MAKING SENSE OF THE CHANGE

FROM BIG WINE TO TERROIR

A JOURNEY IN TASTE

A VERY SPECIAL PARTY

Twenty years have gone bye, since the beginnings of Altos las Hormigas, the winery I founded together with Alberto Antonini, and a few days ago we had a small party, a family style gathering, 25 people approx, all staffers; the Argentine wine industry is not booming right now, nor is the whole country economy, and some restraint is in order. After a day of work at the winery, the reception started around 8.00, and people from the town office started to show up. The food was great, the company too, but the highlight of the evening, besides the oven roasted whole pork, was the Barrique Bonfire.
We floated a barrique on a raft in the middle of the water reservoir, and we set it on fire at sundown, and I have to say that it was a  moment that left a mark, probably for all of us.
At this point reflection is in order: we have spent lots of money for decades on new French oak barrels, and now we set them on fire, having totally abandoned them as a winemaking device: what happened?

EVERY LIVING BEING CHANGES

 There was a time when I was enthusiastic about barriques, I used to truly enjoy wines aged in them, and now I am so turned off by the smell and the mouth feel of those wines, I cannot drink a full glass of it.

Some people say that memory is never a truthful picture of past events, but that it is re written each time we recall the past, and I am not sure, in this case, of the step by step process through which I changed my mind so radically, all I can say is that  after years of working on the concept of Terroir, what I now value in a wine is the quality of its tannins, and I don't like them to be grafted with new oak, as they all become so soft and smooth, losing the diversity that only the naked original character may show.

But why were we making wine with barrique in the first place? I tried to look back, in order to make sense of the path we have walked.

REVOLUTION or EVOLUTION?

The modern wine industry emerged in the '80, together with a new profile of wine consumption. The industry in Europe had suffered decades of setback after WWII, and wine declined as new habits and new products were replacing old customs all over western Europe. After years of dragging, around 1980 the industry turned a corner and picked up speed thanks to new markets. Winemakers learned to produce wines that catered to what was emerging as  the “international” taste, a profile aiming at a novice consumer, a consumer that was not brought up with wine, and not bonded to buy a wine from his own region of residence, a drinker with very low tolerance to tannins and acidity, this new consumer liked sugar, soft tannins and new oak flavour. The solidification of this profile was encouraged by the major US wine publications, as an interpretation of the up and coming American wine drinker, a profile that had a wide coincidence with the taste emerging all over the world. Tannins and acidity are acquired tastes, that we develop with time, as we work our way up the ladder of wine quality, while sugar and smoothness are innate tastes, that we have since childhood. Being slightly extreme, we can say that for a long time we have made wines for “baby” tasters, tasters who had just a few years of experience, and no desire to go further down the road of wine knowledge.
The points score system, invented by Robert Parker JR, was at first a great tool to innovate the world of wine, and level with old snobbery, but it eventually started a competition among producers of these new, clean and soft wines, which ended up in emphasizing concentration and smoothness so much to end with caricature wines, and a standardisation of wines produced all over the world.
We can call this style "Big Wine" as it was large both in terms of its taste and its spread across the market.

At a point in time this pattern became so generalised, that this style of wine was produced in every region around the world, and it became so common that it got boring.

