Fourth in a 7-part series on the Swiss wine harvest 2013
Meinrad Gaillard, Cave du Vidomne, with his grape pickers, comparing Petit Arvine bunchesGENEVA, SWITZERLAND / AMONG THE VINES – Wine artisan Meinrad Gaillard is quick to say making wine isn’t about money but about loving to make great wine, and the secret to that is time. Slow wine, wine that spends years in the cellar before heading to market, is his specialty. Few small wineries in Switzerland age their wines as long as he does because the return on investment is slow and space for storing wine is expensive, but it gives him enough to make a living, and he’s happy with that, says Gaillard.
Time: allowing time for the grapes to ripen fully, time to let the grape juice evolve into wine at the right pace, time to mature in oak and to age in the bottle, all before anyone buys it.
Top Swiss Gamay, winner of the Grand Prix du Vin Suisse for its categoryFor consumers, discovering that his well-made and aged wines sell for the same price after a few years as when they are new, comes as a pleasant surprise.
Best Gamay in Switzerland this year
Gaillard’s Gamay 2012 last week won the top national prize for a Swiss Gamay, a bottle he describes as a modest and unpretentious wine, designed “just to be a very good table wine that you can have with everyday meals, or with a pizza.”
Gamay 2012, Cave du Vidomne, perfect colourAt CHF13.50, it’s a bargain: a terrific little wine. You might have to wait for the next vintage to get hold of a bottle, though.
Cave du Vidomne, the small canton Valais family winery he runs with wife Cathy, is in the charming hamlet of St-Pierre-de-Clages, next to Chamoson. This is Johannisberg country par excellence, an area not particularly known in Switzerland for its Gamay, which makes the Gaillard’s first place prize at the Grand Prix du Vin Suisse (GPVS) all the more precious.
It’s a wine that is beautifully clean and upright, a very pure and elegant Gamay.
Last weekend at my house we had a bottle with our Saturday night dinner of sliced ham, boiled garden potatoes and salad: perfect. The nose was fruity, with Gamay’s typical notes of strawberry and raspberry but restrained compared, for example, to popular Beaujolais wines and with the added elegance of subtle floral notes. In mouth it was well-balanced and mouthfilling, perfect with our meal.
The harvest: a white wine
The day I visited the winery, 19 October, the GPVS prizes had not yet been awarded and although I knew the Gamay and a Chasselas, “Alizées” 2012, from vines at least 50 years old, were finalists, I was there for two other reasons.
I wanted to pick up some of Gaillard’s beautiful “Baton Rouge” wine, a superb and unusual (for Switzerland) red blend of Barbera and Sangiovese. Chamoson, not far from the Rhone valley riverbed, is hot and dry in summer, with rocky soil – not so different from some of the Italian areas where this is a specialty.
“Baton Rouge” spends four years in 450-litre oak casks and at least six months stored quietly in bottles before it goes to market. This is the winery’s top end product, CHF45 a bottle and well worth it, so it tends to sell out. The day I visit, little tags are being tied on and the 2008 is being prepared for its first clients.
I also want to see how a winery of this size and known for its quality, 2.5 hectares and 30,000 bottles produced a year from 20 grape varieties, manages to bring in the grapes and start making the wine.
Petite Arvine, a Valais specialty
Petite Arvine was the grape being harvested that chilly yet sunny Saturday morning, and Meinrad Gaillard was pleased – the grapes were perfect. Arvine, its more correct name (it’s sold as both), is famous for its slightly salty finish, a nervy wine whose dry version usually has notes of grapefruit and wisteria while slightly sweeter versions have notes of rhubarb.
This is a wine that anyone who likes unsweetened grapefruit juice will love – it’s probably my favourite Swiss wine when made well.
It is a native to Valais, rarely grown elsewhere, and happily at home here for over 400 years.
Arvine, he pointed out in the vineyards, which are in the AOC Chamoson area half a kilometre from the winery, is ready when the tight bunches of grapes are turning brown. He and the pickers examined bunches closely to check for slight rot (good) without moisture and thus mould (bad).
