An industry workshop drilling down on red wines, with a focus on paths to delicacy. Industry folks can register for the next workshop, at 3:30pm on Tuesday, April 15.
Some of the growers we tasted are on their own, working against the grain of their regions’ norms and in ways very different from their neighbors. Some are classically-minded, in small, well-established places with a reputation for quality. Some are part of nexuses of natural winegrowing that define their regions’ contemporary energy. All are wines that I might put on a list, drink for fun, or recommend to somebody as worth caring about.
Tasting natural wine blind means tasting a wider spectrum of approaches and possibility in terms of practice and flavor. (For example: a WSET question like “new oak, used oak or stainless?” becomes, “wood vessels like oak, acacia, chestnut, or rauli? clay, like qvevri, tinajas, dolia, or amphora? concrete eggs? tanks made out of steel, fiberglass, glass, or food-safe plastic?” A binary choice like “White or red?” becomes a rainbow of potential color. )
More than “whole cluster” or “destemmed,” delicacy or extraction came to us through these wines via small touches: how many punchdowns, and how hard? What were pumpovers like? What does semi-carbonic mean, and what is your press like, and in what ways are you leaving grapes alone or pushing them to be more? (Read Pascaline talking about carbonic and its role in the history of Beaujolais here.)
Blind tasting them was less about a correct guess, and more about learning to key in to winemaking choices and climate, and thinking through who might make a wine like this, and where.
After blinding (A) and (D) together side by side, each small group worked through three of the wines below on their own, before revealing to the room. We tasted through everything together at the end.
The tasting sheets we used are over at the Patreon. Below, here’s a little more about what we tasted, who made them, and where they came from:
A. NICHOLAS CARMARANS, “Maximus” 2023 (en magnum)
Nicholas Carmarans is virtually alone in Aveyron, on the forested granite plateau of the Massif Centrale, a former natural wine bar guy who has been doing the isolated vigneron thing since 2007 or so in the same place his great-grandfather used to make wine.
The bottling is a great example of the hair-pulling difficulty of nailing down exactly what’s happening with extraction when you aren’t talking to the guy and getting into the weeds: in some vintages, importer tech sheets are saying “one week” or “sixteen days” of “carbonic maceration in whole bunches with the free run juice drained off”, in others they’re saying “all destemmed, infusion method, 7-14 days with gentle pressing.” Nicholas probably varies his approach a bit depending!
The variety here is fer servadou aka braucol, on granite, massale selection of old vines from parcels scattered around a grape conservatory in Marcillac that Nicholas buys from a cousin. Fer always has a peppery-savory-vegetal character to me, a bit in the cabernet franc extended family but more dark and spinach and black pepper. It can definitely give tannin and color if you let it; Nicholas, instead, is taking a lighter approach. That said, many of you remarked on its comparative intensity.
Here’s the info I gave you:
EXTRACTION whole clusters with just a week before pressing, semi-carbonic
VARIETY dark-skinned, capable of tannin and color, with a distinctive, savory-herbal streak
CLIMATE/SOIL temperate, with a complicated mix of oceanic influences and inland continental stuff, frost and mildew are issues, mostly granite
REGION remote, rural, our producer is an isolated figure working to restore old vines where wine culture has almost died out and local regional cultivars are rarities, soils mostly metamorphic granite
B. ENVÍNATE, “MISTURADO” 2022
We’re in Ribeira Sacra, thousand year-old slate terraces in the twisting steep-sloped river valley that curls away from the Galician coast — green, Atlantic, northwestern Spain, relatively temperate and rainy, with runes carved in standing stones and a local language more closely related to Portuguese and empanadas the size of dinner plates stuffed with squid and kids with sandy blond hair and blue eyes.
It’s a place dedicated in the main to one red variety — mencía — but historically field-planted mixes of reds and whites were common, and Misturado de Abeleda is a tribute to that ancestral style: a single-plot field blend, about 80 years old, of red varieties like mencía, brancellao, caíño tinto, and mouratón, and whites like godello, doña blanca, and palomino. 2022 was a lower-yielding, drought vintage in this verdant place, and the wine’s darker, sappier energy reflects this.
The info I gave you:
EXTRACTION whole clusters, food-trod, 30 days on the skins
VARIETY 80 year-old field blend (65/35 red and white)
CLIMATE/SOIL normally rainy, green, mild; this was a low yielding drought vintage in the region, with significant summer mildew pressure, schist and quartz and slate
REGION tiny, ancient history of winegrowing but has only risen to international prominence in the last 15-20 years, soils metamorphic slate / schist / quartz
C) SMITH-CHAPEL, “Chiroubles” 2022
Michelle Smith was the wine director at Brooklyn Fare before falling in love with David Chapel, the cellarmaster at Marcel Lapierre, one of Beaujolais’ pathbreaking natural domaines. They got married in 2016 and started farming 3 hectares in Juliénas, Chiroubles, and Fleurie the following year.
