MARGARET RAND talks to five producers who went to the other side of the world to further their winemaking education and returned with experience, enlightenment and – ocasionally – envy
You know those T-shirts
people (apparently) buy,
saying, ‘My son/daughter/
second cousin went to New
York and all I got was this lousy T-shirt’?
Well, they make different ones for winery
owners. These say things like, ‘My
winemaker went to Australia and all I got
was the knowledge of how to handle
Syrah in a hot year’, or ‘My winemaker
went to Burgundy and all I got was a
shopping list for barrels I can’t buy’.
Winemakers, you see, bring back
different sorts of souvenirs. They bring
back inspiration, ideas: the distilled
experience of generations of other
winemakers in other places handling the
same problems differently. And when they
go home, they change things – perhaps a
lot, perhaps a little. It’s one of the most
subtle and precise ways in which the New
World influences the Old, and vice versa.
Take, for example, the T-shirt that might
have been worn by the late, great Bruce
Guimaraens of Fonseca Port, reading: ‘My
son went to Australia and all I got was a
blueprint for redesigning the port industry’.
David Guimaraens, you see, brought back
more than most from his time at
Roseworthy Agricultural College.
Studying in the New World had
been a deliberate choice, because
Guimarens junior wanted a different
perspective: ‘I already had all the
tradition in the world at home.’ He
settled on Roseworthy because it was
geared to an industry with no source of
cheap labour. The Douro had always
had cheap labour, but it was obvious
even back in the early 1980s that that
was going to change. ‘Portugal then was
very traditional,’ says Guimarens.
‘Although change had started both in
the vineyards and in the cellar, the
industry didn’t have the empirical
knowledge to redesign the vineyards or
the winemaking. It was done, but not
understood.’ Australia was at the other
extreme: mechanised and utterly modern.
Guimarens’ aim was not to study how
Australians made fortified wines – he could
learn that at home – but to understand
what was good about port traditions and
why; and having understood this, how to
modernise in the right places.
‘Australia always had a dedication to
wines at all levels,’ he says. ‘The Old
World tends to worry a lot about the best
wines, while the others are just part of
the process. When I came home, ratherthan redesigning the lagares that made the
best ports, I concentrated on the things
that weren’t working well, such as the
fermentation tanks that had replaced
lagares in the late 1960s and 1970s. As a
result, we’ve been able to push up the
quality of the day-to-day ports to a level
it has never been. We could then tackle
the traditional winemaking, which is
what I’ve done at the new Croft winery,
by using the best of both worlds.’ Taylor-
Fonseca bought Croft in 2003, and that
vintage, the first Croft vintage to be foottrodden
since 1963, made at the new
winery with its modern equipment, was
better than any Croft for years.
The problems of age
For Matt Thomson, winemaker at New
Zealand’s stellar Saint Clair, it was
travelling to Burgundy that proved
revelatory. ‘The big thing about oak in
Burgundy, compared to the New World,
was toast levels. There was a tendency in
New Zealand to use the same oak regime
for Pinot Noir as for Chardonnay andMerlot, but in Burgundy they use a lower
toast for Pinot. The oak levels are no less,
but the effect is more subdued. It tends to
let the fruit express itself more. We’re
doing that now for Delta, here at Saint
Clair.’
Returning to New Zealand and trying
to buy low-toast oak, however, was a
different experience. ‘I had barrel suppliers
refusing to supply me – some just said no,
point-blank. Some didn’t bring them in.
Toast levels vary from cooper to cooper, so
sometimes we buy medium-toast from
coopers who don’t toast too much, and
that way we get lower toast than most in
the New World, even if it’s not as low as
most in Burgundy.
‘Higher toast can flatter a wine early
on. Lower toast can mean our wines
don’t do as well in comparative tastings
on release. But six months or a year on,
they’re much better.’
Thomson goes to Burgundy; Philippe
Guigal, of the Rhône, travelled in the
opposite direction, to Australia – and
California, and most other places as well.
