The word ‘singularity’ has many meanings. We commonly think of it in terms of the Oxford English Dictionary’s primary definition: ‘The state, fact, quality, or condition of being singular; a peculiarity or odd trait’. Singular, meaning single, unique. To describe a wine as singular or possessing singularity in this context, then, would be to describe it as unique (or, arguably, peculiar). Ask any number of wine connoisseurs to name a handful of wines they consider unique, and it’s likely that each one would come up with a different list. They would just as likely be able to put forward reasons why others’ choices were not unique. It could be argued that few wines are truly unique – grape varieties are remarkably reliable in expressing their varietal characteristics, winemaking practices are pretty standard, and despite assertions, most vineyard terroir is replicated somewhere else. If it wasn’t for this, Master Sommeliers and Masters of Wine would not be sitting blind-tasting exams, identifying grape varieties, regions and winemaking regimes from the glasses of wine in front of them.
On the other hand, it could be argued that those very blind tastings prove that there is an element of uniqueness in certain wines or groups of wines. That a skilled taster can identify that one glass of dry Chenin Blanc comes from Savennières, another from Vouvray and a third from Swartland means that there is something recognisably particular about the wines from each of those regions. That a winemaker can recognise their own wine in a blind line-up of other similar wines, and some experts know instantly whether they have Lafite or Mouton in the glass in front of them, and could probably call the vintage as well, means that winemaking, winemakers, vintages and terroir do leave verifiable signatures on the wine.
Looking at the extended definition of singularity, it is also true that some wines can well be described as having peculiarity – ‘an unusual feature’. For example, white wines with extended skin contact have tannins, colour and flavour profiles that are very different from ‘conventionally’ made white wines; a wine that is subjected to prolonged heating and oxidation is ruined, unless it comes from the island of Madeira, where the process of maderization is the very essence of what sets Madeira apart from not just other wines but even other fortified wines.
The question is whether we’re conflating singularity with ‘different from’ and ‘identifiable’. Is Château Mouton Rothschild really a unique wine? Or is it just different from Château Lafite-Rothschild, different from generic Bordeaux and can be identified by those who have tasted it many times?
The second definition of singularity in the Oxford English Dictionary is: ‘A point at which a function takes an infinite value, especially in spacetime when matter is infinitely dense, such as at the centre of a black hole’. This describes a theory that sits within the disciplines of mathematics and science and means slightly different things depending on the context within which the theory is applied. It’s a very complex theory with many applications, but at its most basic (asking forgiveness here from physicists and mathematicians for butchering this), it is a point at which the laws that govern (nearly) everything no longer apply. It is when an object does not ‘behave’ as it should, when the function of that object can no longer be defined, or, according to another definition, the place at which the boundaries of spacetime bend, and spacetime comes to an end. Live Science website explains that singularities “are telling us that our theories of physics are breaking down”.
Of course, none of this applies to wine. Except that I became intrigued with the possibility of looking at wine through the prism of singularity theory as a metaphor. (Once again, I must beg the forgiveness of physicists and mathematicians … ) Are there wines which bend the laws which govern the universe of the wine world? Are there wines which have (metaphorically) infinite properties? Are there wines which do not behave as they should? Are there wines which cross boundaries, take us to the edge of the universe, whose function defies definition? There is plenty of room for debate (and ridicule) here. But, just for the fun of it, I’m going down this rabbit hole. Or should that be black hole?
FONDATA invited me to consider a selection of possible candidates for the notion of singularity. Each one magnificent in its own right. My mission was not to establish whether these wines are great. They all are, unequivocally. So tasting them was an unusual and challenging exercise, as, with no-small temerity, I placed each wine within the construct of the laws of the wine universe and asked whether this wine was defying our generally accepted theories.
