The Vineyards
I got into wine as a schoolboy - my French teacher sent me to France to improve my spoken French - and I ended up working on a vineyard. Practical experience - getting one's hands dirty - is the best way to learn about something in depth. So since leaving school I've combined writing about wine with working in short bursts in various vineyards and wineries worldwide. I've scrubbed buckets, pumps and hoses for red wines in Bordeaux, hosed down huge wine presses on night-shifts for cold-pressed dry white wines in Chile, picked nobly rotten grapes berry by berry for ultra-sweet whites in Germany's Pfalz, and stirred wine yeasts to make barrel-fermented Chardonnays in California's Carneros taste creamier. I also helped make a northern Californian vineyard in Mendocino County 'greener' by planting herbs and flowers and composting manure from the vineyard's cows. This kind of work probably made be a better wine writer - even if it never seemed to get me any closer to actually making my own wine.
I felt like a restaurant waiter frustrated at only ever being allowed to carry dishes to the table. Really what I wanted to be was the head chef selecting the ingredients and creating the dish myself. All that hands-on vineyard and winery experience over the years had taught me one thing however: that going to war on your vineyard every morning with a bunch of chemicals is the surest way of producing lifeless wine. I was determined that when I did get the chance to make my own wine I would do it without using any man-made chemicals. Instead I would use biodynamics - the first type of modern organic farming (dating from the 1920s). Biodynamics uses natural forces - like those provided by the moon - as well as medicinal plants (like chamomile and stinging nettle for example), minerals and natural composts to make stronger vines and healthier wines. In late 2006 I began renting 2.2 hectares (about 5 acres) of red wines vineyards in Mediterranean France's Roussillon region.
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The valley of the river Agly is one of three main river valleys in France's Roussillon region - the others being the Tech and the Têt. |
The vineyard is in the commune of Le Vivier, near St-Martin-de-Fenouillet, in the hills of the Agly valley about one hour's drive west of the city of Perpignan (in France's '66' or Pyrénées-Orientales département). It was these vines that Monty's French Red 2007 - my first wine - came from. The vines belonged to a friendly local winegrower called Eric Laguerre and his wife Corinne (see their contact details).
CONTACT DETAILS
Domaine Laguerre
Le Village
66220 St Martin de Fenouillet, France
Telephone +33 (0)4.68.59.26.92
E-mail domaine.laguerre@free.fr
Eric and Corinne Laguerre's excellent dry white, pink and red wines are sold under various labels: 'Eclipse', 'Le 20', and 'Le Ciste'. Ask in St-Martin's (tiny) main square for directions to Eric's winery - a one minute walk away.
I had first met Eric a few years earlier, after having tasted one of his red wines. In a blind wine tasting of over one-hundred other wines his stood out for its vibrance, freshness and clarity. The wine tasting had been organized by a guy called Jean Pla, who had invited me to the Roussillon region on a wine writers' press trip. With his wife Génévieve, Jean has a wine shop and restaurant (see their contact details) called Cave de la Pichenouille in Maury, a village famous its for Port-like wines.
CONTACT DETAILS
Cave de la Pichenouille
33 avenue Jean-Jaurès
66460 Maury, France
Telephone + 33 (0)4.68.59.02.18 (restaurant & wine shop)
E-mail pichenouille@wanadoo.fr
The Cave de la Pichenouille is both a restaurant and wine shop. A bottle of wine here costs the same price as you would pay direct form the winery. It is located on the main road (the D117) running through the centre of Maury- on the left-hand side as you arrive form Perpignan, heading towards St-Paul-de-Fenouillet.
Jean Pla also helps people looking to buy or rent vines in the area, especially in a sub-region of Roussillon called the Coteaux des Fenouillèdes. The name translates as the 'fennel hills' as wild fennel grows here abundantly. The Fenouillèdes run from Maury, up the valley floor of the river Agly to St-Paul-de-Fenouillet and Caudiès de Fenouillet, as well as into the hills up and around the village of St-Martin-de-Fenouillet. Jean's real estate and vine rental company is called Fenouillèdes Sélection (see his contact details).
