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The Heartbreak Grape, A Journey in Search of the Perfect Pinot Noir
- Marq de Villiers
Harper Collins, 1993, Toronto, Canada
Review by David Farmer
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Pinotphiles is the name given to consumers who are dedicated to the mysteries and flavour of pinot noir. No other grape variety has such a band of promoters and to satisfy their needs a dozen or so ‘pinot celebrations’ are held every few years in the old and newly emerging pinot regions.
The author of The Heartbreak Grape qualifies as a pinotphile and has used his interest to write an appealing essay about pinot noir based on the story of Josh Jensen and the formative years of the Calera vineyard in California.
There is no name for a person who moves from being a pinotphile to actually wanting to make wine but this is what Jensen did in the late sixties when he moved to Burgundy to pick grapes and in later vintages worked as a cellar hand with among others Domaine de la Romanee-Conti.
Jensen returned to California in 1971 and commenced looking for a site to grow great pinot. The influence of the Cote d’Or made him seek limestone and limestone derived soils; requirements he thought critical. After much searching this lead to the purchase of a property high up in the Gavilan Mountains at Mount Harlan and the first vineyards were planted in 1975.
It was natural that Jensen and other pioneers of that time were influenced by the great vineyard sites of Europe and with the increasing awareness of terroir tried to duplicate where possible these aspects in the new world environment. Several that seemed important were calcareous soils, hilly slopes with good exposure to the sun, and for grapes such as pinot noir a marginal ripening climate.
Others influenced by Bordeaux thought that proximity to a body of water was important because of the moderating influence this has on the local climate. Coupled with this was climate modelling of the classical European areas that focussed on daylight hours and temperature and was expressed as ‘heat summation days’ and the use of this data in assessing new world areas.
These are some of the ideas the new world pioneers used in seeking out new viticultural areas.
We know now that a rigid transposing of what works in France and Germany is not necessary and to literally attempt it would be so restrictive that few new regions could have been developed. Landscape features that are important in France do not have much meaning in other countries and a range of other variables are more relevant. For example vines like alkaline soils but a limestone rock base is not necessary.
Indeed the European notion of terroir and how its expression is to be related back to wine is a debate that will continue for a long time. Without the example of Burgundy you wonder whether the notion of terroir would have the strength that it shows today.
Much of the richness of today’s new world’s areas started in the late 1960’s and early 1970’s. The rapid development of new regions in California began in the mid 1960’s and in the Southern Hemisphere a little later. To name a few, the Yarra Valley saw plantings by Yarra Yering in 1969 and Seville Estate in 1972, while Pipers Brook got going in Northern Tasmania in the early 1970’s and over in New Zealand the Otago district was opened up by William Hill in 1973 with Rippon following a year later.
To tell this story of development the account of Calera is a good as any and the book describes in detail the effort required to succeed and is a good management primer for anyone who wants to start a vineyard. And it reminds you of the dozens or hundreds who did not succeed and gave up mid way. Being a pioneer is not easy but at least they left the remains of a dream with which the next owner could start and push forward again.
As for the character of pinot noir, the author has this to say and it sums up pretty well the current view; “In those innocent days when gender descriptives were still thought amusing, the pinot noir was called feminine –by which was meant flighty, changeable, beguiling and seductive.”
It was not always so as here is what Warner Allen said in the Wines of France published in 1924; “If Bordeaux is the Queen, Burgundy is the king of natural wines;” apparently a remark that is also attributed to Prof. Saintsbury.
For pinot noir, that most variable of varieties, a gender change over 50 years is nothing and simply confirms that it is a most mysterious grape.
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Ten Company Histories and Biographies of Our Wine Pioneers
- *(see note for details)
Review by David Farmer
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In the wine business 50 years is too short for reflection while one hundred years spans several generations and covers a wide variety of trading conditions. Companies that are still family owned and trading after 100 years are the rare survivors and it was at this point that most of them commissioned a company history. Many great contributors to the Australian wine history, and to single out one, Alexander Kelly's Tintara, did not survive for long and we know little about them.
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The Romance of Wine
- H. Warner Allen
Ernest Benn Limited, London, 1931
Review by David Farmer
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'When the Portuguese are really enjoying themselves, they sing and dance to a noise resembling that of a heavy bombardment, and in a festival in the mountains at Amarante I was completely deafened by the unceasing roar of about sixty sheepskin drums beaten furiously, broken by violent dynamite explosions.'