Possibly the first group to vocally react to this saturation were the sommeliers, a profession that had grown its ranks strongly in the meantime, sommeliers are always looking for diversity, if sometimes falling prey to fads and to eccentric juices, still their voice has been key to break the dominance of big style wines. The Hamelin flute player of this story was in all likeliness Jonathan Nossiter, a sommelier himself, and a filmmaker, his Mondovino movie was seminal, arguably the first far reaching testimony of the radical wine movement. Bloggers and alternative wine writers, such as Alice Feiring, empowered by the emergence of the new media, followed suit, bringing forward natural wines, artisanal producers, less known regions. This whole movement helped breaking the established World Wine Order, the "wine cathedral" in which Napa and Bordeaux were ruling, with Big Style wines from all over the world filling the ranks of supposed wine excellence. Mondovino dates August 2006, and it may be questionable to fix this date as the start of the new wine movement, but  around this time the tide started to turn. The shots fired at the "Wine Cathedral" were many: natural wines, orange wines, unfiltered sherries, thousands of unheard grapes from almost forgotten regions,  an invasion of diversity, a challenge to the palates of wine drinkers, and the wine cathedral got hit, and started getting smaller and smaller, as one palate was no longer enough to encompass the diversity, and the contradictions, that came along. Today the wine cathedral still exists, but is is much reduced in power and reach, what used to be an empire has now become just a big center of wine consensus, among other centres, a diffused system has replaced the voice of the formerly leading medias, and many different positions are being heard and  followed. 

DIVERSITY FIRST

I believe that the shots that were fired against the cathedral, are not, for the most part, here to stay, and that many of those styles will be followed by a very small crowd of fringe consumers, what will really replace Big Wine, I believe, is Terroir.

The Terroir movement has had a slow process of growth, truly grassroots, and is expanding, through the work of Sommeliers, bloggers and wine geeks, around the world. This movement is naturally multipolar, and embraces a great diversity of styles. As any other movement, the risk exists, that a new "taste tyrant" might highjack it, but so far it has stayed pretty local and diverse.

This movement funds its beliefs in Burgundy, that can be regarded as the sacred soil of Terroir, its temple, but the movement regards at many areas across the globe: Mosel, Montalcino, Langhe (Barolo and Barbaresco), Ribeira Sacra, Wachau etc., while slowly the new world is coming on board, and in every wine region around the world new adepts to the idea are embracing diversity and locality, making strides in the industry at large, but what does Terroir means?

I was sitting at a restaurant table a few days back, and tried to explain the idea to an acquaintance from outside the industry. A famous Albert Einstein quote says that if you cannot explain the concept to a five years old, you don’t really know what you are talking about, and I try to keep it in mind.
The official definition of Terroir can be found on the OIV website, but though precise, it is written in a policy maker style, that does not fit in the purpose of these ramblings.

Those who make Terroir wines allow the place of origin to be the leading force in determining the character of the wine, and give it its imprint.

Some go to the extreme of thinking that Terroir wine makes itself, as if would emerge from mother earth almost on his own, truth is that the formation of a Terroir is a long and complex process, were many players have a role.
Who decided to plant only Pinot Noir in Cote de Nuits? Who invented "capo verso" Guyot pruning in Tuscany? These practices are crucial elements of their "Terroir. Terroir is not just the dirt and the climate, but also the tradition, that was deposited, layered through time, building a unique combination of knowledge and nature, that belong to that one, unique place.

The word “Agriculture” is formed by two words, one means land and the other, well the other is culture, which means farming, but also knowledge, in the building of a Terroir, the toil and the knowledge advance hand in hand.

FROM BOOST TO ART

From 1980 on, technology has become a dominating force in the world of wine, until then wine represented a traditional beverage, for the most part consumed locally, to complete the calories intake of adult people. Around this time, the wine consumption pattern changed dramatically, driving the change in many wine regions, that started a transformation, from producing a local commodity, to crafting an aesthetic object of enjoyment and leisure, that could be appreciated worldwide.
Clean wineries, a careful process and professional winemaking have improved wine enormously, but eventually things went too far, and we ended worshipping technique and winemakers. The trend has proven to be a mistake, as land and tradition became overshadowed by this emerging forces, and sometimes almost erased.

Terroir is not limited to wine, it can be in a cheese, in an olive oil, and in many other things. The acid test question for Terroir is: can I make exactly the same thing somewhere else? If the answer is yes, that is not a Terroir product.

