Article: The Single-Vineyard Wine Scam

WINE TALK
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The article, to me, is written in very biased tone that takes no regard for the very real work and risk it takes most people to produce wines at all. Agriculture isn’t something “hucksters” do. Looking at the fire damage, the loss, and the pain in my fellow producers across the entire West Coast last year, and for many again this year, the tone of the writing is offensive. I spent $200,000 on fruit last year to support my growers and will take a bath financially regardless of how well I handle the fruit. In my very biased opinion, this article is shameful and the author can go f$&k himself. Or maybe he he has equally great risks, like rain on his laptop at deadline or smoke damaging his brains…

I sympathize with the reality that with wine, pricing is basically “if you can get it…”, whether that’s by earning it with great wines or just trying to BS people into paying $50(or if your Frank Cornelisson $250 dollars) but that has little to do with whether terroir is real, interesting, or not.

For me, as one whose psychic needs are more fulfilled by having wines that do show site, there’s no amount of good, great, or amazing blended wines that will replace getting to see a place in a wine.

I made a multi-vineyard tete de cuvee for 11 years that was always the best wine in the cellar, and quit making it after a vertical tasting of the first 7 years showed me that the wine always tasted great. Mostly because it was based upon the most obviously delicious barrels. And honestly because anything “lacking” in the wine could be blended away. But with time I found that I was always opening the older vineyard designate wines in our cellar and never opening the tete de cuvee. In removing the “risk” with blending, I also just made the wine less unusual, less interesting, and ultimately something more like my neighbors wine.

Once I put my name on the bottle, I went to exclusively terroir based wines, only combining vineyards in the entry level Willamette Valley(except the first Berserker Cuvee). There’s not a damn thing that’s huckstery about that choice. And the wines are much more compelling, IMO.

In the same flavor the author wrote his article with…

This article is a viewpoint, filled out with mostly garrulous spew, spending the larger part of the verbiage throwing the baby out with the bathwater. Making claims without citing specifics, passing unproven judgement on an entire industry, blathering on with drivel that basically states that wiping out vineyard designates would be a smarter choice than doing the sleuthing that it takes to sort out who is making really good wines and who is full of crap. Moving us closer to the wonderful world of nothing but good wine. It has the tone and propaganda element that makes me wonder which giant conglomerate paid for the article. After all, managing a slew of vineyard designate bottlings through national distribution is way less efficient than just having wines in 5-6 price points that can come from anywhere. It took a huckster of Ray Walker’s fortitude to do it in Burgundy, and think about how much simpler Ray’s scam would have been if he had just had to find bulk wine to fill demand for a generalized non-vineyard specific wine…heck, it would barely have been a scam at all.

And somehow the author comes to the conclusion that blending multiple vintages of single vineyard wines in Champagne compromises terroir, when a small amount of thought should lean one to the idea it could actually offer a less vintage clouded view of the site the wines are from.

The vineyard is the one place in the whole scheme of wine that never lies.

So, if you are trying to learn what wines, producers, varietals you enjoy, having a vineyard based wine gives you the most firm footing for starting that process. LOTS of other things obscure terroir and interfere, but you will find great producers working with great vineyards 100% of the time.

If you want to know your own palate, how much can you learn from a blend of vineyards? Or regions? Beyond “I like/love/hate this wine”, how much have you gained? If it’s Bordeaux, the centuries of data can tell you a lot. After hundreds of years enough people have had Haut Brion that we know it’s great.

Too many producers do slap $60-90 price tags on young and unproven vineyards. They hurt all of us as producers, but saying that terroir based wines are un-necessary is just horse shit. But short of regions codifying the sites in the manner Burgundy or 200 years of track record, that’s the world we live in. The short-sited, the egotistical, and the less than savory are not unique to terroir based wines by any means.

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I’m +1 on this.

Burgundy makes some of the most profoundly great/delicious wines in the world. But it’s the range of expressions those profound wines can deliver is what makes it the most compelling region for me.

