Leon Femfert
Wine, mountains and philosophy – basically that sums it up.
Dario Cecchini – the poet-butcher from Panzano
Recently I saw this great Video on youtube of the most famous butcher in Tuscany, maybe one of the most famous in the world:
Beside being a smart businessman and holding lectures around the globe about the ethics behind the act of killing animals Dario Cecchini is still a great, great butcher.
If you are in the Chianti Classico area go and visit his shop or one of the three “concept restaurants” he runs in Panzano. I especially recommend “Solo Ciccia” you get tons of different meats (and I’m not exaggerating) , wine (but you can also bring your one without paying a cork fee), dessert, coffee and grappa for 30 euro!!
Vineyards and romanesque architecture in Burgundy
A nice weekend driving around in Burgundy.
Yesterday we drove through the Cote de Nuits and walked around in different vineyards. It is impressive to observe how in bigger vineyard sites like the Chambertin every grower works a little bit different. A couple of photos:
The Grand Cru Chambertin is nearly 13 hectars big and owned today by 21 different wine growers. This photo is taken from the top part of the vineyard and shows old vines which are already pruned.
- Grand Cru Chambertin
- Just a couple of meters next to it, the owner of the land is another one. Clearly the soil was not plowed and he still has to prune.
- The Musigny Vineyard and the village of Chambolle Musigny in the background
- Musigny and Clos de Vougeot in the background. This is again the lieux dits Les Petits Musigny owned by Comte Georges de Vogué. It is interesting to observe that the vines here are grown in with a Cordon training system, while nearly all vines in Burgundy are grown with the Guyot or cane system.
Horseplowing on the La Romanée vineyard owned by Domaine du Comte Liger-Belair. In the foreground Romanée-Conti.
- Domaine Romanée Conti replanting a piece of their Romanée St-Vivant. Since I came for the first time to this place in 2009 I always saw this piece of land, belonging to the Grand Cru Romanée St-Vivant appellation and just in front of Romanée Conti, unplanted. Now after three years they start to replant the vineyard. This guys have money and time.
- Romanée Conti. They still have to prune, while everybody else already did it.
- La Tache and La Grande Rue owned by Domaine Lamarche. The soil differences between this two Grand Cru sites in Vosne Romanée is obvious. While there are always endless discussions about the question if the terroir changes between different appellations in Burgundy, I think this photo shows clearly a difference. On the left we have La Tache, which clearly has a darker soil. On the right side La Grande Rue with a lighter soil and more stones.
- Same situation: La Grande Rue on the left and La Tache on the right.
- Aux Malconsorts and La Tache. While La Tache is one of the most celebrated Grand Crus in Burgundy and a single bottle has the price of a used car, just next to it there is the Premier Cru Aux Malconsorts, with much more reasonable prices. Good producers of this appellation include de Montille and Dujac.
Downtown Beaune
Cluny III or the rest of it. This was once the biggest church in the world before the St. Peter's Basilica
in Rome was extended. With the French Revolution the Church turned out of fashion in France and they transformed this masterpiece of romanesque architecture in a quarry.
One of the few saved capitals in Cluny. This one symbolizes through the vine the eucharisty.
Cluny today.
Somewhere in the Maconnais. One of the many beautiful romanesque churches.
Brancion, an intact medieval town.
The St. Phillibert Abbey in Tournus. One of the first vaulted ceilings in Europe, built in the XI century.
Wine with residual sugar – the monster is coming back.
Since I started studying Wine Business in Dijon I begun to ask myself more often why many people prefer beer or any other drink to wine.
It seems that many wine professionals think that people prefer for example beer because the packaging or the communication strategy is better. “Wine professionals” say than something like “the wine world is too complex” or “we have to take more care about our customers and make the whole wine world more comprehensive and simpler”. I think there is a much more intuitive and logical reason for which many people don’t buy wine: because they don’t like the taste of it. And I don’t mean the specific taste of one grape variety or one wine style, but the taste of wine in general.
