We’re at the recent Pinot Noir New Zealand 2001 Conference in Wellington. There are about four hundred of us tasting nine international pinot noirs before an illustrious panel of international journalists and winemakers. One of the English journalists present was Tim Aitken, editor of the UK’s Harper’s wine magazine, who took the opportunity to put forward rather a pithy question. To the panel at large he posed: ‘To what degree are low level winemaking faults like volatility and brettanomyces desirable or not in pinot noir?’ To which Californian winemaker Jim Clendenen, whose pinot noirs under his Au Bon Climat label are considered to be at the cutting edge of American expressions of this grape, immediately shot back with a reply that immediately brought the house down: ‘If you have to analyse where complexity (in wine) comes from, you don’t deserve to revel in it’. Funny, quick, clever, to be sure. On the other hand very unfair – since it’s an obvious case of playing the man, but also very snobbish from an intellectual point of view. It’s quite ok for us winemakers to understand what we’re doing, he’s really saying, but too bad for you who are trying to explain and communicate about wine to the marketplace. Let’s take a step backwards right now. Pinot noir is still very much the winemaker’s Holy Grail in New World countries, within which the Europeans quaintly list the US, Australia, New Zealand, Chile, South Africa and the like. One of the most special and sensual things about pinot noir is the sheer amount of different flavour and texture that good winemakers can capture in their wines, provided of course that the grapes were grown in good sites. This is known as complexity, and pinot noir will typically alter through time from primary fruit flavours of dark cherries, plums, rose petals and possibly blackcurrant through phases more suggestive of leafy vegetables, tobacco and undergrowth, to its final expression of flavour maturity which more resembles game meat and farmyard character. All the while, the best pinots accumulate flavour as they mature, always seemingly able to retain something from their previous phase. This is part of the reason why good pinot is so special, rare and sought after. There’s a global trend in winemaking today to develop as much complexity as possible in young wines so they look their best when they’re put up for sale. There’s no doubt that this has made most beverage wine intended for early drinking taste better and more interesting than ever before, it can certainly be over-done with wines like top-drawer pinot noir, which typically needs to cellar. Winemakers are indulging in techniques intended to make young pinots taste like mature pinots. Trouble is, it’s just not the same. The so-called ‘feral’ and undergrowth flavours now apparent in so many young pinots are mere caricatures of what genuine high-class pinot noir can become. The presence of flavours from spoilage yeasts like brettanomyces can perhaps contribute to the complexity in young wines, but once you’re awake to their unpleasant horse hair flavours, you quickly realise that all is not as it might be. All of which makes Tim Aitken’s question so relevant yet so poorly dealt with by Jim Clendenen. When you’re paying big bucks for a decent pinot noir – which virtually goes without saying these days – you’re surely entitled to get a feeling for the winemaker’s approach. Some wines made with big risks attached can taste great – for a short time at least – but most then quickly fade away into organoleptic awfulness. Winemakers wouldn’t themselves buy expensive wines without an idea how they were made and how they would cellar, so why should they expect the rest of us to? We’ve passed the time when winemakers would hide behind a cloak of mystique. We live in an age of information, not disinformation or witchcraft. Great pinot noir is thoroughly worth understanding. That way you can enjoy it more. And that, at the end of the day, is the point of it all.