It’s also traditionally been a challenging climate(part of how you get the profound wines), and also goes through extraordinary changes during it’s life in bottle. So not all Burgundy is amazing. Ultimately, while I love the great bottles that I have had just for being great, I also love the ones that are less than stellar.
Especially when they’ll show me the differences between vineyards and communes. Santenay and Mercurey are great examples of communes that I love to drink, even though the wines are usually just good.

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Say it with your Chest, Marcus! Love it :slight_smile:. Love it.

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While I still couldn’t control my mouth, you are spot on.

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Hi Rick, it feels like our different perspectives may be is more about semantics than substance. I don’t drink burgundy as an intellectual exercise to understand terroir. I love the many different way Pinot Noir expresses itself within the Burgundy region and I find the the wines both interesting and very pleasurable To me to call the making of wines from individual pieces of land “an intellectual pursuit” is a bit of an insult to the Burgundian wine makers.

Like Greg K said, blending will produce more consistent wines over time but not necessarily better wines. From my point of view the argument that blending will (always) produce better wines is a flawed premise. In a way I see blending a bit like a band pass filer - removes both the highest highs and lowest lows. The idea that blending at the top addresses in Burgundy would produce better wines is of course a completely untestable hypothesis - so you can’t be proven wrong!

cheers Brodie

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Thanks for your perspective Marcus,

Lots of very good points.

For a while I’ve been thinking a lot about the question of blends vs. SVD wines.

There’s little question that there are some pretty compelling, and distinctive single vineyard wines out there that very much make the case for terroir and single vineyard wines. Though I’ve been wondering for a bit what may be lost by a heavy focus on single vineyard winemaking and a shunning of blends.

Certainly as you noted, blends can stand up to some single vineyard wines, and I’m often left wondering how many of the single vineyard designated wines out there could be made into more delicious and compelling wines if they were blends.

I can certainly see an argument to be made that a single vineyard can in some ways be seen as a ‘block’ for a wider region or appellation in a similar way to how a vineyard may have various different blocks. And even within some single vineyard wines there can be some level of ‘blending’ by the inclusion of certain vineyard blocks, or barrels and not others into the final product.

In a way, it feels a bit like asking if a solo is better than an orchestra. They are different things, hard to compare, and highly situation dependent with no global right or wrong answer. In some scenarios one may shine brighter than the other and vice-versa.

I’m also really curious to know what did you found more compelling about your SVD over the tete de cuvée that made you stop producing it. Sounds like some interesting wines.

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Personally, I have no real interest in blends - I know I could prob make a broader appealing wine if I allowed myself to blend, but I can’t shake the feeling that it’s a little bit like getting something you didn’t deserve. I like the fact that I can’t hide behind it - it is the variety and that vineyard and nothing else. Also, I want to make wines in the American tradition, with varietal and vineyard on the label.

That said, I do think terroir-talk can get a little tiring.

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Burgundy is funny. 95% of the time I agree with all of this. Then I drink a Drouhin Chambolle 1er cru, which is both a brilliant expression of Chambolle, but also a blend of several vineyards, each probably worthy of being bottled on its own. Honestly, I’m glad they aren’t. Except Baudes, on its own since 2008, and only in very good vintages before, so an exception to an exception. Like I said, Burgundy is funny.

Seriously, when I think of wines that scream Chambolleness, it’s hard to do better than the Drouhin 1er cru.

Honestly, I haven’t read the article, mostly because Marcus says it sucks. [snort.gif]

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Exactly.

It strikes me just the same as the Internet-wide phenomenon of people posting heartfelt, but vapid and thoroughly uninformed, opinions — which others then laud as being “valid conversation starters,” and say that the boards would be poorer without their authors.

I’ve never understood that, and never will. Count me as a curmudgeon who thinks the boards would be richer without their authors.

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Yeah I thought Champagne was a poor example with the increasing prominence of grower champagnes. He’s right in terms of volume of course.

I think terroir is important but not exclusively so … vineyard practices and the wine maker / winemaking are obviously very important too.

Article has a point and blows it out of proportion.

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Marcus raises more than one good point.

