Since everyone knows you need to have really old vines to make great wines, I figure the contrarians can share a list of wines (and champagnes) that broke that rule.
To kick it off:
Older examples
Conterno Barolo Riserva Monfortino 1978
Château Latour à Pomerol 1959-62
DRC Romanée-conti Grand Cru 1952-55
Williams Selyem Summa Vineyard 1991
Newer praised younger vine examples (They tend to have multiple clones)
Cedric Bouchard Haute-Lemblée
Sequitur
Walter Scott X-Novo (chard and Pinot noir)
I have found the Sequitur and Walter Scott’s to be delicious.
Myth camp, here. You can make great wines from brand new vines, there are too many examples to mention. Basically all of France to start with - most of their vines are much younger than CA or South American vines.
Only three things that speak for old vines are (perhaps):
Less yield.
Goblet-style trained vines that aren’t “strung up” and stressed.
An ability for the seasoned vine to “household” or “economize” and retain acidity during hot periods (now, this is what I’ve been told, I don’t actually know if this is true, might just be winemaker BS).
Now, I’m all for the old vineyards from a historic and heritage perspective. I want them preserved because it’s amazing to be able to have fruit from a plant that has been here for so long, seen so much, weathered so many storms. There’s something magical about that, something emotional. But the association that older vines make better wines is at best, dodgy. It’s romantic, and we want it to be true, but there is scant evidence.
As for a young vine wine that’s epic, try Enfields’s Waterhorse Ridge Cab.
1985 Guigal La Turque is from 3 year old vines. I have never tried this but recall RP gave it 100pts and folks I know who tried it did said it was great. I’m sure there are countless other examples.
Young vines produce very fruit forward wines. If that’s your jam, and RP liked big fruit forward wines, then young vines are epic.
A lot of this is subjective, so one person’s epic is not in another’s wheelhouse.
I like Sequitur and Beaux Freres Upper Terrace but I wouldn’t buy them ahead of the Beaux Freres vineyard(and I certainly wouldn’t walk up in price point to get them.)
How much replanting was done in Napa in the 90s due to phylloxera? Weren’t there great wines made on young vines because of that? I know Togni replanted in the early-mid 90s and made some great wines. But I don’t know the fraction of vines that were young etc.
I believe you Marcus, but it’ll be very hard for the average consumer to pick that out.
In a blind tasting of young vs. old vine wine from the same (or very close) vineyard, similar clones, similar vine maintenance/harvesting, same vintage, same winemaker and same winemaking…maybe one can distinguish the differences.
I’ve never tried anything remotely close. If memory serves, winemaking style tends to trump terroir tends to trump clones/rootstock with vintage as a wildcard (along with a number of other factors). It’s hard enough to try to distinguish producers and AVA in blind tastings of the same vintage…let alone identifying young vines.
Do winemakers use a different style in making wines from old vines though? Is there more you can do with the grapes? Or is that subjective / a myth too?
In the Douro, where a lot of vines are over 100 years old, the most important factors are genetic diversity and length of roots. The former is self evident - wines labeled ‘vinhas velhas’ in the Douro do not even specify grape varieties because it is very difficult or impossible to establish how many there are in the vines, to say nothing of the diversity of clones - and the latter is directly related to the plant’s ability to self-regulate and withstand environmental conditions, meaning it is both sturdier and produces better fruit.
Quinta do Crasto has even invested in a project named Pat Gen Vineyards, which seeks to replant the iconic Vinha Maria Teresa (which was already an old vineyard when Constantino de Almeida bought Quinta do Crasto in 1918!) with the exact same genetic material, rootstocks, etc. Every nook and cranny of the vineyard is analysed and put in the database through georeferencing, finding genotypes and so forth. It’s hard to not argue in favor of old vines when a producer invests a fortune into something as ambitious as this.
While young vines perhaps tend towards simplicity and fruit, there’s also a self fulfilling prophecy aspect where young vines are declassified by winemakers when they have a blocks of both young and old vines. If the young vine lots are assumed to be simpler, and to drink younger, then they won’t receive the same treatment as the older vines. Which would further tend to emphasize their fruity, simple qualities.
Certainly it seems that some producers can ‘overcome’ the simplicity by force of winemaking–though probably that falls into the new oak and high extraction category much of the time.
Here’s another question though: how young is too young for vines? 2nd leaf? 3rd leaf? I’m sure there’s no simple answer, but I am skeptical of wines made from super-young vines. Even if the difference between 5 and 15 year old vines would be hard for me to decipher, personally.
Clearly old vines are as a general rule better, and younger vines produce fruit forward wines that tend to fall apart earlier. That is what the consensus view is, so I ask about the variant perception, something that people aren’t thinking about, and generally is not discussed.
What scratches my interest is that the tasting notes of the Montefortino (Galloni & Gilman), Latour a Pomerol (Gilman) and DRC (Broadbent’s as others have Rudy risk) show those wines gained complexity with age. Of course these three were in fantastic spots for growing grapes.
If better understood, it gives an opportunity for younger vineyards and winemakers in emerging regions to produce wines that are considered for consumption over a longer time frame. Which is helpful for younger winemakers in places like Oregon and Champagne. It also makes it easier to make the risky move of replanting sites to more interesting mixes of massale and clones.
That said, my preference is to go with the older vine sites, mostly.
When I first started making wines I would taste barrels weekly. I’ve always held that you should work your way up to the best wines, so as we tasted I would start to develop an order to work through the barrels. It took me about 6 months to realize that the order I was tasting in was youngest vines to oldest.
Vines are like people.
When they’re young they tell stories like children do, with great energy and enthusiasm, and they are very easy to like. They are also more inconsistent and definitely put off by challenges like inclement weather.
