Building a wine region from scratch: Three pioneers share their stories

Discussing the most notable update in the recently released ninth edition of The World Atlas of Wine, the global reference on wine geography for nearly six decades, co-editor Jancis Robinson OBE MW pointed firmly to the expansion of vineyards towards the poles.

Even in today’s highly polarised societies, few would disagree that a warming climate is a major driver of this development, which is making viticulture increasingly viable in places such as Scandinavia and Patagonia.

Yet in recent decades, new winegrowing clusters have also emerged in other corners of the world, from Southeast Asia to China and parts of Africa, where climate change has been far less advantageous to the grapevine, if not downright deleterious.

In the new frontiers of the wine world, pioneers are often driven more by a relentless, experimental urge to explore and to push the boundaries of winegrowing.

Merlot in the Colombian Andes

When Pepe Saura, originally from Murcia in Spain, first decided to embark on a vinous adventure on a high-altitude plateau in the Colombian Andes, he found little existing knowledge to draw on about what might work there.

‘My family has a winery in Spain, so I have a viticultural background, but when I arrived here I had no idea what sort of variety could work on this soil and in this climate,’ he says.

His colorful Viñedo Abarán now features around 2.5 hectares of vines, planted mainly to Merlot and Vitis labrusca, which is widely grown across South America and well suited to tropical and sub-tropical climates.

After numerous trials, he has now settled on a pergola system to help control the plants’ vigor (in the region’s never-ending spring, the vines remain in continuous vegetative growth) while also shading the fruit from strong UV light.

Combined with the cool night-time temperatures brought by the vineyard’s altitude, this allows him to harvest every seven months rather than the almost three crops a year the vines could potentially yield, giving the fruit more time to ripen and ultimately resulting in better quality.

'Obviously, there was no textbook'

Murat ‘Murre’ Sofrakis, of Vingården i Klagshamn, is a trailblazer of Sweden’s now flourishing wine industry.

‘Obviously, there was no textbook for what we were doing at the time,’ he points out, encapsulating the challenges faced by most wine pioneers in the early stages of their projects.

‘So I had mentors very close by in Denmark, where the wine industry was a little bit ahead of us, and I visited top producers in Europe who gave me super good advice. But that could only be inspiration, because every location is very different when it comes to winemaking.’

'We have to do everything ourselves'

The challenges continue in the winery. For Giotto Castiglioni, founder of Cantine Balita’s Isola Wine (@isolawine) on the north coast of Bali, Indonesia, all of the winery’s supplies arrive in a single annual shipment.

‘It’s a significant technical problem because if Giacomo [Anselmi, the oenologist] makes a mistake and the container has already left, we have to wait until the following year. It’s not like we can go and buy the product down the road, that stuff simply doesn’t exist here,’ he explains.

Processing presents a similar challenge. The winery is located in a dreamy mountain-jungle setting, but its isolation means that even routine analyses have to be carried out on site.

‘At a small or medium-sized winery like ours, analyses would normally be outsourced because the machinery is incredibly expensive,’ Castiglioni continues.

'But we simply can’t send anything anywhere, because by the time it gets to Australia, goodbye, the wine could have become anything, so we have to do everything ourselves.'

Getting creative

The absence of an established supply chain also makes basic equipment such as oak barrels harder to source and considerably more expensive, so winemakers must look for creative alternatives.

Imported European oak can cost three times as much in Colombia as it does in more established wine markets.

To side-step the obstacle, Saura uses barrels made from indigenous oak, the same type of wood that has long been used by Colombia’s leading rum producer, Industria Licorera de Caldas, in the heart of the country’s coffee region.

Attracting wine drinkers

In regions like Colombia or Indonesia, producing the liquid is only half the challenge. Wine people need to be created, too.

‘The biggest difficulties we have had have been with the human factor,’ says Anselmi.

‘We had to make the locals who harvested the grapes understand that we wouldn’t simply pay them by the kilo, but according to quality (and that they could actually earn more this way). That was really really difficult.’

Choosing to establish a winery near a sufficiently touristy area, where European, American and other Western visitors provide an audience already familiar with wine, can help get a project off the ground while wineries work to build a local audience from scratch.

‘It’s shocking that still now I sell a lot more grape juice than wine,’ exclaims Saura.

‘But now I’m building a small museum here at the finca where people can learn all about the history of wine. That’ll help me gradually build my own local audience of wine lovers.’

In Sweden, where restrictions on the sale and promotion of alcohol have presented an additional obstacle, regulators recently allowed wineries to sell directly to visiting tourists.

‘It’s good that they recognised our industry’s potential with this,’ says Sofrakis. ‘When it started last year, it became a game changer, because a lot of Swedish wine producers are located where the tourists are, so it’s not uncommon for them to sell out all their wines in three months.’

Indeed, regulatory support can offer a valuable boost for emerging wine regions, but it tends to arrive only once a new industry has already begun to establish itself.

Until then, pioneering winemakers have to do much of the heavy lifting themselves. They must learn through trial and error, invest capital (or find someone willing to chip in), endure the inevitable early failures and build a reputation for themselves and for their region as a whole, while simultaneously creating new audiences from scratch.

None of which is easy. It requires determination, the courage to keep trying in total absence of relevant benchmarks and perhaps an element of madness, too.

But humans are an inherently adventurous bunch, naturally drawn to the challenge of confronting the unknown. And establishing a wholly new wine region embodies the true expression of that spirit, in liquid form.

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