting at the Ritz in Lisbon. Would I be interested? Yes.
Today I thoroughly enjoyed tasting through Portuguese distributor Américo Maia’s Decante catalogue. The occasion was greatly enriched by the presence of many of the winemakers themselves. This proved extraordinarily helpful as I was able to get important insight into their varied winemaking philosophies.
As is well understood, the current economy is playing havoc at the high end of the market. The pressure is on to produce quality wines at a certain price point, whether for the Portuguese or American wine drinker. In America that translates generally into downward pressure on existing winery stock. For a wine company struggling with an established high-end brands, these have been difficult days.
One industry response has been the wild proliferation of new, lower priced labels. Indeed, for every new animal or savvy pop label that appears you can be sure that behind the scenes a winery is creatively working to reduce its liquid inventory. (Cameron Hughes, anyone?) Needless to say, this shifting of juice from one label to another does nothing to add to over-all variety. Though the wine drinker benefits temporarily from this brand-protecting strategy, they may get to (unknowingly) taste wines previously outside their budget, for example, you can be sure that as the economy rebounds so shall the prices. More importantly, as we all put on our worn work boots for the long slog to recovery, who is to say that a lower price point will not become the standard for quality, that our budgets, as well as our palates, will not become ‘re-calibrated’, as it were?
As amusing as it would be to have a negociant relabel Opus One as ‘Summer Breeze’ and sold for $15, there is an even more creative, and honest, solution: Portuguese wines. What will prove to be a constant refrain on this blog during my stay here in Lisbon, and beyond, is the observation that Portuguese wines are fundamentally unique and distinctive, across the board. And not only with respect to their modest price points. They are quite simply, in the main, stylistically and philosophically different than what is generally found in domestic American wines: Different grapes historically wedded to terroirs; different winemaking traditions; a basic orientation toward the enhancement of food; the very conscious resistance to forces of globalization (with notable exceptions, of course. The subject of a future post).
Though I continue to insist that Portugal is one of the world’s last great terroir cultures, this is only to suggest that international distributors serving the America market take a hard, fiscally responsible look at what the country has to offer. Decante’s Portuguese holdings in his most recent catalogue is a good place to start.
Two of the biggest surprises of my afternoon of tasting were wines from Goncalo Souse Lopes (left) and Nuno Araujo (right). The first gentleman is half of G&R Consultores (Rui Cuhna, the other half). Out of the Duoro, their wines and the specific meaning of the labels may be read about on their Secret Spot website, still under construction. They are quite new. Just click on a label in the banner. CataVino has additional info.
Nunu Araujo is a biodynamic producer working under the Covela label. His website is in need of a bit of a make-over. Basic information on the wines may be read here.
It is worthwhile to note that the two gentlemen pictured above likely shared a table at the Decante tasting because both utilize the profound talents of enologist Rui Cunha, Nuno’s cousin. These three folks deserve far wider recognition, certainly in the United States, no doubt. And so I add my thoroughly American endorsement to their growing European acclaim. None, I repeat, none of these wines are currently available in the US. The clincher? The wines begin at under 10 euros, for god’s sake.
Other wonderful wines included a range of bottlings by producer Quinta de Chocapalha, located near Lisbon. I shall try to visit them while here. From the Alentejo, the always dependable Cortes de Cima was present. At least they are available stateside! Their unique cuvée Courela, referred to by asst. winemaker Helena Sardinha, as a “crisis wine”, a wine for our troubled economic times, reinforced the truth of the exceptional quality and finesse Portuguese wines offer at such modest price points.
Time constraints prevented me from enjoying all of the wines on offer. And of those I did taste, many are not mentioned here. Another time. Alas, I have a train to catch! I will, however, close with special mention of the braille labels on all the bottlings of Pinhal Da Torre’s wines, the first to do so in Portugal, it is said. The wines are generally available in the US. The affable CEO Paulo Saturnino Cunha impressed me with his humility.
Off to Colares…
Admin
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The volcanic islands of Graciosa, Pico, and Terceira, specifically the parish of Biscoitos, are the demarcated wine regions of the Azores, a Portuguese archipelago just over 900 miles from the mainland. Legally recognized in 1994, each area has, nevertheless, been producing wine for hundreds of years. The vines are grown in the near complete absence of soil and sheltered from the wind and salt water by walls of broken basalt painstakingly built over the centuries. The ’soils’, slowly in the process of creation (globally, depending upon a series of site-specific geo-physical processes, the generation of an inch of soil requires many thousands of years), may be broadly divided into two types: shattered, heavily fissured basalt and a slightly looser, sandy version, its additional material largely water runoff and wind transported. This is most strikingly revealed on Pico where the vineyards come within yards of the open Atlantic. Coaxing vines into healthy production in either matrix is nothing short of miraculous.
The agricultural center of Terceira, this small town is home to S.D.A.T., the Adega do Servico de Desenvolvimento Agrario de Terceira (the cellar of Agrarian Development Service), the wine-making cooperative where, upon deplaning at Lajes Airport, we were taken by winery representative, António Espínola.
Like all the demarcated regions of the Azores, grape growing on Biscoitos is suffering from a generational shift. No longer willing to struggle for a living in the same way as their parents and grandparents have, the young are increasingly drawn to cities. To be sure, it is a pattern repeated in all agricultural sectors throughout the world. But in the Azores it is painfully evident, the abandoned vineyards immediately visible as overrun thatches of tangled flora. The disruption of traditional family practice is a very real threat to the long-term survival of this viticulture unique in all the world.
While at the cooperative, we were given precious insight into Biscoitos’ recent vinous history. Located within an older portion of the adega, António showed us what qualifies as their ‘wine library, a wall of honeycombed masonry (situated at the right in the photo). From the rough, abrasive chambers, an echo of the vineyards’ basaltic walls just outside, he pulled bottle after intriguing bottle of private wines, some made before the existence of the cooperative. As a tribute to the farmers and vintners of these mysterious verdelhos, the dominant white grape throughout the Azores, I will close this post with their simple, mute images.
