Per Marelise Niemann, il richiamo del vino risiede proprio in ciò che potrebbe frustrare i viticoltori meno intuitivi. “Non sei mai in controllo: sei sempre messo al tuo posto,” dice – dal meteo, dai babbuini che mangiano l’uva, dalla natura. Per quanto possa essere umiliante, Niemann ha fatto del Grenache la sua missione – creando le espressioni più fini ed eleganti di quest’uva in Sudafrica, sotto la sua etichetta Momento. 
 Non sorprende, dato lo stile dei suoi vini, che sia stata un’annata in Borgogna a rappresentare per lei l’illuminazione. All’epoca, alla fine degli anni 2000, il Sudafrica era ancora concentrato sulla produzione di vini potenti: i rossi corposi, estratti e molto legnosi erano considerati i migliori. L’influenza di Parker era ancora palpabile, e il Paese stava ancora riprendendosi dall’apartheid e dal soffocante monopolio della KWV. Ma un periodo trascorso a lavorare con il Pinot Noir fece comprendere a Niemann il potere sorprendente e talvolta incongruo della delicatezza – in breve, che più grande non significa sempre migliore. 
 E non era la sola a percorrere quella strada. Il movimento della New Wave sudafricana stava prendendo slancio. Guidati da figure come Eben Sadie, Adi Badenhorst e Chris e Andrea Mullineux, questi produttori stavano creando vini freschi e raffinati, reinventando l’identità vinicola del Paese. Quello che era iniziato nello Swartland si diffuse presto in tutta la nazione, e Niemann faceva parte di questa ondata di rinnovamento. Fu l’agricoltura a spingerla verso il vino, dopo aver trascorso l’infanzia nella fattoria dei nonni a Stanford, un piccolo villaggio nell’Overberg, svegliandosi all’alba per mungere le mucche o fare qualsiasi altra cosa fosse necessaria. Anche se i suoi genitori avevano abbandonato l’agricoltura, lei desiderava lavorare la terra. Crescendo a Elgin, una zona dominata dalle mele ma con un’industria vinicola nascente, decise di studiare viticoltura. Le lunghe nottate universitarie a Stellenbosch, accompagnate da molte bottiglie, la convinsero che coltivare l’uva non fosse abbastanza, e così ampliò il suo percorso di studi includendo l’enologia. 
 Dopo aver viaggiato per il mondo e fatto vendemmie nel Rodano e in California, ottenne un lavoro accanto a Sebastian Beaumont – che aveva appena preso in mano la tenuta di famiglia, Beaumont Family Wines. Fu lì, spiega, che poté “disimparare” tutto ciò che aveva letto nei libri. Durante quel periodo, continuò a viaggiare e a lavorare alle vendemmie nell’emisfero nord – inclusa la già citata esperienza in Borgogna. 
 Sebbene il Pinot Noir fosse la sua ispirazione, ciò che cercava davvero era la freschezza e la vivacità, più che il vitigno stesso – ben consapevole che gran parte del Sudafrica è semplicemente troppo calda e secca per il Pinot. Un viaggio a Terroir al Limit (il progetto nel Priorat fondato da Dominik Huber ed Eben Sadie nel 2001) nel 2010 fu determinante. Si innamorò all’istante delle splendide vecchie viti di Garnacha della regione e degli stili più leggeri che Huber e Sadie stavano producendo. 
 Tornò subito e cercò una parcella di Grenache nel Capo Occidentale. Comprò due tonnellate d’uva da un vigneto di 50 anni nello Swartland insieme a Donovan Rall (di Rall Wines); lui raccolse i grappoli e li trasportò a Stellenbosch, dove li nascosero clandestinamente in una cella frigorifera universitaria grazie a un amico, e poi lei li portò a Beaumont. La vinificazione fu minimale, in parte perché era impegnata con i vini di Beaumont e non aveva attrezzature, ma anche perché volle seguire ciò che il vigneto offriva naturalmente, puntando su uno stile più leggero e profumato. Nacque così la prima annata di Momento Grenache. Era il 2011, e prima ancora che avesse deciso un nome o pensato all’etichetta per le bottiglie, il vino venne scelto per la famosa degustazione Young Guns. (Suo marito – artista – disegnò la vite che si vede oggi sull’etichetta, con volti nel tronco, perché per Niemann il vino non è solo un fatto tecnico, ma riguarda le persone – sia quelle che lo producono sia quelle che lo bevono.)
  Un decennio dopo, Momento si è guadagnato una notevole reputazione. Niemann è stata nominata Young Winemaker of the Year da Tim Atkin MW nel suo South Africa Report 2023, e i critici lodano i suoi vini, definendola una “sussurratrice di Grenache” (come l’ha chiamata Malu Lambert su Decanter). Sebbene Niemann produca anche un blend di Chenin Blanc/Verdelho e un Tinta Barocca, il cuore della gamma Momento è il Grenache – con versioni di Grenache Gris e Blanc, oltre a diverse etichette di Grenache Noir. Non sorprende, dato lo stile fine, fragrante e fresco dei suoi vini, che le sue ispirazioni siano Rayas (ovviamente), ma anche i vini della Sierra de Gredos (come Comando G) e le versioni più fini e moderne provenienti dall’Australia – come Yangarra o S.C. Pannell. Con l’annata 2022, ha introdotto tre nuove espressioni single-site di Grenache Noir, aggiungendo un’imbottigliatura da scisti di Botrivier, una da arenarie di Piekenierskloof e una da scisti di Riebeekberg, accanto al suo vino del Paardeberg (in precedenza etichettato come Swartland o Western Cape, su granito). L’idea è mostrare cosa può fare il Grenache in Sudafrica, raccontando i diversi suoli ma mantenendo sempre la sua firma: vivacità e delicatezza. 
 Per Niemann, il Grenache e le altre varietà con cui lavora non sono scelte casuali, ma vitigni sostenibili per il clima sudafricano. Quasi tutti i vigneti con cui collabora sono dry-farmed (ce n’è solo uno che sta gradualmente disabituando all’irrigazione). Ricorda la siccità del 2015-2018, con la minaccia del “Day Zero”, quando nessuno poteva irrigare le viti: rammenta come il Cabernet e il Merlot dei vigneti vicini si arresero, offrendo pochissimo raccolto, ma non fu così per il suo Grenache, che “continuò semplicemente a vivere”. Come dice lei, “Ci sarà un altro Day Zero in Sudafrica. Diventerà più caldo e più secco. Dobbiamo coltivare varietà che non abbiano bisogno di irrigazione.” Uve come Grenache, Chenin e Verdelho, insieme a Cinsault e Carignan, sono – per lei – la risposta. “È ciò che il nostro clima vuole che piantiamo,” afferma. 
 Una cosa è certa: se questo è il futuro del vino sudafricano, è incredibilmente entusiasmante. Dimenticate il Grenache ad alta gradazione e dolciastro; i vini di Niemann sono fini, freschi, strutturati, profumati e puri – vini che parlano del loro luogo d’origine. Le allocazioni delle sue cuvée single-site sono scomparse quasi istantaneamente al rilascio – e non c’è dubbio che la sua stella continuerà a brillare. Accaparratevi queste bottiglie finché potete. 
 Esplora la gamma Momento o leggi di più sul Sudafrica.