Face it: wine is compared to all the other drinks out there a rather acid, dry, bitter and tannic drink.
If the commercial part of the wine industry would really “take care of their customers”, as wine consultants preach, it should think less of new fancy packaging’s or more subtle and effective marketing and communication strategies but concentrate on the essential and produce a product which average consumers would like.
What could the average consumer like? It doesn’t seem to difficult to understand that a large number of people whose other favorite drinks include Coke, Red Bull, latte or gin-and-tonic don’t like weedy, unripe-tasting basic wines which are supposed to taste like they have something – quiet difficult to understand – called terroir. This is true not only for the western but especially for the asian market. More and more people in Asia are interested in wine for different reasons (health, status, fashion and social) but don’t really like the taste of it probably because it is so different from what they are used to.
Now there is a problem: most wine enthusiasts and wine producers think that slightly sweet wines represent a even bigger heresy than drinking wine out of a plastic cup.
That wasn’t always the case: most of German and Alsatian wines were most of the time off-dry or semi-dry. Only in the last years producers started to promote a “crisper and more mineral style” which at the same time is more difficult to understand as not intuitively enjoyable. Looking more back also Champagne was often lusciously sweet, making it a far better partner for pudding than the brut that is often wasted on this stage of the meal today.
Unfortunately I am not exactly an oracle which can predict the future as there is already a increasingly number of producers which start to produce wines with residual sugar. Yellow Tail – already famous for making not completely dry wines – announced recently that they will launch this month a new semi sweet Shiraz based wine: Yellow Tail Sweet Red Roo. But there are much more wines in this category which are having increasingly success as:
- Totally Random Sweet Red from Adler Fels Winery
- Sweet Bliss White from Sweet Bliss winery
- Barefoot Sweet Red Delicious Red Wine Blend from E&J Gallo
- Red Drop Sweet Red from Precept Wines
- Of course there is also the rise of Moscato as a whole new category…
It is interesting to note that all these wine names have the word “sweet” in it. While only short time ago people would smile at such wines and if they would buy them only without telling anybody that they drink such stuff, today the market seems ready for wines which promote themselves frankly as sweet. Ahhhhhh.
To conclude a few numbers: Nielsen data said that the sweet wine category grew 246% in dollar-value sales in 2011 versus the previous year. SymphonyIRI Gorup independently reported that more than 500.000 cases of sweet red wine were sold in the US in 2011. Not a lot but considering that this category didn’t exist at all a couple of years ago this is impressive.
A couple of links for further readings:
http://www.ereleases.com/pr/yellow-tail-introduces-sweet-red-roo-73247
http://thejosephreport.blogspot.com/2012/02/next-big-thing.html
Complexity
As you may know I’m studying Wine Business in Dijon, Burgundy. Last week we had maybe the best day of classes until now. We first had a class with Phil Reedman MW and then with Robert Joseph, wine consultant, writer and producer.
They talked about different topics, but there was a point which seemed particularly important to both of them: the wine industry is too complex. If we want that people still drink wine in the future and if we want to attract new wine drinkers we have to take more care about our customers, making it all more simple.
While I think that useless complications and complexity is in nobodies interest, I have the feeling that a certain level of complexity is justified, because, well because wine is a wide, multifaceted, diverse and finally complex argument.
In the following I will start by making a distinction between the “low involvement wine drinker” and the “wine enthusiast” (point 1).
Then I will explain why for the “low involvement wine drinker” a certain level of complexity can be acceptable and interesting. I will also indicate that the main problem for this category of wine drinkers is not too much complexity but rather an absence of real choice (2).
Then I will explain why the “wine enthusiast” is willing to learn about the diversity and complexity inside the wine world (3).
Finally I will explain why I personally enjoy reasonable complexity as a crucial part of the wine world (4).