Then there is an adolescent period, where balance is tricky. Too much energy for green growth, not settled into site yet, root systems and symbiotic relationships are just being established, reproduction is not a priority…and the results are pretty much what you would expect.
Then physical maturity of adulthood. Roots are established, microrrhyzial systems are in place, adaptation to site is established. Energy is well developed but hopefully controlled by site and conditions(grapevines need to be challenged not coddled). Like a person, the vine has become “who” it is. Stronger or weaker, it has learned how to live and produce fruit from the specific site it’s grown in. Reproduction is a priority, but energy for green growth is significant. This is a period of high quality, but it is important to remember that the energy in the plant can also go overboard fairly easily.
Older vines-site adaptation is at max, physiological energy is waning. Green growth is limited but root systems, if healthy, are at maximum depth giving maximum opportunity to mitigate climatic variation. Sugar accumulation is naturally moderated. Less canopy means more sunshine on the fruit, better maturity of tannins, acid balance is better, and as the roots are deep accumulation of flavor is at it’s widest. Without the “power” of fruit, the story is told considerably more quietly than say the young vine or adolescence, but for the listener who pays attention, the story is a much deeper and more interesting one.
This is true of every vineyard I have worked with.
But if you irrigate, then the vast majority of what I posted is hogwash. Plants only go as far as they need to for food and water(just like people-my kids first preference for water is for me to bring it to them).
Modern winemaking, and to an extent also modern farming, is basically a laundry list of being too scared to let the vineyard do the talking because it might not tell a “grand cru” story. Wines are forced to be “great” because we can do that. Show me a modern region that is looking to make wines like Beaujolais? So yes, in a huge amount of cases now, winemakers bring amplified instruments to an acoustic session.
With predictable results.
Edit: I should also add modern weather reports. A century ago no one could look at Doppler and see whether or not there was a “window” behind a storm or not. I am guessing with a years work on the vine, a lot more fruit got pulled early due to weather avoidance. Now we can sit through more, and “wait for flavors”. Most of the time the flavors we’re waiting on are darker and sweeter flavors. Sometimes you need to wait, but I think in Oregon good weather reports lead to more of us hanging through weather.
2010 was a vintage where we were close but perhaps not quite there(according to the winemakers) when the weather said, pick now or else. Those wines are among my favorites and I have been “not waiting for flavors” ever since.
This isn’t to blame winemaking, there has been an explosion of wine production all over the world, so young vines are common everywhere(and a very necessary part of getting to have old vines). Competition for consumers attention is fierce. So it is what it is.
Established old world terroirs don’t have to be in as much of a fist fight to get noticed. Nor does financial muscle have quite as much impact on getting those established regions time in a distributors day. Sales reps quotas are a real thing. And places like Total Wine and Binny’s care about price, and really any decent story will do as long as the wine is attractive(very different from authentic).
I pitch terroir 24/7 because it’s what I want to see, and if enough consumers ask for that then more winemakers will focus on showing terroir first and foremost.
It’s also hard to really work through terroir in most tastings. We tend to focus on AVA, often with multiple producers and vintages and then ask the wines to show us the differences. I think that is a lot tougher than it seems. AVA differences in my own wines are relatively easy to spot.
Even differences within blocks of the same vineyard, once I knew what to look for. But that is after 15+ years of intensive tasting for Whistling Ridge. I also think tasting in the cellar helps to see terroir, partly because the cellar is just quiet. We’re a social animal and used to taking subliminal cues from each other. With too many people around, focus is harder.
It’s funny, when I open the early vintages to see what I can learn and how the wines are evolving there are lots of small things I think could be done, but the over riding and only large thing that stands out to me is the vine age. And the youth of the vines I was working with. Nothing was over 13 years old. Some like our early Momtazi fruit was 4-5 year old vines. The wines have aged well from Momtazi, but without any real level of complex nature. They are still more mid-palate fruit and less echo.
We’ve talked about a zoom for the board, and if we do terroir and vine age will definitely be the focus(older vines show terroir much more clearly in my opinion). Maybe some time in April when we are done bottling the 2019s.
What you say about predisposition warrants attention.
One of my absolutes for the cellar is that every bit of fruit can make a great wine. This is future sight-not finished wines or hindsight.
The point is not whether I am correct, but that my mental state should never view any fruit as superior of lesser. My job is to execute the care of the fruit to the best of my ability, not to prove that I am smart by guessing what will be good and what won’t.
So you may be right. But in my cellar, we don’t offer better treatment to anything.
Young vines will often be ready to pick earlier, but that’s about the only difference, and it’s determined by the fruit, not me.
To answer your question about what is too young, my honest answer is that we use it all. You don’t farm all year and make choices to leave anything behind(I may not be getting your query correctly though).
And young vines generally don’t need force of winemaking. They ripen faster, and very young vines have small sets, so intensity is there. Ripeness, fruit, they play well with neutral oak or flashy new barrels(although these are pretty obvious wines). Young vines make delicious wines. Just not wines with much depth or connection to site. And after 10 years in the cellar old vines wines tend to produce more layered and superlative experiences(in my experience).
Old Vine Zin is something people seek out because it’s hardy and because in a typically fruit driven juicy, delicious, grape the older vines restrain sugars just a bit and add extract. Giving depth.
Sorry Cromwell, I should have pointed out that I didn’t think you were saying young vines were superior, but rather that you were putting together a list of sites that seem to have tremendous potential.
And Ex-Novo certainly seems to warrant that. Sequitur as well, but given the zip code I am definitely biased there.
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And had expected to enjoy young to defend my older vine wines.