Nominata Giovane Enologa dell’Anno da Tim Atkin MW nel 2023, Marelise Niemann crea alcuni dei vini più entusiasmanti del Sudafrica. Con l’enologa di Momento abbiamo parlato del suo percorso, dell’amore per la Borgogna e del futuro del Grenache nel Capo Occidentale.

Sitting down with Marlise Niemann, the winemaker behind Momento wines in Bot River, South Africa – Tim Atkin’s Young Winemaker of the Year 2023

Redefining Grenache: Marelise Niemann’s Momento wines

Ridefinire il Grenache: Momento

Andrew Jefford isn’t like other wine writers. Browse his Instagram account and you’ll find not a bottle in sight. Check his Twitter and you’ll find a steady, quiet stream of haiku – or, as he prefers to describe them, “short texts”. These feeds are – like Jefford –gently honest; absent of ego, flash and fanfare. His prose is poised and purposeful, each word carefully considered yet never weighed down by pointed effort. He is a rarity in the world of wine: a writer whose (main) topic happens to be wine.  “I was always a huge reader. It always meant more to me than anything else,” Jefford tells me, thinking back to his childhood. But wine was omnipresent. As the son of a priest, it was a part of family life, consumed “on high days and holidays”.   “I remember first tasting Champagne with my brother, at the age of 10 or 11,” he says. “It was the first tasting note we agreed on: it tasted like vomit. Things got better from then on, happily.” The slight, wiry wine writer smiles, seeming almost sheepish about the wines that he’s since enjoyed.  Aged 16, Jefford decided to start making wine – brewing up grape juice concentrate and whatever else he could find– to supplement supplies at Sunday lunch. The transformative effects of fermentation hooked him – but it was the concept of terroir that reeled him fully in.  He was working at a local hospital, but after his shift – armed with The Penguin Book of Wines and André Simon’s A Wine Primer – he’d venture out to browse the shelves of “French Wine Farmers”, a wine shop in Norwich. He vividly recalls taking home a bottle of Chianti and being struck by the magic of travelling through a glass. “That’s full of wine. And every drop in there came from a vine in Tuscany. I’m drinking Tuscany!” he recalls thinking.“ And I’ve still not got over that. It’s amazing.”  Wine took a back seat when he set off to study English at the University of Reading, before embarking on both a Masters and PhD. The lure of words led him into publishing – a background which, along with his academic approach, defines his writing today. He spent four years “editing mediocre copy into something readable” – but eventually had had enough, and leapt at the chance to write a book on Port.  From there, he wrote articles for Margaret Rand in Wine Magazine, then Decanter, where he’s now a Contributing Editor and his monthly column is the stuff of legend. He was, for a number of years,The Evening Standard’s drinks writer, penned features for The Financial Times and is a regular in The World of Fine Wine. He’s authored several books – including the deservedly totemic The New France. Published in 2002, it looked beyond Burgundy and Bordeaux, shining a light on the nation’s varied wine scene at a moment when it was going through a revolution. If that wasn’t enough, he’s dabbled in radio, presenting for BBC Radio Three and Four.   While wine might be his mainstay, he’s written extensively on whisky and other spirits (including his respected book on Islay, Peat Smoke and Spirit), as well as travel and perfume. But writing, rather than any particular topic, is his real trade. His editorial experience has been key: his prose is intelligent, considered and a masterclass in eloquent economy – something that he finds all too often lacking elsewhere.   Two of Jefford's most famous books: The New France (2002) and Peat Smoke and Spirit (2004) “One of the problems is that a lot of [wine writing] is online, so there aren’t space constraints,” he decries. “[Wine writing] tends to attract quite large egos. They do write three times more than they need to – because they think it’s all wonderful.” It’s perhaps the lack of ego in Jefford’s writing that sets it apart. He seems to approach any topic unbiased and open – still with the wide-eyed joy of that first bottle of Chianti. Wine remains, to him, “dead exciting”.   “It’s a great shame that fairly early on the rest of the journalistic world decided that wine was a ghetto,” Jefford laments. “It embraced wine with gusto initially – probably in the 1990s – then it all got very boring once we passed 2000 and they just asked everybody to offer recommendations and that’s it. Newspapers are no longer a great school for wine writing in the way that they once were.” It is an industry, he feels, sorely in need of imagination. “There’s such a weight of detail to communicate that people never get their head above the waves of the detail.” And that detail, the intricacies of wine – or “its enormous apparatus of geekdom” – are the challenge. He hopes that his latest book, Drinking with the Valkyries – a collection of his work from the last 15 years, “could climb out of the wine ghetto – to anybody who enjoys language, enjoys storytelling, enjoys the interrelation of place and flavour that wine can offer”.  But, by his own admission, wine is “never going to be a mass market popular subject”. While the industry was long obsessed with finding its own “Jamie Oliver” – someone to bring wine to the masses, food is an essential part of life – “whereas wine need be a part of nobody’s life”.   Wine has, undoubtedly, come a long way – “vastly democratised” – but he worries about the “top end of things”, where wine has become so exclusive as to be “almost a plutocracy”. Wine criticism, for him, is intricately linked to the category’s self-imposed segregation, with “its relentless focus on points, excellence and things being better than other things – hierarchy, rather than difference”.  He’s long been vocal about scoring, feeling like Hugh Johnson that – although they may be of practical use to consumers, who undoubtedly want them – they are “philosophically untenable” and “disempowering”.  “You’re being misled to some extent if you think the 96-point wine is always better than the 94-point wine. It’s miles more complicated than that,” says Jefford, who scores wines reluctantly.“ And very often the 89-point wine can be better than either the 96- or 94-point wine.” His advice to wine drinkers is simple: “Trust your palate.”  Despite his impressive resume and effortless intellect, Jefford’s modesty shines through in our conversation – as we dash from the dangers of climate change (“Misery throughout the Third World – but the Bordelais and Bourguignons are raking it in”) to a fascinating co-fermented 15-variety blend from a Lirac estate (Ch. de Montfaucon’s Vin de Mr le Baron). And while the 66-year-old might be softly pensive in the written – and spoken – word, there’s such energy to the man himself.  He’s invariably described as a wine thinker, a philosopher-cum-writer, as well as – of course – a poet; but it’s impossible to pigeon-hole Jefford, his ideas, or his voice.  Andrew Jefford’s book Drinking with the Valkyries, published by Académie du Vin Library, is out now.