(1) One of the beautiful things about the wine world is that it is so diverse, with that I mean that wine seems to talk to so many different people, from the “I don’t care what is in the bottle as long as I get drunk” drinker to the “do you do pump overs or punch downs during fermentation?” wine geek. Both approaches are completely ok and I don’t like wine snobs which feel superior just because they know the 13 different grape varieties which are grown in Châteauneuf du Pape (well actually since 2009 18 different grape varieties are allowed..Important is that the wine industry has to approach to this different wine consumers in a different way. While the average low involvement drinker is not interested in studying for month different appellations just to buy a bottle of wine, a wine enthusiast maybe wants to know what makes this appellations so unique.
(2) If we reduce too much the complexity we risk to reduce also the diversity of the wine world. And I think that is also not in the interest of the low involvement wine drinker. In fact for them the main problem is that there are too many different wines out there, while there is so little real choice, because they taste all more or less the same to them.
The consequence the wine industry should get out of this is that wine brands should differentiate more one from each other and produce a product which supermarket wine drinker really like. (How often did we all hear complaining that wine is to bitter, too dry etc.?).
But creating new wines which really are different from the existing and create a interesting diversity inside the wine world is not possible without a reasonable level of complexity. If all the wines are just labeled as Chardonnay or Cabernet low involvement consumers will be even more discouraged in front of the enormous choice of undistinguishable wines they have in every supermarket.
(3) In the high end market the situation is different: consumers appreciate a certain level of complexity, it is their passion to study wine and to discover little known wines. They don’t want just to know how a wine tastes and with what food they should pair it, as they know that already without reading the back label. They want more details about the people behind the wine, the way they make it and the land it comes from. All this information go automatically along with a certain level of complexity.
Also producers are interested in a certain level of complexity. If a white wine from Puligny- Montrachet (which is made out of Chardonnay grapes) would just say on the label “Chardonnay Made in France”, the producer has to lower his price, because he has to compete with all the Chardonnnays out there. Being a Puligny-Montrachet this wine is automatically something special in the imagination of a wine enthusiast and the producer can ask for a higher price.
(4) Recently I visited Domaine Marcell Deiss in Alsace. Talking about the different terroirs in Alsace and about complantation (growing different grape varieties in the same vineyard and harvesting them at the same time) Jean-Michel Deiss explained us his point of view on this argument: passionate wine drinkers want to learn more about wine and are willing to tackle a acceptable level of complexity. If they spend a certain amount of money on a bottle of Alsatian wine they are so much into the argument that they understand that not everything about it can be explained in five seconds.
For producers like Marcell Deiss it is not the main goal to reduce complexity and/or transform beer drinkers into wine drinkers (this is according to Michel Chapoutier a new world wine consultant approach, which is not really interesting; see Decanter March 2012). And I don’t think this should be the main concerns of top producers: they should concentrate on what they do best: make unique and outstanding wines.
That is what I meant in the beginning: the beauty about the wine world is that it is so diverse, there are wine producers as Marcell Deiss and on the other side big brands as J.P. Chenet. And if done well both approaches can work.
And that is what I like about the wine world. That is why I don’t understand when wine consultants say something like: “if you buy a computer you can choose between a Mac and a PC. Easy. Why do wine professionals don’t understand that it should be that easy in the wine industry?” Well, I’m personally quite happy that the choice is not just between white and red wine, I enjoy the diversity inside the wine world. You can’t compare the wine industry to the computer industry or any other industry. And exactly because it is different from any other industry, I want to be a wine professional and work in this industry.
High times in Chile’s Colchagua Valley
In my last two blog entries I wrote about our trip to Mendoza, Argentina. In this blog entry I will focus on the second part of our trip to South-America, which brought us to Chile and more specifically to the famous Colchagua Valley wine region.
From the city of Mendoza we took the bus to Santiago de Chile. It is a stunning 6 hours drive through the Andes! Outstanding vistas on big mountains as King Aconcagua (nearly 7000 meters, what makes him the highest mountain in the whole Americas and also the highest mountain in the world outside the Himalayan Range). Anyway I highly recommend this bus traverse from Mendoza to Santiago de Chile. Also Santiago left a very positive sensation! A modern, dynamic and metropolitan city.
