Ómós Digest #61: The Curse, the Mothership + Noble Rot.
An introduction to the philosophies of oxidative and reductive wine making. Written by Cathryn Bell.
This week’s newsletter is brought to you by sommelier Cathryn Bell, the creator of Wine Rover, a consultant sommelier service. She previously worked as head sommelier of 2* Aimsir restaurant in Celbridge and junior sommelier at Ashford Castle in Co. Mayo. If you haven’t read her debut article for the Ómós Digest, you can find it here. In her second article, Cathryn introduces us to the philosophies of winemaking, most notably oxidative and reductive, while offering an expansive list of some producers in each category and a useful glossary at the end. This week’s newsletter is on us, but please consider becoming a paid subscriber, to directly support the writing and research, and get access to lots of extra content, first dibs on ticketed dinners, recipes, including access to the entire archive. We REALLY appreciate the support!
Cúán and the Ómós Team.
Back in May, I travelled to Spain for the first time to attend a huge wine fair. During my stay, I was invited to join Aga Niemiec from Ireland’s leading Spanish wine importer, Vinostito, on a visit to winemaker Marc Isart of Bodegas Cinco Leguas and his project, La Maldición, just southeast of Madrid. You might not have heard of Marc but there’s a good chance you have drunk some of the wines from a project that he co-founded – Comando G. For those of you who haven’t met the Comando G wines yet, I politely suggest that you get on it whilst you still have a chance of finding them in the wild.
Marc left Comando G to take up residence in a small area of his family’s vines, setting up a winery in the cute little town of Chichón. It’s made up of old vine Tempranillo and an obscure local white grape variety called Malvar. These vineyards are notoriously difficult to reach and work in, which is why Marc called the project La Maldición (The Curse!). This visit turned out to be one of the most impactful tasting experiences I’ve had, not just because of the wines themselves, but because of the insight into how exactly the wines came to be; the realities of which we are often disassociated from as wine drinkers who pick bottles off shelves or out of boxes.
The curse
The story starts in Chinchón, where Marc picks us up in the late afternoon and it’s still as hot as hell. We head to the vineyards and get as close as we can with the van on the clay soils before gamely setting off on foot. It feels like we’re walking on the moon; the ground is soft and springy, crunching as the chalk topsoil breaks underfoot (excellent soils for retaining water when there’s a lack of it in this hot climate). Plus, the vines are in bush form - untrellised, stumpy and sturdy with 3D shady canopy formations, sparsely spread out so there’s less competition for water and nutrients.
Malvar is a relatively unknown grape variety in Spain and those who do know it consider it only ever so slightly sexier than Airen – Spain’s second most planted grape, historically used for making bulk wine and distilling into the spirit that fortifies Sherry. So what do you do if you are Marc Isart in charge of a hard-to-reach vineyard, the potential of which is yet to be explored? Put it through its paces of course!
In Marc’s immaculate winery, there’s an array of different fermentation and maturation vessels, from steel tanks to clay tinajas (as is tradition in the area) all in the service of channelling Malvar through different approaches and seeing what it can do. Reductive and oxidative techniques, skin contact, inert vessels, oak barrels, zero added SO2 experimentations and even biological aging are at work around us. Marc makes very limited bottles of some of the individual expressions at play here, but his gateway wine is called La Maldición Malvar De La Olla. It’s a montage of these different wines put together and makes for an utterly delicious and compelling 360 degree look at exactly what Malvar can do. We get into position around the token spit bucket and begin to taste.
Reductive vs oxidative winemaking
Now, I am not a winemaker, nor am I an expert on the intricacies of the magic of fermentation or élevage (how a wine is “brought up”), but I can take you through the experience of this tasting and the concepts at play as a sommelier and a wine drinker (one with synaesthesia at that). All of the approaches affect how a wine tastes, feels, moves and in my mind, sounds and looks. It would be fairly ambitious for us to get through them all in the scope of one article, so today we’ll focus on the core winemaking philosophies that determine the fundamental journey of the wine: reductive and oxidative winemaking .
To do this, let’s start with oxygen itself. Oxygen is crucial in winemaking: yeasts need oxygen during fermentation and then after that, oxygen management is key, depending on which way you want to go. Reductive winemaking is all about minimising oxygen exposure to preserve the wine’s fresh, primary fruit characteristics and enhance any notes that one might call “minerality”, particularly if you’ve got an interesting minerality to show. On the other hand, oxidative winemaking is letting oxygen at it a bit more, opening things up to add depth and complexity, softening hard edges, promoting development and longevity (N.B. oxidative does not mean oxidised). Oxidatively-made wines that have had a more liberal relationship with oxygen through different encounters with oak barrels, concrete and clay, are, by contrast, the ballads of the wine world ( or at least in my world!). They feel different to their reductive counterparts: more open and layered, going beyond primary fruit flavours and minerality to command a bit more presence.