Bollinger’s revered Vieilles Vignes Françaises Blanc de Noirs is a wine that comes from two tiny parcels, Chaudes Terres and Clos Saint-Jacques, in the Grand Cru vineyard of Äy. Planted only to Pinot Noir, the vines in these two spots somehow survived as phylloxera swept through and destroyed every other vine around them in the late 19th century. The Vieilles Vignes Françaises name is a little misleading. These are not old vines, per se. They’re young. But the vineyard is managed using an ancient vine-training and vine-replacing technique called en foule (meaning ‘in a crowd’), also known as provignage or layering. Every year the fruiting canes are bent into the ground, buried up to three buds, new roots grow over winter, and new fruiting canes appear in the next growing season. The thick network of interweaving roots under the ground, however, is quite possibly centuries old.
Pre-phylloxera vines are remarkable, and ungrafted vines are pretty special (even if there is no hard evidence that they produce better wines, despite what we in the wine world love to believe). Vineyards managed en foule are unusual. Vines in Champagne trained on single stakes rather than on wires are also very unusual and so is the density of 30,000 vines per hectare (the average in Champagne is 8,000). But one of the most remarkable (law-bending) facts about this wine is that there is nothing different or unusual about the soil in the VVF vineyards. It is a widely held understanding that phylloxera doesn’t survive in sandy soil, so most ungrafted vines, if not in isolated regions, grow in sandy vineyards. These two parcels, however, have soils typical of most of Champagne: a chunk of topsoil over a bed of chalk. It is a mystery, even to Bollinger, why these vines have survived.
Does this unicorn wine live up to its reputation? Or, perhaps the more important question is, does it cross boundaries? True to Bollinger style, it’s barrel-fermented, goes through malolactic fermentation and is aged in wood. I tasted the 2007 which was disgorged in October 2017, giving it nearly ten years on lees. It was deep gold, and the nose was simply haunting. If reaching a bend in the boundaries of spacetime is losing all sense of time, then I would argue for singularity. I sat there smelling the wine for so long that I almost forgot to taste it. The wine was deep, vinous, sonorously powerful. I wrote: “The first impression is power, then grilled lemons, then this exquisitely fine bead that feels like running your tongue over thousands of tiny, tiny pearls silk-stitched into silk organza. The texture is remarkable – like nothing I’ve ever felt before in a Champagne. Heavy cashmere, silk, oily, sensuously heavy. The wine is brooding, mycorrhizal, understory, under shadows, the outline of citrus. Dried lemon peel, bitter lemon, hazelnuts, walnut shells, shortbread dipped in tea. Corn cobs roasted over a fire. Yellow tobacco leaves, still soft. Flavours of mushrooms, verbena, lemongrass run through my brain and ripple across my tongue but then I shake my head because this is not what this wine is saying. This is not its story. It pushes me away as much and as often as it draws me in. It’s truculent then longing. It’s spitting poetry with its palms held high and hard at a stop, then it melts in the same mouthful and pulls as close as a lover. It’s spiced and spliced; a shattering of a million, minute diamonds and a weaving of a million golden threads. A wine of pure dimensionality.”
There are plenty of white Burgundies commanding prices that could be classified as bending the laws of the universe (or perhaps just mind-bending). But, and I might be shot for saying this, white Burgundy is hardly unique. Not even a Montrachet Grand Cru. Far less a wine from Viré-Clessé. This appellation, without even Premier Cru vineyards, let along Grand Cru, is so humble it didn’t even get its own AOC until 1999. It produces about 3 million bottles a year of what is often described as ‘good value’ Burgundy.
Enter Jean Thévenet of Domaine de la Bongran in Quintaine, a hamlet known for producing riper Chardonnay. An organic, minimal-intervention pioneer who became well-known for his atypical wines; rich, late-picked and often with residual sugar, Thévenet’s wines were barred from the Viré-Clessé appellation because of regulations which excluded any wines with more than 2 g/l residual sugar. The regulations were eventually changed and from 2003 Thévenet and son Gautier were allowed to put Viré-Clessé on their wine label. Not behaving according to the norms, not functioning as defined, rule-breaking, rule-changing, the Bongran wines, skating on the very boundary of off-dry, might qualify for singularity status.
