Complications of French wines

Photo: Burgundy's Laurent Drouhin

“C’est compliqué!”

With that phrase, wine writer and co-moderator Jon Bonné set the theme for the plenary session on French wine at the 2020 Vancouver International Wine Festival.

“It is complicated,” he repeated for his unilingual listeners. That is not to reflect negatively on French wines, which Bonné believes are still the greatest in the world. It is just that winegrowing in what is now France began about 600 BC. Complication is inevitable with that much history.

For example, when Laurent Drouhin from Maison Joseph Drouhin in Burgundy speaks of climat, he does not mean climate. A climat in Burgundy is a vineyard. There are thousands, each very likely with an individual terroir.  

Terroir is another complicated concept originating with the French. It is a definition of all the elements, ranging from soil to climate, that govern the character of individual wines. Note how the term was used by Châteauneuf producer Bernard Duseigneur. “My approach is mainly a terroir approach,” he said. “The identity I am looking for in a wine comes first from the soil because we have different terroirs. We have all the soil types and they give different wines using the same grapes.”

Viticulture, in pursuit of sustainability as well as better terroir expression in the wines, has become more complicated. Typical is the decision taken by Caroline Frey after buying the historic Domaine Paul Jaboulet in the Rhône in 2006: the vineyards were transitioned to organic production and now are adopting biodynamic practises. The same is happening at Drouhin in Burgundy.

“We are not doing it for marketing reasons,” Laurent Drouhin said. [We want to] “transmit those vineyards to the next generation in good shape.”

The complication confronting all French vignerons is climate change. While it means better Champagnes, it is a challenge elsewhere. Producers are coping by adapting viticultural practises. After a serious drought in 2017, Bernard Duseigneur believes Châteauneuf-du-Pape producers soon will need to install irrigation.

Riper wines with higher alcohol levels are a consequence of global warming. “When I was a kid, I remember my father being happy when he got 12 degrees [alcohol],” Drouhin said. “Today, 13.5% is very common, even close to 14%.”

The challenge is to continue making wines that are balanced. “We are working at green harvesting,” he added. “There are ways to offset the global warming. Mother Natural is resilient. It changes. The problem lately is that those changes have been so fast that I doubt Mother Nature can adapt that fast. We constantly have to keep an eye on that, but until now, we are able to offset and make sure we still have overall balance in the wines.”

Drouhin believes “we can still be able to produce the Grand Cru wines, and maintain the quality and the typicity in the Grand Cru. It will be more and more difficult to get that and to keep that balance in the wines.”

Palates also adapt, he said. “We are getting more tolerant to those high alcohol wines, darker, deeper wines from Burgundy. Go back to the 1970s and taste those wines. Some of you might consider them to be too light. At that time, they were not considered that way.”

One conclusion seems certain: “The wines produced 100 years from now are probably going to be different,”  Drouhin says.