October 2002
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Is a garage a place you put your voiture? Not always...seemingly it is also a place where you make a few bottles of outrageously priced cult wine. Along with hot tech stocks and CEO's salaries "garage" wines are up there with the spirit of the late 1990's. Fashionable, iconoclastic and generally "nouveau" the French "garagistes" cocked a snoop at the established chateaux and were happy to be promoted as the next new thing with demand for their offerings far outstripping supply. The signs are however that, like everything else about that heady era, things are coming back to earth with a bit of a bump. The basis upon which these garagistes started from was that great wine is created from the quality of the grapes and the vines, not the ancient classification of the chateaux and their tried and tested soils. This of course is anathema to the established names who believe that the quality of their terroir is undisputable. To add insult the wine made from the un-classified plots of these upstarts was fetching far higher prices than the old beloved names. The leader and possibly the founder of the movement is Jean-Luc Thunevin who started up in 1989 by buying a 0.6ha plot. He now has just over 20ha scattered in small unclassified plots round Saint-Emilion .. at least one is an old vegetable patch! Four years later he was producing small quantities of super-concentrated, 100% new oak matured wines from very low yield plots under the Chateau de Valandraud label specifically to appeal to our old friend Bob Parker. These were described by Michel Bettane as "vins de garage" because of their lowly origins and so the name was born. There is actually no secret to producing such concentrated wine. Just massive investment and certain cellar techniques. Severe pruning, hand picking on a tiny plot at optimum ripeness, meticulous triage, slow fermentation, long skin contact, micro-oxidation and reverse osmosis followed by maturation in 100% new French oak, sometimes even 200% (when the wine is racked into new barrels half way through maturation). These wines have been described as a triumph of style over substance, taking no account of history or terroir. The main concern put forward by the less vitriolic haters of garage wines is that they do not reflect the area from which they come. A Screaming Eagle (California), a Dominio de Pingus (Spain) and a Valandraud have more in common with each other than other wines in their region (including their unreal prices). But will they stand the test of time when the bubble bursts? Maybe if they tone down the intervention and create something that can be associated with the region they will genuinely challenge the old stalwarts over the long term. This has successfully been done by the so called Super Tuscans of Tignanello and Sassicaia which started out as revolutionary and have matured into something approaching mainstream, but still world class, wines. The same can be said of Le Pin. By the way when J-C said last month that he is doing a garage vintage this year we think he is only referring to the hands on approach and lack high tech equipment...or has he got something up his sleeve?
On the farm spring had well and truly sprung. The vines grew and grew very smoothly, some of the blocks too smoothly in fact. We are going to have to raise our trellis height by about 30-50cm next winter. This is just judging by the growth on the Syrah at the moment. We don't mind strong vigour this season, as there is only one shoot per bearing position. This makes the canopy twice as open as it will be in the future, and lateral shoot development is not the end of the world (it will actually help the young vines ripen the grapes properly). From next year when we prune to two buds, we'll want to give the vines some more vertical room to move before tipping and topping (if in fact that is necessary). Otherwise, apart from a couple of vines, the growth was nice and even. Even the top block of Cab has woken up. This block is on the most weathered soil at the top of the hill and was attacked by the buck so it is a bit behind. It will be the hardest to pick grapes of even ripeness up there this season, so we will probably have to do some bunch marking at veraison. This will be very labour intensive but it is really worth it. Generally the temptation is to harvest a block at a time as this is the most efficient as far as labour is concerned. The grapes are all taken in one sweep after testing just a few for sugar levels etc. It is also the most efficient as far as the cellar is concerned as you get a block of Cab coming in and you can deal with it before say the Syrah comes in. We are however not in the efficiency business, we are trying to make the best possible wine, so the picking regime and therefore the cellar regime must be dictated by the vines themselves. Unfortunately when the grape bunches reach veraison at different times when you do one single sweep you are harvesting bunches at very different stages of ripeness...but you cannot tell by looking at them. This naturally affects the quality of the wine. The only way to counter this is to go through the block time after time marking bunches as they reach veraison with coloured tape. Then you must harvest in the order that they reached veraison i.e. harvest one block many times over. The result is that the harvest is going to be very extended this season. Also the older vines will come on line much earlier, and the young vines a few weeks later. We had a problem with erinose mites but by the end of the month they calmed down. These are plant feeding parasites that belong to the family Eriophyoidea. This includes gall mites, rust mites and bud mites. These guys are microscopic worm like things with two sets of legs. Their common names describe the effects on the plants they inhabit, some causing blisters or galls on the leaves they inhabit thus reducing plant health and leaf efficiency. Of course they are part of the natural ecosystem inhabiting most plants, and can be beneficial in weed control. They are only considered pests when their numbers explode in an unbalanced mono culture and they cause economic damage. A judicious application of "Bordeaux" mix reduces them if they get out of hand and sulphur applied to control oidium (powdery mildew) suppresses them. Tasks in the vineyard included de-suckering. This is the process of removing "water shoots" which come out of the old wood and are useless to the vintner as they produce no grapes! This is carried out in the spring after bud break when the water shoots are about 15cm long. It is a labour intensive and tedious business as most of the shoots come out from low down the trunk. Trellising also needed to be done as the grape bearing shoots were growing rapidly. 60% of the Cab shoots had shot past the upper trellis wires by the first week of the month. The vine team were also in the 2001 Syrah block putting the arms onto the cordon. Another task was to get the long Mourvedre shoots secured to the trellising wires. The Mourvedre is very brittle in the early stages so we had to wait until it was strong enough and the danger was that the long shoots would get damaged by the wind before we could secure them. We also watered the windbreaks with a batch of compost tea to keep them up with the vines!