The 2010 Cuvée EJ Thévenet Quintaine was the second wine to spin me into a time pause. “Phenomenally complex nose,” I wrote, stunned into wordlessness for quite a while. My tasting note was inarticulate, clumsy, repetitive. “Lemon gold. Extraordinary. Lemon pie topped with roasted dukkah. Pan-grilled hazelnuts. Campfire smoke. Quince. And utter silk on the palate. How to describe this wine … Oranges, creamed quince, melted butter, caramel swirled into clotted cream, alphonso mango. This is beyond spectacular. So unutterably silky in the mouth. Smoky minerals, smoky pebbles, smoke and silk and quince and pineapple and mango and passion fruit and yet densely, intensely savoury. Achingly long. Almost too rich to bear. I honestly don’t know how to describe this wine. I want every sip to last forever. Full and rich, and yet silver-paper fine. Platinum. Sheen. Unbelievable.” The last two words I wrote were, “Yes. Singular.”
Amber wines are two a penny these days. Yet not two decades ago, an amber (aka orange) wine would indeed be singular, if not downright peculiar. Scarcely known outside of Georgia (which was closed off to the western world until 1991, and even then, so politically unstable that visiting Georgia, unless on some dodgy business, was unheard of until the 21st century), they got swept up in the burgeoning ‘natural wine’ movement and are so mainstream now that there are entire wine bars and restaurant wine lists devoted to them. But the origins of the movement could probably be traced back to one man: Joško Gravner.
Simon J Woolf, in his book Amber Revolution, described Gravner as the “high priest” of modern, clean, aromatic, cold-fermented, fruit-driven wine in the cross-border region of Collio and Friuli Isonzo in northeastern Italy and Goriška Brda and Vipava Valley in Slovenia. He was hailed throughout Italy. Gravner’s life crisis and radical change of direction is well-documented. Becoming increasingly disenchanted with technical, international wines that were losing their identity and soul, turning his back on friends and the outside world, his search to reconnect with a sense of place took him to Georgia. He began to experiment with fermenting white grapes on their skins. In 1997, a friend smuggled out a small qvevri (a terracotta pot for winemaking) from Georgia and gave it to Gravner, who fermented a small batch of wine in it. Woolf recounts that, “It was an emotional moment. ‘My heart trembled, watching the wine ferment in the terracotta’, [Gravner] recalled.” He crossed the Rubicon and never made a ‘conventional’ wine again. “Joško has gone mad!” screamed Gambero Rosso’s headlines. He was shunned by the international wine community. He put his head down and ploughed on.
I lifted the magnum of Gravner’s 2003 Anfora Ribolla and poured carefully. Magnums are not easy to handle if you’re not used to them. I knew the wine would be orange, but the colour was still a shock. Deep, reddish amber, glowing as if uplit by an inner electricity. The bone-dry rasp was also a shock, tasted straight after the Cuvée EJ Thévenet. It smelt of cold, long-brewed tea. It smelt like the drawer of a very old camphor chest, sitting years-unopened in a dusty, dark room. I pulled back. Bewildered. Sipped. Drying tannins. Nuts. Dried apricots. It tasted as if the door was closed and I was shut out. I slipped down the wall, sat at the door, waited. Heard the key turn in the lock. Heard the handle. The door opened a crack. I moved, the door slammed. Slammed in my chest and then … I heard a lullaby. I got up, tentatively, very slowly, opened the door.
There is no way of writing about a wine like this in traditional winespeak. I could tell you that it tastes like licking cassia bark and dried orange peel and bitter oranges and candied angelica. That I can find crab apples and kombucha and spice. But actually, it tastes like Zanzibar sunset and dust. A roar of poetry and then folksong around the fire. The urgent thrum of African drums as the moon rises above thorn trees. It tastes like the howl of a wolf, like the howl of a heart, like the whisper of a hand in a hand when no words can be said. Like old clothes folded for too long in a cedar chest; like leaving your heart behind on a train platform. That moment, turning away from the window, everything stiffening inside to hold the world together. It’s a wine that becomes more and more beautiful as it sits in the glass. Makes more and more sense, less and less sense. It’s incandescent and desperately introvert.
