Jane Anson

Roland Barthes’ The Death of the

Author was a big deal when I was an English literature student at Sheffield University in the 1990s. It led to regular debates as to whether you had to know the writer’s own history to fully understand his or her book, or whether that information was superfluous and simply a distraction.

Weirdly, the same question often arises over wine. Is the only way to truly understand a wine to visit the vineyard in person, to walk the vines and poke around under the hood? Or can you understand it simply through what you find in the glass, ideally helped by speaking to the people who made it?

I got to try both ways recently, meeting two different producers: Aristea, a South African estate co-owned by English businessman and Pomerol estate owner Martin Krajewski; and Macán, the Rioja joint venture between Ariane de Rothschild and Pablo Alvarez of Vega Sicilia.

I first tasted Aristea in July 2017, meeting Krajewski and winemaker Matt Krone (also co-owner, along with consultant Florent Dumeau) in London to taste through their inaugural vintages of a Stellenbosch Hills Chardonnay 2016, a Somerset West Cabernet Sauvignon 2015, plus a fragrant yet intense, second-release sparkling Methode Cap Classique Blanc 2015. I loved the wines, but it was only when I met up with them again in October 2019 that I really felt I was getting to understand the story behind the venture.

For Macán, in contrast, I jumped in the car a few weeks ago and headed down to Rioja, about a four-hour drive from Bordeaux. It was a rainy October day, but still stunningly beautiful, as Rioja always is, with vines and hillsides turning shades of scarlet and russet. Macán is set in San Vicente de la Sonsierra, where Rioja Alta meets Rioja Alavesa, and is made up of plots selected because they are at least 450m in altitude and planted to vines that pre-date 1980. The careful piecing together of these plots from 70 different owners started in 2004, with no word that it was a joint venture between Vega Sicilia and the Rothschilds of Château Clarke until 2009. Today they own 92ha, split into two wines, Macán and Macán Clásico, which do not use the classic Rioja crianza-gran reserva system, and are aged partly in Burgundian barrels.

The first vintage of the wine was 2009, released to the market in 2013. The stunning winery I visited helped to cement Macán as a serious new player in the Rioja landscape. It is the first-ever joint venture for Alvarez, and you feel his guiding hand and obsessive pursuit of quality in the glass – this is fleshy Tempranillo, but with precision and poise, and you clearly don’t need to visit the winery to feel it. In fact, I only really got just how good it is when drinking the Clásico 2015 back home, quietly, in front of the fire.

For now, Aristea chooses to source grapes rather than own vineyards, but its quality is assured because of one particular secret ingredient. I was thousands of miles from the vineyards, but it didn’t take long to see that Krone would stand out as a winemaker wherever he was. He is the 12th generation of a winemaking family who helped to establish sparkling wine production in South Africa at the Twee Jonge Gezellen farm, theirs from 1710 until its sale in 2012.

One thing he said really stuck with me:

‘It became obvious that my winemaking philosophy wasn’t about a specific place, but about making a wine truthfully – that was what my father and grandfather had taught me.’ The skill involved in making still and sparkling whites develops a lightness of touch that I can see in the intensity, complexity and delicacy of Aristea’s reds also. They are straight-talking, pared back, delicious.

In truth, getting to know a wine estate is like getting to know a person. It takes time – and each time you meet, something new is revealed, wherever you are.