Andrew Jefford is one of the world’s greatest wine writers. As his latest book – Drinking with the Valkyries – is released, Sophie Thorpe caught up with the wordsmith to talk about his career so far, the art of writing and why he’s so against scoring 

Andrew Jefford – one of the world’s most famous wine writers – on his career, the art of writing and why he’s so against scoring wine

Sitting down with wine writer Andrew Jefford

Andrew Jefford: wielding words

The name Andrew Rankin might not mean much to the average whisky drinker. But mention him to the whisky world – the one that exists behind the public glare, and is largely reliant on lasting relationships and mutual respect – and there’ll be little doubt who you’re referring to.   Throughout his career, Rankin has worked for two of the biggest names in the industry: Chivas Brothers and Morrison Bowmore. When we speak, on an overcast Monday in early November, he tells me it’s 47 years to the day that he joined the ranks as a trainee blender at Chivas.  It’s hard to imagine a wet-behind-the-ears Rankin embarking on his “old-fashioned proper blending training”. He remembers those days fondly, tasting hundreds of different distillates – including malts and grains from Scotland and the US – from the vast library, and getting stuck in with every aspect of the production process from distillation to the vatting and cask dumping. It wasn’t long before the young Rankin found his passion: casks.   “There was a lot of not-very-good wood filled in the industry way back in the 1970s and ’80s,” he tells me. “Even in those early days, I pushed to get some better quality wood in the system.”   Rankin learned from the old guard at Chivas who’d spent their life in the industry. In the early 1990s, he moved to Morrison Bowmore in a General Manager role, concentrating on blending, inventory management and, most importantly, cask trading. He spent 22 “lovely years” at the company until his position became untenable when Suntory (“in their infinite wisdom”, Rankin says wryly) decided to buy Morrison Bowmore’s owners Beam in 2014.   Rankin says the whole dynamic changed overnight and the decision to move global management of all spirits – including whisky – under American management in Chicago was the final straw for him, Chief Executive Mike Keiller and Finance Director Douglas Crawford, who all walked that same year. Rankin says he “doesn’t want to get into it all” but does say part of his motivation to leave was the fact he didn’t want to work for an American-managed company that late in his career – having already experienced a similar takeover with Chivas and Seagram many years earlier.   Rankin is a loquacious Scotsman. When you land on the right subject, he can talk endlessly with such knowledge and humour that it’s easy to lose track of time. In fact, when a small team from FINE+RARE visited his new distillery project, Ardross, in August, we did just that. One thing he doesn’t talk about, without great coaxing, is his immense success. This includes but is in no way limited to his work on Bowmore Black, the Trilogy releases, and the 50-year-old. He is a humble man, and has quite intentionally stepped back from the limelight, while some of his counterparts have been drawn to it.   Since setting up his own company in 2014, Rankin has not stopped working. Undoubtedly his biggest project has been Ardross, a new distillery in the Scottish Highlands. Rankin was given the mandate (and a healthy budget of £30m) to find a home for the new distillery by Ardross Single Cask Society founder Barth Brosseau. He found the dilapidated 50-acre site, which was formerly a farm, with its own seven-acre loch and moved heaven and earth to turn it into the stunning distillery we see today.   Rankin says the project has, and continues to be, “much much bigger” than he originally anticipated, and what started out as a little tree constantly grows branches all over the place. But, he says, it has been his biggest achievement to date.   The latest unwieldy branch is a second, small-batch distillery that is being built on the Ardross site, destined to become the Creative Suite – exclusively for Single Cask Society Members’ use. Once completed, it will be capable of producing 250 casks a year of almost any style of whisky that a Society Member could desire. When it is up and running, likely by the end of next year, Society members will be able to call Rankin or visit him at the distillery to discuss their requirements. He will advise them on certain elements and Sandy Jamieson – Ardross’s Distillery Manager with near-50 years’ experience, and hands-down one of the most hospitable people you will meet – will get involved in the “nittier grittier side of the distillation”.  “Society members have the flexibility of different malt styles, of different grain stills, of different blend styles, and the multi-cask options that we’ll have available,” Rankin says. “But always without getting to the gimmicky stage,” he adds gravely.   This is a word that comes up a lot in our conversations – “gimmicky”. Rankin is, by his own admission, a traditionalist and has baulked at the changes in the whisky industry over the past 47 years.    “In my mind, a gimmicky type thing that lets you say we were the first in the world to do x only lasts a day and then it’s old news,” he says. “So everything we do falls within traditional methods – but pushing the boundaries a wee bit in terms of the styles of whisky.”  After spending a number of hours with Rankin, you can tell he’s not the type to mince his words – his standards are exacting, and he’s been around the block enough times to know when he’s being sold a pony. For these reasons, and many more, he’s unafraid to tell Brosseau – who he on occasion butts heads with – and Society members what he thinks.      It’s this straight-talking, mixed with an unwavering sense of tradition, that has stood him in such good stead throughout his career. Relationships formed over the past four decades have been vital to getting Ardross off the ground and saved his bacon – and the whisky producers he’s worked for – countless times.   “I always made it my policy to not sit on the end of the phone negotiating prices or volumes never having met the person that’s at the other end,” he tells me. “I’ve made it a policy that we’d go and visit all the major suppliers. We’d have dinner with them. We’d get to know them.”  When Rankin first started visiting Kentucky – a place he has a real fondness for and has undoubtedly influenced elements of the Ardross build – the state was just coming back from a real depression. He got to know a lot of people in the cooperages and distilleries, and many of these relationships last to this day. You sense it is this longevity and being around throughout hardship that has fortified these ties. The same is likely true of Japan. Enviably, Rankin has a relationship with one of the oldest independent cooperages in Japan, from whom he sources a steady amount of the mystical Mizunara cask – something many producers would give their right arm for. As quite a coup, Ardross filled some of its first runs of new-make spirit into Mizunara in 2020.   Rankin is too humble to go into detail but he does say these relationships have proven useful over the years. “If barley is in short supply, which it was not that many years ago,” he says, “because of our relationship, we would always get priority. If casks were in short supply, we’d always get the priority.”   Sadly, this way of working is something Rankin sees diminishing in most industries. “Everything is done via Zoom and telephone and internet now,” he bemoans. “Having listened to some of COP26, the environmentalists will say that’s a good thing, you’re not using air travel, but there has got to be a balance.”  Another change Rankin “isn’t keen on” is “the quest to get something different all the time”. “All the limited releases,” he says downcast. “The best limited release now is the standard edition because [producers] push everything else and don’t push the standard edition,” he only half jokes.  “Make no mistake, Barth and I have had a lot of serious heated discussions on various things like all the different wines and tequila [finishes]. It’s not traditional,” he says impassioned. “Why would we want to put a perfectly good product into a cask that’s had tequila maturing for six months?”   He pauses for what seems like an eternity, and I’m unsure if he wants an answer, before he, mercifully, continues: “I ask the question and I’ll get the response that it’s what the modern market wants. To which I respond: ‘says who?’”  Throughout his career, Rankin says he’s always stuck to the more traditional casks, like Sherry and Port. But he’s quick to say that the market is a minefield, and you need to proceed with caution as producers are often offloading casks for a reason.   “Even Port is one that would be low down of my list of things to use,” he says. “Because historically, Port producers don’t generate a lot of casks. They only generate them when they are clearing a warehouse out. The casks will be sold to people in the whisky industry when there is absolutely no maturation left in them at all, so you’re achieving nothing by finishing in those types of casks.”   Rankin says the only chance you have of producing a decent whisky, or at the very least not ruining the good one you’ve got, is to deal with certain individuals who will give you a cask that’s not spent.   He tells me some horror stories from the Glasgow facility where he warehouses and oversees cask operations. “We see some of the casks come in, and we’ve gotta send it back. They’ll say the Sherry casks are new. They’re not. They are probably the oldest casks that have been lying in that bodega. I have to say to the client, ‘Trust me, you’ll lose half your whisky because it’s not good wood, it’s very porous-looking, the smell inside them is slightly sour and you can’t get rid of that. But, it’s your gamble’.” Unsurprisingly, they heed his advice and make another call pretty sharpish.   He adds: “You’ve just got to know what you’re looking for and be careful. Because you can ruin a perfectly good whisky.”   It’s rare to meet somebody with such candour in or out of the whisky industry. Hand on heart, I can’t think of a person I’d rather entrust to guide me when deciding what to do with my whisky.   Learn more about Ardross or read more Editorial 

After working as Master Blender for some of the biggest names in the industry, Andrew Rankin knows a thing or two about good whisky – and good casks. He tells Holly Motion why strong relationships and traditional values are far more important to him than being a whisky personality

The ex-Bowmore Master Blender Andrew Rankin talks about working for some of the biggest names in the whisky industry and tells us why relationships are key.

