Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
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 sul-
phur 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 tosharehissecrets withus.Château LePayral wasresplendent inaclimbing apricot
rose and newly painted shutters.
'Caro, Sean, to be honest, I find making red wine difficult. With the white it's straightfor-
ward, 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 trans-
ported 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 mak-
ing 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.
