Grape Expectations

by Caro Feely

  The biodynamics used today has its roots in a series of lectures by Austrian philosopher-scientist Rudolf Steiner in 1924. With the onslaught of chemical agriculture after World War Two much of the agricultural wisdom of the previous two millennia was forgotten. Steiner's lectures helped to keep this knowledge safe for us.

  Equally important is the overarching concept of a 'whole farm' self-sustaining system. The farm must not live on inputs from outside, it must achieve a natural equilibrium. If illness arises, the cause of the problem, not the symptom, is treated.

  In a healthy, organically farmed vine, only 10 per cent of the plant is created by what it takes in from the soil. Only one tenth! The other 90 per cent is created by its complex relationship with the rest of the elements around it, particularly the sun. Plants are miraculous in their ability to take the sun's energy and transform it into energy like starch and sugar that we can eat. If a vine is offered chemical fertilisers and irrigation it becomes like a drug addict. Not required to find and create its life from natural elements around it, it takes more and more from its drip. Galileo Galilei said 'Wine is sunlight, held together by water'. What a poetic way of communicating this incredible truth.

  After reading the book I was convinced that we should try biodynamics. There was significant evidence that it would contribute to our quest to make expressive wines. Sean planned his next phase of vineyard work around the biodynamic calendar. Before he headed out to start the new season's shoot removal we talked about Dave's order, which was still up in the air.

  'I need to follow up. Can we do his price?' I said.

  'With our yields we need twenty per cent more,' he replied.

  'But we need this sale. He won't buy our wine at that price. I think we should go at ten cents over his price. That way it's not enough to scupper the order but it's enough to show we won't roll over and take whatever price he proposed.'

  'Just make sure you get the order,' said Sean putting the pressure of the decision back onto me. We had to get the order but we also had to agree a price that would keep us in business.

  The next day Dave phoned back. I dropped the juice I was serving Ellie and made my proposal with a tremble in my voice. Without this sale we were finished. If he didn't proceed with the order for the sake of that ten cents I'd never forgive myself.

  'I'll organise the order confirmation. You'll have it in a couple of days.'

  My body flooded with the euphoria of success and an adrenalin burst akin to that of having just avoided a car crash. That evening Sean and I toasted our success with a glass of the wine we had sold.

  I watched the email hungrily. Days stretched into weeks and still no confirmation arrived. I put our creditors off promising to pay in a few weeks and began to worry that he had changed his mind. We needed that confirmation.

  The kitchen drain had been smelly again and I was not looking forward to 'Operation Stench 2'. We needed a long-term solution that did not involve me lying on the ground with my nose in a stinking drain and a hosepipe in my hand every few months.

  'Don't worry,' said Monsieur Fracasse, a compact, energetic artisan in his fifties who had been helping Sean to finish the new terrace. The new terrace was to become our outdoor area. The original one and part of the house would become a self-catering cottage that would deliver much-needed rent long before renovating the old building that Helen and Derek had uncovered – if we could ever afford it. He was full of ideas and spoke fast. 'I work with someone who does septic tanks and drains. I'll call him to come down and have a look.'

  An endless blue sky spread above the Dordogne valley. Our vineyard was awakening from its winter sleep, with tiny pink shoots running along the vine canes. On the valley floor the last of the plum blossoms had given way to green leaves.

  'Pas de problème,' (No problem) he repeated, looking at the view and losing himself in it for a moment.

  'Tiens, autre chose (Another thing). What about the downpipe here? What's this?'

  The downpipe on one side of the terrace went straight into the ground. There was only one place that it could come from and that was the bathroom upstairs.

  'It must be the broyeur out-pipe,' I said.

  'You don't want any trouble with that,' said Monsieur Fracasse. 'We'll have to put new piping in for it.'

  His contact, Monsieur Jegu, arrived a half-hour later. He was a tall, polite man who had the ability to do ferocious amounts of work in a short space of time.

  'We can connect this kitchen pipe to the fosse. There should be no problems and it should solve the problem of the odours with the right angle. But to be aux normes you'll need a grease box at the end of the kitchen drain before we connect it up to the filter unit of the septic tank,' he said.

  'How much is a grease box?' My fear of costs related to plumbing came from the hefty amount of investment we had already made.

  'A couple of hundred euro.'

  I felt the usual frisson of fear associated with unplanned costs.

  'We have to do it. What do you recommend with the downpipe from upstairs? One day I want to get rid of the broyeur.'

  'I'll put in a sewage pipe that you can connect up if you ever replace the small pipe,' said Monsieur Jegu. 'Pas de problème.'

  'Perfect,' I said.

  Work started the next morning. A few hours later the grind of the digger stopped and I saw Messieurs Jegu and Fracasse deep in conversation near our septic tank. They motioned to me to come out to join them.

  They looked embarrassed and I thought they must have broken a pipe.

