April 2002
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April showers April in the Northern hemisphere is Spring, a time of expectation and hope with days lengthening and warming. In the South it is a strange month. The rain comes turning dust to mud and bare earth to green sward. But there is a feeling of resignation at the coming winter and plants are going to sleep, not waking. Cold fronts moved in off the coast as the prevailing wind turned from South East to North West. You could see them forming in the distance and soon they arrived with horizontal rain and low cloud. The mountain peaks behind the farm were now often shrouded. We were used to the constant warm breeze from the direction of Worcester bending the windbreaks. Now it had gone completely and on a clear day the young trees stood erect and untroubled in the absolute stillness. It wasn't until the 18th of the month that we picked the cabernet. We were the proud owners of 800kg of grapes from the couple of hectares that we had planted in July 2000. Manie drove them to Uitvlug and cooled them to zero in the cooling room and de-stemmed and crushed them into two 500 litre wooden vats. The shiraz picked last month was doing great. We bought three 220 litre barrels and the plan was to leave them where they were until August when the cellar would be finished, bring them home and keep them in the cellar for 12 months until bottling. Christmas 2003 was the target date for tasting the first bottle of our own wine. Possibly the most expensive 900 bottles of wine ever produced and we would never be able to sell them. Strange things were going on in the wider wine world. Harpers announced that the global wine surplus had now reached 50 million hectolitres, and that global wine consumption was due to rise only by 10.8 hectolitres before 2010. And that did not include all the recent plantings in Australia, Chile, California and China which are due to come on stream in the next 3 to 5 years. Pity anyone going into the wine business now. On the other hand in Pomerol vineyards were trading at GBP 3m per hectare. AXA the giant French insurance company had just sold Chateau Petit Village (11ha) to the owner of Chateau Pavie for GBP 33m. Now that shows confidence in the business of making wine. To pay that back over 10 years assuming 5 tons yield per hectare he will have to sell each bottle for 60 quid! Back to reality and rain. Our cellar construction was being washed away. There was a sea of mud around the site and some miserable looking builders dripping around the place. The interior was starting to look pretty good though. The malolactic cellar was taking shape. Because of the extra height afforded by the 1.2m step down this was now of cavernous dimensions, dark and cool, surrounded by earth on two sides. The arches in the maturation cellar were taking shape. It was fortunate that the builders were not in a hurry as the painstaking work of building the brick pillars to support the arches was taxing them. With the extra height they looked even more elegant than we had imagined and were skillfully constructed. A break in the rain allowed the guys to proceed with the walls and on the 19th of April the roof was on!. By the end of the month the mezzanine floor was in place.
To take advantage of the rain and the fact that some things grow here in the autumn Manie was preparing the 16 hectares of vines for a cover crop. This wasn't as easy a task as it may be thought and in fact turned out to be quite a test for our equipment. The areas between the rows had never been worked and in places were very uneven and rough. They had been baked hard by several months of sun and were only just softening up with the recent rain. Once they were sodden working the ground would create a mire and the equipment would get stuck so the process needed good timing. Not only that but there was a thick layer of weed that needed to be dealt with before the earth could be prepared. The second hand vineyard tractors that we had acquired were protesting that they were much too refined and venerable to do anything as menial as pull a grop or a rotorvator. One of them soon gave up the ghost and in a fit of pique decided to disable its 3 point and seize up the PTO. The other less sensitive one had to carry on and by the end of the month Manie had sown 11 hectares of cover crop. He chose a multi variety oat and vetch mix to ensure diversity. The soil was much improved over the last 12 months. It was darker and richer, especially in the upper layers and held organic material and worms. In short it was as alive as nature intended and was imparting its unique character to the vines through their roots in the deeper soil below. What that character would taste like in the glass was the mystery we are only likely to discover the answer to in the years to come. Talking of mystery, as John M discovered on a trip to Alsace, the French, having invented the concept of terroir are now trying to prove it exists, scientifically. It seems a strange thing to do because the word encapsulates everything mysterious about the production of wine