To my mind, reductively made wines are about angles and tension, brightness and mineral accents. They can be austere, delicate and precise. Some need coaxing and time to unwind, whilst others were born ready and gloriously exuberant from the get go. Fermentation and/or maturation in stainless steel is usually a key player in these wines, with long cool fermentations to preserve the volatile fruity compounds. In Chinchón, we started here, with the wine from the stainless steel tanks. With Malvar not being an aromatic variety, there wasn’t much to preserve in the way of fruitiness, but what it did show us was the stamp of the land it came from. It was steely and expansive, powerful with a chalky minerality that felt harsh and austere – not particularly endearing, but it showed us the mark of the land that would go to feature in all of the wines.
Moving on from the stainless steel tanks, we tasted our way through barrels, concrete tanks, skin-contact wines (more on that another time!) and clay tinajas pots until we got to the mothership: a barrel of Malvar aging oxidatively under a veil of protective yeast, á la Vin Jaune. I was mesmerised, totally engrossed in the synaesthesia-inducing reaction that the wine was causing. “Cathryn used to be a ballet dancer!” joked Aga. Cathryn did not used to be a ballet dancer and yet there I was, swaying subconsciously, wine glass suspended in hand, thinking about maillard reactions and butter sauces, thinking about fat and umami. The wine was ringing, like a chord held out by the sustain pedal on a piano and it felt like it was moving, looking for something indecently delicious to melt over – utterly incredible. Malvar, in my humble opinion, definitely belongs to Team Oxidative.
A few weeks later, in the middle of a field in Wicklow, I got to live out this fantasy at an Ómós event, whereby I paired Malvar De La Olla (the montage wine) with Cúán’s tomato tonnato. The result was pretty damn good if I do say so myself! Umami loves umami and what is mayonnaise if not fat and acidity bound together by – you guessed it - umami? (Not to mention the umami of tomatoes!) As one guest who flagged me down eloquently put it, all wide eyed and flustered – “that … and that!” YEP.
A tale of two teams
It goes without saying that Marc Isart is a brilliant winemaker and skilled practitioner of both the reductive and oxidative approaches, as exemplified by his work at Comando G and La Maldición. Is Marc unique in his dynamism this way? Well, yes and no.
As with everything when it comes to wine, subjectivity has the last word. There can be drastically different approaches practiced by producers side by side, within the same appellations, with the same grape varieties, expressing their takes on the same terroir in opposing ways and quite often the reductive/oxidative philosophies start in the vineyard, most significantly with the decision of how and when the grapes are harvested. One of the most stark examples of this happening is the appellation of Savennières in the Loire Valley in France with the grape Chenin Blanc. Savennières lies about 15km southwest of Angers and is home to all of 36 winemakers, marching let’s say, to the syncopated beats of the same drum. Amongst the unifying factors is the prevalence of organic and biodynamic viticulture in an area that is prone to fungal disease (fair play to them!). The grapes are harvested by hand and everyone does at least 2 or 3 passes over the vineyards during the harvest to make sure they get what they feel is the optimum expression of ripeness. And thereafter the paths diverge.
On the one hand, you have producers who champion the minerality of the terroir and the laser-sharp acidity of Chenin Blanc, embracing the tension and austerity, making focused, bone-dry wines with absolute conviction in their firmness – Team Reductive. They avoid any softening factors, harvesting and sorting for freshness and shunning any hint of noble rot (the good fungus, botrytis). Cold-pressing and cool fermentations using stainless steel or concrete in favour of oak, blocks malolactic fermentation (the process by which bacteria turns tart malic acid into soft and creamy lactic acid – you’ll know it if you’ve ever met a “buttery Chardonnay”) and some even go as far as closing their bottles under screw-cap to minimise microoxygenation in the bottle. One such producer (and I’d go as far as calling him the team captain of this one) is Florent Baumard of Domaine des Baumard and both his flagship wine, Clos du Papillon and “entry level” wine, Clos de Saint Yves are available in Ireland. On the other hand (quite possibly someone else’s hand altogether) is Nicolas Joly and his Clos de la Couleé de Serrant estate, which has its own AOC – one of only two sub-appellations in Savennières. Joly tactfully (and beautifully) explains this divergence in outlook as, “different artists paint the same landscape in different ways” - a sentiment which must surely be the adopted motto of Savennières at this point. Joly is famously one of the key proponents of biodynamics in the world and his wines, made by daughter Virginie, are as distinctive as he is. The outlook at Coulée de Serrant is that “Chenin gets its complexity only when it is fully ripe” and the first pass of harvest, of which there might be 4 or 5 over the course of a few months, starts when the grapes start to raison from botrytis. Their flagship wine gets the grapes the most marked by botrytis; what Baumard turns away from, Joly runs towards.
As you might have guessed at this stage, vinification and maturation happens in oak. Joly advocates opening the wines at least a day in advance and drinking them over the course of a few days. On his website, he warns that the deep colour and maturity of the wines should not be mistaken for oxidation, rather, it is the sign of a living wine made from perfectly mature and healthy grapes. There is an element of mystique and intrigue about Joly’s wines and anyone who enjoys the wines of other Loire Valley producers who take botrytis as part of the DNA of their dry wines, like Alexandre Bain and Sebastien Riffault, would love these wines too – if only they could find them!