Ex-Bowmore Master Blender Andrew Rankin on casks

The great Scotsman

Ardross is a new Scotch whisky distillery. You’d be forgiven for rolling your eyes about now. Over the past few years there’s been a spate of new distillery openings across the bucolic Scottish landscape and each espouses to be different from the last. Many have an impressive roster of whisky talent at the stills and little expense has been spared on the distillery itself and surrounding architecture. This is something Ardross Single Cask Society founder Barthélémy Brosseau is all too aware of. “I wouldn’t want us to be completely perceived as normal,” he says. “What I mean by that is that we have a great building, great location, great people, great quality spirit but everybody is claiming more or less the same.” As the name may suggest, Barthélémy – or Barth as he introduces himself – Brosseau was born in Bordeaux and is a very atypical Scotch whisky distillery founder. “You don’t see me wearing a suit and speaking very gravely about the Scotch whisky tradition with a Scottish accent, and there is a reason behind this,” the 32-year-old adds. As he is quick to point out, with a smile that rarely leaves his face during our one-hour call, when it comes to the whisky, he takes a giant step back. “Who am I as a Frenchman to tell them how to produce Scotch whisky?” This side of the business is very much driven by distilling legend Andrew Rankin of Bowmore fame. When we speak, the Ardross team is preparing to officially launch its Single Cask Society. A website is in development with an ever-nearing launch date (the designers require a “bit of a kick”), the existing 49 members are regularly in contact with Brosseau (he has most of them on WhatsApp), and he’s not getting quite as much sleep as he might like after the birth of his second daughter. With all these plates spinning, you’d forgive him for being a little flustered. Instead, he is cool personified. He seamlessly weaves the conversation from topics including, but by no means limited to, philosophy, travel and literature (Leo Tolstoy’s War & Peace is among his favourites). It is soon apparent why Brosseau is the butterfly in the company logo. With his tendency to flit from one subject area to the next and, to take his more philosophical approach, his current emergence from a chrysalis of sorts into the Scotch whisky world. Conversely, Rankin, with his near 50-year experience, is the steadfast, knowledgeable other animal in the logo. “Don’t tell Andrew he is the tortoise,” the Frenchman says with that smile. This symbiotic relationship in many ways is an unlikely one, but it’s key to Ardross’s current and future success. “Without Andrew, we would not be where we are today,” Brosseau says. “It would be an absolute mistake for me to say that I am driving this. Andrew is driving Ardross as a distillery and it is thanks to Andrew and his connections in Jerez, in Japan, in the US that we are where we are today. “I have all these crazy ideas and he is the wise guy who has the years and the knowledge and the erudition. And that is why it is interesting – sometimes we are completely at odds. And that’s normal. And from this friction, I think, that creativity ensues.” Ardross is the Scotch whisky arm of Greenwood Spirits Ltd, which is owned by Vevil International who boast London’s The Ned and The Wolseley in their impressive portfolio. Part of their modus operandi is faithfully restoring and renovating Grade 1 and 2 listed buildings and Ardross was no different. After seeing the opportunities that lay within the Scotch whisky sector, the team quickly recognised the need to partner with an industry icon for the project to succeed. After meeting Rankin, the team gave him a mandate to find the Scotch whisky with a big vision a new home. Rankin describes finding the beautiful dilapidated farm called Ardross as serendipitous. He recalls seeing the six- to- seven acre Loch Dubh and snow-covered pine trees, and falling in love right away. The 50-acre site with 19th century farmhouse buildings has since been restored brick by brick at the cost of £30 million and a new distillery built to produce a traditional, quality single malt with a slightly sweeter profile. Although expectations were high after such an investment and the assembly of a production team with a combined experience of over 150 years, few could scarcely have imagined the quality of the spirit after one run. Rankin says it was a “Eureka moment” when they realised the new-make spirit was 95% of the way there – this process typically takes two to three months. The reason for this success right off the bat? Extremely long fermentation times of 121 hours (compared to the industry standard of 60), one of the best, if not the best, production teams in the business, and a relentless pursuit of quality, according to Brosseau. The only thing left to create the Ardross single malt they’d all envisaged was the wood and time itself. For this, Rankin drew on his industry ties and sourced the highest-quality wood from Jerez, Kentucky and Japan. Even for seasoned professionals with decades upon decades of whisky distilling experience under their belts, the chance to work at a new distillery from day one represents a career first. Despite all their achievements, of which there are many in the case of this team, to a certain extent they have been following somebody else’s blueprint and colouring within the lines. Working at a distillery like Ardross, with all its financial backing, represents an opportunity for this illustrious team to create their own blueprint in a way that only 150 or so others ever have. And Ardross, arguably more than most, has the flexibility to dictate what this framework should look like. “We have the luxury of thinking about the future almost in generational terms,” Brosseau says. “We are insulated from the vagaries of short-termism.” Brosseau says the decision was made early on to remain an independent distiller and not team up with the “big boys” for investment or distribution deals. He doesn’t rule this out in the future but says this approach has given the team an opportunity to learn and get their own scars and will make their growth and achievements that much sweeter because they have “done it all themselves from the beginning”. In addition to the distillery, Ardross also owns its own bottling line and warehouse, so they’re not dependent on others. Where other distilleries might be burdened with lofty marketing and distribution costs, and fielding shareholders’ dividends demands, Brosseau says Ardross is “resolutely adopting a different stance”, will not rush to produce a non-age-statement and is under no pressure whatsoever to bottle whisky until the team is good and ready. “For us, Scotch whisky is about time. It is about the long term,” he adds. “The idea is that when you are entering Ardross as a member, you are with us for the long-term and the value proposition unfolds over time. “If you are in a rush and you want to buy your cask and sell the next day, we are not for you. And we are completely honest about it. Go elsewhere basically.” The French charm quickly returns and he says with a smile: “I mean, you will always be welcome of course – but what I am saying is you won’t potentially be happy.” While he is tightlipped about how this value proposition might unfold, Brosseau teases it won’t be via “necessarily classical routes”. “We are not putting everything in front of you all at one time,” he explains. “The idea is to make you discover, or enter our world, almost sequentially. It’s frustrating I think for people sometimes because we live in a world where everything is available straight away – one click and you have everything you want. “And we are quite contrarian in that regard. We are not building right now to enjoy the fruits right away. The idea is to build value and the ripeness of the fruits come over time.” For this reason, and many others, Brosseau says Ardross is “very reasonably priced”.  “You have lots of people today who are selling whisky casks that they don’t really own,” he adds. The Frenchman describes the cask investment trade as a “complicated one” and is very gallant in not wanting to discuss other schemes that are slightly less above-board. Instead, he says: “We are not trying to fool anyone. We know who we are and we know what we are doing quality-wise. “We’re not pretending to be Macallan or Dalmore or whomever. We have a world-class quality team with world-class expertise, among the best in the industry. But we don’t have 200 years of history.” Whereas other propositions might require an accountancy qualification to understand, Brosseau says Ardross is “doing something that is very simple”. “We have the credibility of the industry professionals in everything that is related to production. For the rest, we are out-of-the-box thinking professionals.” While he might not be willing to divulge the “special” things Ardross is doing at the end of this year and next, we can speculate it’ll be worth the wait. Few have the world-class library of casks, superlative new-make spirit and freedom to fly as high as this Scotch whisky distillery. Find out more about Ardross or read more Editorial