Terroir is a relation between man and place, that forms slowly through the generations: site selection, grape variety development pruning technique adaptation, are just examples of the work that builds a wine Terroir.  Along with the vintner's work, other forces are at play in the creation of Terroir. Wine producers need to sell their wines, and the consumers are the judges that compel the vintner to look at himself in a sincere mirror, helping him create an equation that does not just satisfy one ego. All this knowledge, is developed slowly and the place is an active player of this development. Every vintage the quality of the wine is the answer of the land to the work that the vintner did on his vineyard during the season. In this line of thinking, having to correct the wine in the cellar, with technology or using addictive, is a declaration of defeat, we were unable to farm sufficiently good grapes. Not all places are suited to make wine, and some are good for one style, but never for all styles. This specific place might just not be right for the style we have in mind, then we have to work our way to understand what are the strengths of the place, and find a style that might work well there. Think of Amarone in Valpollicella, that is certainly a good example of vintners finding a style that suits their specific growing area. Vintners are passionate, and defend their work and their wine, sometimes beyond reason, but here comes the market, that tells a vintner yes or no, determining if he has a future, if he shall change, or if he is on a good path. True wine can always find a market, just do not make an ocean of it, because this is, again, an acquired taste, and not everybody has acquired the same taste, fortunately.

MINERALITY AS WE (DON'T) KNOW IT

There is a small subgroup of the Terroir believers, to which I belong. This wine "sect" adores minerality, a much debated concept this days.

This group takes the concept of Terroir to the extreme, not contented with "regional terroir" of hundreds if not thousand of hectares, we reduce the scale to a few hectares, Burgundy style, and we look for Terroirs that can express diversity on this scale, as Burgundy does, we can then talk of "Parcel Scale Terroir".
This is not to deny Regional Terroirs, but just promoting the development of Terroirs that can make their voice heard on a smaller and more articulate scale on the map.
To find minerality, you need to work your map on a scale of less that one hectare, and eventually build a larger parcel made out of similar and contiguous pieces. Precision agriculture, geo referencing, and field experience are needed to make this happen.
The vintners from time past made a similar path, with the work of generations, today, with the help of science and technology, we can try to speed up the process, which will still be slow, but on a different scale.

For many years wines that have dominated the market in prestige, were carved on the model of Medoc, or Pomerol, besides the obvious barrel character, their tannins carried the imprint of clay and gravel soils with its typical softness. 

I once heard an Australian wine producer say to its audience that “wine Is flavour”, well minerality is just the opposite, true minerality is not a flavour, and the believers look for a mouth feeling, that releases a tension, a persistence, a texture and a lingering aftertaste. Minerality is linked to soil and to Terroir at large. Believers are convinced that minerality can only be produced by a great vineyard site: it is not created (in the winery) either the place has it or doesn’t have it, it is innate.

Very hard to demonstrate, much easier to experience, at present we can call it more an hypothesis based on a large number of professional observations, always reminding that as any aesthetic experiences, it needs active participation of the initiate.  

Fine Barolo, from a good cru, made with low intervention, has it full fledged, same as good Burgundy, or good Mosel, no doubt. Montalcino can have it, not in the lowlands though, and many other wine regions have it. It does not come out of clay and gravel soil, it needs a different component, coming from altered mother rock, rock that has been battered by weather events long enough to become hospitable for vine roots.

Tannins from gravel and clay are soft, and all wine drinkers, experienced or not, can relate to that.

But once you acquire the taste for the energy that minerality imparts on wine, gravel and clay tannins seem dull and somehow dead. To praise minerality is an aesthetic position, and as any other aesthetic position is not there to claim absolute truth, but just to claim its own place among other positions. As we can never say that Classical art is superior (inferior) to Romantic art and we will never be able to prove that the balance of Fidia is a higher (lower) expression, compared to the oblique beauty of Rodin, in the same way, we cannot demonstrate that Giacomo Conterno Monfortino beats hands down Chateau Petrus, and still, deep in my hearth, this is the truth.