Article: The Single-Vineyard Wine Scam

WINE TALK
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3/4 we see people who talk terroir more than they walk it because terroir matters. They may not be real, but they are talking about terroir because it is real. They just don’t have the courage(or time/price point/whatever) to be authentic with their terroir. Maybe if they made less wine, they could choose a different path.

4/4 DP and VC have become brands. Not implying the wines aren’t good, but…well Moet & Chandon isn’t and VC isn’t the wine it used to be(perhaps because they catered to production opportunities and made millions of bottles instead of a couple of hundred thousand). It’s a logistical business and if you are making millions of bottles, branding is probably more important to you than terroir. However, at their top tiers both Dom and VC make exceptional wines.

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According to Mr. Google there are some 65,000 wine producers globally working on roughly 15 million acres of vines. There cannot possibly be a single right way to make and sell wine. And when the marketplace likes something, others will notice and imitate. There isn’t one trend, there are dozens, most of which are perfectly reasonable and sensible. There are big corporations exercising big corporate marketing and sales channel control. There are small producers who make what they love and don’t know/care about marketing. And everything in between.

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This. That there are people that will literally say anything about how their wines are made while doing things in contravention to, at the very least, the spirit of what they are talking about doesn’t disprove anything. Assuredly there are folks in Oregon using shrinky-dink machines and who knows what that are happy to prattle on about “Burgundian methods” (gag me) or how they are minimal interventionist or whatever they think moves the needle. They exist everywhere, in every wine region on earth. In this case I don’t believe the bad apples spoil the bunch.

Just because people talk shit about terroir does not disprove the existence and importance of terroir in vineyards and wine.

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I’ve heard a number of times over the years that when Beringer assembles their flagship Private Reserve that the final blend outperforms the component vineyards (in blind tastings) of Chabot, State Lane, Home, Lampyrdae etc. If this is wrong, please correct me.

It seems that if one wants to make the best wine possible, then ignoring blending possibilities is limiting the potential upside.

I would also observe that for growers/seasons/vineyards that had unfavorable cycles, if there wasn’t some kind of blending, their crop on a standalone basis would be hard to drink (possibly unsalable). Sometimes the only way to salvage tart grapes, or flabby ones, is to balance everything out, which might mean blending fruit which was exposed to different elements.

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One of the issues with the idea that a “blend” outperforms components, is that it ignores the reality that “best” is completely subjective. It would be equally accurate to say that a blend is “more immediately appealing”.

Many of the more serious posters on this forum regularly disparage over ripe, over oaked, and over done wines. So while bypassing blending may have an inherent risk of not making the “best” or “more immediately appealing”, there’s certainly a risk involved with having winemakers blending as well.

Regarding vintage variation, I would stand by the saying that great producers find a way to make great wines. Or they can declassify, or they can utilize multiple vineyards for blending, at the correct tier that one would release less than stellar fruit-entry level.

We only release vineyard designates that demonstrate the quality that I believe will represent the vineyard correctly(that may be 10 years from now) and then push lesser barrels down to the AVA bottlings and Willamette Valley botttling(which is still a very good wine).

No one is limited to only vineyard designates. That’s one of the reasons the article is misguided.

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I think there needs to be a delineation between “best wine” and “best representation of a single thing (place, variety, etc)”. For my wines, I try and create the best Grenache I can that best represents the vineyard in that vintage. That means I only make Grenache. If I was trying to make the best wine, I would bring in Syrah and Mouvedre for possible blending components, as those tend to add things to the blend that Grenache will lack, and would in theory make a better overall wine. There is nothing wrong with either approach, and I think there are customers that are looking for both.

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Why is blending across vineyards treated differently than blending grapes within a vineyard?

“Best” may not be “most distinctive” and vice versa. Different people will seek different things.

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I have been in the wine trade for fifty years now. One thing I have seen is how an idea ‘sweeps’ the business for ten years and then we move on. Now usually these ideas have more than a kernel of truth in them but later we forget about them. In the late’60s and '70s it was estate bottling. Buying grapes was bad, although folks like Joe Heitz made pretty good wines doing just that. But the idea was that if took care of your own vineyard and made the wine, the results would be good. This was bad news for Burgundian negociants; good for domaines. In Bordeaux regional blends went the way of the dodo bird and cru bourgeois and petits chateaux did much better.