But lets talk about the wines now: My first important encounter with the Chilean wine world was in 2003. At that time I lived in Napa Valley and worked for Frogs Leap. At the same time I shared an apartment with a Rodrigo Romero a Chilean winemaker. He influenced me extremely. There are very few people who thought me so much about wine as he did. Today he works as a winemaker for Dos Andes Wines, and produces great Pinot Noirs in the Biobio Valley in the southern part of Chile. I didn’t arrive to Chile with exactly negative prejudices.
The most interesting wineries we visited during our trip to Colchagua Valley were Luis Filippe Edwards and Clos Apalta by Lapostolle.
Luis Filippe Edwards produces around 12 million bottles a year, mainly for supermarkets. The top range includes well made wines as Doña Bernarda. A couple of years ago they started planting new vineyards with the aim to produce premium wines. These were planted on steep hill sides, with poor soils in cooler climates. Besides the fact that this are among the most beautiful vineyards I have seen in Chile the wines we tasted (they are not on the market yet) were very promising.
Here a of some of the beautiful new Luis Filippe Edwards hillside vineyards.
Clos Apalta by Lapostolle situated in the micro region Apalta valley is of course a complete different story: it is a small boutique winery which represents the crown jewel of the much bigger estate Casa Lapostolle (production around 10 million bottles), owned by the French spirit company Marnier. From a marketing point of view it is interesting to observe that the whole company Lapostolle gains a much higher positioning thanks to the outstanding quality and awareness of Clos Apalta. When people buy Lapostolle wines they have the feeling that they buy a small Clos Apalta. Still the Lapostolle wines are good, especially considering their reasonable pricing. Clos Apalta is something else. They build a special cellar in a unique setting.
The Clos Apalta winery
The barrel cellar
It is without doubt one of the most exceptional cellars I have ever seen. I wouldn’t describe it as an technical state of the art cellar, because you don’t see any machines at all in the cellar. The cellar has five different levels so that they don’t have to pump the wine at all – everything works just with gravity.
The five level winery of Clos Apalta
One of the most incredible facts is that they don’t use any destemmer: all the single berries are separated from the stems by hand with the help of 80 women. I heard that some producers do that for mini parcels of Grand Cru in Burgundy, but they have at the end a barrel of wine and not 80.000 bottles…
Good times at Clos Apalta
We tried different vintages of Clos Apalta, which is mainly Carmenere with some Cabernet Sauvignon and Petit Verdot (which by the way is getting more and more popular not only in Chile). Big, precise and straight forward. Perfect, maybe even too perfect. Just for the records in the last 10 years they were 3 times among the top three wines of the year for Wine Spectator…
The other wine which is produced in the same cellar is BoRoBo – which stands for Bordeaux, Rhone and Borgogne, the three favorite wine regions of the winemaker Michel Rolland. It is a unusual blend of the three main grape varieties of these regions – Cabernet, Syrah and Pinot Noir. Something special.
Still thinking about Argentina or simply Old vs New World
In my last post I wrote about the wines of Mendoza, Argentina. I got some feedback on the fact that I was maybe generalizing a bit too much saying that most of the towns in Latin-America are more on the humble side. Thank you for that! Because of course it wasn’t my intention to sound deprecatingly and I hope nobody took too serious what I said.
Still this comments made me think a bit more about the topic in general and especially about what confused me so much during my trip to Argentina. I came to Argentina with a romantic and maybe traditional view of the wine world and I found that most producers here can’t be caught with the old world wine categories I’m used to.
Again: I didn’t want to sound deprecatingly. The contrary is true: I love Latin-America. I was lucky enough to travel in most of Latin-Americans countries and I lived for a year in Guatemala. An experience which changed profoundly my way of seeing the world and life.
But this blog is not about my love towards Latin-America neither it’s a economical/cultural blog in which I discuss what the definition of humble is and if this definition applies to most of Latin-American towns.