First – the author paints all bottlers of single-vineyard wines with a verrrry broad brush. What he says is probably true of some folks who make single vineyard bottlings. But at most 1-2%. Based on that, the author slams them all. He’s just your garden variety troll in search of clicks. Let’s not reward him.

Second – variety is the spice of life. I like wines with character. It’s a valid choice to prefer homogeneous blended wines – but it’s a choice, not a given. And the more often you drink wine, the more likely your are to find them boring.

Third – it would frankly easier for them to just put “Private Winemakers Reserve” on the bottle and charge even more. That business model worked for many years, and it would have just kept on working if no one cared about site.

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It does sound like a communication difference. Your analogy of blending and a band pass filer is spot on.

Where it was originally stated that blending makes a wine “better” is perhaps a mis-communication. Safer wines and more obvious wines are equally common results.

It removes the highs and lows as you noted, and it generally serves to produce better first impressions.

But I would guess that you, Rick, and I all agree that blending in Burgundy would not improve things.

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Read the article sometime last week. Much eye rolling was done. If you can write an “inflammatory” piece about SVD wines and the “problem” with them and a person who made 24 of them (I think, top of the head) in 2019 can only muster eye rolls you have done a poor job in your work and (likely) identified yourself as some sort of fake “industry watchdog” online troll. My only thought about this was that it was going to end up here which would make me think about it for more than the scant few minutes it took me to read it. If you want this kind of stuff you can watch basically any channel on daytime TV (ESPN, Fox, etc.) and find someone filling time and getting a check for being the “zagger.”

What. Ever.

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Very thoughtful post as always.

I agree that almost every wine has some element of blending to it. In 2018, the sum total of our fruit from the Upper Bench at Temperance Hill filled one barrel and a wee bit of topping wine. But mostly, vineyard designates in our cellar are still wines from selected from a larger group.


What I found most compelling about the vineyard based wines, was the singularity of each wine while still retaining the essential place of the vineyard. When I opened Durant, it would be unique and yet very Durant. Whistling Ridge held that essential Whistling Ridgeness in the nature of the wine. Having multiple vineyards meant that I had a range of expressions to try, to explore, and to learn about, and with the least amount of interference.

The tete de cuvee always tasted the same. Yes, it was a lovely wine but with blending you not only make the vineyard fuzzy, but also the vintage. In 2011, our coldest vintage the tete de cuvee was 13.0% abv as I had picked the barrels with the most weight and substance. In 2012, it was 13.2% as I had blended the barrels that were very much on the elegant side of my options. You blend away flaws, and you blend away the high points as well. It was just always a boringly predictable wine. I didn’t need to open it, because I knew how it would taste.

Blending in the youthful stages of wine production it’s very difficult for a winemaker to not want to make things more impressive. We’re judged on work that we have only one opportunity per year to produce. A lot of beautiful wines really need time to become what they are, and many of the most beautiful wines can seem wan or lesser at the point of bottling, and if the option for blending is there, very, very, very few winemakers wouldn’t “correct” the wine.

When I started working with the Durant family in 2010, I had a 2 acre block that was mid-slope, East facing, very optimal in my opinion. I also split the old vine Bishop Block with Jim and Patty from PGC, and I made a wine for the Durants from a block lower down at the foot of the hill planted in 1993. With the low block, I split the wine with the Durant family 50/50. So I had wines from all three blocks, and felt that the old vine and my block produced excellent wines, while the lower elevation block was always pale and lacking the substance of the other two blocks. Invariably it would close the gap a little after being in barrel for 15-16 months but it never had the heft or intensity of the other two blocks. Because the Durant wine came only from that fruit, I was able to compare the wines as they evolved, and while I knew that we had made them a nice wine in 2010, I was surprised to see it close the gap on the other wines by 2015-2016. I was even more surprised to taste the wines in 2018 and feel that my vineyard designate was really good, but just a little too rich and dense compared to the sheer prettiness of the Durant family bottling. Maybe in 4-5 more years that will reverse again, but it was a lesson for me and definitely reinforced my desire to continue producing the range of block bottlings that I began doing in 2017. The Long Acre wines would probably never make a tete de cuvee wine at bottling, but that block bottling is consistently one of my favorites because it gains just enough weight in bottle to have the balance between etherealness and intensity that I really want.