Does anybody remember boutique wines? Food wines?? Short-lived concepts.

In the early 80s Parker became popular and wine sales people embraced him or looked for an alternative. I remember Becky Wasserman, my former business partner, promoted Clive Coates as an alternative. He was somebody who understood Burgundy…in other words, not Parker. Others got behind the Grand Jury Europeen. I think this is when terroir got promoted as a sales concept. Before that, the notion of gout de terroir was said to be something Americans could never understand. Even Burgundians mocked it a bit. I remember one fellow from the Cote de Beaune telling me that ‘every time we screw up, we just say it’s terroir’. Indeed terroir used to be all about the soil; then it was the soil+ microclimate. Then soil, microclimate, and social environment…The official side of Burgundy said, ‘Respectez les crus’…meaning look at the label and if it is a grand cru it must be better than a premier cru. But others pointed out that certain domaines/winemakers made, for example, Chorey les Beaune, that was better than the prestigious wines others made.

When Latour was sold to the British, de Gaulle approved the sale saying, Well, they cannot take the dirt with them.

Terroir is another way of saying, All our children are above average. Look at our wines and understand them. This is certainly fair. Or as the director of Haut Brion once said, I make my wine to be drunk with a nice juicy steak, not to be tasted in a line up with Lafite and Petrus.


Does it make more sense to market wine by terroir?? Probably something hard to prove. But people believe it, so they talk about it endlessly.
I am not saying site of origin is unimportant. Au contraire I am asking why. Is it because the soil is perfect? The climate?? My point is that when the when the right grapes, planted the right way, are planted where the soil and climate match up, then winemakers can make great wine. For example, drainage is important in Bordeaux and Burgundy, where it rains a lot. In Napa? Clay helps retain moisture. This is a good thing except for those rare rainy vintages. When I made wine with Jim Clendenen we found a vineyard in the Anderson Valley where they had chardonnay planted on clay. The clay retained moisture and retarded ripening for us. We loved it. Raj Parr sold pretty much all of it. Unfortunately the vineyard got old so we found another vineyard, planted on gravel. Grapes there tended to shrinkle so we had to change our winemaking.

One more thing: the author talks about how global warming will change Burgundy for the worse…not to mention the world.This is not news to anybody who reads a real newspaper. …But Burgundy has gone through many changes. We forget pink wines were made 250 years ago and until vineyards had to be replanted with American root stock in the latter part of the 19th century because of phylloxera, vines were planted ‘en foule’…that is to say, every which way like little bushes. Then vines were planted in rows. So Burgundy has changed.

Anthony Hanson wrote in his famous book on Burgundy that if one accepts Erich Fromm’s definition of religion as a ‘group-shared system of thought and action’ then terroir is a religion in Burgundy…‘a sort of harking back to the pagan veneration of trees, plants, hills and springs.’

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In the first situation, I believe the vineyards and the PR are all released, so one could actually compare them ten years later. I suppose it would make sense if one had been there when it was blended.

What’s to stop a producer from taking their estate wine, and just bottling up vats separately, maybe calling them North Slope and South Slope, assuming they had the grapes separated, and saying one showed better acidity and the other more fruit, and raising the prices? And maybe even getting the consumer to buy more since the avid collector has to have all the bottlings? It might be economically rational for a producer to this, even if the quality of bottlings was lower than what it might have been originally.

I approach this from a consumer standpoint - if I’m being asked to pay more I like it to be better. If all the SVD’s aren’t tastier to me, I don’t see the point. In some cases, like the Rhone, I find that the extreme bottlings (tete du cuvees and that ilk) seem to age worse than the base blend. Of course I’m not a professional nor have a Leve like tasting note database, but I feel that way after experiencing these as consumers might (whole bottles over a day or two, not big trade tastings).

