Jane Anson
‘If you’re interested in rare grapes, you’ll be in heaven in the Valais’
It sounds lIke an impossible number: 22,000 smallholders working 80,000 plots of vines. especially when you realise that all of those plots add up to about 4,850ha – not even as big as the st-emilion appellation in Bordeaux that counts somewhere between 700 and 800 winemakers.
It only started to make sense as I stood in the vineyards of switzerland’s Valais region – or rather when I was craning my neck to look upwards as the vineyards soared away in front of me. nestled in the alps, this is the largest wine region in switzerland, spread over 65 communes on slopes that reach gradients of 70%, sited between 800m and 1,100m in altitude and planted on terraces that date back to the 11th century in places.
the landscape is stunning, with soaring mountains on all sides, hardly conducive to easy agriculture and, much like in Japan, every tiny scrap of land is used to grow something – never mind how back-breaking the work must be to plant, cultivate and harvest.
Most of the vines in the Valais belong to locals who have inherited a few rows outside their kitchen window (the lack of inheritance tax helps). the owners – known as sunday winemakers – almost invariably earn their livelihoods from entirely different careers and send the grapes to a local cooperative cellar or to one of about 300 producers who are bottling wine across the Haut-Valais. every year the famously methodical swiss functionaries painstakingly record any changes in ownership or grape plantings, stacking up around 5,000 transfers or replantings annually.
It’s both entirely bonkers, and entirely swiss. In a country famed for its discretion, how much more under-the-radar can you get than a wine region where more than 95% of the vineyards are owned by people who choose not to bottle under their own name, or even under the name of a specific estate?
despite this, the Valais is entirely in the zeitgeist – even if they don’t exactly shout about it beyond their borders, exporting just 2% of production in 2017. In the last decade it has become one of the true centres of indigenous grape varieties in europe – helping to explain where dr José Vouillamoz, co-author of Wine Grapes, got his passion.
this is a subject I’ve been following since writing Wine Revolution, which champions sustainable wine-growing and suggests that it is almost invariably easier with indigenous grapes that have adapted to local conditions over generations. switzerland grows over 240 varieties and since 2000, the percentage of vineyard given over to local autochthonous grapes has risen from 15% to 36%, headed by arvine and Cornalin. during my time in the Valais, I tasted wines from amigne, Cornalin, Gamaret, Heida, Humagne Blanche, Humagne Rouge and Petite arvine, along with Chasselas, Gamay, Pinot noir and sylvaner, almost all of them bottled as 100% single-varietal, and almost entirely unoaked. If you’re interested in rare grapes, you’ll be in heaven here.
there are moves to further protect and highlight the region through the sierre Grand Cru category that was first given the official nod in March 2015, joining the grands crus of Conthey, Fully, salgesch, st léonard and Vétroz. In sierre only four grape varieties are allowed to be grown on grand cru sites – arvine (the name Petite arvine is a local distinction) and Marsanne Blanche for the whites, Cornalin and syrah for the reds.
I tasted 2015 sierre Grand Cru wines made by the Rouvinez family (dominique Rouvinez lobbied for almost a decade to gain acceptance for the concept) that were released for the first time in april 2017. this is very early days – sierre Grand Cru covers a potential 100ha across six communes, representing 12% of the total vines in the communes. to date only 8.5ha have been bottled by 10 producers – but if they are a way for the country to connect with consumers outside their national borders, and to promote the rich variety of swiss grapes, then we can all be grateful.