Joly’s wines are rare and expensive. I’ve only ever had one of them once, during a stay in Champagne a few years ago and I’m still processing it – and let me tell you, I want more! The only thing in Ireland that would come vaguely close to it stylistically, but very much of the same school of thought, would be the wines of Domaine de Closel, the owner of which, Evelyn de Pontbriand is the President of Savennières, as was her mother before her. Both Baumard and Joly’s wines are built to last and can be most approachable once they’ve entered their teenage years. If anyone does find a bottle of Coulée de Serrant in Ireland and needs help with the drink-me-over-a-few-days experiment, do let me know won’t you?
Glossary of Terms
AOC: Appellation d'Origine Contrôlée. This guarantees the legally defined geographic, stylistic and quality parameters of a wine.
Appellation: A legally defined and protected categorisation of wine
Biodynamic viticulture: Organic viticulture with bells on. A holistic overview of agricultural practices, including adherence to lunar and cosmic rhythms, with particular focus on the soil as a living organism in itself.
Biological aging: A process whereby a protective layer of yeast forms on the surface of the wine in the barrel.
Botrytis: Also known as noble rot. It’s a fungus that attacks the grapes when they’re on the vine, piercing the skins and concentrating the sugars. It’s responsible for famous sweet wines such as Sauternes.
Clay tinajas: Clay pots traditionally used as fermentation vessels in Spain.
Cold-pressing: A process by which frozen grapes are put into the press, resulting in optimum extraction of juice from perfectly ripe grapes.
Fungal disease: Various fungal diseases that can attack both the grapes and the wood of the vines.
Inert vessels: Vessels that allow for little reaction with the wines.
Maillard reactions: A reaction between amino acids and reducing sugars through heat to make the roasted flavours of browned foods.
Organic: Excludes the use of artificial herbicides, pesticides, fungicides and fertilisers.
Skin contact: When white grapes are processed like red wine production with extended contact between the juice and the skin of the grapes.
Terroir: The taste of the place.
Tomato tonnato: Tomatoes with a sauce made of mayonnaise and tuna blended together with capers, anchovies and lemon juice (ish).
Umami: The 5th tastes of intense savouriness.
Untrellised: Vines that grow without the structure of a trellis system.
Vin Jaune: A speciality wine made in the Jura area of France from Savagnin grapes that have been aged in barrels that have not been topped up,for at least 6 years and 3 months.
Zero added SO2: Zero added sulphur dioxide in the winemaking process.
Some exploring to do
If this article has ignited an interest in exploring the two approaches, I’ve compiled a list of some producers that I feel, broadly speaking, fall into the two styles. I should say at this point that very few producers follow a strict “all in” approach of one style or the other. Quite often, winemakers will employ both reductive and oxidative techniques somewhere along the line – as I said, oxygen is a crucial component of winemaking, it’s just a question of how and where a winemaker wants to feel its impact. So with that said, it’s with a pinch of salt that I’ve put these producers into their respective stylistic categories for you to explore and get the gist!
Team Reductive
Comando G and Dani Landi – Madrid, Spain
Fedolos dos Coutos/Piexes - Ribeira Sacra, Spain
Jean Thévenet – Burgundy, France
Raveneau – Chablis, France
Domaine Daniel - Etienne Defaix – Chablis, France
Bodega Ponce – Manchuela, Spain
Bénédicte & Stephane Tissot - Jura, France
Terroir al Limit – Priorat, Spain
Ruinart – Champagne, France
Raventos I Blanc – Penedes, Spain
Luis Anxo – Ribeiro, Spain
Terre Nere - Sicily, Italy
Le Grappin – Burgundy, France
Pierre-Yves Colin-Morey – Burgundy, France
Bollinger – Champagne, France
Lapierre – Beaujolais, France
Jo Landron – Loire, France
Marie Coutin – Champagne, France
Suertes del Marques - Tenerife
David Léclapart – Champagne, France
Nicolas Carmarans – Aveyron, France
La Marca di San Michelle – Le Marche, Italy
Domaine Fabien Trosset – Savoie, France
Martin Texier – Brézème, France
Team Oxidative
Marc Isart – Madrid, Spain
Raul Perez – Bierzo, Ribeira Sacra, Galicia etc Spain
Alvaro Palacios – Bierzo and Priorat, Spain
Rafael Palacios – Valdeorras, Spain
Enric Soler – Penedes, Spain
Luis Seabra – Douro, Portugal
Thomas Pico – Chablis, France
Celler del Roure – Valencia, Spain
Guimaro – Ribeira Sacra, Spain
Eduardo Torres Acosta – Sicily, Italy
Savart – Champagne, France
Georges Remy – Champagne, France
Louis Roederer – Champagne, France
Recaredo – Penedes, Spain
Domaine de l’Ecu – Loire Valley, France
Alexandre Bain – Loire Valley, France
Rafael Lopez de Heredia – Rioja, Spain
Domaine des Ardoisiéres – Savoie, France
Gravner* - Friuli, Italy