After years of painstaking renovation and restoration, the £30 million Ardross project is about to take off. Single Cask Society founder Barthélémy Brosseau tells Holly Motion all about the contrarian Northern Highlands distillery’s transformation and why this team is proud to be different

Exploring the story behind the fledgling Highland distillery with an amazing distilling pedigree, Ardross, and its exciting Single Cask Society.

The Ardross genesis story

Ardross: the butterfly effect

The latest from Latour In the wake of last week’s launch of the 2016 vintage of the First Growth’s third wine, Pauillac de Latour, the Pauillac powerhouse will be releasing the 2013 vintage of the Grand Vin, as well as 2015 Les Forts de Latour, its second wine. The 2013 is only the second vintage of the Grand Vin that the property has released since it moved away from en primeur – and there’s no doubt, despite the vintage’s sometimes maligned reputation, that this is going to be highly sought-after. New from Champagne March brings with it a bounty of fine fizz releases. Top of our wish-list are the new wines from Henri Giraud – a House that produces small volumes of outstanding, terroir-driven wines, almost all of which are oak-fermented (and is, for that reason, often compared favourably to Krug). We’ll see the latest release of its multi-vintage cuvée (described by Jancis Robinson MW as “a sort of Montrachet of Champagne”) and the new, 2013 vintage of their top wine, Argonne. Keep an eye out also for 2007 Bollinger R.D. and Pol Roger’s 2012 Sir Winston Churchill.  Single-farm spirits The unfailingly modish and exciting Irish distillery Waterford has been making waves in recent weeks, having scientifically proven terroir’s influence in whisky. This month will see the latest spirits from the Irish distillery released – two single-farm single malts that offer a chance for you to explore the concept yourself. One comes from Hook Head – a site on the southern coast with clay-loam soils, while the other hails from Lakefield, with deep loam soils in County Laois. Burgundy There are still a few 2019s emerging from the Côte d’Or – including wines from Domaine des Lambrays and Le Grappin. Clos des Lambrays was a stand-out from our trip in October last year, while Aussie Andrew Nielsen’s Le Grappin wines (a darling of London’s restaurant scene) offer brilliant value year in, year out. The 2021 collection from Maison Leroy has almost entirely sold out, however we’ll also see the latest releases from the rest of Lalou Bize-Leroy’s empire – Domaine Leroy and Domaine d’Auvenay. Available, as ever, in tiny volumes, these are some of the world’s most collectable wines, and unmissable for Burgundy aficionados. Italian icons After a series of superlative 2016s from Brunello, Tuscany is on the mind. While Castello di Ama’s 2017 San Lorenzo is already available, the 2018 vintage of the Chianti Classico property’s flagship wine, L’Apparita, will be released in the coming weeks. Tasting through a selection of the range with our team, CEO Lorenza Sebasti told us that she and winemaker Marco Pallanti feel it’s “the best we’ve ever made”. We’ll also see the new vintage of Ornellaia’s entry-level bottling – Le Volte dell’Ornellaia, which provides an affordable and earlier-drinking taste of this Super Tuscan estate, ahead of the release of Ornellaia “proper” in April.

A new month brings another flurry of fine wine and spirits releases. While Bordeaux en primeur is on the horizon, March sees new vintages from Latour and the Grandes Marques, as well as releases from Tuscany, Burgundy and Ireland’s most exciting distillery: here’s our pick of the bunch

A new month brings another flurry of fine wine and spirits releases. Here, we pick the best of the bunch – from Latour, Castello di Ama, Waterford and more 