I haven’t seen Jim post here, but he and I definitely share the love of how this bit of dirt and that are different. And we both will generally take fruit if it’s old vine and from a place that we believe is farmed well and has a unique aspect. Ultimately, we just share a need to know what each place tastes like. The average consumer probably would prefer a delicious bottle of Pinot that is consistent(as Pinot Noir can be), and that’s a very fair reality. They also don’t need to be gouged by producers who over value their work or by smarmy importers who know if they can get a hipster label and tell the right story about an unheard of producer from region x in Europe, that they can make a boatload of money marking the wine up egregiously.

There are also many regions that grow multiple grape varieties in order to blend them in the vineyard and between vineyards, like the Rhone valley.

But I think that most serious enthusiasts, will eventually need to dig into more restricted wines. Burgundy, Piedmont, Oregon, and also in many ways the Loire Valley all produce tremendous wines that are single variety wines, often from a single plot.

As a wine lover, I can’t imagine having Clos des Briords blended. That’s an appalling idea. It doesn’t mean that all Muscadet should be vineyard designate, any more than I would ever not make a Willamette Valley bottling.

I think what irritates me the most about this article, besides some jackass writer directly insinuating a lack of moral character in producers, is the idea that we somehow don’t have a balance between “terroir” based wines and blends. There’s no shortage of both options(there’s no shortage of any kind of wine at all, except perhaps reasonably priced GC Burgundy…).

That’s one of the reasons that I think this is paid for propaganda. The beneficiaries of consumers viewing vineyard designates as a scam would definitely include larger distributors and wine factories where the ups and downs of individual sites disrupt the predictable continuity that box movers prefer.

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No matter if blended or single-vineyard, it all ends up as generic pees, whose tastes nobody will brag about distinguishing.

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Thanks Marcus, I totally agree. There are many single vineyard designations that produce some of the best wines. To say that vineyard designated wines are not valid is just nonsense.

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Before we line this guy up against the wall and throw terroir at him…perhaps chucks of limestone mixed with marl, slate and volcanic rock, let me defend him:

1/blends are often better than wines from a single vineyard…but as research project of the AAWE showed, the more narrow the origin of a wine, the better the bottle price for the producer
The old Ch Chevalier made a pinot blended with Edna Valley and Carneros fruit…it impressed the Burgundians I took there.
2/Don’t tell anybody but there is a lot of BS in wine sales and marketing…how many times have I heard somebody say, Oh, we just let the wine make itself…it tells us what to do…this always reminds me of the Smothers Brothers take on talking to trees…

3/let’s face it: we are being terroired to death…i know guys who centrifuge into barrel talking about their terroirs…really??

4/Champagne: Dom Perignon is honored with a brand that selling millions of bottles every year…ditto the Veuve Clicquot…but how many consumers know what they did…


Everybody is looking for Unique Sales Proposition…terroir holds trump in this area.

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+1000

Then the pretense of speaking from a position of authority leads uninformed readers to believe and repeat the misinformation. Any voice trying to undo the falsehoods gets drowned out.

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Citation needed here, I think.

I’m extreeemely skeptical that they were comparing apples to apples. There’s about a 99.999999% chance that a close look at the study will reveal methodological problems (not uncommon with this sort of industry study, I suspect). Correlation is not causation, and I doubt very much that this study accounts for that.

I mean, the narrowest origins are things like Chateau Grillet and Romanee Conti. One of these things is priced a bit differently than the other, and it’s due to other factors than the size of their respective AOCs.

There might be an actual reason why Vosne-Romanee is divided into small individual vineyards, while the fruit sources for Two Buck Chuck never seem to be mentioned on the label by name.

2/Don’t tell anybody but there is a lot of BS in wine sales and marketing.

So what? There will always be those who BS in any way they can to sell more units.

That’s not an argument that site of origin is all marketing and no substance, which is the claim under discussion.

You should know better than this.

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Really? You should know better !!

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