CONTACT DETAILS
Jean Pla
Fenouillèdes Sélection (vineyard sales and rental)
Telephone + 33 (0)6.07.69.54.78 (mobile)
E-mail contact@fenouilledes-selection.com or plajean@wanadoo.fr
Jean - who speaks English - has helped investors from South Africa, Mexico, Bordeaux and beyond find vineyards in the Fenouillèdes, his region of birth.
The Fenouillèdes was seen as an up-and-coming region offering potentially top quality wines from well-sited and but relatively cheap vineyards. The vineyards were cheap because the vines were on quite difficult terrain - steep, windswept, sun-scorched rocky slopes. These often have to be worked by hand rather than by tractor. Lots of these vineyards were up for sale as a generation of elderly winegrowers was retiring while their sons and daughters preferred to earn bigger salaries from air-conditioned, office jobs than to struggle with the tough life of winegrowing. And anyway, few people really seemed to rate wines from Roussillon which were seen as old-fashioned and less good value than cheaper, sexier offerings from places like Chile and Australia. When I first met Eric I was initially intimidated by his huge physical frame and early 1970s, Viking-like hairstyle. But when I said how much I liked his wine (always a good thing to say to a winegrower!) we hit it off.
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Eric Laguerre bundling up some old, pruned vine shoots ready for use as a firewood for a barbecue. Wine growers never tire of telling you that cooking over the hot coals of from burning vine shoots make for the tastiest grill. |
From tasting his wines, Eric obviously had really great vineyards but after some persuasion he agreed to rent me one - he said they were too precious a part of his family heritage to sell. There are two ways of renting vines in France so I had a decision to make.
To Rent or Buy?
Either you pay a flat cash fee each year ('en fermage'); or you pay rent by giving a percentage of the grapes from the vineyard (usually 25-30%) to the vineyard owner every harvest in a sharecropping or tenant farmer system ('en metayage').
I opted to pay Eric the cash fee. I paid a slight premium because Eric's vines were certified organic by Ecocert France, which is recognised by both the French government and the European Union as competent when it comes to deciding if a vineyard can describe itself as 'organic' or not.
Organic Certification
Full organic certification takes three years to obtain. No man-made (chemically synthesized) compounds like weedkillers, fertilizers, fungicides, and pesticides can be used.
The lieu-dit or 'named place' where my rented vines are located in Le Vivier is called 'Planels'. This is right on Le Vivier's hilly northern border with St-Martin-de-Fenouillet, between the Pyrénées mountains to the south and the Corbières mountains to the east.
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Looking across the vineyard from the forest behind it and south towards the Pyrénees. |
Here the climate is Mediterranean: hot, sunny, and dry in summer for easy grape ripening, but cold enough in winter to kill off most over-wintering vine pests (mites, leaf hoppers). The vineyard is 500 metres (1,650 feet) above sea level. The altitude has a cooling effect on the grapes, allowing for steady ripening and intense flavours.
My rented vines have an ideal south-south-east facing aspect towards the Canigou, the highest peak along this part of the French Pyrénees mountains (behind the Canigou is Spain's Catalan region and the historic city of Barcelona). The vines were planted by Eric's grandfather in the 1950s, and on a drought-resistant rootstock called Richter 110, which is typical for this area.
The Soil
The sandy granite soils (arènes granitiques) in the vineyard were formed around 500 million years ago. This type of soil is among the oldest for vineyards in France, and is also found directly to the south in Spain. In fact, the vineyard is right on the edge of the geological fault-line pushing Spain up into France.
The light texture of the soil allows both deep rooting for the vines - important if one is to make wines exhibiting mineral as well as fruity flavours - and means that what small amount of rain does fall penetrates quickly and easily. This helps vines to form the really deep root systems needed for complex wine flavours.
The Climate
My rented vineyard overlooks the Mediterranean 40 kilometres (25 miles) away to the east. The sea is visible on clear days. However, the key moderating influence on the sunny climate comes from strong mountain winds (the 'tramontana' being the main one) which blow almost daily.