The wines and spirits to look out for this March

What to look out for this March

If my wife and I are lolling around on the sofa, sharing a bottle of wine and listening to jazz, I’ll sometimes ask, in tones combining the genial authority of a quizmaster with the tacit menace of a Stasi interrogator, “Who do you think is playing bass?” Or piano. Or drums. If she doesn’t know, I respond with appalled astonishment because it’s so obvious (you only need to hear a couple of notes) that it’s Charlie Haden. Or McCoy Tyner or Max Roach or whoever. When I was studying jazz in the 1980s (by studying I mean getting as stoned as possible with my friends) we’d play records for each other without revealing the identities of the musicians and, in this way, I built up an instinctive database of who sounded like whom. Of course, that’s not all I was doing, back then. I was also swilling gallons of beer and respectable quantities of wine, both of which I consumed with just as much pleasure as I listened to music. The difference is that with wine, I never paid any attention to what I was drinking, where what I was drinking had come from, or what grapes might have gone into it. Still don’t, actually. So, while my wife sometimes doesn’t know who she’s listening to, I rarely know what I’m drinking. Now, if my enjoyment of jazz is enhanced by knowing who I’m hearing, when an album was recorded, how a given version of a tune compares with other versions by different musicians and so on, does it follow that my enjoyment of wine is correspondingly diminished by ignorance and indifference as to its provenance and ingredients? Am I sitting around liking what I like while unable to tell whether what I’m liking is a bottle of Kenny G or vintage Sonny Rollins? To answer this question and address the larger issue, a bit of history is helpful (isn’t it always?). I grew up in a non-drinking household. We knew that other people drank wine with dinner but this was seen as an exotic, middle-class custom, as removed from our own potential experience as the tribal rites featured in National Geographic. No one we knew drank wine except the homemade kind – blackberry, pear, potato etc – that my parents made, stored in the cupboard under the stairs and offered to thirsty relatives who came to visit. Bearing no relation to wine as usually conceived, this beverage was more akin to a potent species of cider. Ah cider! As was the case for all boys of my generation, cider proved such an effective conduit to getting blind drunk that I’ve not been able to face even a sniff of the stuff since a horribly enjoyable first encounter. Same with Cinzano Bianco, but I’ve never turned my back on beer. As part of the general drift into all matters alcoholic, I drank a bit of Liebfraumilch (yum) but didn’t encounter anything like the notion of a ‘good’ wine until I was at Oxford. (The fact that I had to wait till then is a good indicator of the class status of wine in the UK back in the 1970s.) One day a fellow-student at my college offered to sell some bottles of what he pimped as “excellent red wine.” Three of us forked out for six between us. It was great. Sort of peppery tasting. We glugged the lot in one evening and I was violently sick, from my friend’s window, into the lane outside (a reversal of Charles Ryder’s first encounter, in Brideshead Revisited, with Sebastian Flyte who pukes into his room), but I was on my winey way. Most boozing took place in the pub (beer) but, as I gradually got used to drinking wine at dinners and at art openings, an unreliable and poorly projected map of wine awareness began to take shape.  In my early 30s, there was a Bulgarian Cabernet Sauvignon for which I developed a particular fondness. At three quid a bottle it seemed more appropriate, even then, to cut it down to three syllables: Bulg-Cab-Sauv. Then came the news that the contents of any bottle could be improved by being allowed to breathe. Sometime later, living in Paris, I got wind of a crude truth that you could tell a better wine by how far you could stick your finger in its bottom, in the whatever-it’s-called at the base of the bottle. The further the better was the rule of thumb, so to speak, though why this should be the case I never discovered. These were excellent, easy-to-implement tips but the bigger picture remained blurry. I knew there were regions, different kinds of grape, but I was never sure which was which (Burgundy always sounded like a type of brandy) and I knew enough to know that it wasn’t enough to know that you liked a Merlot, say; you also needed to know what was going on within that species of grape or region, that certain brands and years were better than others. Although a drawing of a château on the label could be a good sign, it was not an infallible one, especially when some high-quality wines began to feature labels that shared an aesthetic with edible marijuana products or t-shirt design. And over all this uncertainty hung a larger cloud of astonishment – a symptom of the world’s fathomless ability to defy logic – generated by the ‘fact’ (I still have trouble accepting it as such) that white wine is not necessarily made from white grapes, nor red from red. Even when we factor in the odd big Tuscan moment in Italy, or Pinot epiphany in New Zealand, my understanding has not advanced significantly in the last 20 years. I know what I like but, as with many things – learning German, for example – I feel I’ve left it too late. Any attempts I make are the equivalent of looking up the occasional word in an online Deutsch-English dictionary. One can often spend one’s way to an enhanced experience, but my natural skinflintery means I prefer my father-in-law’s model, whereby he had knowledged his way to improved enjoyment. He not only serves fantastic wine, without exception, on every occasion; he always serves wine that costs a fraction of how it tastes.  I like this approach but, to borrow the term from London’s taxi drivers, I’ve never done the knowledge. I’m like the new generation of Uber drivers who rely so passively on their phones’ navigation apps that, after years behind the wheel, they still have almost no idea where they’re going. My phone comes in handy too. If I drink a fantastic wine at a friend’s house, I’ll take a picture of the label and, if it’s in stock at a local store, will buy a case. It’s nice being able to repeat a pleasing experience but it’s rarely as nice as I remember it and often not nice in the way that I remembered it. Or, if it’s nice at first, it almost always seems less nice, months later, when I’m down to the last couple of bottles. There are as many moving parts in the world of wine appreciation as there are in and around the mouth.  We have moved, by a combination of association and anatomy, to the potential source of the difficulty, to language. Having failed to acquire home-grown expertise, I am at the mercy of advice from the people who work in wine stores. Overall, I would estimate that this has resulted in a 50% success rate at twice the necessary expenditure. Is this because of shortcomings in their expertise and counsel, or is it due to linguistic failure, to inadequate translations of their knowledge into my preferences? We are told there’s no accounting for taste, which is not true, but it seems there are multiple problems with recounting one’s tastes or satisfying other people’s desires. Compared with sex where you can easily get by with half a dozen verbs and nouns, saying either what you want from a wine – or what it will do for someone else – demands a linguistic dexterity that is almost Joycean. We have all sat entranced as a waiter’s attempts to do justice to the merits of a given wine begin to sound like a libationary remix of Chomsky’s “Colourless green ideas sleep furiously.” But even while allowing for scepticism, incomprehension and constant proximity to parody, I continue to wonder about the extent to which my experience of wine would be enhanced by becoming more articulate in la langue du raisin. ‘Smooth’ is generally considered a good quality (as opposed to ‘rough’) but Kenny G, a purveyor of ‘smooth jazz’, is tacitly at odds with ‘complexity’. I can sort of appreciate complexity in a wine, without any understanding of how that complexity is constituted but – a defining character flaw – am more often conscious of a lack of complexity.  The strange thing is that while wine appreciation is not like a foal’s ability to get up and running straight away, it does find its feet over time. Even if uninformed, un-cultivated and left to fend for itself without any supporting help, it seems one’s tastes in wine not only change; they improve of their own accord. This might be considered a welcome, accidentally ameliorative side-effect of getting older. Or would be were it not for the fact – one I have no trouble accepting – that this improvement manifests itself negatively, as a steadily increasing capacity for dissatisfaction. To put it simply, what might have seemed an excellent wine a few years earlier becomes merely tolerable because of a lack of what may or may not be complexity. The tolerable becomes unacceptable, and the unacceptable becomes vile. My tongue has become more responsive to taste while remaining tied; my discernment is entirely inarticulate. The product, above all else, of laziness, this manifests itself in several unattractive ways. Do women on a date prefer men who take control of the wine menu? (Could this be the civilised residue of what was once a more widespread assumption and acceptance of male domination?) My own dating history leads me to suspect that they might, though the belief that the evening gets off to a bad start – with my saying, “I don’t know anything about wine, you choose” – is more palatable than conceding that it might have more to do with the way it ends (with my saying, “Let’s split the check”) or, come to think of it, with the middle passage (constantly refilling my own glass while droning on, without interruption, about the musical complexity of Ornette Coleman). It’s not just laziness and tightness, there’s also the question of sophistication and refinement. I can eat with chopsticks – I really can! – but have never been able to master the knack of swirling wine round the glass and forensically nosing it. You can do it, I’m sure, but I always feel like I’m engaged in such a blatant affectation that the first flicker of an erotic bond starts to form between my date and the waiter because they can tell that I’m parroting the action without any idea of what I’m attempting to discover, that it’s obvious to anyone watching that my head is entirely filled with a single idea: keep the cost down. In this regard, price, I am pleased to report that limited progress has been made. In my mid-20s, in London, I was sometimes invited to the house of the writer Lisa Appignanesi who was at the centre of London’s intellectual and cultural life. Well-mannered enough not to arrive empty-handed, I’d stop off at the off-licence near her house and pick up the cheapest bottle of discounted plonk on offer. Lisa always accepted this shabby gift graciously (she did everything graciously), while making sure that it never darkened the table. It now seems one of the rudest things one can do, to show up at someone’s house with a crap bottle of wine, though where crapness begins or ends is anyone’s guess. A shitty bottle of wine is always over-priced, is always money wasted. At the opposite end of the scale, my limited experience of drinking very expensive wine has confirmed what I had always expected: that it’s wasted on me. I ooh and ah, naturally and gratefully, but even though I enjoy these $200 bottles I am thinking: well, it’s not 170 bucks better than a 30 dollar bottle. Perhaps from a certain point – $100 upwards? – you have to pay twice that for a tiny percentage improvement in experience. That makes sense. If this were not the case, then a $1,000 bottle would surely bear so little relation to wine that it wouldn’t be wine at all. We now have sufficient linguistic tools available to describe my ideal relationship with wine. When I think of wine, it’s never as a drink or a taste experience but always as part of an occasion, part of a narrative. What I love is going to a dinner at a restaurant with a non-clamorous acoustic (wood and carpet, not metal and concrete) and a limited menu (I hate choosing food), knowing that someone else will take care of ordering the wine which will flow without let or hindrance. The problem at my father-in-law’s is that although the wine is always excellent, there’s never an infinite amount of it. And what I want from wine, above all, is more. That’s the key word in all this. I love talk and the progression of conversation as the wine makes itself felt: the glow of friends’ eyes, the flow of chat. Red wine, reflections of the room and of candlelight in the glasses full of wine. Everything is held together by the wine, even though that wine is less important than the people, the subject, the jokes and laughter. The wonderful remarks become more wonderful as the evening unfolds, until nothing anybody says really makes any sense at all. In the morning I will not remember the details of the wine or the food. What I will remember is the warm glow, the happiness of it all.  This article was originally published in FONDATA, Issue One

Writer and critic Geoff Dyer charts his slow journey towards an ever-increasing appreciation of – and reverence for – well-chosen wine. Photography by Marcus Nilsso.

