I’m about to start a series of reports here on older vintage Swiss wines. I’ve hesitated because of a niggling question: why should the public care about them? What’s the big deal, as far as drinkers are concerned?
First, some key dates if you want to taste vintage wines:
Two excellent ways to enjoy and learn about older Swiss wines are the Nuit des vieux millésimes project and the semi-annual tastings of the Mémoire des Vins Suisses that are open to the public.
The Nuit des vieux millésimes is 19 March, with 15 restaurants in French-speaking Switzerland taking part and the Festival des vieux millésimes is 21 March, Saturday, at the Château d’Aigle. A special treat for 2015, if you happen to be in London, is that Mosimann’s restaurant is taking part, featuring older vintages from Robert Taramarcaz at Domaine des Muses.
The next Mémoire & Friends tasting for the public is in Zurich 30-31 August 2015.
I decided to ask several wine producers what they thought, since I was taking part in a number of vertical (different vintage) wine tastings across the country.
For them, the answer is so obvious that they don’t usually understand the question. They want to know the optimal moment for selling their wines to consumers. And they want to understand how their wines evolve, which helps them to improve new wines.
But that doesn’t tell us much about why you and I should care. Here’s my take, after reflecting on remarks made by three producers.
Two excellent ways to enjoy and learn about older Swiss wines are the Nuit des vieux millésimes project and the semi-annual tastings of the Mémoire des Vins Suisses that are open to the public. The Nuit des vieux millésimes is 19 March, with 15 restaurants in French-speaking Switzerland taking part and the Festival des vieux millésimes is 21 March, Saturday, at the Château d’Aigle. A special treat for 2015, if you happen to be in London, is that Mosimann’s restaurant is taking part, featuring older vintages from Robert Taramarcaz at Domaine du Muses.
The next Mémoire & Friends tasting for the public is in Zurich 30-31 August 2015.
Wines that teach us
Wine is a living, breathing beverage, one of our finest examples of human creativity coupled with nature. Wines made to recipe with the goal of changing as little as possible from one year to another ignore nature’s voice. They’re comforting to people who don’t pay much attention to their wine, or who don’t know much about it, or who aren’t really interested in more than the alcoholic high.
Wines that allow nature to speak and tell us about the growing cycle for a given vintage are the wines worth drinking – when they are young, but especially when they are older. They are our teachers: from them we learn about wine. Even if you’re a beginner, this is where you start to make sense of the world of wine.
Three winemakers, three philosophers
Meinrad Perler, founder of Agriloro in Ticino and Swiss Winemaker of the Year in 2010, told me he learned much from an older winemaker who liked to say that there are vintages when nature cries, and we need to understand why. And then, the sage told him, there are “the orgasmic years”! We need to listen to both. Perler recalls a client who said he wanted to order a quantity of wine, but only from all of the winery’s best vintages. “I told him, you don’t understand my philosophy.” And he refused to fill the order.
Raoul Cruchon from the Henri Cruchon winery in Echichens, near Morges in canton Vaud, whose biodynamic wines are making a name for themselves, told me that we don’t understand the beauty of a wine from a great year until we see it and learn to love it in lesser years, too. We’d all like the world to appreciate us that way – why not our wines.
Dominique Rouvinez of Domaines Rouvinez in Sierre, Valais, said during a tasting session of “Tourmentin” to mark that popular blend’s 30th anniversary that “in the face of success we often forget the past”. He was referring specifically to how skeptical people were when he and his brother created what was one of the first contemporary blended wines in Valais.
Wine history is tied to a region’s history, and also to our own. Tasting a 1985 Tourmentin brought back a flood of memories for me – just as Rouvinez pickers were harvesting the grapes I was arriving in Switzerland from China on the Transiberian Express. When the wine was beginning its life in oak barrels Reagan and Gorbachev were meeting in Geneva, and the Cold War was drawing to a close. The weather that autumn was perfect and the grapes, which ripened slightly later than usual, were “generous”. Even nature was optimistic, it seems, and the wine gave “great satisfaction, right from the start”.
Old wines – common misperceptions
A few suggestions if you’re starting to taste older wines:
Quality: The first idea to get rid of, with an older wine in front of you, is that it is automatically better or more valuable because of its age. This is one of those Bordeaux mania side effects: aged wines increase in price, therefore they must be better. Not so, and be prepared to be open to mixed quality – especially if you’re trying a 10-year-old bottle of a forgotten wine you happened to find buried under your son’s old toys in the garage. My favourite example of this, this week, is the 150-year-old wine from a shipwreck that was tasted to great fanfare and much laughter, when the judges couldn’t get to the spittoon fast enough!
What to expect: Not the same wine, just more elegant, but wines less marked by their primary aromas and in the case of older wines by the presence of tertiary aromas – or odours, more precisely, according to specialist Richard Pfister, author of Les parfums du vin. Wines in their youth have primary aromas from the grape, which reflect the grape variety. Think of a grapey Muscat versus a lime and green apple Sauvignon Blanc nose. Secondary aromas usually come from these, but develop during the vinification process, especially fermentation. An example: cedar or oak, especially for wines matured in barrels.
Tertiary aromas develop during the maturing process before the wine is bottled and while the bottles age. Example: beeswax. Not everyone likes these aromas, and if you’re expecting fruit, these can be a shock.
Price: if you can find older wines in Switzerland, they generally cost more because the winery has to provide storage space for barrels and for the bottles to age. Consider the price of real estate in Switzerland and you won’t question this commercial logic.
Availability: Swiss wineries as a whole traditionally have not aged their wines and, while this is changing, space is at a premium and most Swiss vineyards are small, with small quantities. Longtime fans are learning to love aged versions of their favourites. The result is that stocks tend to run out quickly. A handful of wineries make a point of selling older vintages, however.
The “right” time to drink a wine: Your best bet is to ask the winery and follow their advice because this is an area that has a never-ending learning curve. Oaked wines tend to age better than those made in stainless steel, for example, but that’s a gross over-simplification. And for years the common wisdom about Chasselas was that it must be drunk young. Regular tastings of older Chasselas wines in the past 10 years have shown that if well made they often age beautifully
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