Chiroubles is a tiny cru at a higher elevation than the rest cru Beaujolais, an amphitheater facing south and east with steep slopes, some on tiny terraces like Côte Rôtie, with more of a potential for freshness in a place where climate change affected hot vintages are routinely making for riper, boozier wines than historically. The gamay in this bottling comes from two 1-hectare parcels of old vines. David and Michelle work the soils with a cable plough, garden tools, and a horse.
EXTRACTION semi-carbonic whole clusters in fiberglass with gentle pumpovers (no punchdowns), 3 weeks before pressing
VARIETY thin skinned, vigorous, medium acidity, widely planted.
CLIMATE/SOIL historically cool continental, this vintage high-yielding, relatively dry, warmer than (historically) average, quartz and granite
REGION a region that was hit hard by chemical farming / commercial production post WWII and saw a nexus of natural winegrowers working against the grain emerge in the 70s/80s
D) COMANDO G, “La Bruja” 2023
José Pastor calls the Gredos a “holy collision between the Mediterranean and the Alpine.” Certainly it’s an under-appreciated region, and notable for what I think of as a wholly unique expression of grenache (in the same way that the Steiermark in southern Austria will change the way you think about sauvignon blanc). I wrote a bunch about this here.
The main inspiration for Comando G’s renditions of low-yielding, old-vine grenache on sandy granite has always been the crazily transparent infusions of Château Rayas. Rayas ferments partly-crushed whole bunches, and does very soft pumpovers once a day to limit extraction (but again, this is a big generalization and it’s the tiny decisions that matter). We can guess Comando G’s approaach is similar — it certainly tastes like it.
EXTRACTION whole clusters, two months’ gentle maceration
VARIETY gives little color, sun loving, high potential alcohol
CLIMATE/SOIL mountainous, hot and dry, a cooler fall this vintage, granite and sand
REGION this producer was among the first to revitalize this place, whose old, steep vineyards had been virtually abandoned
E) MAGOUTES, “Xinomavro”
Xinomavro is a grape whose name means “black, sour”. If it’s often compared to nebbiolo, its expression here in Siatista might be most comparable to the way that that variety shows somewhere like Carema in Alto Piemonte: limestone, high elevation, a freshness and transparency that will flip your understanding of what it’s capable of on its head. I tasted a bottling from Magoutes recently while covering a shift at Chambers and had exactly this experience — I wanted to share it.
That said, all of the information online about the approach Dimitrios Diamantis and George Papageorgiou are taking focuses on the vines, the history of the region, etc. It seems like vinification involves long whole cluster fermentation in larger oak cask with Barolo-like macerations, but I truly have nothing to go on other than feel here.
Info I gave you:
EXTRACTION ???? I cannot find specific winemaking details
VARIETY a late-ripening, high acid, famously tannic grape variety
CLIMATE/SOIL high, inland, relatively cool climate in a generally warm place, up to 3,000 ft elevation, limestone
REGION one of the few wineries in a small region that had fallen into almost total neglect by the 70s
F) FATALONE, “Teres” 2023
An iconic winery in Puglia, the children of farmers who had always grown grapes and sold to the co-op, and who became the first people in their families to bottle their own wine. More than an early grower-producer in the region. they’re also noteworthy for a natural approach in both the vineyard and the cellar, which isn’t exactly regionally common.
“Teres” is an exceptionally refreshing take on primitivo in Puglia, which can be a bruiser — they use the “second fruit”, the little later-ripening wings in the big bunches the plant produces, destem it, and take just the juice with no pressing. That peach-ring finish — it really does feel like a rich, oily Mediterranean white wine if you close your eyes.
Info I gave you:
EXTRACTION destemmed berries, 36 hours of maceration, only free run juice
VARIETY thick-skinned, deeply pigmented, uneven ripening, vigorous, drought resistant
CLIMATE/SOIL hot and dry, with cool nights, mostly limestone
REGION benchmark producer (one of the first to estate bottle) in an historically poor region where most farmers sold to the co-ops
G) TUE-BOUEF, “Gravottes”
Cheverny, in the limestone east of the Loire just before the landscape gets swampy and forested south of Orleans (full of fishing ponds and hunting forests and chateaux) is the missing link between the Loire Valley and Burgundy. Some local specialties like menu pineau and romorantin join Burgundian varieties like gamay and pinot noir, chardonnay and sauvignon blanc. The soils are part of the same shallow bowl of the Paris Basin. The climate is cold continental, with the last gasps of the warm Gulf Stream having petered out around Tours.