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Defining quality is a difficult issue.
I remember a tasting at a cool climate conference in Oregon some time in the mid 80s

Somebody asked professor Bernard how he and his compadres judged. He said, we are Burgundians… we know Burgundy wine…not really an answer but entertaining!

If you use some kind of hedonic scale it is easy for a blend to win
If you say which wine shows terroir…. Different

It all depends on your goals

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Nothing stops producers from doing this (bottling separate parts of a single vineyard separately). In fact many do this, or try. For example, have a look at J.J. Prüm, one of the most venerated Mosel Riesling producers. From their one heralded vineyard (Wehlener Sonnenuhr) they literally made (at least) 10 different bottlings in 2015! Is this some evil conniving plan to extract our hard earned Dollars (or Euros)? Or has Prüm figured out how different parts of the vineyard, and different picking times lead to different and worthily interesting expressions of their terroir? You decide.

This is but one example. We could site hundreds, thousands.

Arv, buy what you want. You like what you like, nobody can deny that. But others like SVDs or Vineyard fractions, or blends, or perhaps all of the above for different vintages/producers/appelations/regions/varietals. I do. I love Bartolo Mascarello Barolo (a blend), Fratelli Alessandria Monvigliero Barolo (a SVD), Ridge Monte Bello (basically a blend, or a kinda blend from what others would call multiple vineyards), Ridge Lytton Springs (a blend of different varietals from a single massive vineyard) and Littorai Savoy (an Anderson Valley SVD) etc. etc. So do my preferences have no validity? And if producers craft wines that tickle my intellect or palate is that lacking validity? Or somehow wrong?

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I wonder how many clicks the article got because of this thread.

Yaacov was right way back early on page one.

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That is what I do.

We bottle 5 different Pinot Noirs from Whistling Ridge. Usually the Heritage bottling, 1-3 different block bottlings, the vineyard designate, and the Ribbon Ridge
AVA wine.

If that’s not the way you think it should be done, you have around a million other great options to choose from. Even if you really want a wine from the same hill, you can just buy Beaux Freres instead of Goodfellow.


That’s where much of this thread and the article become foolish. There’s no limit on the choices everyone has.

The problem is when we start trying to pretend that there’s only one right answer.

There isn’t. You want the best wine(and fairly so, no disrespect intended), according to your palate. You may or may not care about anything beyond getting the most appropriate wine for your taste.

And I want to see the magic of how individual Pinot Noirs can be, even when grown within 50 meters of each other.

Neither is a scam. Everyone gets to pursue the aspects they’re interested in and can allocate their dollars as they choose. If you think that my block bottlings would be better if blended, then don’t buy them. I don’t tell my buyers that the block bottlings are better than any of my other wines. For several reasons:

  1. I don’t know their palate.

  2. All of my wines go through periods of being open and being closed, so which is best depends upon when you open them. My 2017s are shut down right now, except for the Willamette Valley. So the best wine, today IMO, is the cheapest. That will change at some point.

  3. the majority of cost differences are due to inefficiencies in producing micro-lots.

4)they are 100% about exploring terroir. yes, I work my behind off to make sure they are stand alone wines as well.


And bluntly-you approaching it as a consumer should have the wine that you think is better. But wineries shouldn’t be constrained by your personal palate preferences either.

It’s also worth recognizing that Grand Cru Burgundy, especially from the 80s and 90s rarely tasted great in their youth and certainly did not taste their best at that stage. Whereas many of the uber-cuvees in the Southern Rhone are bigger, riper, more unctuous, and more intense. And sometimes do not, in my opinion, age as well as the base cuvees. That’s not limited to the Rhone, by any means nor does it mean that it’s ubiquitous. But it’s a factor of trying to make “better” wines(or they wouldn’t be tete de cuvees). When you are limited in blending you face challenges of needing to make very good wines regardless of vintage variation. When you blend, you face challenges of catering to some amorphous idea of “best” that often turns into simple achievements like higher levels of ripeness, over sorting, too much new wood, and fixing perceived weaknesses with winemaking ameliorations that a year or two in bottle would sort out without issue and in a better fashion.