What I wanted to say in my last blog post is that I was surprised that in a region like Mendoza they produce premium wines with high end prices.
I grow up with the idea that wine is a agricultural product, linked to a (wine) history and to a cultural (wine) heritage which is profoundly rooted in the area the wine comes from. I grow up with the idea that wine represents the region and the people living there. I found not much of all that in Mendoza and probably I wouldn’t find much of that in other new world or new old world wine regions. What I found mostly in Mendoza were super modern high tech wine cellars, made mostly with money coming from abroad and very little of all that “cultural wine environmental”. But what I also found – and I can’t point out that enough – were precise and clean wines, wines which intrigued me.
Still I was irritated by the gap between the area and their wines. But this irritation made me better understand nothing else than the forever persisting and often stereotype dispute between old and new world wine fans. While the philosophy of the first is full of conceptions linked to tradition, the focus of the latter ones is more on precise and scientific winemaking.
To conclude: I didn’t want to say that investors are wrong when they start doing premium wines in a region as Mendoza, I just wanted to say that it is different from the, maybe romanticized, approach I’m used to.
Wine Adventures in Argentina and Chile
Recently I did a trip to Argentina and Chile with my family. In Argentina we went to decadent Buenos Aires, to surreal Patagonia and to the wine country of Mendoza. Afterwards we traversed the Andes crossing into Chile. Here we hanged out in the vast area of Santiago, driving down to the coast and finally to the most well-known Chilean wine region: Colchagua Valley.
In this and the following blog entry I will tell you more about our wine adventures in this two countries. As always I will concentrate more on general impressions and not so much on tasting notes, as I think that this could be dull and super-biased.
That’s us above one the Glacier Tunél, one of the many glaciers around the Fitz Roy massif.
Let’s fast forward to Mendoza: the city of Mendoza itself with its 300.000 inhabitants is quiet uninteresting. There are a couple of decent restaurants as meat and wine quality is of course exceptional, but for the rest we didn’t find much to do. That is why we moved fast from Mendoza further south into the wine country itself. The most well-known wine-producing areas are Maipù, San Carlos and San Rafael. Most of the high quality vineyards are located between 1000 and 2000meters. We decided to stay in the Valle de Uco, which is located between San Carlos and San Rafael. Compared to wine regions in Europe we found the landscape not particularly interesting, quiet flat and dry. BUT you always have the Andes, with King Aconcagua (the highest mountain on the whole American continent) in the background. So it’s not all exactly boring.
But still, coming from Europe and used to the wine regions here we felt a bit lost during our stay. Maybe also because most of the towns we visited are so typical for Latin-America: simple, humble, apparently without many cultural spaces and with little to do. High quality restaurants are still an exception.
Completely opposite are instead the wineries: all cellars are new and look like big cathedrals in the middle of the desert. Most of the wineries are owned by foreign investors or people which make money in other businesses and are now also investing into the wine industry.
If you are still reading by now, you should have caught that Mendoza didn’t leave a Burgundy like impression on me.
The prices of the high quality wines are not low at all, probably also because most of it is exported.
What left a impression on me, is the fact that this wines are produced in a region which is completely opposite, from a economically and cultural point of view, from the ones in which they are consumed. I’m very aware of the fact that regions which we perceive today as traditional – let’s just think of Bordeaux or the Chianti area – were also built up to a certain point in an artificial way. In fact these regions were brought on the map only thanks to important investments from abroad. But I still believe that there is a difference: these regions were just “sleeping really deep” before foreign investors arrived, while in Mendoza quality wine was something unknown. All that left me kind of perplexed, but at the same time shows once again that the wineries here are doing an exceptional job: while a couple of years ago premium wines from Mendoza were rather unknown, today everybody raves about how great wines are here. Only a couple of months ago Wine Spectator dedicated the cover story to Argentinean Wines.