With his wines, Gravner irrevocably broke the rules of the wine universe. He took us back in time, forward in time, created a new parallel, a new dimension. He crossed boundaries with such force that his known world collapsed. He was ostracised for not behaving as he should, for wines that didn’t behave as wines should. He found the frontier of a new world. A wine such as this might be the very definition of singularity.
Somewhat reluctantly, I picked a California wine to include in my search for singularity. California is so full of ‘icons’ you could fill a Byzantine cathedral. But I was nudged in that direction, and I had the option of tasting an old-vine Zinfandel made by a family with a reputation for making some of the finest Zins in California, and, to boot, it was an opportunity to taste a wine from Contra Costa, so I shrugged. Napa may define the laws of a wine culture that is, in American wine writer Jon Bonné’s words, “addicted to prestige ... consumed with attempted self-importance”, but Contra Costa is the very antithesis of that.
The wine was the Turley Duarte Zinfandel 2009, coming in at a whopping 15% ABV. I happen to know that Turley winemaker Tegan Passalacqua works with some of California’s oldest Zinfandel vineyards, farmed organically, picked early and spontaneously fermented, so I was curious. Was this wine going to be maximum impact and Napa-esque, or would it slip through a rip in spacetime?
The Duarte is not 100% Zinfandel – there’s some Carignan, Grenache and Mourvèdre in there. The fruit from these dry-farmed bush vines, planted between 1890 and 1960, are hand-picked, wild-fermented and aged in 80% French oak, 20% American oak for 15 months. The wine is unfined and unfiltered. All the stuff that makes my wine heart beat faster, but certainly not remarkable or unique. There is something tangibly special about old vines and we should do all we can to save old vineyards from being grubbed up, but they can be found all over the world. So what makes this any more special than any other old-vine wine?
The cuvée is an homage to Joe Duarte, a grape grower in Contra Costa who first introduced Larry Turley to the remarkable, sandy, windswept rugged vineyards of this almost forgotten AVA. Chris Howard wrote evocatively about Evangelho, one of the vineyards which provides fruit for the Duarte: “[It is] one of the United States’ oldest vineyards. Planted in the 1890s by Azorean immigrants, Evangelho’s roots run deep in an ancient alluvial sandbar where the Sacramento and San Joaquin Rivers converge with the Bay. Surrounded by a power plant, scrap yards, a Burger King and a motel that rents by the hour, the striking juxtapositions and incongruities are a far cry from the romance of Napa and Sonoma. And yet, there is beauty of another kind here, a beauty which perhaps speaks more truthfully to our precarious times.”
I am shamelessly borrowing his words, because Howard sets forth the case for singularity in the Duarte in a strikingly stark, beautiful way: “Evangelho first appears like something out of Mad Max or Westworld’s ‘valley beyond’. On winter days, against the backdrop of the power plant, it’s as if the vines have somehow survived the apocalypse while everything else has perished. Linger with the disorienting gestalt, however, and the binaries ordering our language and thought begin to blur. Neither utopia or dystopia, Evangelho is better described as what the philosopher Michel Foucault calls a ‘heterotopia’ – an ‘other’ space that disturbs and contradicts our assumed order of things. Understanding these strange spaces requires more than seeing and looking, but what the anthropologist Anna Tsing calls ‘arts of noticing’. ‘Noticing’ implies a subtle but important shift, because to notice something is to realise that it has unsettled your worldview – the way you understand and inhabit the world. If we pay attention, we notice that Evangelho is much more than a vineyard, but a layered microcosm of California history, social struggles, disturbed ecologies and passionate winegrowing.”