Here, in the triangle between the Loire and the Cher, a subset of the long Loire’s natural wine movement sprang into life: this is the territory of Clos Roche Blanche, of Hervé Villemade, of Pierre-Olivier Bonhomme. And this Clos du Tue-Bouef? That’s fellow OG Thierry Puzelat: specifically, a parcel that’s at the core of the old, well-recorded domaine his family has farmed for generations. (When the label is gold with weird little medieval drawings on it it’s from the old estate core that Thierry farms; the white labels are purchased fruit from friends.) “Gravotte” is almost all pinot noir, a single 1.2 ha parcel with maybe some gamay along with it.
Info I gave you:
EXTRACTION 10 days of whole cluster semi carbonic before pressing
VARIETY thin skinned, high acid grape variety widely planted around the world, with a wide range of epigenetic mutation (more about pinot)
CLIMATE/SOIL cool continental, limestone, frost and mildew are major pressures
REGION historical but not particularly fancy (these vines are on a site with written records dating back hundreds of years), an early nexus of the region’s natural wine movement
H) YOYO, “Akoibon” 2021
We’re on the black schist fist of Banyuls-over-the-sea, in the southernmost part of the Roussillon before you hit the Pyrenees and cross the border into Catalunya. Banyuls is an ancient port in a tiny cove backed into rugged mountains. Its wines, classically, were outfitted for ship voyages: fortified, oxidized, sweet, grenache-based, the French answer to Port.
The Roussillon is small, but there’s still a big difference between the coastal wines of Banyuls and the inland, high-elevation river valley wines of the Agly. For the latter, think Clos du Rouge Gorge, Matassa, Gerard Gauby, etc; for the former, think Casot de Mailloles, Bascule, Leonine — and Yoyo, the nickname of Laurence Manya Krief, who’s been working since the late aughts; her exceptionally transparent, delicate wines cut very much against the grain of the sun-soaked, high potential ripeness you’ll find here.
EXTRACTION semi carbonic whole clusters (70/30 grenache/mourvèdre), a destemmed pied de cuve added on top to start a healthy fermentation then sealed up in a steel tank for 7 days before pressing
VARIETY two local sunloving varieties, one a bit thinner skinned, the other a bit thicker skinned / more structured
CLIMATE/SOIL intensely hot, extreme, moderated by nearby water, on black schist
REGION in an historically poor region where most farmers sold to the co-ops, from an idiosyncratic transplant artist who moved here fifteen years ago
I) BARBICHETTE, “Câche-Câche” 2022
César and Louisiane come from coffee (Café Integral) and made their first vintage as an experiment for friends in the back of the coffeeshop. Their first couple of vintages were made in a Brooklyn warehouse, but a few years ago they moved into a permanent winery in the Finger Lakes, which is where this cabernet sauvignon was grown.
The Finger Lakes’ winegrowing history has its roots in champagne-method hybrid sparklings in the early 19th century, and most of its vines remain hybrids and natives, although Prohibition severely impacted its wine industry. The history of vinifera up here is much more recent — starting in the 50s, but with significant changes in the style and quality of wines coming out of here in just the last decade.
Its two largest lakes, the deep, narrow Seneca and Cayuga, act as natural heat sinks, and there’s a band of slope around each that allows for surprisingly late, full ripening — if vines can survive the hard freeze of the winter. (Most vinifera in the Finger Lakes has to be cut down to renewals and covered in earth so that the sap doesn’t freeze and burst, killing the vine.) Go up in January when there is snow on the ground and you’ll see places on the lakes where the snow doesn’t stick; it can mean as much as 10 degrees difference.
EXTRACTION whole clusters foot-stomped for two weeks in a concrete egg with gentle daily pump-overs, pressed into a 1800L old oak foudre to finish fermentation and bottled the following fall
VARIETY dark-skinned, capable of tannin and color, with a distinctive, savory-herbal streak
CLIMATE/SOIL cool, continental, with significant frost and mildew challenges, moderated by local bodies of water, metamorphic shale
REGION small, with a recent quality revolution over the last 10-20 years and a nearby metropolitan market to drive wine sales
J) SULAUZE, “Charbonnières” 2023
The prettiest clusters from the harvest are picked on the first pass, and then infused in direct-press from the second—carbonic maceration in juice, which is what some people mean when they say “infusion.”
