Tony's Web Diary
 | | | Flying Winemakers on TV! - November 2005
This year we have filmed the vintage; the wine harvest of 2005. The cameras have followed our latest globe-wandering team of 'Flying Winemakers' working around France.
Though the 'Flyers' represent only a small part of what my company - Laithwaites - does, the significance of what Flying Winemakers have achieved over the years is huge. Probably I should lose the capitals and write 'flying winemakers', although what started as a trademark of ours has ended up as a generic term listed in such august tomes as The Oxford Companion to Wine ...so it's an 'official' term for winemakers who commute from northern to southern hemispheres to make one harvest in September and another in March. Our Flying Winemakers and everybody else's flying winemakers (the idea was adopted by just about everybody in the wine business) have quite simply revolutionised winemaking across Southern Europe. Not so much by improving techniques as by raising the morale, hopes and aspirations of small winemakers everywhere.
Today, almost every wine producer anywhere believes he can make better wine - even great wine - and that wine drinkers around the world will give it an enthusiastic try and maybe make him famous. That was far from being the case in the eighties before the Flyers flew in and really messed up the wine maps.
Prior to 1987 wine maps were easy to draw. 'Here be good wine'. 'Here be great wine'. 'Here be quaffing wine'. 'Here be plonk'. It was all so easy. It was out of the question that anywhere hot could ever make great wine.
How that's all changed now! Just because ideas move around. And the Flyers carry so many ideas and seed them all over.
Anyway (climbs off hobby horse) during vintage the cameras have also followed the tracks of us who don't actually make wine; (me and the buyers) but go round encouraging wine producers everywhere to believe in greater possibilities, and to keep on making better and better wines to delight us.
Vintage is a busy time for all. It is when wine really comes alive. Even I come alive. The instant I catch the first whiff of fresh grape juice the adrenaline starts to pump. These five films follow all our leaping around from the end of August to early November.
Flying Winemaking started in 1987. They were all Aussies back then (no longer) and they brought rigorous method and cleanliness (for Australian winemaking comes out of a mostly German tradition) and a mastery of refrigerated winemaking. Australia is very, very hot and without refrigeration just could not make its fresh, fruity wines. Australia had no choice but to master the problems of heat. The warmer parts of Europe were much slower on to this. After all they'd managed without chillers for thousands of years. But inevitably, in the heat, they produced duller wines. Their regional typicity was strong, but nobody outside the local area was keen on drinking them. As I kept finding out. To my cost. So, I found us our first Aussie. Nigel Sneyd.
Above all else the Aussies brought their renowned 'can do - no worries' attitude and that total disrespect for authority and rules which has made them what they are.
Nigel was the first to do what they all have ever since; fly into a totally unknown, off-the-map, depressed little wine village, taste the fruit on the vine and go "Wow! Hey! Great Stuff! Lovely! We can make a cracker with this'!
The effect on winegrowers who loved their vineyards but had always been told that they live in a third rate area capable only of making 'simple' or 'quaffing' wine ... well, it was, and still is, just electric! Condemned - damned, in fact - with very faint praise, why ever before should they have worked themselves into exhaustion (as you have to) to make wine no-one would want because it had the wrong name. Wine prejudice - wine apartheid! - was still rife in Europe back in the Eighties. But the flyers just didn't know that.
Serenely ignorant of any traditional constraints, the first flyers pitched-in and along with the best local growers, worked round the clock and immediately made wonderfully vibrant, exciting wines. By 1988 with 'Bonneville' Sauvignon-Semillon, made in the lowly (then) Montravel region they had made a white in a forgotten little Dordogne village so good that it won the White Wine Trophy at the biggest, most important wine show in France's top white wine region; Burgundy. Quite a feat.
That's really what flyers do; they revive moribund wine villages. And these days they can do that without even going there. Because the word is out. The old maps and textbooks are ripped up. You put in the effort, you learn the skills, you too can transform your wine. And today's customers no longer find it surprising that great wines do now come from what were once the unlikeliest of places.
Mind you, the France-Australia culture clash could've started World War Three. Left to officialdom it would have. But pretty well all winemakers and vignerons of every nationality are sweet natured souls, just fascinated by each other's cultures (and I don't just mean yeast cultures.)
I love watching them work. I continue to learn every vintage. Normal wine producers tend to be secretive. But flyers work in other people's cellars so everything they do is out in the open. And boy, they love to talk. So they are perfect for filming.
We had an exhausting time making the series. They started filming me ten minutes after I had arrived back at our French home with Barbara who had been in hospital most of August after an emergency Op for a nasty peritonitis scare. So didn't do too much wine stuff in August! Hence if I don't sound too coherent its not surprising.
Kate Beale and her little team of bright eyed young cameramen and directors seemed to disappear into the background most of the time. But when you are rushing round - and vintage time is all rush - being asked to get in and out of cars three times and repeat that walk through the vines AGAIN ... it can wind you up. But Kate and Fran are so sweet. I remained calm throughout.
