Andrew Jefford
Three months of pandemicinduced lockdown are drawing to an end. It hasn’t been all frustration and anxiety. I’ve enjoyed being at home with the family – and the internet wine chat which has replaced the customary tastings, travel and research. Two interview questions, in particular, set me thinking.
‘What does it take,’ I was asked by US importer of Languedoc-Roussillon wines
Carol Bailey-Medwell in an Instagram Live session, ‘to be a great winemaker?’ It begins, I suggested, with luck – the luck to be working with a distinguished site; no amount of skill can magic fine wine from mediocre grapes. But you need, too, to be a ‘site whisperer’ – to understand, through engaged intimacy, what sort of wine your vineyard would most like to produce, and to help it to do that, no matter the cost in effort.
Attention to detail is critical; that’s a part of the whispering, but it’s also emphatically the basis of craftsmanship in the winery. No gesture should go unconsidered.
Wine skill, though, is also founded on a love for and understanding of great wine other than your own. That’s why I’m always encouraged to see other producers’ wines, and wines from different regions, in cellars I visit. If those bottles are empty, so much the better. The final element I mentioned to Carol was ‘a streak of madness’. Not in a clinical sense, of course; but the willingness to go beyond what a partner, worker or colleague might consider reasonable in terms of ambition, effort or innovation is often a trait of the greatest winemakers of all. Tough in the early days, when experiments fail or the personal price is too high; but the rewards come later, when the world tastes the results – and understands. And enthuses.
In another Instagram Live discussion with sommelier and filmmaker Kim Gertler of the Canadian Association of Professional Sommeliers (this time at 2:30am in France), I was asked about the world view of the wine community, and how it might help and heal a post-Covid environment. What is it that wine people believe?
The starting point, surely, is that nature will always have the last word, and that wine beauty can only be created by working hand-in-hand with nature. Every sip of wine is a homage to nature, translated by human skill; interventions are only justified if they help show nature at her best. The pursuit of the natural in wine, rather than the artificial or synthetic, is an imperative, though there are hazards in doing this over-literally or dogmatically. Wine people, too, understand the slowness of nature’s rhythms. Rushed wines are bad wines. The better the wine, the longer it needs to unwind, to unfold, to reach mature articulacy. Confinement taught us all to live less frenziedly.
Wine people also believe that difference is the principal source of joy in wine, and a respect for difference the key to wine appreciation. In this sense, the pursuit of ‘the best’ in wine is a kind of exceptionalist folly, and doomed to failure; it is only by understanding the various forms of excellence that we can know and appreciate wine. There is, though, a threat. We’re standing in the highway kicking the troublesome Covid boulder aside... without realising that a road train is thundering down on us. That juggernaut is climate change. Somehow we need to slow it and stop it. The wine community recognises this as our most urgent priority.
The wine world, finally, is a place of sharing – the sharing of wine, of course, but also of fun, of knowledge, of research, of ideas, of trade. It is free and internationalist in its ideals, even if taxed and tariffed in practice. Covid robbed us of some of our customary chances to share – but not of all of them; that’s what all those Instagram Live and Zoom sessions were about. As we remake our world, let’s fight for the generous ideals brimming in every glass of great wine.
DAndrew Jefford is a Decanter contributing editor and multiple award-winning author
‘Wine beauty can only be created by working handin-hand with nature’
Domaine de Fenouillet, Faugères 2019, produced on one of the estates owned by Jeanjean: a breakthrough from this large source. It was dark, with cherry-kernel scents. Textured tannins and a sort of stony sterness balanced its exuberant, almost explosive fruit. The promise of purity was exhiliaratingly delivered.