Sulauze is an interesting infusion of young energy into a region (Provence) that tends towards either highly commercial production of oceans of heavily manipulated rosé or fancy lifestyle wines made by people with money vacationing from Bordeaux — at its worst, Provence’s wine industry is like a bigger, more intensively planted, sunnier version of Long Island’s.
Karina and Guillaume met hiking in Corsica (Karina is originally from Brazil, Guillaume grew up in Marseille) and in moving back to Provence together took advantage of a French government subsidy to encourage young people to return to the land and to crop cultivation. Their winery is in a defunct local co-op, and in addition to grapes they farm wheat fields (for bread), barley (for beer), olive trees (for oil) and a big vegetable garden. They’re Demeter-certified, and the biodynamic brewery is across the dirt road from the winery.
The info I gave you:
EXTRACTION juice direct-pressed over whole clusters (infusion) for 15 days
VARIETY blend of two often blended varieties, one with thicker skins / deeper color / tendency to reduction, the other less color / tendency to oxidize
CLIMATE/SOIL warm, mediterranean, moderated by nearby water, limestone
REGION large and largely commercial, this producer relatively young and in polyculture, having taken over a local co-op (they also grow grains and brew beer)
K) LIGHTWELL SURVEY, “The Way It Was Before”
In one way or another, Ben Jordan has been involved with most of the wines I’ve been genuinely excited about from Virginia, whether in his former role as head winemaker at Early Mountain, his work with Lee Campbell at Common Wealth Crush, or here at Lightwell Survey, his personal project.
Lightwell focuses on co-ferments, and uses petit manseng as its primary weapon. In a region where vintages begin with frost and in hurricanes, a thick-skinned, relatively mildew resistant, resiliant, late-ripening variety that holds on to acid and can shrug off a rainstorm is invaluable. Petit manseng, says Jordan, does almost as well as a hybrid in the face of adversity.
“The Way It Was Before” uses chambourçin as the star of the show: varietally I often think of chambourçin’s bright, tart red-berried lift and sweet-herbal streak as being like putting an extra fistful of sage in your cranberry sauce. This is a sequel to a wine he made in collaboration with a local cidery, floating chambourçin over pressed apple juice. Here, the apples have been replaced with pressed white grapes: mostly manseng, as well as riesling, chardonel and traminette (both Cornell hybrids), and vidal (an old French-American). More on hybrids here.
Here’s the info I gave you:
EXTRACTION whole clusters infused in direct-press white juice
VARIETY co-fermentation of a variety of red and white grapes
CLIMATE/SOIL complicated, warm and humid with cold winters, rainy autumns, and early spring frosts, mostly limestone
REGION relatively young, with most quality-minded production starting in the last two decades
L) HIYU, “Fionn” 2016
Finally, this was a last blind I brought from my cellar at home: rogue ex-MS and Gandalf figure Nate Ready’s work at Hiyu in the Columbia Gorge.
Nate likes to write about his wines, so I’ll let him:
“Fionn is from the steepest part of the vineyard in the desert. This part of the site is planted to Zinfandel and filled with basalt cobbles. The vines are half the size of those on the lower part of the site. This was fermented in open top vats, whole cluster and tread by foot once a day. After three weeks it was pressed in a basket press directly to older barrels. The wine aged in the barrels for 14 months, on the lees, without any additions before being bottled by gravity.
“One would never guess that this was Zinfandel. More likely some long lost grape variety, that only grows on the cliffs of a single village, in a forgotten mediterranean isle. The structure of this wine is nearly invisible. All of the aromas, textures and sensations are knit in a seamless way. It smells like mulberry, warm huckleberries, clary sage, clove and allspice. Its hard to separate the flavors. The taste of the herbs and cool spices bleeds into the taste of fruit. As with all the wines from this site the sense of minerality strikes one as soon as its in the mouth. Here it is blood and iron. But just as quickly one is overwhelmed by this feeling of gentleness. This is a wine without edges. Its impossibly soft. The wine finishes with brightness, lift, a penetrating note of blackberry, blood and even more exotic spice.”
And here’s the info I gave you:
EXTRACTION whole clusters, tread by foot once a day for three weeks
VARIETY a sun-loving, intensely colored variety that ripens unevenly
CLIMATE/SOIL hot, dry, extreme, with cold nights and little water, moderated by a nearby river, basalt and other volcanic soils
REGION relatively young and isolated; standout producers tend to be on their own
Children's Atlas of Wine 