Says Guigal: ‘What is disturbing for
French traditionalists is that the wine
industry is changing very fast in Australia.
When I first went there, 17 or 18 years
ago, many people were a bit arrogant. I
don’t mean that in a negative way, but
they were convinced their wines were
the best in the world. Nobody spoke of
terroir. Then came Chile and Argentina,
and now their [Australians’] speech has
changed. They don’t talk any more about
Cabernet Sauvignon and Chardonnay,
but of Margaret River, Barossa and so on.
Now there’s nothing else but terroir.
‘We have a very traditional winemaking
philosophy at Guigal. It could sound
pretentious, but I don’t want to. In 2003,
for example, I was very happy to have
spent time in Australia and California.’
That was the year of the very hot vintage
– the year in which scores of Parisian
grandmères, abandoned by their
holidaying families, died of the heat. It
was, says Guigal, with some
understatement, ‘not a classical vintage’.
Consequently, his New World experience
came to the fore.
‘When you receive grapes in a veryhot vintage, the first samples of juice have
a high pH and low acidity,’ he
says. ‘But after the alcoholic fermentation
and racking, the pH decreases and the
acidity increases, and by the end the pH
has fallen sharply. The first juice is from
the centre of the grape, and then later
you get juice from just under the skin,
and it has a different balance. A lot of
people in the Northern Rhône took
samples and thought they should add
acidity. I knew that we must do
nothing. We picked on 21 August –
a month early – and we made no
correction of acidity; and after racking,
the pH dropped. I have no doubts about
the quality of the 2003.’
Alessia Antinori has also done the
rounds of Syrah producers in Australia,
and first went there about 10 years ago,
for a 15-day tour in the company of
viticulturist Richard Smart. They went
from the Hunter to the Barossa,
though it was the McLaren Vale that
impressed her most: ‘The winemaking
was practically nothing. The wineries –
like d’Arenberg – were really basic,
just concrete. Everything was focused
on the vineyards. They had big vines,
with very low yields.’
Antinori doesn’t have a lot of Syrah
planted: there’s a bit near Cortona and
some at Bolgheri, and it was at the latter
that Alessia decided to carry out an
experiment. ‘We’ve planted half a hectare
without rootstocks. It’s very simple; you
don’t have to be a genius. The soil is very
sandy there.’ And so far, she says, there’s
no sign of the dreaded phylloxera. It will
be a few years before she can take a view
on the results, but as she says, rootstocks
are fundamental.
Nothing but terroir
Louisa Rose was at Roseworthy in
1991/92, just after David Guimarens. But
her journey had been made in the
opposite direction, to the Viognier
vineyards of the Rhône, even though she
never heard of Viognier in the whole
time she was at Roseworthy. ‘It was never
talked of once,’ she says.
By the time Rose went to France, she
was part of the white-winemaking team
at Yalumba and already working onViognier. ‘They weren’t doing anything
particularly different [in the Rhône],’
she says. ‘We were already working on
wild ferments and fermenting in oak;
there were small things that were
different. But it was inspiring to see that
we were heading down the right trail.
And what gave me confidence, too, was
to see so many young vineyards’ – giving
the lie to the idea that only old vines
make great wines.
In 2001, Rose was there again, to visit
Guigal and Domaines Yves Cuilleron,
and André Perret, both of Condrieu. ‘It
was a really good contrast to what I was
used to. André Perret was making finer,
more long-term styles for bottle ageing;
Yves Cuilleron was making big wines
with character and new oak. He was also
making a botrytised sweet wine like one
we’d just started, and that helped to
foment our ideas.’
The other inspiration Rose found in
the Rhône was her first sight of eau de vie
de Viognier. She came home, dug out an
ancient pot still and set to work. First,
she made a bit just for fun, using wine
rather than marc, expecting to put it
aside and look at it again in 10 years or
so; but it was beautiful young. Now
Yalumba is selling its own version,
V de Vie, though so far on the domestic
market only. If you happen to be in
Australia, it would make a better
souvenir than a T-shirt…
Written by Margaret Rand