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Ribbon Ridge has swiftly become a dear favorite Pinot Noir area for me. One of the things that has set that preference has been the sheer variety of bottlings I can try. It’s been a journey that satisfies both the intellectual wine lover soul and engineer data freak sides of my personality. SV and appellation wines from Goodfellow and Vincent have anchored that exploration. Some nights I am looking for the micro-expression of an SV. Other nights a “basic” Ribbon Ridge bottling suits my mood. They are all good, and there’s no scam involved, as they are all different. There’s an endless number of thought experiments that can happen in the exploration of a very small place. That makes me happy. Nobody else has to dive that deep. It’s all what suits your mind and palate.

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Thank you for the thorough response Marcus

Really appreciate you sharing you experiences and insight with the Durand vineyard. A nice reminder that it’s often easy to dismiss a wine too quickly.

I share much of your thoughts on single vineyard wines. I often find that from the wines I drink, single vineyard wines tend to be most compelling; demand more of my attention; and galvanise my intellectual curiosity.

For some wine fans, there is just a desire to dig down deep into a particular place to learn more about it. What do the grapes from this or that plot taste like? What do they taste like during a cool vintage or a warm or rainy one. What if they’re picked earlier or later, with stems or without. It goes on and on. One may prefer one cuvee or vintage to another as personal preferences vary widely, but unquestionably many single vineyard wines prove to be an ample and rich source of information for many curious oenophiles.

Interesting comment on how blends can make vintage characteristics fuzzier. How do you view regions that have emphasis on blending either site and varieties like the Rhone and Bordeaux in that aspect? Are those kinds of details inherently ‘fuzzier’ in those wines?

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One of my favorite sayings, from French winemakers, is that tradition is an experiment that worked.

I tend to think that in any region with a thousand years of history, there has been time to work through many, many, many options and to see the results, both short term and long term, and to make a determination of how to handle the fruit, and for the marketplace to choose to buy in or not.

I’m only a consumer of Bordeaux and the Rhone(and only a dabbler in the Southern Rhone anymore, primarily Eric Texier’s wines). And I am pretty happy with the Bordeaux I drink, so I would say that I support their choices in blending.

My main thought would be to remind everyone that while Pinot Noir may only be one variety, the grape, and it’s multitude of clones, absolutely loves to demonstrate it’s differences. That is what draws me to it, and the art of blending, even in vineyard designates, was a significant aspect of my winemaking(though I do it a bit differently) until 2016/2017. But honestly, I love the single puncheon bottlings. They’re the most connected you can be to the process. Not just the vineyard, but the individual fermentation itself. I love doing them, even though they’re about the worst business idea ever.

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Are you sure your last name isn’t Merkelbach?

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If i may offer a note on the history of wine sales here in the USA: During the 70s and 80s winemakers here were treated the way the French treat chefs de cuisine. People like Joe Heitz, Ric Forman, Zelma Long, Dick Graff, Dick Arrowood and others were given the star treatment. We have a few star winemakers left —notably Pam ‘Rock’ Starr–but now it seems folks are promoting terroir.

This reminds me of a visit to a winery in Pauillac, where the PR woman told us there was no word in French for winemaker. I told her there was no word in English for chef de cuisine, that the food leaps off the farm and into the pan. A few days later i was in Burgundy, where several ‘winemakers’ said they did the same job, but had no one word for it. Eventually ‘directeurs techniques’ will be called ‘les winemakers’…

One advantage for the winery/vineyard owner to promoting terroir: the winemaker can quit and you still have the vineyard.

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Left to itself, with no winemaker, the terroir would create vinegar!

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Not sure of the accuracy of that statement, Arv.
Have you ever taken a half-consumed btl of wine and left it out in the open for several months? Try the experiment and I can almost guarantee
you will not get (good) vinegar.
I often have opened btls sitting on my counter, opened for several weeks. And, even though they are within a foot of several on-going
active vinegar ferments (from EmilioCastelli’s vinegar mother, which dates back to the middle 1880’s), so there’s plenty of acetobacter
in the air, I almost never pick up any vinegar aromas. (Good) vinegar is not the easiest thing in the World to produce.
Tom