I tasted the Turley a few days before the other wines because, I must confess, I didn’t think it would stand up to the savoury complexity of the others. I was expecting Big Wine: high alcohol, a good dollop of Zin jam. Unedited, my tasting note went: “Such an intense nose that if I’d been standing, I would have taken a step back. Shape-shifting nose. Intense. Volatile acidity, church polish, rose buds, smudged Victoria-plum jam, sweet kimchi, sumac. Almost no tannins! Like damask in the mouth. Elevated. How is it possible that this is 15%? It tastes, even feels, like Pinot Noir. It’s chiaroscuro in shades of blood red. The fruit is sweetness and purity on a flute-like scale, the tannins are diaphanous. This is a total revelation. Cherry kombucha tang. Symphonic. You can drown yourself in this wine. Barberries. Kimchi. So many layers, so much complexity, such intense juiciness, possibly one of the most beautiful red wines I’ve ever tasted.”
All I can do is repeat Howard’s words: “an ‘other’ space that disturbs and contradicts our assumed order of things”. Singularity.
Henschke, Hill of Grace Shiraz, Eden Valley. Next to Penfolds Grange, possibly one of the most iconic wines from Australia. After a visit in 2018, I wrote: “We arrived on a day lashed with wind and rain. Hunching against the cold, Prue Henschke hurried across the immaculate yard to meet us, a member of staff behind her with a tub in hand. Would we please stand in the tub, we were asked politely. Our shoes duly disinfected, we climbed into Prue’s truck and, wipers full tilt, headed up the road.
“Even the most cynical, vineyard-weary person would feel a prickle of awe standing in the Hill of Grace vineyard. There is something sacred about the place. It’s not only the hauntingly beautiful name which comes from the Lutheran church overlooking the vineyard, built in 1860, the same year that the vineyard was planted. That these vines, ‘The Grandfathers’, have stood there for nearly 170 years, through droughts, fires and storms, tucked away from the ravages of world wars and phylloxera, watched over by the spire of their little church and in many ways protected from a century and a half of unprecedented change and turmoil, is something that seems little short of miraculous.
“As I knelt down in the thick straw mulch piled up high against the trunks, touched the deep fissures of the hunchbacked wood, knotted like arthritic limbs, it was impossible not to feel reverent. How deep must these roots go in this dry-farmed land? How ancient must the relationship between vine and microbiome be, metres, and how many metres, under this ground? How many people, pruners and pickers, owners and visitors, labourers and writers, merchants and wine drinkers have these vines reached, in one way or another?”
I almost never fail to feel moved in a vineyard. Old-vine vineyards even more so. But standing there in the rain, listening to Prue Henschke talking with so much passion (and I use the word in its truest sense) about the 20-year programme she is running to reintroduce native plant species to their vineyards, rebuild the insect populations, regenerate the soil, link the vines into natural ecosystems, my spine tingled. Some icon wines come with a great marketing story, well told, often told, and Hill of Grace is one of those wines. But this is a true story.
There are damson trees where we live, and every September my days are steeped in damsons. Eaten fresh off the tree, bruised off the ground, cooked to spoon over yogurt or bake into pies, cooked to make jam, steeped in gin for a year or more to make liqueur gin. My fingers are purple for a month. The house smells of damsons. There are fruit flies everywhere, and our compost bin is piled high with pips. I know the smell, the taste, the texture of damson intimately. Hill of Grace 2012 smells like my kitchen in September. But it also smells like old Zimbabwean tobacco barns, steaming hot and fragrant with tobacco leaves turning bright green to gold to amber to brown. It has a sepia gentleness in the mouth, a quiet spirit that reminds me, not a little, of Stephen Henschke and his composed deep-underground energy, his well-modulated voice and the very little amount of space he seems to take up for a man with a towering profile in the world of wine. The tannins have the rough-gentle, curving-to-the-ground flow and stubbornness and resilience of the vines themselves. The wine tastes like opening the pages of an old Bible: pages stained with coffee and fingerprint, dust and age, light and drought and rain and flood. Hand-written names blurring into time, old leather turned cracked and spicy, that cracked porcelain teapot steeped with generations of tea. Red earth, dried hibiscus and peony, goji and paprika. Barossa Shiraz tends to be a hot, powerful Colossus, straddling all who dare to enter. This graceful wine defies all that. The vines defy the laws of survival. Singularity carved into every fissure.
