I don’t buy that. I drank a lot of Bordeaux in the 80s – a lot! – and I don’t think cleanliness was a widespread issue for the classified growths or major cru bourgeois properties.
Don’t know John. Maybe you’re right. Heaven knows it’s outside of my sphere or knowledge. So maybe I’m conflating “clean” with “brett management”, which isn’t exactly the same, although it’s related. But you’re right, the issues that come from being unclean aren’t all brett. There are worse problems one can have.
But not long ago, UC Davis professor Linda Bisson, who’s done a lot of work on the various aromas/flavors in Cab/Merlot wanted to look at the subject of traditional vs modern. So she did an online survey for wines that consumers described as “typical Bordeaux”. She bought a bunch of them, tested them, and found that they were full of 4-ethylphenol and 4-ethylguaiacol, which are the molecules responsible for the Brett aromas called “band-aid” and “ash”.
And many Bordeaux that I’ve had from the 70s, 80s and 90s showed a lot of it. Pichon Lalande, Cos d’Estournel, Gruaud-Larose, Figeac are kind of characteristically bretty. Stéphane Derenoncourt is on record as saying he tries to avoid brett as much as possible, even though a little bit can add complexity, but he feels it blots out terroir. Rolland has said similar things. They don’t make all the wines in Bordeaux to be sure, but they are influential and they’ve only become so relatively recently.
As far as terroir goes, I have mixed feelings about it. You stand in a Bordeaux vineyard that stretches pretty much as far as you can see and it’s almost as flat as Kansas and I guess there’s a little deposit of one thing or another, and Peynaud talked about the different soils on the different banks, so that’s there. But Bordeaux isn’t quite the same as mountainsides that have been lifted from the sea or erupted from volcanoes. Places like St Emillion are hilly and Bordeaux is so huge it has hilly regions and flat regions so it’s hard to say that the region as a whole has something unique regarding the soil and microclimates.
In its broadest definition, “terroir” is found every place on earth because that place isn’t someplace else. That’s fine, but a steep mountain or large hill will have very different and unique conditions on the different sides, and will affect the valley below as well, particularly if it blots out noon sun. So I guess you’d get a lot more variance in hilly and mountainous regions than you would in some of the relatively flat areas in much of Bordeaux.
