Interview: Peter Vinding- Diers
Through his unquenchable thirst for adventure, this nomadic winemaking legend has helped to shape some of the world’s most renowned estates – and revolutionised practices in the winery along the way. Stephen Brook tells the traveller’s tale
Stephen Brook meets one of the world’s great (formerly) wandering winemakers
In a winery line-up, you wouldn’t pick out Peter Vinding-Diers as the winemaker. This tall, confident man, still dashing in his late seventies, looks as though he’d rather be striding across moorland with dogs in tow than pruning vines.
It was a glimpse of the vineyards of Beaune that first made him think that making wine could be his future. At that time, he probably never dreamed that in the years ahead he would be acclaimed as an oenological wizard, especially for his work in isolating yeasts and solving other winemaking conundrums; nor that he would play a major role as an early ‘flying winemaker’ and in reviving the ancient traditions of Tokaj in Hungary.
His patrician family had always bought and drunk fine Bordeaux, so wine was already in his veins. ‘But my father and grandfather were so Francophile, even living half the year in France, that I knew I had to learn the craft elsewhere. And that’s what took me to South Africa.’ He seemed to fall into jobs and assignments, working in a laboratory in Stellenbosch and later being a more hands-on winemaker at the splendid Rustenberg estate.
‘Sooner or later, France tugged me back. In the 1970s, I did a spell at Château Loudenne in Médoc, where the director Martin Bamford played host to many of the big names in Bordeaux, whom I got to know. Len Evans and other Australian investors were keen to become involved in Bordeaux. They had their eye on Yquem, but it wasn’t for sale, so they ended up buying Château Rahoul in the Graves, which I ran and where we lived.’
The yeast experiments
‘I became interested in the role of yeasts in giving wines a particular identity. It just seemed evident to me that wines such as Léoville Las Cases and Léoville Poyferré, from adjoining vineyards and made in adjacent cellars, were so different and distinctive in large part because of their yeast population. Bordeaux University’s Professor Denis Dubourdieu was soon convinced, even though his boss Pascal Ribereau-Gayon had always advised châteaux to use selected yeasts.’
In 1985, he vinified a batch of Semillon from Rahoul in three tanks, one with yeast from Lynch-Bages, the second with yeast from Angludet, and the third using the Rahoul strain. The wines turned out differently and were shown at tastings to the grandees of Bordeaux. The point was made. Dubourdieu told Peter Sisseck (Vinding-Diers’ nephew): ‘Peter VindingDiers intuitively saw and understood what had taken me 20 years to prove scientifically.’
This battle was decisively won, and today most prestigious wines are made using native or ambient yeasts, although Vinding-Diers admits that if he were producing mass-volume wines, he would stick to the safety of commercial yeasts.
Problems and persistence
His French sojourn was complicated by issues with investors, banks, bureaucrats and, occasionally, personnel. There was a period when he and Len Evans fell out. He bought Domaine de la Grave and then Château de Landiras in 1988, both in the Graves. His fresh white wines, so different from the drab and sulphury tank-aged examples available then, soon found favour in international markets.
He also championed Semillon as a grape variety at Rahoul and at Landiras. Although the variety of choice for Bordeaux’s sweet wines such as Sauternes, it was less popular than Sauvignon Blanc for dry wines.