But the whole thing made me look again quite closely at what we do and why we do go and get so involved in our wines ... when we could, in fact, order wines perfectly well sitting in a UK office. That is the normal way to do it. Laithwaites has never been 'normal'. Watch the programmes and you'll see.
The Wines
The series-accompanying cases do not contain the wines you see being made because those won't be finished for another year or so. So, in the good old food programme tradition we offer "the ones we did earlier"!
Neither do the cases contain only Flying Winemaker wines. Far from it. They just contain wines of every sort but all with a success story to tell. The cases feature wines made by winemakers and vignerons not born with a silver tastevin in their mouths, but who believed they could make fantastic wines where none was made before. And you will meet them all in the films.
FLYING WINEMAKERS France 2005 on The UKTV Food Channel
Click here to view the broadcast schedule
Meet; Chief 'Flyer' Jean-Marc Sauboua, in overall charge, and André Roux
Les Abeilles, Côtes du Rhône AOC
André Roux, though he works in someone else's cellar, cannot I suppose be truly said to be a 'Flyer' as he only has to drive from his home on the east bank of the Rhone to the cellar at Chusclan. That's on the west bank and where we dropped him a dozen years ago, (shortly after he thought he had retired as one of the valley's most illustrious winemakers). At 76 he is the oldest in the group. Every year he still makes remarkable improvements and wins many medals. We will never let him retire!
Aimé Guibert
Réserve de Gassac, Herault VdP, 2003
Aimé Guibert is, you'd think, the last person likely to welcome Flyers in his cellar, being as apart from his great wine (THE great Languedoc wine) Daumas Gassac he is best known for fighting a long legal battle to prevent a major US winemaker from bringing its big scale operation to his Languedoc hills. But he and his son work happily with us making this special wine
Christelle De La Malmaison
XV du Président, Côtes Catalanes VdP, 2004
The 'Quinze', 15 or EX-VEE as it seems to have become known, is a huge success for us . Despite the fact that all wines generally seem to be getting stronger, the XV stands out for its smoothness and innocent-seeming fruit driven style. It is a Grenache-syrah (NOT A BLEND IT'S 100% GRENACHE) wine made in the hottest, driest part of France. An area both hotter and rockier than Châteauneuf-du-Pape where wines of this style were first popularized....and Appellation Contrôlée was invented
 The rugby-mad village of Opoul was where I first found the strong wine the President of the winery and the rugby club reserved a lot of this wine to revive and fortify his players. Before or after the game I am still not sure. Anyway, the good old XV just seems to get richer and fruitier with every vintage.
We filmed a lovely inter wine-village match down there for the TV which degenerated into a huge fist fight. Everyone was soon mates afterwards of course.. But the TV authorities made us cut it.... Sad.
Thierry Lesne and Bernard Derain
Prince de Dulphey, Crémant de Bourgogne AOC, 2003
Bernard Derain has never wanted an Aussie in his cellar. Indeed I have seen him threaten to boot one out for repeatedly questioning the naturalness of his fermentations, his fruit and his methods. "My boot you will feel up your xxxx , Monsieur..... that too is complétement naturel" was how it went. But he welcomed Thierry from Champagne and the two have crafted the best sparkling wine I have ever had outside Champagne itself.
Peter Schell & Christelle De La Malmaison
St-Tropez, Maures VdP, 2004
Peter is a Kiwi working in Oz now quite famous for his Spinifex wines, who has 'flown' for us for many years.
St-Tropez is known to everyone, possible not for its wine. But we found that the rich and famous residents had long ensured their privacy by protecting and conserving many acres of ancient vineyard which in a more viticulturally commercial area would have been ripped up and replanted. And old vines make the best wine once you bring in a top winemaker. We did. It worked a treat and is now a regular bestseller.
John Adams
Laithwaite Sauvignon Blanc, Bordeaux AOC, 2004
The Sauvignon Blanc which goes under our name is the result of the efforts of our Flying Winemakers in Bordeaux since 1988. We have found that what works best is to combine the talents of the local boy our Jean-Marc with a top antipodean Sauvignon specialist. John has his estate near Snowy River; one of Australia's coolest climates.
Jean Douillard
Domaine Douillard, Melon Loire Atlantique VdP, 2004
Muscadet is an area that has suffered a lot from bad image. So much so that some growers like Jean Douillard have taken to selling wine not as Muscadet but under the name of the grape from which it is made. The 'Melon' is a grape from Burgundy that makes wine that someone must have though tasted of melon. Melon works well in this very cool oceanic wine region (where grapes can be hard to ripen,) because of its natural resistance to frost. Muscadet or Melon like Jeans have improved out of all recognition in recent years, getting fatter, rounder ... due to a combination of climate change and better viticultural and cellar techniques. This is not the cheap and cheerful drink of your student years, but a wine to challenge its neighbours in Sancerre and Pouilly.
Enjoy the films. Tell us what you think we plan more but your encouragement would help!
And to help you focus your thoughts, why not grab a specially priced case of the Flying Winemakers' Collection? Click here for full details. |
|
|