When I was asked to consider the topic of singularity in wine, one of the first wines that came to mind was Chateau Musar. I first tasted Musar maybe 20 years ago, but it wasn’t until 2018, when I had a gift of an opportunity to taste 20 Musar wines, that I really began to understand and fall in love with this controversial wine. Jancis Robinson MW wrote, after that tasting, that “it really was a thrill to see how beautifully these wines age. When tasted young, they can sometimes seem a tad coarse and unruly, but with a bit of bottle age, the reds mellow into extremely serious, well-made wines … the very youngest vintages (not young at all compared with some red Bordeaux currently on the market) were definitely too young to broach now. Slow burners indeed!”
In 2020, a documentary was released about Chateau Musar called Wine and War. I’m pretty impervious to the constant barrage of wine marketing levelled at wine writers, even in the form of well-produced emotion-stirring movies. But I grew up a child of civil war, and still today the sound of sirens and/or helicopters triggers a freeze-then-flee response in me that leaves my skin cold and my heart rate way too high for too long. So, watching this documentary brought it home to me, in a way I hadn’t previously appreciated, how much the Musars are wines of beauty and courage triumphing, defiantly, in the face of war and almost unbelievable adversity. I’m not ashamed to say that I cried several times while I watched it. I wanted this wine on the list, not just because it divides the wine world with its Brett-sculpted profile, but because it’s a child of war, a defiant survivor, and a wine that came to lead an ancient wine region back to the modern world stage.
The legend of Musar is nothing I can add to. Harvesting grapes under shell fire. Trucks laden with harvested grapes that had to be diverted, taking three days instead of three hours to reach the winery, arriving already fermenting. A book Chateau Musar: The Story of a Wine Icon published by Académie du Vin Library tells of a day in 1990 when Syrian shelling shook the apartment Hochar (Chateau Musar’s owner and winemaker at the time) lived in. Instead of fleeing to the bomb shelter, he opened a bottle of 1972 Musar, decanted it in its entirety, shut himself in his bedroom, sat on the floor, and from 11am onwards took a sip of wine every time a shell exploded. For 12 hours, sip by sip, he drank that wine. “Every time a shell landed, I would take a sip and ask the wine, ‘What do you have to say to me now?’”
In 1977, Hochar asked the oldest employee of the winery, a man in his nineties, how long the war would last. Maybe more than 20 years, Mr Yousef told him. Hochar called his employees to a meeting that evening: “From now on, we are going to manage this company as if a war has started that will last 20 years. We will freeze all the salaries, so no one will get a raise. But no one will be fired either.”
The Académie du Vin Library book reveals just how dangerous a time the Lebanese civil war was for Hochar and his wine team: “Between 1975 and 1990, Lebanon was a mosaic of wars … Your surname alone was often your death sentence. Your accent would betray your ethnic origin.” Serge Hochar tells a story that gives us just some inkling of what making wine in a war zone was like: “The Musar wine press had broken down just before harvest and the replacement part was sitting over at the airport. Without it there would be no wine. ‘It was a beautiful day,’ remembered Serge. ‘The kind of summer day that grapes love. En route, I noticed that outside the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps there was a militia checkpoint. We called these barrages de mort, killing barricades. If you had a name like mine, they’d kill you – finished.’ He drove past as people were being pulled from their cars and executed. ‘I carried on to the airport, picked up the machine part and sat quietly by myself for 15 minutes. I thought, I know my faith. This is not a religious thing. But it is the same faith I have in my wines. So, I got back in the car. By the time I drove past Sabra and Shatila, the checkpoint had disappeared.’”
This was one stubborn life-force of a man, with a vision that exploded the paralysis of fear that war creates, at the same time as regenerating life and hope in a landscape and political culture of destruction and death. Hochar, more than a winemaker, was a philosopher who found deep joy in life itself. Author Elizabeth Gilbert, after meeting Hochar, wrote, “He warned me against judging any wine too quickly … ‘When you encounter a bottle of wine, it is always a case of life meeting life … We must let it grow,’ he said, ‘we must see what it becomes, because it is alive.’ Then he said something I have never forgotten. He said, ‘It is the same with people.’”