He pointed to the quantity of dead grapes on the ground – the winery prunes heavily to reduce yield and improve quality and these were the grape bunches snipped off in July, already starting to enrich the soil as they slowly shrivelled.
Picking the grapes – story continues below
Tiny team must work fast
Back at the winery it is a rush for a team of just three to unload the grapes, press them, ensure that the piping that carries the juice up and around the cellar and into the tanks, the cuves as the aluminum containers are called in French, is working correctly.
Meanwhile, one person is steadily washing the growing pile of plastic crates in which the picked grapes are transported. They must be clean and dry by tomorrow: cleanliness is godliness: the rule for quality wines.
The cool weather is a help, with the grapes staying at a relatively low temperature. The start of fermentation will be delayed until they are in the tank. Hot weather can mean grapes begin fermenting even before they make it back to the cellar for pressing, a potential source of problems.
It’s critical to get all of the picked grapes pressed and into the tanks before the day ends, to make sure the grapes remain healthy.
Romantic product, but don’t forget the engineering
Wine in the bottle is a romantic product but wine in the making is a feat of understanding nature and helpful technology, with an appreciation for good engineering. Gaillard’s busy cellar is home to vats and tanks and tubes and the tinkerer in him clearly enjoys this side of the business.
The basic white wine process is not complicated: grapes are delivered, whole bunches are put through a press, the bulky solid matter of skins, seeds and stems is filtered out and the thick juice, or moût, is sent through plastic pipes to the stainless steel tanks where it will ferment, a process that may take up to five days for white wines.
Story continues below
Beautiful juice, a harbinger of lovely wine
We test the moût, or must, the freshly pressed thick grape juice, some of the best I’ve ever had, so fruity and yet sharp. My somewhat bored daughter, tagging along, drinks a large glass in one go and accepts a refill. Gaillard measures the sugar level: 100 Oechslé, a sign of very definitely ripe grapes.
One month earlier the federal Agriculture Office had issued a notice that the grapes were on average at 65.2 Oechslé, only three points lower than the average for that date from 1925 to 2013, erasing fears that the weather was leading to a late harvest with under-ripe grapes. By mid-October the grapes had caught up with the average.
Swiss winemakers, like Germans and Austrians, measure the density of grape must, an indication of grape ripeness and sugar level, using the Oeschlé scale.
Gaillard reminds me that fruit juice at this stage has no smell other than fresh raisins: the aromas we connect with wine arise only during fermentation, the process when yeast turns sugar into alcohol.
The sugar level will gradually drop over the next few days as the white wine ferments at a low temperature, leaving the aromas intact – as the sugar level drops the alcohol level rises, and the grapefruit and perhaps rhubarb notes will become apparent.
For now, the grapes are in and pressed, and we wait for the tractor to return with the next load of grapes in crates.
Cathy Gaillard and son accept the GPVS prize for Switzerland’s top Gamay; Cathy, who ran the winery for several months after husband Meinrad had back surgery, was briefly overwhelmed by the award.I climb a ladder to check a vat of Merlot from the top. The red wine is happily fermenting, the visual equivalent of not quite simmering with its skins and other solids, the source of red wine’s colour.
We visit the cellar, a quiet and peaceful place where the barrels sit, letting the wines breathe as they mature, and where bottles rest, waiting their turn.
Happily, it’s now time for some of the bottles to go to market.
These are wines to drink when you want to take a little extra time to live. Let the wines be your guide to getting the rhythmn right.
Ed. note: as with most small, family wineries in Switzerland, visits are by appointment only (they’re usually out in the vines or working in the cellar). Meinrad Gaillard’s English is fluent.
Swiss wine harvest 2013
Part 1: Swiss 2013 vintage could be very good
Part 2: Let the wine grapes roll: harvest underway! Jean-René Germanier, Valais
Part 3: Nature makes the calls, Henri Cruchon, Vaud