Defining a style, a question of patience, commitment and passion

The winery i work for has produced its first vintage in 2003, and i arrived in NZ with the 2004 vintage being bottled. Although my role is in sales and marketing, I worked with the winemaker in 2005 and was bottling the wine, which got me to understand about the bottling process, without touching the wine in the cellar though. In 2006 we changed winemaker, and from there i stopped bottlings, and have been part of the blend tastings, and diverse experimentation tastings with the winemaker, his assistant and the viticulturist. I have been lucky enough to have tasted quite a bit before i started working with this winery, and that the winemaking team welcomed me in their tastings and blending decisions. I am sure it is something not so obvious in lots of wineries, but here my opinion was taken into account for both what it was in terms of pure tasting and what it needed to be from a commercial point of view as well.

Therefore, it's been now 5 vintages that we work on understanding the characteristics given to both our sauvignon blanc and our pinot noir by first the different soil types of the estate, and then different other components such as different coopers (which we now have defined which ones suit better our wines and styles), different finings, different closures (cork, screwcap, which degree of sealing etc.) etc.
The second important point for us was to determine 3 styles, corresponding to our 3 labels, which also correspond to 3 price points, and in the end 3 different terroirs (or almost). Starting from scratch, to succeed in determining these 3 labels is a fantastic story we write vintage after vintage, for we have to understand what we get from nature first, and then try to integrate the different components listed above (and more indeed), and finally define 3 different profiles. We wanted 3 wines showing one identity but with 3 syles that we defined through natural differences. To be more precise, the clays would give a sort of richer wine, while the gravels would be generally finer. That was the base of our styles.

It is now very exciting to see that after trying different blends from different soil types, or at different proportions, we finally defined our 3 styles. Today we were tasting the final blends of pinot noir 2009, the objective of the tasting was to see the wines before and after fining.
But finally it is rewarding to realise that we have defined these 3 styles, and that they show the identity, the philosophy of that one winery and its terroir. It is obvious on the nose and in the mouth that each wine corresponds to its label, and that it is in the continuity of last vintage. Blind, you can classify them per label. The identity is generally elegance, subtle fruit rather explosive fruit bombs, rounded mouth, femininity rather than big extracted wines - and it is true for our both varieties. But we managed to decline this identity in 3 styles, 3 labels, 3 different price points - and this with the same work in the vineyard (same yielding, same ripeness). It is a question of precision on the tastings, and blending propositions back and forth, and it is above all a question of time... patience has a good reward though. I have of course to add that this was possible because the vineyard is worked to show natural characteristics (or terroir), and that the style of wine we wanted to produce was first defined in the vineyard.

This winery brings its new lots of joy to me, everyday, not one excepted - since 6 years. It is for me such a beautiful story to be part of, this story is being written right now and i love being part of drawing these lines one by one.

Who I am in few words…

27th of December... I had just turned 27, and decided to start a blog. Things leading to another, work over my head, trips here and there, and finally my poor blog ended up with 2 posts after some 8 months. Ah, working on this blog requires some time. So there I am again, with new objectives. But first, a little description of who your devoted blogger is:

I have been acquainted with wine for just a few years, 5 exactly. I began drinking sweet white wines - nice, easy and for a woman slightly more elegant than drinking beer out of a bottle. (Nothing wrong with beer, I actually love them too.) Little by little I began asking myself questions about it, without ever being able to understand it. Always very studious at school, this was a subject I couldn't get through books, no matter how small and easy these were. I should also probably mention that I’m from France, which is certainly not the easiest country when you want to start understanding wine.So 5 years ago, after a business school, I decided to specialise myself in wine marketing, and this has been the greatest decision of my life, so far (leaving room for some more is certainly a good idea…). I started a year of travel around more than 20 countries from Sweden to Hungary, through Germany, France, Portugal, Brazil, Argentina, USA, Australia etc... and all this while studying – basically a concrete education based on daily tastings directly from the source. Stopping from time to time in universities (very rarely though), meeting the different actors of the wine industry and most of the time going from wineries to wineries wisely listening to the winemakers, viticulturist, sales and marketing people, or owners and catching every possible answer to my questions. Sounds like a dream? Indeed it's been great.

Books would have taught me about theories, but I got to feel wine in every sense: with my nose and palate, but also through the stories and the people. I got to feel wine from Where it was from, from Why it tasted a specific way, from Who were the people behind the wine and What it was made with and from. The wine in a glass always brings up these 4 W questions to me, some wines will answer more than one of them, but only a beautiful wine answers these 4 questions truly. That was actually the name of my first blog – wineandthe4w.over-blog.com.

Fresh start.

Before I end this introduction up, I’m here to share information and don’t pretend knowing everything since I actually know such a little compared to what I still have to learn, and that’s why I love so much wine!

All this being said, so many of these blogs or websites already exist! Why creating another one and most importantly how different will that be? …