These winds do two things. First, they maintain a freshness to the summer heat, which is key in minimising the heat stress that can leave wines with too much alcohol and not enough flavour.
Secondly, the mountain breezes dramatically reduce the risk of pests and diseases, making organic farming easier.
The Grape Varieties
The vines are around 80% mainly Carignan Noir, a late ripening, quite tannic red grape and plus around 20% of three other grapes mixed in: Syrah, a softer, earlier ripening red grape, Grenache Noir,a very soft, juicy red grape and Maccabeu, a white grape, also known as Viura across the border in Spain.
Modern vineyards are usually only planted with a single grape variety in each plot. Old vineyards however were almost always complanté - meaning they were planted as a mix like mine. All the different grape types were harvested in one go and then deliberately fermented together.
The idea behind this was to make more balanced wines - a bit of Syrah and Grenache would soften up the sometimes leathery Carignan, while the white Maccabeu grapes also provided useful all-round freshness.
Vine Design
The distance between each vine in the row is around 80 centimetres (2.6 feet). In the local Catalan dialect this spacing is called sept empans, meaning seven times the distance from your forefinger to your thumb.
The space between each row is 2.80 metres. This works out at a vine density of roughly 4,000 vines per hectare (1,820 vines per acre). The vines are pruned to short spurs rather than long canes - which is typical on a windy mountain site like this with minimal rainfall. They are goblet rather than cordon trained, usually by leaving five heads (têtes) with two spurs (coursons) each. Each spur produces a couple of shoots (branches) off which the grape bunches hang.
The vines were free-standing until the late 1970s when support wires were strung horizontally across wooden and metal posts to make mechanisation easier. This system also meant the vine shoots would have something to cling on to, to prevent them snapping in the wind.
Compost & Pruning
In winter I had certified organic (municipal) compost from Perpignan spread on the soil at around 7 tons per hectare (2.8 tons/acre). It was then ploughed into the topsoil by tractor.
The idea of using compost was to feed the soil and then let the soil feed the vines - in contrast to chemical fertilizers which work by feeding vines directly, making the soil they grow in largely irrelevant.
The vines were pruned at the end of February 2007 under what is called the descending moon cycle. This cycle begins every 27.3 days when the moon’s physical position in the sky becomes gradually lower (exactly like the sun's between summer and winter).
The descending moon cycle lasts half of this 27.3 day period - then the moon is said to be ascending as it climbs higher in the sky each night for nearly fourteen days, before it starts descending again. Note that the descending moon is not the same as a waning moon, which is when the moon's shape is becoming smaller after each full moon.
Pruning during the descending moon period is said to help keep vines strong. The idea is that the descending moon is the moment when precious, food-rich sap descends down into the roots where it is safe.
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Pruning at the right time moon-wise means the pruned wood which gets thrown away contains nothing the vines would miss |
It makes no sense to throw away much needed food by allowing sap to remain in the old shoots that are being pruned off to make way for this year's crop.
Biodynamics
One of Eric’s conditions when he rented me my vineyard was that I maintained its official organic status. I however wanted to go one step further and farm using biodynamic methods. This is a stricter form of organics, which Eric was also interested in. Biodynamics recognises invisible forces - like those exerted by the moon - as being just as important for a healthy vineyard as tangible, physical substances, like compost.
To help the vines optimse any beneficial forces I would have to do what all biodynamic farmers do which is to use nine so-called biodynamic preparations (numbered '500-508') on the vineyard.
So, in March 2007 the first biodynamic preparation - called horn manure (or '500') - was sprayed on the soil as large droplets. This is made from cow manure aged in a cow horn. After six months the manure is removed from the horn. After this time the fresh light brown manure will have changed into something darker and earthier-smelling and with no trace of the initial fresh manure smell.
Horn manure is stirred in warm water which is then sprayed on the soil in the afternoon as the dew falls. The horn manure preparation brings billions of living microorganisms onto the soil. They encourage stronger, deeper, more complex vine root systems capable of giving wines strong mineral and even earthy flavours.
