André Simon Awards shortlist: Inside Burgundy The Second Edition by Jasper Morris MW

Jasper Morris MW explores the idea that a wine is not just a product of a vintage or terroir – but the sum of those countless decisions which define a producer’s style in this extract of Inside Burgundy, which has been shortlisted for the André Simon Award: drinks category.

An extract is included below for your pleasure:

It is a temptation for critics and consumers alike to impute the quality or style of  a producer’s wines to one or another of various key decisions during the growing,  or more often winemaking, process. I very much doubt if this is really the case, though of course certain choices such as including stems or otherwise do have a major part to play.

But more importantly, the style of a producer’s wines depends on the myriad miniature decisions which he or she is making throughout the day and all year round. These choices are a combination of temperament and technique, and will inform his or her wines throughout.

I suspect that it is also for this reason that domaine wines almost always seem to be superior to négociant cuvées in the cellars of those who make both. Even if the purchased grapes have come from an impeccable source, they will not have been grown in the image of the man making the wine, whereas those from his own vineyards will have been.

Much depends also on the balance between an intuitive understanding of what needs to be done and a reliance on prescribed techniques, in the way that some cooks use their cookbooks for instruction, others just for inspiration.

In Burgundy the majority of producers will have inherited their positions and a house style will already be in place – though of course the incoming generation or technical director may wish to tinker with it, or possibly even introduce dramatic changes. But it may not be the right idea to search too deliberately for a style. It is as well to be aware of technical developments and to adapt techniques where desirable, but producers should beware of chasing trends. For one thing you will have to change your winemaking when the trends move on. For another, your wine will never be as exciting to drink as it would have been if you make wine from the heart.

 

Faut-il suivre le millésime?

 

This is an age-old question – should the vigneron follow the style of the vintage, or do what is needed to countermand its failings or excesses?

 

My immediate reaction to this conundrum – perhaps an emotional rather than intellectual one – when I first heard it discussed in the early 1980s, was that it would be much better to follow the vintage. If the vintage is sunny and the grapes ripe but low in acidity, so be it. If the season is cooler and the wines a little on the lean side, then we just accept that they will be stylistically different from another year. 

 

I suspect that the great majority of producers, if posed the question in its simplest form, would also say that you should follow the vintage. But I do not think that this is what actually happens, as producers tend to try to compensate for the shortfall of the particular year. If there are significant tannins already present, most vignerons will try to extract less. Certainly, if the aim is to provide a consistent product year-in, year-out, there will be more need to resort to techniques and technology.

 

Techniques and technology

 

Every so often a new technique is discovered – or often rediscovered after researching 19th-century texts. Next, a vigneron in the limelight or an œnological guru promotes the use of said technique. Many disciples follow and critics praise the results. So far so good; but the following crowd, reasoning that if occasional use of this technique is good, decides that greater use of it must be better.Eventually the pendulum swings back the other way as people begin to see the drawbacks of the technique, now restored to where it should have been all along: a useful tool in the vigneron’s locker to be brought out when circumstances indicate that it would be of use to that particular wine in a given vintage.Obvious cases in point are the cold soak (maceration à froid) technique for red wines and lees stirring (bâtonnage) for whites. More recently the search for a reductive minerality in white, and the mantra in red of doing ‘nothing more than an infusion’ come to mind. Some would add whole-bunch vinification to the list.

 

Il faut avoir le courage de ne rien faire

 

Others prefer to eschew intervention as much as they possibly can. ‘You should have the courage to do nothing’ was the great dictum of René Lafon (1927-2019), still frequently quoted on the Côte.

 

Of course, we have to intervene somewhere. Even the most ‘natural’ winemakers in the movement for ‘natural wine’, eschewing the use of sulphur at any stage, must intervene to the extent of picking the grapes and pressing or crushing them. René Lafon was not advocating leaving the wine untouched in barrel without topping up, for example. And he was prepared to intervene in case of crisis, such as encouraging his 1963 whites to ferment by adding the lees of subsequent vintages, or extracting some colour in rot-infused 1975 reds through heating.

 

However, exceptional circumstances aside, he liked to leave the wine to do its own thing without constant nannying, chivvying or tweaking. It does take courage. But, to return to an earlier metaphor, the cook who keeps pulling a dish out of the oven to see if it is done will not achieve the perfect roast of the one who relies on experience.

 

The infinite capacity for taking pains

 

There is a tendency to think that there are some key secrets to winemaking. You must filter or not filter, use 100 per cent new barrels or none at all, rack by the light of the moon or avoid racking altogether…. It is clearly not as simple as that, and I have never been in sympathy with those importers who believe that they know better than the vignerons how to produce great wine, prescribing from afar what techniques they want their suppliers to use. (Surely the role of the importer is to identify suppliers who know what they are doing? And to ship wines made in different styles to appeal to the different palates of their various customers?) If you were to shadow a talented winemaker for a season or even a week or perhaps just a day, it would soon become apparent that he or she is taking tiny decisions at every moment. If these are conscientiously made, with intelligence and flair to boot, the overall quality of the final wine is likely to be good. But more importantly, it will have been imprinted with the style of the person making all those mini-decisions.

 

Who a man is and where he comes from

 

Is there something in the air (or the water) in Gevrey-Chambertin that makes it difficult for a Gibriaçois (as inhabitants of Gevrey- Chambertin are known) vigneron to produce a fine, gentle, graceful Chambolle- Musigny? Certainly in a line-up of Chambolles, those made in Gevrey (Thierry Mortet’s excepted) tend to stick out for their deeper colours and more assertive tannins, even though when the wine is tasted in the grower’s own cellar, the Chambolle may seem more elegant and less structured than the Gevrey- Chambertin.

This may be because different cultures and traditions grow up in the various villages. Or it may be to do with another form of culture: that of yeast cells. We speak of the natural yeasts coming into the winery on the skins of the grapes, but it is not entirely clear whether the work is really done by these yeasts, or by populations which have developed over time in the winery itself. If the latter, then– to follow our example – the Chambolle grapes being vinified in Gevrey- Chambertin may be fermenting away with Gevrey yeasts.

Extract from Inside Burgundy The Second Edition published by Berry Bros. & Rudd Press Copyright © Jasper Morris 2021. Shortlisted for the André Simon Food and Drink Book Awards 2021. http://www.andresimon.co.uk/ 

Rose Murray Brown MW selected the shortlisted entries for the drinks category, while Nigerian-born writer and artist Yemisi Aribisala selected the food category titles.