Writer and critic Geoff Dyer charts his slow journey towards an ever-increasing appreciation of – and reverence for – well-chosen wine.

FONDATA: The Mirth of More

The Mirth of More

The Grand Cru wines of Alsace and in particular the wines of Zind-Humbrecht are some of the most transparent and detailed aromatic whites out there. The wines from the single-vineyard sites in particular have all the breeding to be some the most complex white wines in the world. The wines are barrel-fermented in the old traditional oak foudres using only natural yeasts, typically taking a staggering 12 to 15 months to ferment.  As a comparison, most white wine takes just two to three weeks to ferment. The reason for the long ferments is to do with the high acidity levels in the wines, pushing them right through malolactic fermentation, and Olivier’s insistence on only using natural yeasts during fermentation. He wants to ferment his wines to dryness and with grapes such as Riesling and Pinot Gris from Alsace, this means a long wait. The wines are then aged on their lees and bottled, unfined and filtered, directly from the original cask 18 months after harvest.  Tasting the single-vineyard sites from Zind-Humbrecht provides a fascinating exploration of site, variety and vintage that is rarely laid so bare. The wines have as much intensity and intrigue as Grand Cru Burgundy, yet they are distinctly Alsatian in style, with their power, warmth and spicy mineral complexity defining its sense of place. Another distinct element to the Alsace region is that within the same vineyard each of the four permitted Grand Cru varieties - whether it be Riesling, Pinot Gris, Gewürztraminer or Muscat – are free to flaunt their individuality within the same site, providing different interpretations of the dominant terroir through the characteristics of each variety.   

Two of the most complementary and contrasting single-vineyard sites within Zind-Humbrecht’s portfolio are the limestone-rich Clos Windsbuhl vineyard in the Hunawihr region in Central Alsace and the volcanic Clos-Saint-Urbain vineyard located in the most southerly part of Alsace, within the Grand Cru of Rangen de Thann – the most iconic and historic vineyard of the region. 
Clos Windsbuhl: limestone 
Clos Windsbuhl overlooks the church of Sainte Hune. A monopole site (owned entirely by Zind-Humbrecht), it isn’t actually a Grand Cru, although many believe it should be. It sits directly above the Grand Cru of Rosacker – the source of Alsace’s most cult wine Clos Sainte Hune. It has a distinct soil type, rich in limestone with clay and chalk on the lower part. It is one of the last vineyards to ripen in Alsace due to its high altitude (350 metres above sea-level). It is this cooling influence and slow ripening that creates the aromatic complexity typical of this vineyard. Nestled close to the Vosges mountains, it is protected from the winds but as one of the coolest sites in Alsace, Clos Windsbuhl performs best in a warm vintage such as 2018.   Tasting the latest wines from 2018, the pulsing drive in all three wines – Riesling, Pinot Gris and Gewürztraminer – is obvious, no doubt the limestone soils providing this distinct tension and focus. Despite the pulsing drive, the wines remained controlled and very elegant. Olivier believes it is this finesse and elegance that is the defining characteristic of Clos Windsbuhl.  2018 Riesling Clos Windsbuhl The Riesling has a strong limestone presence, taut structure and pulse. It’s so linear, but with contained fruit – honeyed pink apple and white peach. In some ways it shares strong similarities with white Burgundy. 
2018 Pinot Gris Clos Windsbuhl The Pinot Gris has a slightly oilier texture, and an additional lushness. Despite this, the limestone still plays a very strong role in this wine – poised, taut acidity pulses through the wine. It does not have the aromatic camouflage of Riesling, the chalky minerality is even more. Very powerful and elegant – forward drive seems very characterful of Clos Windsbuhl. 
2018 Gewürztraminer Clos Windsbuhl 
The Gewürztraminer has a beautifully focused rather than flamboyant nose of lychee and white flowers. Noticeable residual sugar gives the wine a lovely creamy textural quality, yet the energy and poise so typical of the vineyard is still very present, giving the wine lovely balancing mineral freshness. Olivier states that this Gewürztraminer has the same tannin levels as a red Burgundy!  Clos-Saint-Urbain: volcanic sandstone Clos-Saint-Urbain sits within the Grand Cru of Rangen de Thann and is Alsace’s most southerly vineyard with a unique composition of highly mineralised volcanic soil (unlike any other site in Alsace). With its south-facing steep vineyards, the vines get incredible sun exposure, and the dark reddish-brown soil heats up like a furnace.  All these elements help the grapes reach high levels of phenolic ripeness, while the altitude of 350 to 450 metres means the vines are some of the most late-ripening, with the harvest often taking place two to three weeks after the start of the harvesting period in Alsace. The altitude and poor soils also protect the acidity in the wine, together producing some of the longest-lived white wines ever made. Decanter’s Andrew Jefford describes the Rangen vineyard as producing "the ultimate terroir wine", and it has even been nicknamed by many as "the Montrachet of Alsace".

Like Clos Windsbuhl, Clos-Saint-Urbain has similar intensity and strong mineral presence, though the mineral profile is really very different. It is much flintier and smokier, almost a touch of peat-smoke. All the three varieties are much more savoury on the palate. Whereas the fruit is more present and pristine in the Clos Windsbuhl, in the Clos-Saint-Urbain, the fruit is more caramelised and plays second fiddle to the volcanic minerality. 
 Riesling 2018 Clos-Saint-Urbain This is expressive on the nose, dominated by flint, chalk stone and caramelised lemon. The tension is remarkable. With the high mineral content comes real intensity and power too. Quince, lemon sherbet and a strong salinity creates an expansive mouth-watering finish. This is epic.  2018 Pinot Gris Clos-Saint-Urbain This rich, full-bodied, opulent Pinot Gris has heat-fuelled flint and smoke characters. The wine has a very creamy mid-palate, a silky and supple texture with gorgeous apricot and nectarine flavours interspersed with the saline-tinged smoky minerality. Tension builds on the back palate, this is bold, rich Pinot Gris, but with plenty of focus and a mouthwatering finish. 2018 Gewürztraminer Clos-Saint-Urbain The Gewürztraminer has a wonderful smoky, peat-like nose with plenty of ginger spice, classic lychee aromas and flinty minerality. Again, there is a silky texture to the wine and a light, herby, saline bitterness to the finish. It’s very long, with a fiery, spicy finish. Explore Alsace or read more Editorial 

