Notes from a Grand Cru castle

What happens when you taste two wines, of the same grape variety, the same vintage, the same Grand Cru, the same soil, the same terroir, and also, at a very similar price point?

If we follow the soil-driving terroir tradition they should taste the same, isn’t it? They were both made from plants growing on the same ground, with the same amount of nutrients, the same water retention/supply capability, so for sure, they taste the same. But do they? Do they taste the same?

Ehemmmmm. Nope.

Why?

Because they were made by two different human beings.

Two different people, who were brought up with two different stories altogether, even if they lived their whole lives in the same village, surrounded by the same vines. Two different people with different ideas about how to interpret the character of the grapes in a particular growing environment. The resulting wine cannot be more contrasting. Two totally different creations.

As it happens with cover songs in music for instance, “Redemption Song” sounds very different when sung by the original Bob Marley than when sung by John Legend, same lyrics, but different emotions, not the same song. Check these links if you don’t believe me.

So it’s not only about the “granitic” soils or any specific type of soil, isn’t it? It is not only the “terroir” that makes the wines. And I know I am tiptoeing into a contentious issue here, and some people will completely disagree with me. I risk my French house being vandalized and getting labelled as a heretic, but hey ho.

Many wine people (including me sometimes) tend to simplify the communication about wine. We hurry and make a direct link between the soil type and what’s inside the glass.

As if the magic wand of terroir (aka only soils) shakes… and bang!

Green fruit, floral and citrus aromas appear in your Riesling.

Why do we forget the very many (and very human) decisions taken to create what’s inside the glass? It takes at least two years for the vine life cycle to produce the fruit that goes into your glass that vintage, plus another six extra months on average to vinify the grapes and bottle the wine.

Two and a half long years of human decisions to make one glass. Without humans, there are no contingency plans or adaptation to changes possible when the weather factors associated with a particular terroir misbehave. And we are seeing plenty of misbehaving in the last couple of years.

We diminish the role, the story, the energy, the creativity, the struggle, the skills to adapt and change, and the effort of the men and women behind the production of wines.

We make them disappear behind the scenes. Like the names written in small print at the end of a film. Their contribution to the work of art minimized to a little white spot on the black screen.

We all know that “terroir” on its own is not the only factor that affects or creates the style of each wine. And by terroir, I mean only the type of soil.

The soil plays an essential role in terms of water management for the plant, draining it when too much, supplying it when too little. They also provide those key minerals that allow the healthy growth of the fruit.

But so do all the other aspects of the terroir play their part. The climate, the temperature, the amount of sunlight and rain, the weather patterns of a particular vintage, the location of the vineyard: aspect, altitude, the inclination of the slope, and the many human activities in the vineyard like pruning, canopy management, pests and fungus control and more.

Perhaps it is “time” then, or the lack of, the reason why we ignore other things apart from the soil. It is too long, it is cumbersome and complex to cram all the terroir aspects (besides the soil) into those few seconds of “elevator pitch” presentation where we have to explain a glass of wine to someone. 

I do get it.

In simple real estate terms, the value of the agricultural land is a multiple of the price that you can sell the grapes for times the kilos you produce, or even better, the retail price of the bottle in the market times the number of bottles you make. This explains the many zeros for the most expensive parcel of agricultural land in the world, the 1.63 hectares used to produce Romanée-Conti.

I guess it makes sense for many to walk the road in the opposite direction and associate the value of a specific wine (and its intrinsic fruit, aroma and quality characteristics) to that of the land (soil) where it comes from.

France pioneered the terroir-driven focus, perhaps since the first monk in Burgundy started to divide the Cote d’ Or “slopes” into which parcels made wine worth sampling by the Pope and the King versus those areas good enough to make wines for the less privileged ranks of the clergy and society.

As a consequence, the entire French wine industry has been for centuries deeply rooted in this origin/land/soil storytelling. With almost religious fanaticism I would say, it has anchored the valuable characteristics of a particular wine to that of the land (soil) that produced it. And there is nothing wrong with it, but it gets too simplistic and romantic rather than factual sometimes.

There is another reason I find relevant for the single terroir argument to explain a wine.

The humans behind a wine change with time, but the land stays.

Winemakers come and go, they move from one Domaine to another. Older vignerons leave their vineyards and wineries to younger generations, or richer individuals sink their fortunes into the romantic world of wine when buying struggling wineries.

If you ask winemakers point-blank, they would also make themselves disappear. “I am only trying to create the best expression of the terroir” they keenly express. It is not their hands (or decisions) that make the wines, it is the God (or Goddess) of the terroir. They are just messengers, so to speak, of the divine.

However, I don’t think we are saying anything to wine drinkers by describing the beautiful properties of Kimmeridgian marl, the chalks, the limestones or volcanic soils. It sounds scholarly and knowledgeable, that I agree. It implies you know your wine shit.

For me, it makes matters worse, we make wine drinkers feel bad. Intimidated. Distant. Outsiders in a world that only the selected few real wine geeks can understand.

This also pushes many to consider and choose wines as a commodity. Why bother caring if I don’t understand it? Let’s just choose a bottle because the label looks pretty, the price promotion seems a bargain or the brand marketing power makes the wine available everywhere. I see it so often, I must try it.

By keeping the description of a wine only based on soil and terroir, we are narrowing the points of connection and contact that a wine drinker can have with a specific wine. We are missing the important emotional human side as if we were avoiding the skin to skin contact of a baby with his/her mum or dad.

There is a richer human narrative that can attract not only regular wine drinkers but also those curious about wine who feel less intrigued (and more often than not, puzzled) about how on earth "granitic soils make a Riesling more vertical than a calcareous soil type do"

We live in times when “time” is in short supply. Evidently, we don’t have the luxury of the attention for the whole terroir conversation, so instead of simple meaningless soil talking, I prefer to aim straight at the heart. Straight to the core. Straight to the connection point. 

I have tested a few times already the “Human side experience” in the vineyards of Wineck-Schlossberg Grand Cru in Alsace, where I take people on my e-bike tours.

I explain how some winemakers want to still honour their family heritage and tradition. They are precise and do a great job at adapting to new times but still maintain certain “controllable” parameters in the winery, their wines show that.

But others have decided to completely throw tradition out of the window, and embrace their own way of doing things, they risk and play with the uncomfortable unpredictability of letting the grapes be grapes. Sometimes it works as planned, sometimes it works less, but the wines have no technical faults. They are as enjoyable as the more traditional ones.

So after discussing these two points with my guests, I pour the wines and invite them to taste, raw, without me influencing their experience, without me saying other words.

Then I ask…

- You, as a living human being, without your googles of a wine drinker trying to sniff specific aromas or feeling obliged to say something clever about the wine…

- With which creation (or cover song!) do you associate yourself? The traditional and more controlled? Or the one off-piste and perhaps more maverick?

- Which of the wines that you have just tasted were made in a more traditional or in a more free-spirited way?

- Can you nail which is which?

By asking these questions I feel,

First, that I have not forgotten the humans behind the wine.

Second, that I have given more points of contact for the drinker to remember or relate to the wines.

And third, I have somehow explained the human factor that makes this or that wine taste the way they taste, without the technical geeky part.

After this, then I cover the other relevant terroir factors and pop the question about which wine suits more their palate, explanation about how the wines are made or include other descriptions.

In the end, I am not sure if it is for the grandiose setting of the Grand Cru vines, flanked by the ruins of a twelfth-century castle, but I have seen more people happy to answer the initial human side questions with confidence and enthusiasm, than those shaking heads affirmatively when I pointed out how vertical in the palate the granitic-soil Rieslings can be.