In April another six biodynamic preparations made from medicinal plants, all of which are fairly easy to come by, were sprayed together on the soil, this time as a quick or 'barrel' compost.
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Me sitting on the barrel containing my newly made barrel compost (Photo Ant Palmer; copyright Monty Waldin). |
I made the barrel compost in March-April 2007 in my vegetable garden in St-Martin-de-Fenouillet, using a wooden wine barrel as a container. Fresh cow manure was mixed with the six specially prepared medicinal plants, each of which has a role in aiding healthy vine growth:
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the yarrow flower heads (or '502') make vines more sensitive to their surroundings
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the chamomile flower heads (or '503) prevent vines from stressing, in hot or very cold weather for example
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whole stinging nettles minus the roots (or '504') act like an all-around, pick-me-up tonic for vines and the soil
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oak bark (or '505') helps stop vines growing so quickly they become diseased
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dandelion flower heads (or '506') help the influence of the moon, sun (which dandelion resembles when in full flower) and other important celestial bodies penetrate right into the soil
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a liquid extract of crushed valerian flowers (or '507') makes the beneficial effects of the other compost preparations radiate via the cow manure into the soil in the right way.
To sum up then, the barrel compost helps keep soils strong in organic matter and humus (you could say humus is like 'the earth within the earth') as well as helping convey the right kind of growth forces to the vines. Then the vines were shoot thinned (late April), de-suckered (May) and weeded (May-June) - all by hand.
Weeds
After the vines flowered/blossomed a strip of weeds (about 30-50cm wide) nearest the vines was ploughed out by horse to make picking easier and to prevent high-growing weeds from blocking sun light on the ripening grape bunches.
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Ploughing weeds away by horse take about twenty times longer than doing the job using weedkillers and tractors - but it doesn't leave noxious residues in our ground water. |
The horse is gentler than a tractor - there is less risk of knocking vines over as with a tractor-mounted inter-vine weeder - and more precise. The centre of each row remained grassed with native plants/weeds, partly to prevent erosion on the slopes but also to add organic matter to the soil when the weeds are ploughed in during winter. A local couple called Arnaud and Viviane Dautas did the work with the horse.
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Leaving a strip of weeds in the middle of the row may look messy but it provides a vital habitat for beneficial insects, and prevents soil erosion. |
The wild grasses also provide a habitat for ladybirds and other beneficial insects like lacewings and syrphid flies which eat pests like aphids and mites that can damage the vines.
Fungus Diseases
Powdery mildew (oidium) was controlled by spraying liquid sulfur in the early part of the season when the vine shoots were the length of your hand, and then by sulphur dust when the grape-bearing shoots had reached forearm length and beyond.
Some sulfur was sprayed by hand during the day but essentially this was by tractor at night to prevent leaf burn.
Powdery mildew pressure was strong in the early part of the 2007 growing season. To counter this I thinned the vine shoots by hand, allowing more air and light into the leafiest vines. This also helps reduce risk of grapeworm caterpillars burrowing into the ripening grapes later in the season, turning their juice to vinegar.
The biodynamic tea made from common horsetail or Equisetum arvense (or '508') was sprayed on the vine foliage in July. The horsetail was gathered wild from plants growing wild along the banks of a stream running close to my vegetable patch. Horsetail is super-rich in silica. Silica brings a light and heat force into the vineyard, making it more likely spores of vine fungus diseases will remain in the soil where they really belong rather than jumping up onto the vines and damaging them.
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Me stirring the biodynamic horn silica (the white powder in the back on the right hand side) in early September. |
Finally the biodynamic horn silica (or '501') preparation was sprayed as a fine mist above the ripening grapes in early September. This is made by ageing ground silica powder in a cow horn for six month then stirring the horn contents (not the horn) in water before spraying over the tops of the vines. Horn silica improves the taste and ripeness qualities of the grapes by helping vines maximise the sun's heat and light forces.
