New vines for old?

Perhaps you remember the story of Ali Baba and the 40 thieves?  When the magic lamp with its genie disappeared the villain went around offering “new lamps for old”, to entice the unsuspecting and attempt to retrieve the battered old treasure.  Well, the wine world has become a bit like that.  There’s a group of fashion drinkers out there who, rather than sticking with the tried and true, are always searching for something different, preferably the latest fad.  They seem oblivious to the fact that the reason why the classic wines of France and Germany have developed such a reputation is that chardonnay, pinot noir, sauvignon blanc, riesling, merlot blended with cabernet, and the like, have inherent qualities which make them capable of producing wines of high quality.  This is not something shared by many other less well known varieties, such as clairette, chasselas, refosco and so forth.  It’s not that these others can’t produce a quaffable drop given the right conditions, but the reason they are obscure is that they lack excitement, balance and finesse.

Commercial nurseries exist to sell plants and once you have planted your vineyard, you really have little further need of them, unless of course you pull up your old vines and exchange them for something new.  Not surprisingly nurseries tend to be quite keen on this idea and have imported a number of new varieties into the country in the hope that someone will give them a whirl.  Now, there is nothing wrong with experimentation.  We would stagnate if we didn’t have it but swapping new vines for old is certainly not the way to go about it.

Generally speaking, wine produced from old vines is regarded as being better than that from younger ones.  The French have a special term, vieilles vignes (old vines), and wine labelled as such commands a premium.  How old is “old”?  It lacks clear definition but it is certainly over 20 years, frequently over 30 and sometimes over 100.  Old vines are thought to produce better wine because they put all of their goodness into fruit and less into trying to grow big and sturdy, which is what young vines do.  Also the older vines have deeper rooting systems and are better able to tap underground reserves, including mineral stores. 

Our oldest vines have seen between 20-30 summers and are thus creeping into the vieilles vignes category.  They certainly provide us with our best fruit and, while we have planted younger ones, we don’t want to swap them.  We hope that over the coming years the genie will continue to come out of them and work his magic.

The art of Pegasus

We have been lucky to have an on-going relationship with 2 art galleries, namely Jonathan Smart and Fisher Galleries, who take turns at supplying a stunning range of contemporary art to grace the walls of our restaurant and tasting room.  Each display has involved a range of artists, so we have thus had great diversity.  The next 3 months, however, we have decided to concentrate on a single painter so you can see the depth and breadth of her work.  We think Mel Brew has a unique and exceptional style and feel sure you will agree.  Come to see her display.

We are plucking unsure

In cool climate vineyard regions, of which Waipara is one, it has become common practise to remove leaves from around the bunches of grapes and expose the berries to sunlight to help them ripen.  In hot viticultural regions, like much of Australia, the leaves provide valuable shade and stop the berries becoming sun burnt and damaged.  Leaf plucking is mainly carried out on red varieties and increases colour, as well as getting rid of green flavours and protecting against rot – well that’s the theory.  It is thought to be particularly important in pinot noir, which naturally has a lighter colour than most other red grapes.  There has, however, been relatively little scientific work done on leaf plucking.

In order to know how to get the best from our grapes we have taken on a post-graduate student from Lincoln University, Belinda Kemp, to study this for her PhD.  Belinda did a viticulture and winemaking degree at Plumpton College in the UK and has come to New Zealand specially to do this project.  She will be looking at what effect the timing of leaf plucking has on pinot noir wine.  We have separate blocks of grapes which have been leaf plucked 10 days after flowering, 1 month after flowering and at veraison (when the first signs of colour occur).  She will compare these with the effect of not plucking at all.  The wines will be made in an identical way and the differences in their chemical makeup will be thoroughly analysed as well as the wines being critically evaluated by tasting panels.  She will do this for both the 2008 and 2009 harvests.  All this is about trying to make the best wine we can.  Otherwise we will just keep plucking in the dark.

Greenies at heart

Once the Waipara valley was forested with native trees, including totara, matai, lacebark, kowhai and lancewood.  This was dramatically transformed, first by Maori and then by Europeans, with loss of forest, development of farms and subsequently the planting of vineyards.  Recently Waipara Winegrowers and others in our community have teamed up with Lincoln University to undertake The Greening of Waipara.  This is a project to reintroduce lost native flora into our environment, especially into and around our vineyards and wineries.  Pegasus Bay is a proud supporter of this project and our plantings of native flora should encourage an increase in native fauna, including lizards and predatory insects which will diversify our environment and help reduce the number of harmful insect pests.  It is all about living in harmony with our environment.  This is central to the aims and objects of Sustainable Winegrowing NZ, of which our vineyard is a certified participant. 

From the Prescription pad...

Having been in the medical game I am very familiar with the nature versus nurture debate.  How much can be attributed to our genes, and how much to our nurturing or upbringing and the various life experiences we are subjected to?  It applies not only to illnesses, but to every facet of our personality and behaviour.  It’s an on-going debate that is of interest to medicos, psychologists, sociologists, politicians and, indeed, all of us.  It is at the heart of views about ability, class, race and the like.  The resolution of the conundrum is really quite simple.  If we cloned genetically identical individuals and subjected them to different nurturing conditions we could resolve the problem once and for all, or would we?

