Blending sites is not blending terroir

The salesman looked deeply puzzled as I put my $120 down on the counter.  “Great choice - you will love this” he had said. I had replied “No I will not’.  

As I walked out of the store, clutching my bottle of current release Nuits St Georges Les Vaucrains,  I regretted my rather ungracious response.  Then thought better of it. Surely Les Vaucrains is truly no ones favorite wine. I was buying it on my friend’s instruction for a higher purpose than intrinsic enjoyment - to drink alongside other burgundies at her Cote de Nuits tasting event the next day.  What mattered was not how much we enjoyed every individual wine but that the wines tasted different, faithfully reflecting the unique and tightly demarcated soils in which the vines were grown - a reaffirmation of the celebration of difference that is at the core of burgundian sensibility.  And we were going to demonstrate this emphatically, even if it meant drinking the brutally structured Les Vaucrains.

This value proposition represented by this strong allegiance of grape and specific place does not look kindly on blending from several vineyards, no matter how closely situated.   Burgundy’s appellation rules are biased against this, mandating downgrading a wine that is a blend from different villages and prohibiting naming more than one vineyard on the label. It is as if the purity and authenticity of terroir is maintained only by binding the concept to very small parcels of land. So appellation law almost obliges you value that the wine reflect site specificity over how good the wine actually tastes. Authenticity is valued more than intrinsic quality. The rules in Barolo similarly prevent one naming two or more vineyards on the label, though a single vineyard need only be 85% from the site named.

And wines from small plots usually command higher prices. If you push the point far enough every square meter on earth has its unique terroir.  And the consumer is being asked to believe that the smaller the plot the more “authentic” its terroir expression. “We make just 75 cases of Block 35”. So you should pay more, right ? Even if the wine is perhaps not as enjoyable as it would be if it had been blended with wine from the neighboring block.  You must pay for authenticity - and authenticity is somehow heightened by small delimitations of terroir.  The consistently lower prices of the blended “classico" bottlings in Barolo relative to the same grower’s single vineyard bottlings reflect the market’s preference for narrowly defined sites on the label.  When drinking the brutal Les Vaucrains perhaps one has to take solace largely in the notion that, even if not especially pleasant, the wine is undeniably an expression of a particular place.

This has to stop. The pendulum has swung too far towards favoring narrowly defined sites. Let us trade a little purely cerebral satisfaction deriving from precise site specificity for the increased gratitude of our taste buds. Site specificity seems to have risen in esteem to overwhelm pleasure. 

It is surely irrefutable that blending wine from several sites will likely produce a wine of greater balance and perhaps complexity than a wine from all but the greatest single vineyard. The likes of Maria Teresa Mascarello and Guiseppe Rinaldi would argue it always does. Vineyards of different soils, altitudes and exposures complement each other.  Prior to going their separate ways the brothers Jamet had, according the the Rare Wine website, 25 parcels in 17 lieu dits across the Cote Rotie. Blending plots with different soils, altitudes and exposures in Cote Brune and Cote Blonde in their view produced a more complex wine. Not all the plots are always used in the finished wine. The same is true at Chave and Clape, even though they have vines in many famous designated sites. They blend because the resulting wine is simply better and likely more consistently so over successive vintages.

Nor should there be any heresy in asserting that a terroir may equally well be defined as a larger area than a minute single vineyard designation. As is well known Jean Louis Chave has vines in several individually designated vineyards on the Hermitage Hill and yet he makes a single red Hermitage because that is how he sees the terroir he is seeking to reflect. The terroir he is seeking to reflect is Hermitage - the entirety of the hill. They have done so forever. Their prowess and skill in blending has long been admired. There are of course practical limits being able to do this.  You need vineyards in the appropriate locations.  If you only have vines in Le Meal you had better make a Le Meal, because it alone is a poor terroir refection of the entirety of the Hermitage Hill.  The same is true of Auguste Clape, who could clearly make a series of single vineyards from their holdings in Cornas but choose to make a single bottling. Theirs is not a bottling of the Reynard site - but of Cornas as a whole. It would be interesting to discuss this with Bernard Faurie who bottles different combinations of vineyards from the Hermitage Hill, labels all the bottles simply "Hermitage", but designates the particular vineyard combination by a different colored capsule. 

This same argument applies also at a micro level. Although there are actually several better examples, the single vineyard Bonnes Mares in Burgundy is notorious for having two quite distinct soils in the upper and lower portions of the vineyard. Yet Christophe Roumier, though having parcels in both, blends them to create a wine faithful to Bonnes Mares as a whole. My understanding is that in fact every grower having parcels in both soils either co-vinifies the grapes or blends them later as wine. De Vogue, incidentally - having parcels largely in only the red soil of the lower part of the vineyard - fully concede their Bonnes Mares does not reflect the whole. One senses they regret this.  Those with multiple plots across Echezeaux or Clos Vougeot also typically blend these. The only example I can think of of a grower creating two different wines from the same designated vineyard (other than an old vines version) is Etienne de Montille in respect of his two holdings in Aux Malconsorts - and he has very particular reasons for doing so. Of course if you have a monopole - such as Clos de Tart - no one would even consider making separate bottling based on soil type alone - because the purpose is to express the terroir of the entirety of the monopole. And Clos de Tart has many different types of soil. My point being that a designated vineyard is considered the optimal scale of the expression of terroir and that to go smaller by bottling two versions from the same vineyard because the terroir would seem to be different in some parts of the vineyard to other parts runs counter to that perceived optimum. But if one accepts there are different soil types in the same vineyard one surely has to accept that to arrive at the perceived optimum expression of that vineyard one needs to blend from those differing parts.   And so blending does not dilute terroir. 

And indeed a village Vosne Romanee can be at its most wonderful when it is made up of vines grown throughout the village, so long as you regard Vosne Romanee as a whole as having a singular and identifiable terrior. Les Barreaux alone does not reflect it, neither does Aux Communes - but a blend of these might come close. Gerard Mugneret intentionally seeks to create a Vosne Romanee at the village level that is “geographically representative of the village as a whole” by blending plantings from the north, the center and the southern end of the village. In doing so he is defining the terroir he is seeking to reflect in the bottle quite widely. Frederic Mugnier blends his Les Plantes and La Combe d’Orveau parcels in Chambolle because he feels the resulting wine is better, Les Plantes contributing body and structure and La Combe d’Orveau elegance and finesse. Perhaps lieu dits ought be thought of as an indicator that the wine is not a blend of wines from throughout the village -  but from a single site that will not in fact faithfully reflect one’s expectations of the typicity of a village as a whole. 

There is surely equal wonder and no loss of faithfulness or authenticity to terroir by a modest expansion of the physical territory in respect of which a defined terroir is asserted, which itself has an identity no less particular than a smaller site. Blending sites does not dilute terroir. The terroir one is seeking to express is just different. It is no less precise or authentic. It is perhaps even more difficult to deliver that in the bottle.

I refer you to Jancis Robinson’s article entitled “When terroir trumps quality”, published on her website on May 28, 2018, which discusses the tension that can arise between authenticity and quality.