Andrew Jefford – ‘We tasted, against “control” magnums buried alongside the casks’

It was like a funeral – in reverse. A curious crowd stood around the giant pit. Below us, picks were flying. First one remnant appeared in the earth, then another. A mechanical digger was drafted in, to excavate delicately around the remains before trowels and shovels did the fine work. After two hours, they were hoisted out, one by one, and laid out on a cart. The smartphones flashed; the throng gawped.

Relax: this is not a murder enquiry (though gentle handling and infinite reverence was still required). What had been excavated were three barriques, filled to the brim with Brouilly 2015 and Côte de Brouilly 2015, and they’d spent the last 18 months buried two metres deep ‘in contact with the rock which had given birth to them’, as a nearby panel proclaimed. Rock? It looked like ploughman’s soil to me; the moisture and the worms had eaten away at the barrel chimes, and heavy lumps of clay clung to the staves.

We were gathered high on the slopes of Mont Brouilly. The ostensible aim of the exercise was to see how wine evolved when it was buried underground, like pirate doubloons. Why do this? It’s a laborious exercise that’s fraught with uncertainties. Just a few more years in the deep earth would almost certainly have ensured the total destruction of a barrique, just as it does of an oak coffin.

The casks were opened; we tasted, against ‘control’ magnums buried alongside the casks at the same time. In two out of the three cases (the Côte de Brouilly, a four-grower blend from the Domaines of Michel Aubry, Franck Tavian, Patrice Monternier and Pascal Mutin at Père Benoît; and the Brouilly of Les Vignerons de Bel Air), the magnums seemed better to me. They were fresher, purer and more vibrant. The wines in the casks had acquired harmony, but were showing some reduction too, as if the earth had suffocated them. The third cask – a Brouilly from Château de Pierreux – seemed broadly similar in each format, though the wine from the buried cask had an additional savoury note (a hint of earthy snail minus the garlic – trust me).

The real reason for this elaborate exercise, perhaps, was to draw the world’s attention to the application made by Beaujolais for UNESCO ‘Geopark’ status. This is usually given to areas with ‘geological heritage of international value’ and Beaujolais is keen to be the first wine region to win this accolade. ‘This event,’ said Interprofession president Dominique Piron, ‘won’t do anything for international commerce. But it brings growers and merchants together around a project, it recreates links in the chain, people get together, they talk about wine, they talk about techniques, they exchange with each other… That’s what we’ve been missing as a region during the years of crisis.’

You can’t escape the symbolic value, too. No one claimed that burying a cask of wine in earth can ‘intensify its sense of terroir’ – but I could see the light shining in the eyes of the growers involved; I could feel the pride of the local mayors, wearing their red, white and blue ribbons; and I noted that none of the people there felt that it had been a preposterous thing to do. It was as if the wine was a child which had been placed back in the arms of its mother earth for a while, in some obscure propitiatory ritual.

When you look at a vine, fruit included, almost everything you see is made from thin air (carbon dioxide) and rain (water), using solar energy. The principal function of the soil is to stop the plant falling over, and to dose the plant with water through the root system. Why, then, should we not consider that the lineaments of aroma and flavour are made in the air rather than in the soil (which does little more than to provide a nutritional tweak to these processes)? The real terroir of Brouilly may lie in the shape of the hills, their position on earth, the way they face the sun, and the constitution of the skies, clouds, airs and winds overhead, rather than in the soil. One day, perhaps, we’ll know.

What I’ve been drinking this month

I write this as a mellow, mild Languedoc autumn is just drawing to its close – and a bottle of Dog Point’s Sauvignon Blanc, Marlborough 2016 provided a perfect counterpoint to the balmy air. Green, juicy, quenching, unflamboyant (the passion fruit quickly dissipated), it was a graceful, classy and dry incarnation of the luminous, ocean-freshened valleys where 41.5727°S meets 173.4217°E. One glass followed another in a way it rarely does when all the showy stuff has been cranked up.