  'What's up?' I asked. They pointed at a little pipe that ran into the exit of the septic tank.

  'The out-pipe from the broyeur goes straight into the final filtration unit of the septic tank and not into the tank itself,' said Monsieur Jegu.

  'I don't think I understand. What do you mean?'

  'They connected the upstairs toilet to the out-pipe instead of to the septic tank itself so the waste from upstairs has never gone into the treatment unit. The new pipe must be connected to the main septic tank,' explained Monsieur Fracasse.

  I looked up to heaven. Our 'unusual' plumbing went a lot further than kitchen waste at the corner of the house.

  'How much will it cost?'

  'Don't worry, I won't change the price,' said Monsieur Jegu.

  He had picked up my nervous twitch. I thanked him and went inside to follow up on the order confirmation. Once again I found Dave out and left a message. I was getting seriously worried. He was our only hope of survival. Without his order we would not be able to pay the bottling costs and our suppliers could force our liquidation.

  Sophia and Ellie were growing up fast. Now four and two respectively, they were real characters. Sophia was the confident, studious type and Ellie, the rogue rock star. One spring evening, I stepped out onto the terrace into delicious warm air. The immense sky was clustered with stars. Ellie was dropping stones into her water-filled beach bucket while Sophia and Sean were deep in conversation. It was the weekend and way past their bedtime but the conversation was so interesting I sat down.

  'When I grow up will I find a good man like you to marry so I can have a baby?' asked Sophia.

  'Yes, you'll find a good man,' said Sean.

  'I think I want to marry you.'

  'But you can't marry me because I'm already married to mama. You'll find a man that can make your heart sing, like a beautiful morning.'

  'I don't need a man tonight because the stars are making my heart sing.'

  Later that evening Sophia called me upstairs. Ellie was already fast asleep.

  'I can't sleep because the stars are too bright and noisy.'

  'But the shutters are closed.'

  'I know but I can still hear them. They're excited that summer is coming.'

  I closed my eyes and listened. I could hear faint chattering in the distance of the still night. Perhaps it was a party in Gardonne, perhaps it was the stars.

  Back in the winter we had stopped heating the red w
ine and elected to wait for the malo to start on its own in the spring. Spring was now well under way, even the stars were telling us about it, but there was still no sign of the malo. We had promised buyers like Dave that we'd bottle our merlot in May, but now it was out of the question.

  Sean tried a malo starter culture, carefully following the instructions, making sure the temperatures were ideal and monitoring the wines like newborn babies. They remained calm and oblivious.

  'Don't worry,' said Lucille when I bemoaned how harsh the red wines still were. 'They will soften as soon as the malos are finished. When do you want to bottle?'

  'Before Christmas,' said Sean.

  'Good. We'll make sure the malos are finished by October,' she said.

  'But what else can we do?'

  'Let's test them again and if there is still no activity we'll try a starter culture again.'

  We were losing confidence in Lucille and we were tired of waiting. I found the wines downright disgusting and for all Lucille's assurances I found it hard to believe that the malo would make such a difference to how they tasted. I called another oenologist we had met a few months before, who specialised in organic and biodynamic winemaking. She visited to taste the reds. They were as grim as I remembered.

  'It's a good wine,' she said, leaving me gobsmacked. 'It's got a high level of organic matter and flavour. It needs to do its malo. Send me your PH, SO2 and AV levels and I'll tell you what to do.'

  A year before I had no idea what AV was and a faint notion from school science of PH and SO2; now I was becoming expert in sulphur dioxide (SO2), free sulphur dioxide, total sulphur dioxide, acide volatile (AV) and the like.

  Sulphur dioxide is the preservative used in winemaking and many other products. It is strictly controlled and measured in the French appellation system. Excessive doses of sulphur dioxide explain why you sometimes wake up with a sore head, much worse than you expect relative to the amount you drank. An upside of the reluctant malolactic fermentation in our red wines was that they had now completed a full year of maturation with almost no sulphur dioxide since they could not be dosed until it was complete; but that didn't make me feel any better; they still tasted horrible.

  We had to find someone to set us on the right track with our red wines. Thierry Daulhiac agreed to share his secrets with us. Château Le Payral was resplendent in a climbing apricot rose and newly painted shutters.

  'Caro, Sean, to be honest, I find making red wine difficult. With the white it's straightforward, with the reds: not so simple. Each year is different. Each year we try something new to strive for better quality. This year we bought a rolling carpet so the grapes can be transported into the vat rather than pumped. Despite all these efforts, I have only made one red vintage that Isabelle likes. Can you believe it? Twelve vintages and only one that she likes!'

  Isabelle, Thierry's wife, was a country girl with blonde hair and an easy, open manner. I tried to picture her spitting Thierry's red wine out in disgust and could not. I thought his red wines were delicious.