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Eric Laguerre and my partner Silvana picking the grapes in September 2007. |
Harvest & Winemaking
The vines were hand picked when the moon stood in front of the constellation of the Lion (a 'fruit' constellation) on September 24th 2007. Picking grapes when the moon is in the Lion is said by biodynamic farmers to make for potentially longer-lived wines.
The grapes were fermented in unlined, sealed cement tanks. I tipped the grapes in as whole bunches and directly by hand. The idea is the grapes don't get crushed or split, so each grapes starts fermenting from within. This is called carbonic maceration and is used in Beaujolais to produce colourful red wines with fruity rather than tannic flavours.
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A British friend from college, Graham Wynde, holds a crate of my grapes. Tipping the grapes straight from the crates into the fermenting vat meant the grapes were as fresh as possible, and could ferment initially as whole berries, for a softer-textured wine. |
After a week of fermentation (when the density of the grape juice must had reached about 1025º) fermenting juice/wine from the bottom of the vat was pumped over the skins floating at the top. This added depth and texture to both fruit (flavour) and tannins (structure). I called it 'adding Bordeauxness to Beaujolais' as pumping over is common for structured red wines like Bordeaux.
When the all the sugar had fermented and the wine was dry it was pumped to an adjacent cement tank. To this was added a small amount of press wine resulting from pressing the skins in a pneumatic press. The wine then underwent its malolactic fermentation, a natural process for virtually all red wines as bacteria in the wine convert appley (harsh) malic acid to softer (milky-textured) lactic acid.
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I did a deal with Eric so I could use some old cement vats in his winery to ferment my wine in. His grandfather had built five of them but they had not been used for thirty years. If I helped clean and renovate all of them, Eric said I could used two of them for my wine. Here, Eric is taking a break from cleaning thirty years' worth of grime off the vat walls with a power hose. |
The wine was racked off the sludge of lees (dead yeast) which had formed at the bottom of the tank in January. It was pumped to a single fibreglass tank with a moving hat. This could be positioned right above the top of the wine to prevent air gaps which would oxidize the wine.
Bottling
The wine stayed in this tank until bottling on Wednesday 19th March 2008 when the moon stood in front of the constellation of the Lion - again because biodynamic growers believe this constellation will keep the wine stronger for longer in bottle.
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Holding a bottle of your own wine, as I am doing here, is a big thrill. The boxes behind me were shipped to Adnams in the UK the very next day (Photo Ant Palmer; copyright Monty Waldin). |
The wine was lightly filtered with a pad filter before being filled into Burgundy style bottles, sealed with a DIAM cork. The wine was bottled with around 20ppm free sulfur (20 milligrams per litre), and less than 100ppm total sulfur dioxide. It contains 12.5% alcohol and is bone dry (less than 2g/l residual sugar). As the wine was not fined it is suitable for vegetarians/vegans.
The Label
The label was designed by Neil Tully (see his contact details). Neil is both a Master of Wine and the UK's leading wine label designer.
CONTACT DETAILS
Neil Tully MW
Amphora Design Ltd
2 Kelso Place
Upper Bristol Road
Bath BA1 3AU
England
Tel 01225.461431 Email info@amphora.co.uk
I gave several label designers a brief - some of whom came up with some brilliant and original designs incorporating pictures of soil, the moon, and even the biodynamic medicinal plants - but Neil stuck to the brief and honed it into exactly what I wanted.
The lettering on the label may look like it came out of a computer - but in fact everything was completely hand drawn by Neil and his team.
The Future
I have rented more vineyards from Eric and so will be making more wines in 2008 - two dry white wines, a rosé, and two, maybe three reds. Neil's label design should allow me to use the same basic label for each one, maybe changing the red letters to green in the case of a white wine, for example.
The idea behind my label was that if people like a wine with the "Monty's" name on it, they'll know what to look for on the wine shop shelf.
But we all have differtent tastes and expetetions about how wine should taste so if anyone doesn't like a wine with my name on it they'll also know what to avoid.