This is Warner Allen’s picture of the locals in the Douro region who enjoy letting off rockets with sticks of dynamite attached when celebrating. Any book that discovered a tradition like that has something interesting to say.
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Ancient Wine, The Search for the Origins of Viniculture
- Patrick E. McGovern
Princeton University Press, 2003
Review by David Farmer
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We do not know when humans first began to enjoy fermented wine beverages. Ancient Wine traces the origin of the deliberate making of alcohol back to the early Neolithic, about 7000 years ago. A seasonal or occasional drinking of alcoholic beverages probably goes back much further as many fruits collected in a container would ferment naturally. The current warm cycle of the ice age commenced about 10,000 years ago and this also marked a change, in a region of the Middle East, when humans turned from nomadic hunter gatherers to the first permanent settlements based around the cultivation of cereal crops. It is suggested that the earliest permanent settlements began in Eastern Turkey in the headwaters of the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers. more...
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In Praise of Wine
- Alec Waugh
1959, (Cassel)
Review by David Farmer
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In Praise of Wine is a book of personal reminiscences about wine and follows the style of the educated amateurs who wrote before and immediately after the Second World War. This book though was published in 1959 and has crossed into an era in which wine books were beginning to contain detailed descriptions of wine regions and technical aspects of wine making, the forerunners of today’s large wine publishing industry. This in turn heralded the end of the amateur commentator. more...
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The New France A Complete Guide to Contemporary French Wine
- Andrew Jefford
Mitchell Beazley 2002
Review by David Farmer
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How strange to divide wine writers into a wine left or right. It will help you to enjoy the early chapters of this book if you have a soft left interpretation of the world wine industry, and enjoy railing against the globalisation of wine, the sameness of taste, the industrialisation of wine and a future driven by world wide brands. This book takes the proposition that the true way to make wine comes from those who bond with the ground, who work the vineyard night and day, break their backs, and by so doing achieve in almost a religious sense a bonding with the earth, the place and the wine produced. more...
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Penfolds-The Rewards of Patience
- Andrew Caillard M.W.
(Fifth Edition)
Review by David Farmer
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In the simplest term this is a consumers guide to all the Penfolds red and white wines. The tasting notes cover wines made by Penfolds in the 1950's right through to the current releases. There are tasting notes for every wine, apart from the Rawsons Retreat wines, the Koonunga Hill whites and one or two others which I detect the winemakers wish they did not have to make under the Penfolds banner. Others wines such as the Penfolds Old Vine Semillon which were part of edition 4 have been dropped off. more...
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Classification of Australian Wines
- Dan Murphy
Macmillan 1974
Review by David Farmer
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I’m a bit of a collector of wine books and recently purchased a first edition signed by Dan Murphy and by the great Hunter vigneron Max Lake. It cost $20.00 from the Berkelouw bookstore on Oxford Street, Sydney, where I buy a lot of second-hand wine books. I first read this book in 1975. Back then it was seen as a bold attempt to classify Australian vineyards and wines in a hierarchical system similar to the French appellation classification. It was a very useful book. Thirty years on it acts as a timepiece and is worth reviewing to see how the wine industry has evolved. more...
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Real Wine - The Rediscovery of Natural Winemaking
- Patrick Matthews
Mitchell Beazley 2000
Review by David Farmer
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This is one of a number of wine books published over the last few years, mostly by English authors, which take the view that there is a correct way to make wine and this is only known and followed by a small number of dedicated winemakers. The core of the argument is that big company winemaking produces ‘industrial’ wines and these lack character, while true wine is made by the artisanal wine maker using tools and methods, often ancient, which reflect the unique character of the site. more...
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Ten Company Histories and Biographies of Our Wine Pioneers
- *(see note for details)
Review by David Farmer
|
|
In the wine business 50 years is too short for reflection while one hundred years spans several generations and covers a wide variety of trading conditions. Companies that are still family owned and trading after 100 years are the rare survivors and it was at this point that most of them commissioned a company history. Many great contributors to the Australian wine history, and to single out one, Alexander Kelly's Tintara, did not survive for long and we know little about them.
more...
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