In winemaking we have had the possibility to do just this.  Vines are generally propagated by cuttings and each one is genetically identical to its parent.  Thus, young riesling plants should be able to produce the same fruit as the mother vine and hence be capable of making the same wine.  Any difference should result from the way in which the vines and grapes have been nurtured.  In spite of this simple fact there is a major division of opinion about which is the most important and what elements in any wine are due to nature or nurture.

Basically, the Europeans think that nurture, or what the French call terroir, is all important and they usually label their wine to reflect this.  There is no equivalent English word for terroir, which also escapes precise definition, but it generally means the soil, site and climate of a viticultural region and even a single vineyard, or part of a vineyard.  Some people also include the customs of the people who grow the grapes and make the wine.  According to this philosophy every little patch of dirt makes its own distinctive type of wine and these are reflected on the typical European label, which precisely identifies where it comes from and not from what the wine is made. Thus, the most expensive of white Burgundy wine will be simply labelled with the vineyard name Montrachet, along with the maker’s particulars, without so much as a single whisper of chardonnay.  It would be quite illegal to include any wine made from a vineyard just across the fence, even if it was to all intents and purposes identical and the winemaker owned them both. It means that you have to know a lot about regions and individual vineyards to be sure of what you are actually drinking.  In addition, it has resulted in a strict hierarchy of prestige, and hence price structure, of wines based on the patch of dirt in which they have been grown.  This has remained largely unchanged for generations and it is hard to break out of this class system of wines.

The New World has emphasised nature, in other words the type of vine, and most wines have been labelled by variety.  Winemakers have considered it is of first importance to be able to taste the pure essence of the variety and that peculiarities of the vineyard location and winemaking should not obscure this.  Thus, the fact that a sauvignon blanc comes from Timbuktu should not obscure the fact that it tastes like a “savy”.

So important is the terroir culture in Europe that France has its own terrroiristes.  Yes, masked winemakers have attacked importers’ businesses, smashed bottles, opened tanks and left lorries burning on the roadside to stop inferior, filthy foreign wine getting into their precious country.  Generally these terroiristes own particular terroir tends to be well down in the pecking order and they feel the economic pressures more than those at the top.  The same attitude, however, pervades throughout the ranks.  I well remember Jancis Robinson, the well known English wine-writer and television personality, giving a producer of top white Burgundy a glass of quite decent Australian chardonnay to taste.

He felt forced to go outside and expectorate it in case it should contaminate his winery!  It seems to me that the real reason behind such behaviour is contained in the reported complaint of one French vigneron that “each bottle of New World wine sold in Europe, is a bomb aimed at the heart of our rich European culture” (and purses - my words not his). 

Now, into the heart of all this comes another bombshell.  You might remember a year or so back when the human genome was unravelled and the precise genetic structure that underlies us all was published.  It was found that the difference between all races accounted for considerably less than 1% of our total gene structure.  Well, the precise genetic sequence for the first grape variety has just been published and it so happens it is one very close to my heart, and hopefully yours, pinot noir.  Although this is now propagated by cuttings, the very first pinot noir plant in the world, like all grape varieties, resulted from a seed that came from one vine’s pollen fertilising another vine’s ovum (egg).  It turns out that the 2 sets of chromosomes in pinot noir, reflecting genetic material from the pollen and the ovum, have an amazing 11.2% degree of difference, which is considerably more than exists between you and a chimpanzee. 

Knowing a variety’s genetic structure immediately opens the possibility that it could be modified to produce something better – a grape with more flavour and taste, a vine which is resistant to disease and does not need spraying, plants that are not affected by frost or drought and the like.  Quelle horreur! I can hear you say, “We mustn’t tamper with nature”.  Well, it turns out that the chemical substances produced by such new genes rarely turn up in the grape flesh and they are basically confined to the grape plant itself.  Thus, wine made from any genetically modified vine should not contain them.  Grape vines do not cross pollinate with other plants and, as all grapevines are propagated by cuttings, there is no risk of these genes “escaping” into the environment.  In addition most, if not all of the genes could be obtained from other grape vines.  The same result could theoretically be obtained by cross pollinating one vine with another and growing the seeds into plants.  The only snag is that might have to grow millions or billions of plants to get by chance the exact combination of genes you are seeking.

You could also use this gene technology to identify a genetically favoured plant developed by cross pollination, rather than growing it to maturity and making wine over a number of vintages, which is what happens at present.  It might thus help shorten the laborious and expensive task of breeding new other varieties, something which is currently being done in a small number of centres in the world.

People tend to have strong views on genetic manipulation, and often take up strong positions on opposite sides of a very electrified fence.  No matter what you or I think about the topic there are people out there, including the French, who are at this moment genetically altering grape vines and they are changing some to suit certain terroirs.  Perhaps these should be regarded as the terroiristes of the future!

Cheers, Ivan Donaldson.

Ps.  All of our wines and vines are guaranteed free of genetic manipulation!