and is a major clarion call from French producers supposedly setting them above the rest of the rather mediocre wine producers around the globe. To demystify it may be thought counter-productive, but then again the French do things differently. Apparently the Colmar branch of the Institut National de la Recherche Agronomique (INRA) is under a lot of commercial pressure from the French wine industry to prove the existence of terroir, due to the fact that the industry is so tied up in the ethos. Due to the complexity of the term this is not an easy task, and in the end of the day any definition will be claimed and counterclaimed. Basically they are trying to find out what makes a wine taste good and then try to discover what combination of climate, soil, clonal selection, and natural intervention made it so. To start with one has to define "good". INRA has decided, quite fairly, that it is the full expression of varietal qualities. So if you buy an Alsace Riesling you expect a certain taste and a good bottle would be one that fulfills your expectations in abundance. Good wine is also defined as having complex organoleptic qualities, basically it tastes/smells interesting. If you take a good wine and subject it to volatile aroma compound analysis by gas chromatography and mass spectrometry you find a high level of terponols and phenols. Blind tasting of such wines bear this out with wines described as being complex having high levels of these compounds. What INRA are trying to do is pinpoint what about the environment of certain vineyards leads them to produce wines with higher levels of these compounds. Fortunately for most producers not many people walk into a tasting room with a mass spectrometer so this whole navel gazing exercise is unlikely to go beyond the esoteric, but on the other hand not much time will be spent by researchers in Australia for example trying to prove that terroir is not a factor in good wine production. If nothing else this research will help to cement the concept in the minds of those who are truly interested in good wine. For interest's sake one piece of research that John stumbled on during his visit was being done on one of the great vineyards of France, the Brand at Turckheim. They are growing Gewurztraminer on three controlled sites within the vineyard. The vines are being grown identically, with the only difference between the sites being the terroir of that site. The sites are described as such Brand 1. Brown soil on a gravelly colluvial of arene granite, lower southerly aspect, 16% slope. Brand 2. Gravelly eroded surface (0.5m), with fine granite, high southerly aspect, 32% slope. Brand 3. Same soil as Brand 2 with northerly aspect and 16% slope. Each site was picked and made into a batch of wine which was subjected to the analysis above, including blind tasting. There was, not surprisingly, high variance in terpenols and phenols, with the higher levels coming from wine produced from grapes on the high, steep, south facing site. Well there you go! The main research done at INRA is into improving the stock of vine material and they have "new" material that has been in development for near on 40 years. They invest huge amounts of money into this at the three wine research centres in Colmar, Bordeaux and Montpelier and they are really serious about developing clones with more desirable traits such as balance, disease resistance etc. Their aim is keeping French wine at the top of the quality tree. There is however a great deal of hope, if nothing else, being invested in South Africa and this is not going un-noticed in the foreign wine press. Tim Atkin the editor of Harper's wrote an interesting piece this month in the Sunday Observer which is a national broadsheet in the UK. The main thrust of what he said was that in his opinion over the last five years where red wine is concerned there has been a greater leap in quality in SA than in any other New World country. He singled out Neil Ellis, Marc Kent, Gyles Webb, Jeff Grier, Adi Badenhorst, Gay and Kathy Jordan and David Trafford as leading the charge. The wines he picked out are Charles Back's Spice Route 1999 Pinotage, Graham Beck's 2000 Shiraz, Plaisir de Merle 1998 Reserve Cabernet, Vergelegen 1998 Flagship Merlot and De Toren 1999 Fusion V. Of the latter he said "close your eyes and you could be drinking a top Bordeaux - but at half the price". Now that is the sort of press SA needs! He says that until recently three things have held back South African wine. Growing white varieties in areas where reds would have been more suitable, the low quality of red wine clones many of them virus infected, and traditionalism among older winemakers ("cellar palate" he calls it). All this has been well known within SA, but it is interesting that outside observers are commenting now. Anyway, next month we return to the task of building an Estate that will be added to the list of SA super stars and get more good press for the SA wine industry. We, as ever, live in hope! Copyright © 2000 Tulbagh Solutions. All rights reserved.
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