During our stay here we visited three wineries:
O.’ Fournier, located in the uprising Valle de Uco area. José Manuel Ortega
Gil-Fournier was also so nice to host us while we stayed in the area for a couple of days.
This is the state of the art wine cellar of O.’ Fournier.
Today they have around 100ha of vines in production and they produce around 1.000.000 million bottles.
The cellar is quiet impressive, all is over-sized, made for contemporaneous winemaking. The wines are all of absolute top quality, very precise and clean. They also have a great art collection in the wine cellar and one of the best restaurants in the area.
Another winery we visited was the top rated Finca Sophenia. While we visited they just finished major rebuilding works in the cellar. The wines, different blends made out of Malbec, Cabernet Sauvignon and Merlot, as well as some single varietals made out of Malbec and Sauvignon Blanc are all on the bigger side impressing with high concentration and big structure. As in many other wineries in Argentina and Chile they are assisted by the Bordeaux based winemaker Michel Rolland.
Finally we visited Bodega Salentein a rather “industrial” winery. They have a beautiful structure to welcome visitors, a nice restaurant, a not insignificant art museum, which is at the same time the main visitor center, and even a chapel. They produce different ranges of wines starting from the younger entry line of “Portillo” up to the premium line “Salentein Primus”. The focus is mainly on Malbec grape varietal. All the wines are well made, convincing mainly trough big structure and clear fruit aromas.
In the next blog entry I will go on and tell you something more about our experiences in Chile!
EWBC 2011
Wine producers, bloggers and social media consultants all agreed that social media is better suited to communicating than selling, during the recent European Wine Bloggers’ Conference (EWBC).
A couple of week ago I participated at the EWBC hold in Brescia, Italy. During this conference wine producers, journalists, bloggers (which in my opinion take themselves often a little bit to serious) and other people involved in the industry met to network and party basically. Between the parties there were conferences, tons of wine tastings and some winery visits. Every year the venue of the event changes, the previous editions were hold in Austria, Portugal and Spain.
I came home from this event with lots of new ideas and things to think about, what could I except more?
In this post I will try to focus only on one argument which seems particularly important to me: The general importance social medias, blogs etc. have in the wine industry.
Before attending this event I had the opinion that the importance was rather limited.
This for two reasons: first of all I’m not a big fan of the web 2.0 in general as I have the feeling that it is just a big time wasting machine most of the time.
Second I didn’t believe that the people which spent money on wine have the time to hang around Facebook or Twitter to read about wine. On the other side people which buy less expensive wines normally just go to the supermarket and buy the bottle with the biggest discount. For sure they are not interested in geeky wine bloggers, which write about obscure wine regions that in their opinion are now super-exciting.
I changed my opinion at least partly. While I still think that wine blogs are read mostly by other wine bloggers I realized that the web is a big opportunity for wine producers. That because it gives them the opportunity to communicate directly with their clients. In the past producers had a hard time communicating with their clients around the world, when they could only hope that agents, retailers and sommeliers would accurately forward their message.
The Champagne producer Tarlant is a good example of how to use the web successfully. He has 12,500 followers on Facebook, an incredibly high number considering that he produces only 100,000 bottles of Champagne per year. Benoit Tarlant, the owner, says: “The internet gives us the possibility to get directly in contact with people. We have to use that possibility.”
At the same time he says that social media is not the right medium for hard selling.
“While people are on Facebook they search for information and want to relax. It is a recreational space. It is not a commercial platform. If you try to sell something to people, they will stop following you.”
In the end I think the web 2.0 will be more and more important but it will never replace the traditional communication and marketing tools wine producers are using today.
Bolivia steep skiing
Have a look at this article published by Powder Magazin about Dave Rosenbarger, Giulia Monego and Cristian Pondella skiing some bigger lines in Bolivia.
Bolivia is not really famous for having lots of snow, and when they have it is normally quiet icy. But the three did a great job, also considering that there are not many information about skiing big mountains in Bolivia. Also great pics by Cristian Pondella!