As ever there was a debate about equipment, not just for the cellar but for the vineyard. Michael managed to break a piece off the blue 4x4 tractor while cutting the cover crops, which made life a bit difficult. We got the job done using the little Fiat. This made us think about the pulling power of our vehicles at harvest time and what would happen if we had breakdowns. The idea would be to have enough vehicles so that we can fetch in the grapes quickly and efficiently when the harvest starts, but that can be used all year round and have a low pressure footprint. What we need is something strong enough to pull a trailer or two with the cartons of picked grapes on but is light with low ground pressure. 4WD is probably a must. We priced up a small multi purpose 4 wheel all terrain that can tow a couple of pallets of grapes and has low ground pressure. The range of prices for these things are between R30k and R120k. They start with rear wheel drive two stroke scrambler types and end with 1000cc full on four wheel drive auto gear select etc. A PTO doesn't really feature as any trailer that needs reasonable amounts of power is driven by its own wheels (fertilizer spreaders, mowers etc). A spray attachment on the vehicle would be pressurized by a 12 volt pump. A spray trailer would be powered by a separate petrol engine on the trailer itself. Our little Fiat 5566 tractor is actually the ideal four wheel drive vehicle with a low pressure footprint. The Ford four wheel drive tractor is slightly heavier than what would be desired in compaction terms. The crux is power. The Ford is more powerful and so is the first choice to get jobs done quickly and more efficiently, but the footprint is heavier. Any tractor can handle about two tonnes if the terrain is flat but as soon as there is a hill then kilowatts become critical. With the two tractors fully operational we could easily get two hectares worth of grapes to the cellar faster than 40 people could pick it. This is one of the advantages of the cellar location being right at the edge of the vineyard. For mowing we use the two meter wide mower pulled behind the Ford. For compost tea, copper and sulphur applications as well as any other foliar application where the product cost is lower than the labour cost we use the blower pulled behind either of the tractors. Where the product cost is prohibitive, for example the foliar applications, we get it done by hand. For moving stuff around we use Manie's modified bin trailers pulled behind either of the tractors. This will include the lug boxes of grapes. For more volume we really need another two plain bin trailers as each tractor can comfortably pull two trailers. In fact after seeing what it is capable of on the building site the Ford would probably handle four fully loaded trailers! For ploughing we use the Ford towing a grop. The rotorvating gets done by the Fiat. The conclusion was to look out for another good condition second hand tractor like the Fiat which can be used for all but the heaviest tasks, when the Ford will step in. That way we are covered for breakdowns and we avoid compaction as much as possible. We also had to think about upgrading the firefighting equipment with summer nearly on us. We thought our best solution would be a fire trailer or a bakkie mounted equivalent. We needed a dedicated piece of equipment that everyone was trained to use, to complement what we already have. Fortunately Manie regularly goes through the drill with Michael and Bob as well as the vine team. All the dams are connected to a point at the cellar where it takes less than five minutes to fill the spray pump under gravity. The spray pump is currently our main fire fighting resource. It is however pretty effective as towed behind a tractor it goes anywhere whereas we cannot get a fully loaded bakkie up the steep slope to the top cabernet. The windbreak irrigation goes right the way around the vines and we can get about 50m³/hour through to where it is needed. So for the ultimate system for the farm at a reasonable price we would be looking at getting a custom trailer built. To that we would bolt a 1000 litre tank and a petrol powered firefighting water pump. This could be pulled by either of the tractors or the bakkie. The cellar equipment for our harvest was as ever a source of intense debate. J-C looked around and spoke to as many people as he could and came up with what he though would be our best bet for 2003 and the future. 1. Crusher Destemmer. Marchisio G40. Has a capacity of 4 tons/hour, which will be perfect for us, even in a 160 ton harvest. The crusher unit can be separated from the destemmer so we can do triage in between the two actions. 2. Basket Press. Marchisio TR65. Has a capacity of 270L. This sounds small but the idea is that it we ferment in 400-600kg bins which is what we will be using in 2003. In the future it will be insufficient, but we will purchase another basket press at a later stage to work forward with. The idea is to keep this one after 2003, and use it when we ferment small batches in the future. 3. Impeller Pump. Mencarelli. For general use. With the gravity cellar we won't be doing much pumping so this is all we need. Variable speed and reverse. 4. Barrel Washer. Moog. 5. High Pressure Cleaner. Goes hand in hand with the barrel washer. Wall-mounted is the best option. 6. Pipes, Fittings, Etc. I have just got quotes for enough pipes and fittings for the 2003 harvest. Also some buckets, barrel filler, sight glasses, butterfly valves, etc. Other things like fermentation bins, cooling plates, forklift refurbishment, lab equipment and chemicals also need to be ordered. Looking forward to next month we will be into the crucial flowering period when our little beauties start the berry forming part of their lives. Copyright © 2000 Tulbagh Solutions. All rights reserved. |
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