  Thierry showed us round his winery.

  'We developed this punch down system on the open vats; it's like the ancient way of making wine.' Punch down, or pigeage, is the extraction method typical of Burgundy whereas pump-over, or remontage, is more common in Bordeaux. When you punch down you push the cap of skins and pips into the liquid; when you pump over you pour the liquid over the cap. The punch down saves the wine from the trauma of mechanical pumping several times a day.

  'It's gentler on the grapes and it saves us time. We found the tannins were softer, more supple.'

  By the end of our visit we still didn't have the answer about how to make excellent red wine but with exchanges like this our knowledge was growing. The next time I was over at Pierre de Saint Viance's, our friend and bottler, I met Pierre's sister Benedicte and her husband Christophe.

  'You must visit them,' said Pierre. 'They're organic too.'

  And so, a couple of weeks later Sean and I arrived to visit their Château Couronneau bringing friends from New York to taste Christophe's wines. We drove up a cypress-lined avenue to the fairytale stone castle and chai. The castle was beautiful despite having been partially destroyed through two key periods of French history: the Hundred Years War between the English and the French which ended in 1453, and again at the time of the French Revolution in the late 1700s.

  It was a dream property; manicured, restored to perfection and ticking like clockwork. Christophe was mowing the front lawn. He was a wealthy ex-wine merchant with several employees but he was hands-on, his hands stained dark red, a tell-tale sign of a hardworking vigneron.

  'We have a hundred acres of merlot, most of it replanted to high density,' said Christophe. 'I have a worker responsible for every twenty-five acres. I used to use men but now I only use women. They do double the work in half the time.' He looked to me and my friend Hilary for a reaction. We all laughed. A young man joined us. 'Except, of course, Mickael. He is my secret weapon. He wrote to me saying he wanted to work on an organic vineyard. Now he runs everything.'

  Mickael laughed.

  Back in the winery, gleaming stainless steel vats were connected to a sophisticated temperature control system. Christophe gave us each a taste of his Château Couronneau wine.

  'You know what they say? To make a small fortune in wine, start with a large fortune. But it's not the case for the grand crus. A friend of mine was visiting Ausone a few weeks ago, the premier grand cru classé A in St Émilion, and a Chinese man arrived and wanted to buy five cases. He paid €250,000 on the spot. That's good business. I heard they cleared fifteen million euros in profit last year on about twenty acres.'

  Christophe's clever system for pressing allowed him to use a high quality basket press without losing much efficiency. We had picked up good ideas for the future – budget permitting – but his set-up was so modern compared to ours that there were not many parallels. We returned home to a storm warning. As organic producers, the weather controlled our every move in spring and summer. If rain was forecast, the vines had to be protected before it arrived. One missed treatment and mildew could take hold. Unchecked, the entire vineyard could be destroyed in a couple of days.

  Sean prepared his biodynamic concoctions in the kitchen then disappeared into the vineyard for several hours. His preparations smelt clean, herbal and comforting. Since starting biodynamic treatments we had dramatically reduced the amount of copper we needed to fight fungal disease. Copper, the ingredient officially sanctioned for organic producers to control mildew, has been used in agriculture for over 200 years but it's expensive and it doesn't break down; excessive use creates 'copper toxicity'. We wanted to reduce it and biodynamics was helping us to do that.

  The biodynamic preparations smelt so pleasant I enjoyed Sean making his concoctions in the kitchen. Systemic chemicals, on the other hand, smelt so toxic I could not be outside when farmers were spraying miles away. Favoured for their long-term effectiveness, systemic chemicals are toxic to the person applying them plus they enter the plant's system rather than operating by contact, thus leading to chemical residues in the fruit and in the resulting wine. My sceptic's heart was being convinced by hard evidence. Biodynamics smelt good and it worked.

  We decided to farm organically because we believed it was the route to great wines. There again, we had to question the financial wisdom of organic. It produced cleaner wines but it was labour-intensive and offered lower yields than conventional. It was early days but we were getting despondent. Unlike organic vegetables, where people expected to pay a premium for a healthy product, it seemed that wine lovers would not pay more for organic wine.

  Studies had shown that polyphenolic substances, the natural flavour compounds found in wine, were higher in the organic wines than in conventional wines. Not only was the flavour better, but organically farmed wine was also higher in antioxidants, the wonderful little critters that fight cancer. My stress-busting dark chocolate was also packed with them. Hand me a
nother slab and a large glass of organic red wine, please.

  Through our journey as a producer I realised that organic was more important than it seemed from afar as a consumer. It was more than quality, taste and health; it was fundamentally important for the well-being of the land. Farming chemically set off a series of imbalances that could only be adjusted by yet more interventions. Chemical farming leads to erosion from herbicides, toxic salinity in the soil from chemical fertilisers, long-term build-up of chemical residues and lack of biodiversity.