As Domaine Zind Hubrecht’s 2018s are released, we explore Alsace’s terroir – comparing and contrasting two of its finest vineyards, Clos Windsbuhl and Clos-Saint-Urbain with Olivier Humbrecht MW

Tasting Domaine Zind Hubrecht’s 2018 wine releases and exploring Alsace’s terroir, Visiting Clos Windsbuhl and Clos-Saint-Urbain with Olivier Humbrecht MW

Exploring Alsace’s terroir

Exploring Alsace’s terroir: Clos Windsbuhl versus Clos-Saint-Urbain

“I can die happy now,” Jon Bonné chuckles to me. The writer spent almost a decade as the wine guy at The San Francisco Chronicle, and is now Managing Editor at Resy, having spent time at Punch, writing for Noble Rot, Decanter and many more in between. His latest book, The New French Wine, was released earlier this year and The New York Times wine critic Eric Asimov dedicated an entire column to singing its praises – something he almost never does.  The hefty, two-part tome has been a long time in the making – almost a decade, in fact. The idea was a frivolous suggestion, casually agreed to over one too many drinks (“unsulphured Gamay in Oakland – as one does”) with his editor in 2014, soon after the publication of his seminal The New California Wine. But what was conceived as part of his quest for “the next thing”, to build on the momentum of his first book, rapidly spiralled.  “It's very hard to see a bigger picture of French wine because it is so overwhelming,” Bonné tells me over Zoom. Initially he’d envisaged a few trips, a project that would take a couple of years – but it “kept growing and growing and growing”.  “There was this much bigger story that I was sort of stumbling into,” the writer says. He gradually realised that there was an “enormous meta transformation” taking place across France – and this is what the book wrestles with. As he writes in the book’s introduction, “I imagined the new French wine would be about the undiscovered country – the cracks between known places.” But as he soon discovered, the new French wine was everywhere – and it took him nine years to piece it all together.   The work is split into two separate books – The Narrative and The Producers, the former the story behind the reference guide that forms the latter. The Narrative is a deep dive into the face of France and its winegrowing today, broken down by region, with break-out essays on topics such as natural wine, farming and the appellation system. It’s a rich tapestry of stories, interjected with the frank and striking photography of Susannah Ireland and occasional illustrated map by Francesco Bongiorni, reminiscent of Art Deco postcards.  For Bonné, the “new France” is about postmodernism, about “wilful rejections of the b******t of the past”. It’s about a (re)focus on site, about producers seizing their destiny and hunting for a more sustainable approach – in the vineyard, winery and beyond – although it’s far from that simple. “To understand French wine and to love it, you simply have to embrace its messy, self-contradictory, and, yes, complicated postmodern reality,” he writes. He points to Muscadet and Beaujolais as two of the most exciting and representative regions of this movement – both having entirely reinvented themselves within a generation. Producers here, he tells me, are “doing the work and focusing on terroir and technique and farming”, while Champagne “has completely transformed its vision of what its wine should be”.  Change is most importantly, however, “an inclusive force” – and looking at who did (and didn’t) make it into The Producers, Bonné’s definitive gazetteer of the nation’s movers and shakers, shines a light on this. It’s not a list of the vignerons he loves, it’s a pain-staking selection of those he deems significant and meaningful in the context of the movement – encompassing both more traditional names and those on the fringes. Take the Bordeaux chapter; you’ll find Pétrus, Lafleur and Pontet-Canet, as well as many less conventional, smaller and often natural-leaning properties such as Clos 19 Bis or Ch. Julia – with “Benchmarks” and the more up-and-coming “Names to Know” highlighted.  It’s fascinating – and fun – to see these two, seemingly opposing strands of France’s wine scene woven together. When I queried the inclusion of these elder statesmen of French wine, he highlighted how, for him, Pontet-Canet perfectly exemplifies the change in France today, with the forward-thinking Tesseron family handing the keys to previous cellar master Jean-Michel Comme to do “radical, radical s**t”.  Bonné deliberately chooses to champion those who have revved the engine of broader revolution – and those who reflect that revolution’s values. When it comes to Domaine de la Romanée-Conti, for example, he describes how they “upheld the moral pillars of Burgundy and winemaking” and “use their power for good”; whereas one top Pauillac estate he vehemently tells me is “perpetuating the worst practices of the Bordeaux trade”. For him, “wine is a consumable” and, as 21st-century consumers, “people have a right to explore the values of producers”.   While Bonné certainly likes natural wine – and many of the movement’s figureheads feature in the book, he is far from an evangelist. When he first started thinking about the book, natural wine was different; “It hadn’t quite catalysed into this very specific cultural beast,” he says, a cultural beast born in Hackney, Bushwick or Paris’s 11th. He talks about the movement’s “sense of tragic fashion” and how, with its clique-y nature, it has “baked in its own expiration date”. There were, he tells me, producers that didn’t make the cut – those who act as a “cautionary tale” for natural wine. “There are wines that can be delicate to being transported. And then there are wines that are just f***ed up at the source,” he says frankly.   His outlook is broadly positive for France, the nation’s ongoing revolution and its vignerons, but the book also acts as a call to arms of sorts, for: “The enforcers of the old ways will be forced to adapt, or they will perish,” he writes.  It’s not a perfect book. With a work of this size (over 860 pages and 600,000 words), it is almost inevitably slightly out of date by the time it is printed – especially with the pace of change today. Lafleur’s entry, for example, talks of Acte but not Les Perrières. I’d also have loved to have captions for each of Susannah Ireland’s images, knowing where – and of whom – they were taken. But these are quibbles.   I can’t pretend to be unbiased. Bonné is one of my favourite wine writers. There’s a lightness to his phrasing, with dry humour and a palate that I tend to identify with – although I’d argue he’s become a little more funk-friendly over the years. His writing is intelligent without being arduous. Perhaps it’s because, like Andrew Jefford, he was and is a journalist first. What really fills his writing is a sense of joy, of almost gluttony – it’s still filled with the excitement that so many wine writers seem to lose, as they tire of bottle after bottle of exceptional wine. He’s still easily absorbed by the stories that make each one different. For me, he doesn’t fit neatly into the critic box, even though it’s a term he uses to describe himself repeatedly in our conversation. “The notion of a critic has devolved to a place where you are simply handing out numbers,” he explains, but to him his work is about “criticism at a deeper level”. It’s about “being able to dive into the culture and come away with the insights and interpretation, and explain why certain wines really do matter”.  And it is this that makes The New French Wine stand apart. It isn’t just a wine book; wine is the lens through which Bonné observes a broader cultural shift. Whether you agree with everything he says or not, it’s a joy to read, hold and look at. It’s a book that will prompt conversation, prompt you to uncork bottles, prompt you to consider quite how complicated – and endlessly fascinating – France’s wine scene is. And is there anything more French than that?  The New French Wine: Redefining the World’s Greatest Wine Culture (Ten Speed Press) is out now.  Read more Editorial 

Ten years after The New California Wine was published, Jon Bonné has published a new book – an epic tale of France’s revolution. Sophie Thorpe caught up with the author to talk about his ambitious project to capture The New French Wine

We sit down with Jon Bonne, the wine writer and author of The New French Wine, to find out more about his second book

Writer Jon Bonne on The New French Wine

Facing up to The New French Wine: Jon Bonné

Andrea Formilli Fendi

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