The 2000 Musar is a case in point. I opened it, poured it, and wrote: “Smells of mouldy cellar steps, cardboard caught in the rain, wet cement. It absolutely, 100% smells corked. It’s on the spectrum. Not quite clean, but impossible to turn away from. Graphite, prunes, dates, leather. Old cement tanks. Crushed blood oranges. Dirty floors. Sweet red plum skins. Old lorries. The shadow of dried cherries in a recipe book a hundred years old. Dank cellar steps. Gritty, grungy, messy, mesmerising.” A couple of nights’ later, tasting with friends, we found it approachable but still dank. A week later, the wine smells of bruised rose petals and cinnamon. It is so exquisitely gentle that I turn off the music to find it. The tannins have woven themselves into the fruit, which has curved forward, woven itself into spice and old words and the spaces between the stones of old stone walls. I press my cheek into the wine and wait for it to respond. It grows into the waiting. A wine of war that is a wine of peace. A wine that breaches the boundaries of time to transcribe its earth-dirt into poetry. Singularity.
There was one last wine I wanted to include in the search for singularity: Madeira. No category of wine rebels against wine rules like this does, and yet it has done that for so long that Madeira has become a law, and a legend, unto itself. Even saying that, however, there are Madeiras and Madeiras. I was given a choice between Blandy’s 1968 Sercial and Barbeito Frasqueira Boal, 1982. A chance to taste Blandy’s 1968 Sercial, a wine that Julia Harding MW scored an unheard-of 19 when she tasted it in 2017 (it’s up there on my very short list of heartbreak wines), was so hard to turn down that, reader, I confess, I might have wanted to cry.
But Blandy’s wines, however stunning, however incontrovertibly awesome (in the real meaning of the word), are wines that bear testament to doing something well (very well), for centuries, within the well-behaved framework of the accepted laws of the vinous universe within which one is operating.
I chose Barbeito because it’s a rare story on Madeira; a grower turned cooking-wine producer turned fine-wine winemaker. On a trip to Madeira in late 2020 I met the exquisitely charming, composed, refined and polished, yet somehow down-to-earth Chris Blandy, and in total contrast I also met Barbeito winemaker, Ricardo Freitas, iridescent, edgy with nervous brilliance. Freitas single-handedly challenged the status quo of wine production on Madeira and could well be credited with bringing Madeira wine into the 21st century with innovative production methods, quirky marketing and his remarkable gift for understanding cultural differences and splicing the past with the future, and technology with tradition into a whole new weave-weft fabric.
So, here is Barbeito Frasqueira Boal, 1982, straight from my notebook. “It smelt of strawberries. Antique cupboards. The smell of a violin-maker’s workshop. Analogue watches. The clash of time. Digital override analogue. The sweetness of late-season peaches drenched in honey, maple syrup on an old wooden spoon, a slice of dripping mango rubbed in nutmeg, Seville oranges fragrant and hanging heavy on the trees in the heat and dust. But so much more. The fiery heat of this wine has the intensity, passion and need of a lovers’ fight. It wants to be loved. It’s wild in its depth and fierceness of its hunger and craw. I can’t explain the way that this wine fills the soul with emptiness in a space and way that sunset light fills the vaulted magnificence of an empty cathedral – huge, empty spaces of prayer and hope, fear and longing, breathing and grieving, dust and cold silent stones. There is an eagle-like magnificence here, and a kind of raw, broken perfection. Kintsugi.”
Einstein said, “The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and science. He to whom the emotion is a stranger, who can no longer pause to wonder and stand wrapped in awe, is as good as dead; his eyes are closed.” I may not have found or defined singularity in wine. But, in tasting these wines and so, so many other ‘ordinary’ wines, I am constantly wrapped in awe. I kneel, hold my arms and my palms wide open, and, child-like, say “wow”.
This article was originally published in FONDATA, Issue Three.
