Today, driving through the middle of Melbourne in peak hour, I heard a raw, rasping, but totally seductive sound coming up from the inside lane. Without question it was a Ferrari, struggling to come to grips with the heavy traffic, a 60kph speed limit and a short interval between poorly programmed traffic lights. Glancing to my left I glimpsed the frustrated vehicle, almost driving up the exhaust pipe of the Holden ahead of me in the process. Because to my eyes at least, the Ferrari had something horribly wrong with it. Instead of being the anticipated proprietary red, it was another hue entirely. Indeed it was completely the wrong colour for a Ferrari – a bad colour in fact. It was the colour of a pencil lead, graphite. What on earth did someone think they were doing?
Strangely, perhaps, the wine that made me think of this particular Ferrari is a Premier Cru from Nuits-St-Georges called Les Murgers, made by Alain Hudelot-Noellat, vintage 2008. I have a glass of it near me right now, a few inches away. This wine, a typical expression of this maker’s particular art, is actually the vinous equivalent of a grey Ferrari. So what’s wrong with it, I hear you cry? Absolutely nothing at all.
To return to Planet Earth for long enough to bring you with me, this metaphor is worth exploring for a moment longer. Ferraris, to each and every one of us capable of normal thought, are red. We typically contemplate any Ferrari not conforming to this most basic of requirements in a particular, peculiar and regretful way. It’s what we want, but it’s dressed up as if by mistake. Its design, its engineering and its performance are thoroughbred, but it’s marching to a different tune. It’s a penguin, but rather than wearing its habitual dinner suit, it’s attired in a significantly more drab-looking morning suit instead. So it almost meets our expectations, but it’s dressed for someone else, not us. All the same, it’s still a penguin.
Returning to Wine
Wine does that all the time. Just as Ferraris are all supposed to be red, the wines of Bordeaux are supposed to be robust and sinewy, the shirazes of the Barossa ripe, oaky and jammy, and the chardonnays from Margaret River heady, thick and concentrated. We live in a world of preconceptions with wine, in which vintage charts incorrectly suggest uniformity across entire regions and in which powerful critics like Parker judge wines against their own preconceptions, rather than what they find in the glass before them.
To succeed, it’s essential, then, for winemakers to follow the pack, and to deliver conservatively on popular or media-driven expectation. To do otherwise is to take a risk, and a risk that deserves careful consideration.
Striking a Chord
Listen to great musical performers playing the same tune in a live context and you will not often hear the same sounds repeated exactly twice. Creativity and art are often expressed in the variations created around a theme. It’s no different with wine, and it’s actually the very thing that the rejuvenated movement towards the individual expression of ‘terroir’ is all about. Winemakers and their growers should be encouraged for expressing the very things that makes their sites unique. Shouldn’t we exalt over the differences, rather than the similarities?
That’s why, when a maker like Alain Hudelot-Noellat elects to defy the popular trend in Burgundy by retaining a subtle, herbal expression of pinot, delivers an emphasis of a fine and fragile structure and utterly refuses to modernise his approach to the grape with an overabundance of alcohol or squeaky new oak, I become very interested. His wines could easily be made in a more mainstream style, and in doing so he’d quite probably become more famous and make more money. Obviously, he’s far more interested in the integrity of his own, personal philosophy, regardless of the opportunity cost in doing so.
To shun popular trends and to follow their own convictions has been what has made and broken many a winemaker. It takes vision and bravery. Sometimes the vision can be so false that the bravery then required can resemble stubbornness and even stupidity. But when it works, such vision can be capable of delivering wine of such quality, of such rare and individual beauty that regardless of whether or not it might conform to a popular expectation, it remains totally compelling. Just like the Les Murgers 2008, the volume of whose fragrance and magnitude of arresting beauty matches in perfect disproportion the level now barely remaining inside its bottle. It’s a wine of rare subtlety and beauty that takes time to unravel its true personality. It’s classically formed, with much of what is expected from its source, but retains an emphatic individuality. Having breathed, it nearly conforms to expectations, but then stops well short. It remains entirely true to itself.
Perhaps, then, I should find out who was driving that graphite-coloured 430 convertible. And offer an apology.
Vive – as the French are wont to say – la difference!
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